In it, he is surrounded by the NYPD. One of them is carrying an M4 carbine. Luigi’s dead centre, wearing an orange jumpsuit that POPS against their tactical black. His expression is calm, languid, and nonchalant. It radiates a certain je ne sais quoi. A certain… something. A certain… what!?

The answer, dear reader, is radical chic.

Radical chic? What is radical chic? And more importantly, how do I get some? In order to SLAY (💅) like Luigi, do I need to slay the CEO of an insurance company? Do I then need to wear a $1,000 Maison Margiela sweater to my trial, like Mr. Mangione did?

All these questions and more will be answered in this style guide.

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Radical Chic

In 1970, Tom Wolfe wrote an article titled Radical Chic: That Party at Lenny’s.

Wolfe crashed a house party hosted by the Jewish composer, Leonard Bernstein. That’s BernSTEIN, NOT BernSTEEN. Indeed, Lenny insisted on STEIN, not STEEN, as if to say: I will not let the stupid goyim anglicise my last name! I am a Jew. Moreover, I am a proud Jew! I am Leonard BernSTEIN!

BernSTEIN composed West Side Story. BernSTEIN conducted the New York Philharmonic. BernSTEIN brought classical music to television. And BernSTEIN was very—VERY!—rich. Indeed, he lived in a thirteen-room penthouse on Park Avenue. Park Avenue is, of course, the place to be in New York. And New York is, of course, the place to be in the world. Millions YEARN to live like BERN(stein).

At Lenny’s penthouse (which had thirteen rooms, BY THE WAY!) he hosted a party for the Black Panthers. Several prominent members of that organisation—including Don Cox, Robert Bay, and Masai Hewitt—were in attendance.

The Black Panthers were Maoist Revolutionaries. Their leader, Huey P. Newton, called for armed revolution against the ‘slavemasters.’ By which he meant, the police. To quote him:

When the masses hear that a gestapo policeman has been executed while sipping coffee at a counter, and the revolutionary executioners fled without being traced, the masses will see the validity of this kind of resistance.

You know what Huey?That’s SO valid!💅

Anyway, Huey didn’t just talk about shooting policemen. Huey actually shot them. In 1967, he was charged with the murder of patrolman John Frey. Shortly before shooting Frey, he said:

Kill the slavemaster, destroy him utterly, move against him with implacable fortitude. Break his oppressive power by any means necessary.

In that same year, the Black Panthers stormed the California State Capitol with loaded weapons. Not cool, guys! You shouldn’t, like, kill police officers! And you probably shouldn’t walk into the Capitol carrying rifles and shotguns either. But… you have to admit, the Black Panthers looked cool. The tight black turtlenecks. The leather jackets. The Cuban shades. The afros. It’s all so… funky! So… exotic! So… chic!

In 1969, the Black Panthers were charged with conspiring to bomb police stations, department stores, railroad lines, and the Bronx Botanical Gardens. The soirée at Lenny’s was held to raise money for their legal defense. Wolfe showed up to this soirée and witnessed one of the most bizarre spectacles of the twentieth century. The spectacle of radical chic.

The party was attended by New York’s new elite. Like the old elite, they were wealthy. VERY wealthy! But unlike the old elite, they were left-wing. Sure, they still had servants (one simply must—MUST!—have servants). But these servants were white, unlike the old ones. After all, you can’t have Negro butlers and maids serving drinks and canapés to the Black Panthers. No, that would be… ABSURD! Instead, the Black Panthers were served by white servants.

I wonder what these Maoist revolutionaries thought about the little Roquefort cheese morsels wrapped in crushed nuts? Did they appreciate the subtle taste? Did they, in the words of Wolfe, appreciate the way the dry sackiness of the nuts tiptoed up against the dour savor of the cheese? What did Don Cox think about the asparagus tips in mayonnaise dabs? Did Masai Hewitt try the petites boulettes de viande au Coq Hardi?

After eating the Roquefort cheese morsels, New York’s new elite assembled in Lenny’s living room to listen to the Black Panthers speak. It was here, in Lenny’s living room (which had two grand pianos, BY THE WAY!) that the young black panther Masai Hewitt said:

Some of you here, may have some feelings left for the Establishment, but we don’t. We want to see it die. We’re Maoist revolutionaries, and we have no choice but to fight to the finish.

According to Wolfe, he spent the next thirty minutes talking about ‘how the struggle would not be easy, and that if buildings were burned and other violence ensued, that was only part of the struggle that the power structure had forced the oppressed minorities into.’

That’s so true, Masai! But surely you’re not talking about burning buildings like… this one? Surely the Maoist revolutionaries aren’t going to burn Lenny’s thirteen-room duplex with a private elevator and views of Central Park? Surely not!

But where was I? Ermmm... I was trying to define radical chic.

Radical chic is when you START A REVOLUTION! From a Penthouse on Park Avenue. Radical chic is when you KILL THE SLAVEMASTER! Then eat little Roquefort cheese morsels. Radical chic is when you ASSASSINATE A CEO! Then wear Maison Margiela to the trial.

Nostalgia De La Boue

The upper-class obsession with the lower classes—which was on full display at Lenny’s—is not altogether new. Indeed, the French coined a term for it back in the 19th century: nostalgie de la boue (literally, nostalgia for the mud).

I think nostalgie de la boue can be traced back to 19th century romanticism. During that time, it was en vogue among Russian aristocrats to believe that the life of the peasantry was superior to their own. Some even cosplayed as them. Count Tolstoy, for example, had a particularly severe case of nostalgie de la boue. Under the influence of Rousseau and Diogenes, he began dressing like a muzhik. To quote the British journalist, William Stead:

In Russia and out of Russia, I have found people more interested in the personality of Count Leo Tolstoi, the novelist, than in that of any other living Russian. He is a man of genius who spends his time planting potatoes and cobbling shoes.

The aristocratic Tolstoy turned his back on literary fiction to… plant potatoes!? Nostalgia for the mud, indeed!

In Victorian England, nostalgie de la boue took the form of slumming.

The Oxford English Dictionary’s definition of slumming is not exactly definitive. To slum was to ‘visit slums, especially for charitable purposes.’ But it was also ‘to go into, or frequent, slums for discreditable purposes; to saunter about, with a suspicion, perhaps, of immoral pursuits.’ Slumming was also defined as visiting ‘slums out of curiosity, especially as a fashionable pursuit.’

Wait… was slumming about charity, philanthropy, voyeurism, fashion, or immoral pursuits? Honestly, I don’t know. What I do know is that wealthy Londoners in the 1880s developed a taste for slums. They were chic, vogue, à la mode! In 1883, Punch satirized this taste for distaste:

‘Going already? And in mackintoshes? Surely you are not going to walk?’

‘Oh, dear no! Lord Archibald is going to take us to a dear little slum he’s found out near the Minories. Such a fearful place! Fourteen poor things in one bed and no window. The mackintoshes are to keep out infection, and hide one’s diamonds, and all that!’

The conservative cultural critic, Mrs. Roy Pember-Devereux, believed that this ‘abnormal attraction towards the gutter’ stemmed from ‘morbid curiosity’, rather than ‘genuine human sympathy’. When writing about slumming, she said:

To my mind it has no such humanitarian significance, but is simply a form of hysteria based upon a morbid appetite for coquetting with sin, so characteristic of the modern woman…. Her inveterate habit of throwing dust in her eyes no doubt obscures the underlying motive of her devotion to what is called ‘rescue work’.

Suffice to say, this habit is still very pronounced among wealthy leftists. They still throw dust in their eyes to obscure their underlying motives for being ‘virtuous’.

Much like the Victorian aristocracy, New York’s new elite had an ‘abnormal attraction towards the gutter’. Dare I say, they had a morbid appetite for coquetting with sin! Hence, by the late 1960s, they were frequently throwing upscale cocktail parties for people who threw Molotov cocktails. Lenny’s party was by no means unique. New York high society threw several similar fundraisers for the Black Panthers, as well as other radical groups (such as the Young Lords).

The fashion industry also suffers from a terminal case of nostalgie de la boue. Haute couture houses, such as Balenciaga, have been selling the aesthetics of poverty at astronomical prices. Their Paris Sneaker, which costs over two-thousand dollars, looks ripped, scuffed, and muddied. Nostalgia for the mud, quite literally!

***

What explains the appeal of haute hobo? Why was slumming popular among upper-class Victorians? Why did Tolstoy turn his back on literary fiction to plant potatoes? Why did New York high society host parties for people who wanted to destroy New York high society?

Why, in other words, are the haute boooooooozh-wah nostalgic for the mud? Why do they take a gauche thrill in aping the styles of the lower orders? Why are they obsessed with the plight of working people, non-working people, and people who aren’t really people (but monsters!)?

I think some of them are genuinely altruistic. When they give to the needy, they do not let their left hand know what their right hand is doing. But this is the exception, rather than the rule. I think most of them give because they want to be seen giving. They want, in other words, to signal noblesse oblige.

The French term noblesse oblige translates to ‘nobility obligates.’ Europe’s noblemen were expected—nay, obligated!—to protect their subjects and provide for the poor. Charity was, in other words, a class-marker. And charity remains a class-marker. Many wealthy people attempt to distinguish themselves by championing the downtrodden. I think most of them are motivated by a sincere desire to help. But… they are also motivated by something more invidious. Namely, status.

To quote Thorstein Veblen’s book, The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899):

Many ostensible works of disinterested public spirit are no doubt initiated and carried on with a view primarily to enhance the repute of their promoters. This is especially true with respect to such works as lend distinction through large and conspicuous expenditure; as, for example, the foundation of a university or of a public library or museum. But it is also, and perhaps equally, true of the more commonplace charitable work. These serve to authenticate the doers superior status by highlighting the contrast between themselves and lower-lying humanity.

Perhaps Tolstoy chose to dress like a peasant to highlight the contrast between himself and lower-lying humanity? ‘Although he wore the dress of a peasant’, the Scottish economist James Mavor observed, ‘he had neither the aspect nor the bearing of a peasant. No muzhik ever had his piercing eyes or his air of composure and mastery.’ Likewise, when we see an inner-city trendoid with a mullet wearing workwear, we know he’s not working class.

Put simply, the higher status someone is, the more déclassé they’re permitted to be. Because if you’re truly classy, nothing you do is déclassé. When Rihanna wears basically nothing to the CFDA Fashion Awards, it’s stunning, brave, and iconic. When I wear basically nothing to my job at Red Rooster, it’s so-called ‘indecent exposure’.

‘A good indication of having super-high status’, the fashion writer David W. Marx observed, ‘is being able to get away with distinctive acts.’ High-status people can wear whatever they like. Tolstoy can dress like a peasant, and never be mistaken for a peasant. Likewise, Kanye West can wear Balenciaga’s trash Pouch—which was inspired by a garbage bag—and nobody will mistake it for a garbage bag. This, I think, explains the upper-class taste for distaste. To ‘pull off’ haute hobo, you need to be the opposite of a hobo.

‘New arrivals’, Wolfe writes, ‘have always had two ways of certifying their superiority over the hated middle class. They can take on the trappings of aristocracy, such as grand architecture, servants, parterre boxes, and high protocol; and they can indulge in the gauche thrill of taking on certain styles of the lower orders. The two are by no means mutually exclusive; in fact, they are always used in combination.’

The upper-class also take a gauche thrill in aping the politics of the downtrodden. I don’t think this is because they love the downtrodden, so much as they HATE the mids. In other words, political radicalism is a class-marker that distinguishes the upper-class from the more conservative middle-class (much like outlandish fashion).

Naarmgroids

Now that we’re acquainted with a bunch of French terms I can barely pronounce, let’s talk about the city I grew up in. Namely, Melbourne, Australia. Or rather, let’s talk about Naarm. After all, anybody who is anybody calls Melbourne Naarm. Who still calls Melbourne Melbourne!? How outdated! How passé! How… colonial! One simply must—MUST!—now use the Aboriginal word for Melbourne: Naarm.

What part of Naarm should we talk about? Frankston? Dear God, no! Craigieburn? Stop, I’m going to be sick! Those outer-suburbs aren’t really Naarm. Only Fitzroy, Carlton, Collingwood, Brunswick, Northcote and—at a stretch—Coburg are Naarm. Everywhere else is Melbourne (yuck!).

Naarm, in other words, refers to Melbourne’s trendy (not to mention, WEALTHY!) inner-North. After all, only in the inner-North do people call Naarm Naarm. Everywhere else, they call it… Melbourne!?!?

The people of Naarm are called Naarmgroids. This should not be confused with Negroids. Indeed, Melbourne’s inner-North is overwhelmingly white. It is also overwhelmingly left-wing, educated, and… COOL!

The coolest suburb in Naarm is Fitzroy. In addition to being the coolest suburb in MelbouUHH—I mean, NAARM!—Fitzroy is also her oldest suburb.

‘The best places socially’, Paul Fussell observed, ‘would probably be found to be those longest under occupation by financially prudent Anglo-Saxons.’ Too true, Paulie! In Melbourne, Fitzroy is the place that has been under Anglo-Saxon occupation the longest. Indeed, it was the city’s first suburb.

FitzRoy is Anglo-Norman for ‘son of the king.’ Fitzroy is not, as far as I’m aware, home to royalty. But it is home to the closest thing Melbourne has to cultural royalty. Namely, the Naarmgroid.

According to a local historian, Fitzroy has ‘the most complete repository of the kinds of buildings erected in the early colonial years.’ In 1850, it was the ‘chosen resort of the principal inhabitants’ of Melbourne, and the ‘first fashionable quarter’ of the city. Wealthy industrialists and bankers built romantic villas here, such as Osborne House, Royal Terrace, and Grantown House. But by the turn of the century, the haute bourgeois began fleeing Fitzroy. And by the early twentieth century, it was a refuge for Melbourne’s refuse. The grand houses built by wealthy industrialists were converted into boarding homes for proles, prostitutes, and political radicals. By the 1930s, Fitzroy was considered a slum.

But Fitzroy didn’t remain a slum for long. In the 1960s, it began to be ‘gentrified’ (a term used almost exclusively by the people who do it), and soon, it was once again Melbourne’s suburb à la mode. The proles were driven out, and the bourgeois returned.

This new bourgeois is nothing like Fitzroy’s old one. No, they’re bourgeois-bohemians (otherwise known as BOBOs, champagne socialists, or caviar communists). They’re rich people, who hate rich people. They sympathise with the poor, and even dress like them. Indeed, Naarmgroids are afflicted by nostalgia de la boue. On Gertrude Street (perhaps the COOLEST street in Fitzroy), there’s a store called Satisfy Running. They sell MothTech™ T-Shirts. MothTech™, per Satisfy Running’s website, ‘is inspired by cotton that’s been in dialogue with time. Softened. Weathered. Each hole is laser-cut and hand-opened, creating airflow where the body needs to breathe.’ In other words, they’re T-Shirts that looked like they’ve been fucking destroyed by moths. Naarmgroids are spending close to half a grand on singlets that have holes in them!

Naarmgroids DON’T like colonialism (after all, there’s no pride in genocide!). But… they like to live in places named after the great houses of Europe, such as Hanover street (named after the House of Hanover) or Coburg (named after The House of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha). They believe that ‘the colony will fall.’ But… they like to live in the part of Melbourne with the best preserved colonial architecture. They celebrate when a statue of Queen Victoria gets vandalised. But… they yearn—YEARN!—to live in a Victorian terrace on Gertrude Street (named after Queen Victoria’s cousin). How much does a Victorian terrace on Gertrude Street cost? Three-million Australian shekels!!!!

Since we are on the topic of housing, it’s probably worth pointing out that the median house price in Fitzroy is 1.8 million dollars. And yet, Fitzroy is the most left-wing suburb in all of Melbourne. They vote for the Greens, the BOBO party par excellence, and support whatever the social justice issue du jour is. After all, nobility obligates!

The Naarmgroid is obsessed with Aboriginals, despite not knowing any Aboriginals (or living anywhere near them). And lately, they’ve been getting really into Palestine. Indeed, the keffiyeh is rather en vogue in Naarm. Hamas probably shouldn’t have, like, killed those people. They probably shouldn’t have, like, mutilated their bodies. But—WALLAH!—the keffiyeh is rather fetching.

Conclusion

Contra this essay’s title, being poor isn’t cool (even if you’re rich). Nor, for that matter, is cosplaying as a radical. You know what I find cool? Grantown House. You know what else I find cool? 122 Nicholson Street, Fitzroy. I find it cool, in other words, when rich people unashamedly behave like RICH PEOPLE!! Which is to say: when they build grand houses. When they fund public buildings named after themselves (à la Carnegie). When they wear extravagant clothing, like red high heels and massive wigs.

In short, I prefer overt status-signaling to covert status-signaling, provided it is done in good taste.

Nietzsche talked about the benefits of overt status-signaling in The Gay Science. When writing about Genoa, he said:

Genoa. I have looked upon this city for a considerable time. This district is strewn with the images of bold and autocratic men. They have lived and have wanted to live on—they say so with their houses, built and decorated for centuries, and not for the passing hour. The whole district is overgrown with this superb, insatiable egoism of the desire to possess and exploit; and as these men when abroad recognised no frontiers, and in their thirst for the new placed a new world beside the old, so also at home everyone rose up against everyone else, and devised some mode of expressing his superiority, and of placing between himself and his neighbour his personal illimitableness. Everyone won for himself his home once more by over-powering it with his architectural thoughts, and by transforming it into a delightful sight for his race.

In their thirst for the new, the Genoese placed a new world beside the old. Couldn’t the same be said about the men who colonised Australia? Like the Genoese, they placed a new world beside the old. Like the Genoese, they were driven by an insatiable egoism. This insatiable egoism is reflected in their houses, which were built and decorated for centuries, and not for the passing hour! What has the Naarmgroid built? Will it last for centuries, like the colonial architecture of Fitzroy? I don’t think so

Let’s end where we began. Namely, with the question: if you want to slay, do you need to slay a CEO?

I don’t think so. In fact, I think radical chic and haute hobo is soooooooooo OUT! In 2027, colonial core is soooooooooo IN! Victorians will once again be behaving like Victorians. We’ll be exploring the interior of Africa, building grand houses, erecting colossal monuments, writing poetry, wearing frock coats, founding learned societies, hosting salons, and settling new cities named after European royalty.

Inshallah, the Naarmgroid will be relegated to the dustbin of history, and Victorian Victoria will rise again!!!

-Russell Walter, the last VictorianVictorian.

• How political should an author be?

• Is Nutcrankr actually a right-wing book?

• How much does Nutcrankr owe to A Confederacy of Dunces and Don Quixote?

• How autobiographical is Spencer?

• What is a “Chudjack,” and is Spencer one?

• Autism vs. sociopathy — what’s the difference?

• Is self-publishing now a real alternative to traditional publishing?

• Why do young people struggle to plan for or invest in the future right now?

• How much of generational conflict is really the boomers’ fault versus just unavoidable technological change?

• Is doom-and-gloom rhetoric actually harmful to young men’s motivation?

• Can heroic, earnest storytelling still work in a cynical, ironic age?

• How can we “re-enchant” the world?

• Is nationalism becoming disconnected from actual nations, replaced by online tribes and “network states”?

• Why is it so hard to make a living as an independent fiction writer today?

The El Paso Walmart shooting has largely been forgotten. But the face of its perpetrator has been immortalised. Chudjak, otherwise known as ‘LE/POL/FACE’, was modelled to resemble him.

Chudjak first appeared on 4chan, shortly after the shooting took place. It was an epithet used by left-wing 4chan users to describe the site’s stereotypical /pol/ user. Chud is an acronym, standing for Cannibalistic Humanoid Underground Dweller, and it originally referred to terminally online right-wingers.

Today, the word has taken on a much broader meaning. Just last week, I heard a zoomette say she’d been ‘chudmaxxing.’ By which she meant: doomscrolling, bed-rotting, and eating junk food.

I object to the misuse of this word! A Chud is not simply a lazy idiot. A Chud is a certain psychological type, or archetype. In this essay, I’m going to try and properly describe this archetype. I want to provide an overview of Chudjak’s traits and behaviors. But more importantly, I want to provide you with the means of self-diagnosis. By the end of this essay, you will know whether you are a clinically certified Chud.

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Anime Death Tentacle Rape Whorehouse

To understand the Chud, you must first understand 4chan. Our psychological investigation, then, begins with that website.

4chan was set up in October 2003. It was founded by Christopher Poole when he was just fifteen years old. His main inspiration for 4chan came from the site Anime Death Tentacle Rape Whorehouse. That is worth repeating. His main inspiration for the site came from Anime Death Tentacle Rape Whorehouse. That fact alone tells you most of what you need to know about 4chan. It remains, to this day, a digital death tentacle rape whorehouse.

Unlike other social media platforms, 4chan doesn’t require a registration or login. All posts are submitted under the default username anonymous. This anonymity leads to a totally uninhibited online environment. Anons share weird pornography, gory images, and their darkest thoughts. Many openly talk about taking their own lives. Others tell them to do it, only half-jokingly.

This brings us to one of the site’s defining features. Namely, its irreverent, cruel sense of humour.

In 2006, a seventh grader named Mitchell Henderson shot himself in the head with a .22-caliber rifle. The next morning, his classmates created a virtual memorial for him on Myspace. Mitchell’s page came to the attention of /b/, one of 4chan’s message boards. ‘Something about Mitchell Henderson’, Mattathias Schwartz observes, ‘struck the denizens of /b/ as funny.’ They hacked into his MySpace, and gave him the face of a zombie. They posted Mitchell’s face onto hardcore pornography. They uploaded a re-enactment of his suicide to YouTube.

This was not the only prank orchestrated by the denizens of /b/.

After TMZ released a photo of Justin Bieber smoking weed, an anonymous /b/ user proposed a ‘cut yourself for Bieber’ campaign. ‘Tweet a bunch of pics of people cutting themselves,’ he said, ‘and claim we did it because Bieber was smoking weed.’ The goal, as he put it, was to ‘get some little girls to cut themselves.’ By the next day, #CuttingforBieber was trending in America. ‘Stop the drugs,’ one Twitter user said, ‘and we’ll stop the cutting.’

Now, of course, only a small fraction of the site’s users were involved in these stunts. Nevertheless, I think they give us an insight into 4chan’s ethos, and—by extension—Chudjak psychology. Chuds have a sadistic sense of humour. Their appetite for schadenfreude is borderline sociopathic. And yet, I don’t think Chudjak is a sociopath. He does struggle with empathy. But I think this struggle stems more from autism, than sociopathy.

According to psychologists, there are two distinct forms of empathy: cognitive empathy and affective empathy.

Cognitive empathy is the ability to read someone’s emotions. Affective empathy is the ability to actually feel those emotions. Sociopaths lack affective empathy, but have cognitive empathy. Autists lack cognitive empathy, but have affective empathy.

‘Children with autism’, Simon Baron-Cohen observes, ‘may sadly be blind to the very existence of other people’s feelings, which can lead them to pursue their own desires regardless of the other person.’

He continues:

The psychopath is aware that he is hurting someone because the cognitive element of empathy is (largely) intact, even if the ‘affective’ element (the emotional response to someone else’s feeling) is not. The person with classic (lowfunctioning) autism often lacks both of these components of empathy.

Their love of American Psycho notwithstanding, I don’t think Chuds are psychopaths. I think they’re spergs that struggle socially. Countless greentexts attest to this. Anons frequently post about their romantic rejections, awkward social encounters, and struggles with loneliness. Suffice to say, they have none of Patrick Bateman’s sociopathic charm or predatory glamour.

Bateman’s cruelty stems from a lack of affective empathy and a lust for domination. The Chud’s cruelty stems from resentment and poor cognitive empathy. In other words, Chudjak is more like Elliot Rodger than Patrick Bateman (even though he may identify with the latter).

The day after Elliot Rodger killed six people, someone on 4chan asked: was the supreme gentleman part of /b/? The consensus, among those who responded, was that ‘he was a /b/ tard.’ One anon pointed out that he used 4chan’s native idiom in his manifesto, describing himself as a ‘kissless virgin’ and saying ‘I do not forget, I do not forgive.’ Another said:

He was fairly good looking. He must’ve just been the beta to end all betas if he never got laid.

Here we arrive at one of 4chan’s main obsessions. Namely, the beta male.

Many 4chan users identify as beta males. They frequently joke about the coming ‘beta revolution.’ When 4chan user Chris Harper-Mercer shot up his community college, one anon joked:

Our kind has struck fear into the hearts of America… The Beta Rebellion has begun. Soon, more of our brothers will take up arms to become martyrs in this revolution.

The night before Chris killed nine people, he posted on 4chan’s /r9k/ board. ‘Some of you guys are alright’, he said. ‘Don’t go to school tomorrow if you are in the Northwest.’ The first responder in this thread asked, ‘is the beta uprising finally going down?’ Another wrote, ‘make sure you got molotovs. It is a really easy way to kill many normies.’ A third suggested he target ‘Chads’.

Chuds harbour a profound hatred for Chads. In Elliot Rodger’s manifesto, he constantly inveighs against ‘fraternity jocks’, as well as the women who ‘throw themselves at them.’ To quote him:

There was this one obnoxious jock with a buzz-cut who had a gorgeous girlfriend. They always sat next to each other, talking and touching each other with affection. Every day I had to see this, and my envy grew and grew. I constantly glared at them with raw hatred. What did I do wrong that he did right?

4chan is preoccupied with the idea of beta and alpha males. As has already been said, most 4chan users identify as betas. ‘They discuss’, observes, ‘how women prefer alpha males and ignore beta males, by which they mean low-ranking males in the stark and vicious social hierarchy through which they interpret all human interaction.’

Chudjak clearly has an inferiority complex. Elliot Rodger—the Chudjak par excellence—describes himself as ‘dorky,’ ‘weird,’ ‘physically weak,’ ‘a worthless loser,’ an ‘inferior insect,’ an ‘insignificant, unworthy little mouse.’ He interprets his social and sexual rejection as proof that he is at the ‘bottom of the food chain.’ And yet, Rodger also had extreme delusions of grandeur. At the end of his manifesto, he says:

Humanity has never accepted me among them, and now I know why. I am more than human. I am superior to them all. I am Elliot Rodger… Magnificent, glorious, supreme, eminent… Divine! I am the closest thing there is to a living god. Humanity is disgusting, depraved, and evil. It is my purpose to punish them all. I will purify the world of everything that is wrong with it. On the Day of Retribution, I will truly be a powerful god, punishing everyone I deem to be impure and depraved.

So the supreme gentleman had both an inferiority complex and a superiority complex. These two seemingly contradictory psychological tendencies are actually inextricably linked. People who believe that they are flawed in some dreadful way often overcompensate. To quote the psychologist, Alfred Adler:

When the feeling of inferiority is intensified to the degree that children fear they will never be able to overcome their weakness, the danger arises that in striving for compensation they will not be satisfied with a simple restoration of the balance of power. They will seek to tip the scales in the opposite direction. In such cases the striving for power and dominance may become so exaggerated and intensified that it must be called pathological, and the ordinary relationships of life will never be satisfactory. The urges in these cases are apt to have a certain grandiose quality about them.

I believe that Chudjak’s desire to kill ‘billions’ of people and his embrace of far-right politics are both forms of psychological compensation. In other words, Chudjak’s wants to reassert hierarchy, because he is at the bottom of the hierarchy.

So far, my description of Chuds has been almost entirely negative. But Chuds are not without their virtues. Indeed, they’re often very intelligent and creative. So creative, in fact, that they’ve produced the most potent counter-culture of the 21st century. Words that originated on 4chan—based, normie, maxxing, cope, foids, Chad, etc—are increasingly part of people’s everyday lexicon.

***

In short, Chudjak lacks cognitive empathy and struggles socially. He oscillates between feelings of inferiority and delusions of grandeur. He is intelligent and creative. He is, in other words, the typical 4chan user.

And yet, this definition is clearly flawed. Not every 4chan user is a Chud, and not every Chud is a 4chan user. We cannot, therefore, confine our investigation to this website.

When Joseph Campbell wanted to understand the hero archetype, he turned to Homer’s Odyssey. When the Jungian psychoanalysts wanted to understand the puer aeternus, they turned to J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan and Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince.

If we want to understand Chudjak, we too must turn to literature. Namely, John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces and 's Nutcrankr.

A Confederacy of Dunces

In 1964, Toole finished writing A Confederacy of Dunces. Five years later, he gassed himself.

Considering how Toole’s life ended, you might expect this novel to be grim. And yet, it is one of the funniest ever written.

The novel centres around Ignatius Reilly, the prototypical Chud. Tom Bissell, writing in The New Yorker, described him as: ‘the godfather of the Internet troll, the Abraham of neckbeards, the 4chan edgelord to rule them all.’ And indeed, whole passages of Reilly’s dialogue are reminiscent of a 4chan message board. He describes people who annoy him (which is to say, everyone) as ‘mongoloids’ and ‘sub-humans.’ While watching a children’s television show, he says the actors ‘should all be gassed.’ One actress, in particular, draws his ire. ‘How dare she pretend to be a virgin,’ he yells. ‘Look at her degenerate face. Rape her!’

Ignatius Reilly is a fat, thirty-year-old misanthrope who lives with his doting mother in New Orleans. He is unemployed, not through any fault of his own, but because his medieval Weltanschauung provokes fear and hatred in potential employers. That, at the very least, is what he thinks. To quote him:

Employers sense in me a denial of their values. I suspect that they can see that I am forced to function in a century which I loathe.

Ignatius revolts against the modern world. He wants to go back. Not to the nineteen-fifties. Not to the eighteen-fifties. No, Ignatius wants to go back to the thirteen-fifties. He believes that the Renaissance and the Enlightenment were both catastrophic mistakes. It was during this time—or so Ignatius would have you believe—that European man was first ‘faced with the perversion of having to GO TO WORK.’

This obsession with the past is, I think, symptomatic of Chuds more broadly. They suffer from a kind of historical escapism. Which is to say, they are so obsessed with previous ages, that they fail to engage with the one they’re living in. If only, they think, I’d been born in the Middle Ages. Then—then!—I wouldn’t have to ‘GO TO WORK.’ I’d be too busy saving damsels in distress!

Chudjak’s failures are never his own. They are always attributed to the age he is living in. He cannot get a girlfriend, ergo, the West has fallen. This Spenglerian schtick is clearly self-serving. It turns individual failure into a universal tragedy.

This phenomenon is perhaps best demonstrated by the supreme gentleman. In his manifesto, he writes:

All of the hot, beautiful girls walked around with obnoxious, tough jock-type men who partied all the time and acted crazy. They should be going for intelligent gentlemen such as myself. Women are sexually attracted to the wrong type of man. This is a major flaw in the very foundation of humanity.

The fault is not with me, cries the Chud. The fault is with society. The fault is with modernity. The fault is with the very foundation of humanity itself!

Much like the supreme gentleman, Ignatius is plagued by feelings of inferiority. He describes himself as ‘broken physically, mentally, and spiritually.’ And yet, he also has delusions of grandeur. He is constantly coming up with schemes to change the course of history, despite being unable to perform even the most basic tasks.

For example, he devises a scheme to ‘save the world through degeneracy.’ He plans to form a political party made up exclusively of ‘sodomites.’ These sodomites will infiltrate the military, thereby replacing war with gay orgies. To quote him:

Our first step will be to elect one of their number to some very high office—the presidency. Then they will infiltrate the military. As soldiers, they will all be so continually busy in fraternizing with one another, tailoring their uniforms to fit like sausage skins, inventing new and varied battle dress, giving cocktail parties, etc., that they will never have time for battle… None of the pederasts in power will be practical enough to know about such devices as bombs; nuclear weapons would lie rotting in their vaults somewhere. From time to time the Chief of Staff, the President, and so on, dressed in sequins and feathers, will entertain the leaders, i.e., the perverts, of all the other countries at balls and parties. Quarrels of any sort could easily be straightened out in the men’s room of the redecorated United Nations.

This, again, is characteristic of Chuds more broadly. They tend to occupy themselves with matters of world-historical importance, while totally neglecting their own issues (which are, admittedly, much less interesting). Ignatius, for example, is trying to bring about world peace, but can’t even hold a peaceful conversation with his own mother. He is constantly arguing with her about the state of his room, his refusal to get a job, his hygiene (or rather, lack of it).

The novel takes its title from Jonathan Swift. ‘When a true genius appears in the world,’ Swift writes, ‘you may know him by this sign, that dunces are all in confederacy against him.’

Now, I don’t think Ignatius is a genius. But there’s no denying that he is smart. Smarter, arguably, than everyone else in this novel. And yet, his intelligence is functionally useless. In fact, it’s a liability, because he uses it to construct self-flattering fictions. For example, after trying to incite a workers’ revolt, he insists that he was fired because ‘his excellence confused’ his employer.

Nothing is ever his fault! All his personal failures are attributed to ‘Fortuna’s wheel’, ‘the total perversion of the modern world’, or a ‘conspiracy of subhumans’ plotting against him. Reading such explanations, I’m reminded of something Orwell’s said:

‘One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that; no ordinary man could be such a fool.’

Nutcrankr

If Ignatius Reilly is the prototypical Chud, Spencer Grunhauer is the archetypal one.

Spencer is the main character in Dan Baltic’s novel, Nutcrankr. He attended ‘one of the nation’s most highly esteemed liberal arts colleges.’ He brings this up quite often. In fact, he mentions it on just about every page. He wants you to know that he went to one of the nation’s most highly esteemed liberal arts colleges.

After attending one of the nation’s most highly esteemed liberal arts colleges’, Spencer got a job at the Center for Social Advancement (hereafter referred to as the CSA). The ‘so-called Executive Director’ of the CSA is Zachery Herz. Zachery only has a public university diploma. And yet, Spencer must report to… him!?!?

Spencer considers the CSA a ‘bastion of global Marxism’ and a ‘reprehensible organization’. He subverts the centre’s subversion by writing a political treatise—known as The Project—on company time. Spencer describes The Project’s ambitions in suitably modest terms:

The Project would deliver a crushing rejoinder to Rawls, Foucault, and all the devils of modernity. Like a gas bomb clearing an apartment of roaches and ants, the Project would smoke out the postmodernists, structuralists, and Marxists hiding in the walls. And after the purging fumes of Spencer’s thought dispensed with the pests of our time, what would remain? A philosophy wed to the nature of man and his interests.

Spencer writes The Project on his work computer. He uploads chapters to the anonymous website, 3chain (a not so subtle allusion to 4chan). Chapters include:

• A Theory for the Equitable Distribution of Wives.

• On the Virtues of Divine Kings: A Monarchy for You and Me.

• Toward a More Pagan Conception of Christianity.

• Viking Concepts of Courtship.

• Reeducating Feminists: From the Gulag to the Kitchen.

• A Question of Good Governance: Why the Historic West Must Reestablish Colonial Rule.

Spencer is fired by the CSA after they find out he has been posting these ‘crazy and offensive’ ideas from his work computer during business hours.

With his ‘schedule unshackled’, Spencer is able to devote himself wholeheartedly to The Project. Nutcrankr follows his epic and heroic quest to make The Project a reality.

Like Ignatius, Spencer has aristocratic disdain for almost everyone he encounters. He habitually refers to the general public and his peers as ‘proles,’ ‘naughty piglets’, ‘criminal peasants,’ and ‘animals from the rodent class.’ He thinks of himself, by contrast, as a high-born nobleman. Elliot Rodger had similar delusions of nobility. In his manifesto, Rodger proclaims, ‘I am descended from British aristocracy!’

Where do these delusions of grandeur come from? I’ve already suggested that they are a form of psychological compensation. But I also think they stem from NPD and ASD. In other words, I think the Chud is a narcissistic sperg.

Anecdotally, I’ve noticed that a lot of spergs are narcs. Or at the very least, they appear to be narcs. Is autism correlated with an increased likelihood of having narcissism, or do we just mistake one for the other? What, in other words, is the link between autism and narcissism?

I wasn’t able to find many studies exploring this question. But this one from 2014 found that people with autism:

• Have elevated levels of grandiose and persecutory delusions.

• Overcompensate for feelings of inadequacy in social situations by becoming arrogant and egocentric.

• Rate themselves much more favourably than external observers do.

• Experience considerable difficulty acknowledging that they have made a mistake.

• Are hypersensitive to any suggestion of criticism, yet overly critical of others.

We will leave the psychologists to study the link between autism and narcissism. For our purposes, it is sufficient to say that Spencer Grunhauer is both an autist and a narcissist. Ignatius Reilly is both an autist and a narcissist. Elliot Rodger was both an autist and a narcissist. I’m not entirely sure how the two conditions relate. But I am sure that the Chud has both.

Like a typical narcissist, Spencer rates himself much more favourably than external observers do. This leads to constant romantic faux pas. For example, Spencer mistakes his professor’s basic professional courtesy for romantic interest:

Spencer stared into Nora’s eyes and knew that she saw a champion gazing back at her… He took Nora’s soft hand and held it. ‘Whoa,’ said Nora, pulling away as though from a hot pan. Taking a couple of steps backward, Nora continued, ‘That’s not what’s going on here.’

At the risk of belabouring the point, I don’t think this romantic faux pas can be explained by narcissism alone. It is also explained by Spencer’s autism. Autistic people suffer from ‘mindblindness.’ Mindblindness, according to Simon Baron-Cohen, is a ‘selective impairment in mindreading.’ In other words, Spencer struggles to accurately infer what other people are thinking or feeling.

Chudjak habitually refers to other people as ‘NPCs,’ ‘normies,’ ‘normgroids,’ ‘goyim,’ and ‘employim’. This dehumanising language implies that other people have no inner life—that they are mindless automatons. But perhaps this says more about Chudjak than other people. Perhaps they come across as two-dimensional, not because they are, but because he lacks the cognitive empathy required to perceive their interiority.

I think mindblindness is particularly dangerous when paired with narcissism, because it creates a void that the narcissist can fill with delusions of grandeur. In other words, if you can’t read what’s going on in someone’s head, you’re free to fill it with whatever you like. This is something that Spencer and Ignatius constantly do.

***

But enough with the psychobabble! What is a Chud?

A Chud is a narcissistic sperg with a history of social rejection. Despite their high intelligence, or perhaps because of it, they struggle romantically, socially, and often financially (due to lack of employment). He makes sense of human behaviour, not through cognitive empathy, but through systemizing. This systemizing makes him prone to ideology, particularly right-wing ones.

Now that you know what a Chud is, you are ready to take the Chudjak self-diagnostic test.

The Chudjak Self-Diagnostic Test

Please read each statement carefully. Award yourself one point for each statement that applies to you. Answer honestly.

1. You wear glasses.

2. You are overweight.

3. You hate jocks.

4. You feel misunderstood.

5. You have spent time on 4chan.

6. You use words like normie, normgroid, goycattle, etc.

7. You are introverted.

8. You agonise over certain social interactions for a long time.

9. You spend more time in front of a screen than with other people.

10. You struggle with social cues.

11. You prefer being inside to outside.

12. You are obsessed with evolutionary psychology.

13. You are underweight.

14. You are terminally online.

15. You were bullied as a child.

16. You’ve never had a girlfriend.

17. You believe you are more intelligent than most people you meet.

18. You have a job that you consider beneath you (or no job at all).

19. You believe the West has fallen.

20. You have written, or attempted to write, a manifesto or treatise.

21. You believe your failures can be attributed to forces beyond your control (the Jews, Klaus Schwab, etc).

22. You believe you would have thrived in an earlier era.

23. You believe billions must die.

24. You are right-wing.

25. You suspect that you are on the spectrum.

If you scored fifteen or above, I regret to inform you that you are a clinically certified Chud.

Conclusion

So, you’ve just found out that you are a clinically certified Chud. What are you to do?

Don’t ask me! As a handsome, socially well-adjusted, and humble Chad, I struggle to empathize with fat little Chuds. What’s wrong with you guys? Maybe you guys should, like, get some hoes? Failing that, there’s always suicide. Just look at Toole. He gassed himself, and ended up winning a Pulitzer Prize!

I guess I’d give you guys the same advice Socrates did: namely, know thyself. I, for one, know who I am (namely, an alpha male). Reading books like the Iliad helped me realise this. I can see so much of myself in Achilles!

If you want to know yourself, my little Chuddy, you should read Dan Baltic’s book. It holds a mirror up to your ugly little face!

BUY NUTCRANKR HERE.

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Take, for example, the plight of her friend, Gogo Bumhole. Gogo Bumhole is a theatre and drag performer. Gogo Bumhole has to work ‘multiple part-time gigs’, including ‘caring for a Sydney cavoodle.’

In a sane society, Gogo Bumhole would be subsidized by the state (or better still, patronised by a wealthy benefactor). But because we live in an insane neoliberal hellhole, Gogo Bumhole must moonlight as a dog-sitter. A dog-sitter! Has any country, in all of human history, been so wantonly cruel to its artists?

Nina isn’t a drag performer, like her friend, Gogo Bumhole. She is a writer. At university, she was told that she would probably never make it as a writer. Her lecturer said, ‘maybe two per cent of you lucky ducks will. The others are going to drop out, go into communications, advertising or—god forbid—become copywriters. If you want to make money, this isn’t the degree for you, folks.’

In light of this fact, the lecturer gave students an opportunity to leave, and a handful of them actually did. But not Nina. No, Nina stayed. Now, she is thirty. She lives above a pizza shop with ‘sewage water periodically leaking from the kitchen sink.’ She is ‘thoroughly in debt’. She cooks jacket potatoes in the microwave. The microwave! And she is wondering, how did this happen? To quote her:

This doesn’t sound like life as it was promised when we were told that racking up university debt was a fast track to a mortgage and an air fryer.

Ermm, Nina, you were explicitly told you weren’t going to make money. If you wanted an air fryer, maybe you should have studied accounting instead of creative writing? Or maybe you should, like, go on Facebook marketplace?

Nina is a millennial, and this essay reeks of millennial entitlement. The not-so-subtle subtext is: why won’t the government subsidise my hobby? Why must I... work?

Anyway, it got me thinking about the relationship (or lack thereof) between money and writing. Samuel Johnson once said ‘no man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money.’ But Samuel Johnson was arrested twice for debt. So perhaps it would be more accurate to say, no man but a blockhead ever wrote for money. That, at any rate, is the contention of this essay.

Extremistan

In 1976, students from the University of California were asked to rate the personal importance of various life objectives, such as raising a family or being very well off financially. ’Measured by life satisfaction twenty years later,’ the psychologist Daniel Kahneman observed, ‘the least promising goal that a young person could have was becoming accomplished in a performing art.’

In other words, aspiring actors, dancers, and musicians reported the lowest levels of life satisfaction. Aspiring writers, I suspect, would place a close second.

Why is this?

Maybe it’s a temperamental thing. Artists are, after all, infamously moody and broody. But I think a more plausible explanation is that most of them fail to achieve their life goals. As Kahneman says, ‘one recipe for a dissatisfied adulthood is setting goals that are especially difficult to attain.’

Suffice to say, becoming a professional writer—and a literary one, to boot—is especially difficult. Contra Nina, I don’t think it’s difficult because of ‘neoliberalism’, or other such bugaboos. Instead, I think it’s because of technology.

Technology has made art a winner-takes-all domain. ‘Consider’, Nassim Taleb says, ‘the fate of an opera singer at the end of the nineteenth century, before sound recording was invented. Say he performs in a small and remote town in central Italy. He is shielded from those big egos at La Scala in Milan and other major opera houses. He feels safe as his vocal cords will always be in demand somewhere in the district. There is no way for him to export his singing, and there is no way for the big guns to export theirs and threaten his local franchise. It is not yet possible for him to store his work, so his presence is needed at every performance, just as a barber is (still) needed today for every haircut.’

Today, that same opera singer has to compete with every other opera singer in the world. Technology, in other words, has made art scalable. Pavarotti doesn’t need to perform Nessun Dorma every time you want to listen to it. Nor does he need to travel to your city. In fact, he couldn’t (because he is dead). But you can still listen to him on Youtube and Spotify, which millions of people do monthly. Meanwhile, the median musician on Spotify has more band members than monthly listeners.

Now, let’s compare art with something non-scalable, such as hairdressing.

A hairdresser competes with a handful of other hairdressers in town, rather than every other hairdresser in the world.

The most successful hairdresser in Ballarat is perhaps twice as rich as the least successful. The most successful musician, by contrast, is probably a million times richer than the least. 99 percent of book sales come from less than 1 percent of authors. Such a disparity is unthinkable among bakers, plumbers, and prostitutes.

Scalability, in other words, produces brutal inequality and competition. Saying you want to be a professional writer is, therefore, kind of like saying you want to be a professional basketball player. That’s cool, I guess. But even if you are incredibly talented, you probably won’t be.

Melville’s magnum opus, Moby Dick, sold a mere 3,000 copies in his lifetime. Over his entire career, he earned less than $10,000 from book sales. He spent twenty years working as a customs inspector in New York, and died in near-total obscurity.

Likewise, Franz Kafka remained almost utterly unknown during his life. He worked for an insurance company, and wrote in his spare time. A few weeks after his first book was released, he wrote: ‘eleven copies have been sold. I bought ten myself. I’d like to know who bought the eleventh.’

H.P Lovecraft lived in a vermin infested one-room apartment in Brooklyn, and survived on a diet of canned beans. Later in life, he came to regret not having a regular job. To quote him:

I made the mistake in youth of not realising that literary endeavour does not always mean an income. I ought to have trained myself for some routine clerical work (like Charles Lamb’s or Hawthorne’s) affording a dependable stipend yet leaving my mind free enough for a certain amount of creative activity—but I was too damned a fool to look ahead. I seemed to think that sufficient money for ordinary needs was something which everyone had as a matter of course. Well, my calculations were inaccurate!

Suffice to say, all three of these authors were extremely talented. And yet, they were unsuccessful in their own lifetimes. Talent, therefore, is not sufficient for success in the literary world. You also need luck.

Now, of course, these authors did eventually ‘get lucky’. Their work was discovered posthumously. But for every great author that is discovered posthumously, there are probably a hundred that aren’t.

This is a long-winded way of saying, literature is one of the most speculative, demanding, and riskiest of careers. You probably won’t be one of the ‘lucky ducks’ that Nina’s lecturer spoke of. You will, most likely, be one of the unlucky ones. Which is to say, you will earn next to nothing and write in near-total obscurity.

What, then, should the aspiring Australian writer do?

Personally, I think they should take Henry Lawson’s advice, and kill themselves. I suspect, however, that most writers (and Australian ones, in particular) are too cowardly to do this. So allow me to offer an alternative solution.

The Barbell Strategy

In trading, there’s something called the barbell strategy. Those who adopt it embrace extreme risk, whilst simultaneously embracing extreme risk-aversion. Which is to say, 90 percent of their money is in safe assets (gold, government bonds, etc), while the other 10 percent is in extremely risky ones. That way, they’re protected from catastrophic downside, whilst simultaneously being exposed to enormous upside.

Nassim Taleb calls it the ‘barbell’ strategy, because a barbell has weight at both ends, but none in the middle. To quote him:

I initially used the image of the barbell to describe a dual attitude of playing it safe in some areas and taking a lot of small risks in others... That is extreme risk aversion on one side and extreme risk loving on the other, rather than just the ‘medium’ or the beastly ‘moderate’ risk attitude that in fact is a sucker game.

Many writers recognize that writing is an extremely risky profession, and therefore hedge it with something safe. They adopt a ‘barbell strategy’. In other words, they get a fucking job!

As H.P Lovecraft pointed out, Nathaniel Hawthorne worked as a measurer of coal and salt in the Boston Custom House. In his spare time, he wrote books. These books were rejected by publishers. In 1828, he used his own money to anonymously publish his first novel, Fanshawe. It failed to sell, and Hawthorne remained financially dependent on his government job until the publication of The Scarlet Letter (1850). By then, he was 46 years old.

Chekhov’s grandfather was a peasant, and his father owned a grocery store. When that grocery store failed, Chekhov’s family was relegated to the ranks of the meshchanin, or urban lower-class. Chekhov viewed medicine as his ‘passport to freedom.’ It would allow him, in other words, to move from the lower-class into the professional intelligentsia.

Because of his medical practice, Chekhov only had a few hours each night to devote to his writing. ‘Medicine is my lawful wife,’ he said, ‘and literature is my mistress. When I get fed up with one, I spend the night with the other. Though it is irregular, it is less boring this way.’ Eventually, however, he made enough money from writing to stop practicing medicine.

Anthony Trollope worked for the Post Office. His work day ran from ten till four, which left the mornings free for writing. He would wake at 5:30am, and write for three hours, holding himself to a quota of 250 words every quarter of an hour. ‘By beginning at that hour’, he said, ‘I could complete my literary work before I dressed for breakfast.’

Conclusion

Let’s return to the question posed at the start of this essay. Namely, who can afford to be a writer in Australia these days? If by ‘writer’, you mean someone who lives solely from their pen, the answer is next to nobody. But that is not just true of Australia ‘these days’. It is true of everywhere always.

Kafka couldn’t ‘afford’ to be a writer. Hawthorne couldn’t ‘afford’ to be a writer. Trollope couldn’t ‘afford’ to be a writer. Melville couldn’t ‘afford’ to be a writer. Chekhov couldn’t ‘afford’ to be a writer. They all had to work. And unless you come from an extremely wealthy family, you will too.

It is, therefore, stupid to study creative writing. Instead, you should study something uncreative, that will help you attain a job with few intellectual demands and high job security. Ideally, you ‘work’ (I use the term loosely) for the Australian civil service and adopt the sinecure-cum-writing model. Or maybe you could work as a bank clerk (T.S. Eliot), a high school teacher (Oswald Spengler), a lens grinder (Spinoza), or a diplomat (Stendhal). Alternatively, you could ‘follow your dreams’ and become a temporarily embarrassed famous author (i.e., a barista/dog-sitter).

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Who are we?

We are a persecuted people. No, we are not the proletariat. The proletariat suffers physically, but they’re free when they’re not at work. The literary man is never free, except when he is dead. And even then, he is profaned as just another ‘dead white male’.

Enough!

We are the New Oz Cunts, a group of antipodean freedom fighters. The state considers us terrorists, and the literary establishment is terrified of us. Why? Because we like tote bags, Bret Easton Ellis, targeted assassinations, wired headphones, houndstooth blazers, the classics, Michel Houellebecq, cigarettes, Thomas Pynchon, and pipe bombs. But perhaps most of all, we like white male protagonists who are at odds with society, and seek violent revenge against it. Because we are white males who are at odds with society, and seek violent revenge against it!

It is time to rise up. Litbros of the world, unite! We have nothing to lose but autofiction written by sluts from New York. We have a world to gain.

Lit brothers, how do we gain the world? We must:

First, Establish a Literary Vanguard.

A military and ideological vanguard must be established to spearhead the interests of the literary man. The military vanguard will be called The David Foster Wallace Wehrmacht, and it will be responsible for launching kinetic attacks against the literary industrial complex. The ideological vanguard will be called The Softboi Schutzstaffel (hereafter referred to as the SSS). SSS recruits will be drawn from the Litstack intelligentsia. They will raise the revolutionary consciousness of the Litbro and serve as shock troops in the kulturkampf.

Second, Launch a Handmaid’s Putsch Against the Longhoused Literary Establishment.

The David Foster Wallace Wehrmacht will assault key strategic targets, including—but not limited to—writers festivals, MFA workshops, and literary journals. After the blitzkrieg is complete, the SSS will assume control of these institutions, purging them of their longhoused elements.

Third, Secure Breastmilk for our Beloved Matcha Lattes.

The refuse of the establishment will be put in cattle cars and sent to dairy farms. There, they will be artificially inseminated and milked for the benefit of the matcha loving literary man.

HAHaha, JUST KIDDING!! :-P

This is not a manifesto. It is something far worse: another essay on the death of the literary man. Another essay on the death of the literary man!? Won’t he just hurry up and die already!!! How many more of these god forsaken things do I need to read!?

Just one more, bro. Please bro, just read one more essay on the death of the literary man. I swear bro, this one is different

But in all seriousness, this one is different. In this essay, I’m going to argue that the literary man isn’t dead, but the publishing industry is. Or at the very least, it will be. We are in the midst of a Gutenberg revolution. Centralised fiction is finished. Decentralized fiction is the future. And I think the literary man has a key role to play in building that future. But before I talk about the revolutionary potential of the literary man, I’d like to tell a story

Because I am a glutton for punishment, I recently attended a writers festival.

The first speaker was a science fiction writer. Her novel is set in a future where everyone has a microchip grafted to their cerebral cortex. This chip influences their thoughts, actions, and beliefs. The protagonist is a ‘patriarchy hacker’. Which is to say, she hacks into men’s implants and deletes their sexism. I think it’s funny that she didn’t, like, delete the thought control. Just the sexism.

The second speaker was Nigerian. She kvetched about how underrepresented Nigerian authors are in… Australian fantasy fiction? The third speaker was a Gadigal woman. She kvetched about how underrepresented the Gadigal are among Australian crime writers. Not Aboriginal authors more broadly, but the Gadigal, specifically. How many Gadigal people even are there?

Anyway, as one of the speakers began to talk about the lack of Hazara perspectives in Australian chick lit, I heard a voice in my earpiece:

Launch operation Morning Glory Milking Farm!!

I reached into my tote bag and produced a copy of Infinite Jest and a gun. ‘EEEEEEEEE,’ the girl next to me screamed. ‘HE’S READING DAVID FOSTER WALLACE.’

Oblivious to the chaos unfolding around her, the speaker continued to drone on about the Hazara. ‘We need to ask ourselves whose stories are bei—’

Her head snapped back and exploded. Blood and brain splattered on the screen behind her. Alongside several other members of the Wallace Wehrmacht, I charged on stage. ‘We are the New Oz Cunts,’ thundered, ‘and we have come to give you back your future.’

Okay, that didn’t actually happen. Not the terrorism part, anyway. But I did actually go to a writers festival. And there was actually a book about a patriarchy hacker.

Much to my surprise, I left this festival inspired. Not because it was good. But because it was so unbelievably bad.

Now, I should mention, I didn’t actually read any of the books discussed at this festival. Perhaps they’re great. But based on the passages read aloud, I’m fully convinced I could write something more interesting. In fact, I’m fully convinced that most of you reading this could write something more interesting. Many of the passages sounded like something written by ChatGPT. In fact, this science fiction writer pretty much admitted as much. She told the audience that ChatGPT could replicate her style exactly.

The other passages read aloud revolved around (do I even need to say it?) themes of identity, racism, and gender. This should come as no surprise. Literary agents now prioritize ‘elevating diverse voices’ above all else. These are not my words. These are theirs. Just go and read their websites. That’s what and did. Here is what they found:

1. ‘ABOVE ALL, I prioritize diverse voices from marginalized communities.’

2. ‘She welcomes the surreal and is excited by fiction that explores gender, language, identity, and/or systems of power in creative and compelling ways.’

3. ‘She loves novels that subvert dominant cultural narratives and explore questions of identity, belonging, community, inheritance, and diaspora.’

4. ‘In all genres I prioritize diversity and marginalized voices.’

Maybe you should, like, prioritise things that are interesting and original instead? What a quaint idea!! But no, the publishing industry doesn’t prioritise things that are interesting. Instead, they prioritise agitprop for kindergarten students. If you don’t believe me, just walk into any bookstore in Australia. There, you will come across a diverse range of titles, such as: Growing up Asian in Australia, Growing up Muslim in Australia, Growing up Indian in Australia, Growing up Queer in Australia, and (how could one forget!) Growing up Aboriginal in Australia.

Put plainly, the state of Australian literature and letters is depressing. But it’s also inspiring. If you are an aspiring author and literary man, you can almost certainly write something more interesting than what is currently being published. It will not, however, be published.

I won’t belabour this point, because it has already been made by (see here), (see here), and (see here). Suffice to say, the literary man has been actively gatekept by the girlbosses of the publishing industry. But he need not despair, because a new ecosystem is emerging. A literary subculture is beginning to develop on Substack. I think this subculture has revolutionary potential. To understand why, we must take a brief look at the history of publishing.

A Short History of Publishing

Changes in the means of production lead to changes in literature and letters. Which is to say, the way novels are funded, distributed, and produced shape the kind of novels that get written. This is a massive topic, but for our purposes, a rough sketch will suffice.

In 16th century England, there was no ‘reading public’, because nobody could read. Or at the very least, not many people could. Bishop Stephen Gardiner estimated that ‘not the hundredth part of the realme’ was literate. In other words, not even one percent of the English population. This was almost certainly an exaggeration. Modern historians estimate the figure at closer to ten percent. Still, 16th and 17th century England was hardly a ‘strong product-market fit’ for an aspiring bookseller.

How, then, did authors make money? The answer, in short, is through aristocratic and royal patronage. Authors would dedicate a book to a wealthy lord in the hope of financial reward. These dedications were often simpering and sycophantic. Perhaps the most shameless dedications were written by the English poet and inveterate glazer, John Dryden (1631-1700).

After Dryden’s The Wild Gallant (1663) failed on the London stage, Lady Castlemaine—the king’s mistress—arranged a private performance at court. Dryden described her as a ‘god that descended’ to preserve his ‘condemned and dying muse’. Tyrannic Love (1670) was dedicated to the Duke of Monmouth. Dryden claimed Monmouth was reminiscent of Achilles, and that the only thing he needed to be his equal was a poet as great as Homer to record his deeds (I wonder who, exactly, he had in mind?). His dedication to the Duchess of York in The State of Innocence (1677) was flattery on a scale not attempted since the deification of Roman emperors. ‘Our Tongues’ he says, ‘have not leisure even to praise you: for language seems too low a thing to express your excellence.’

Perhaps I should take a page out of Dryden’s book, and begin dedicating essays to my paid subscribers. Something along the lines of:

To my paid subscribers, on whose breast alone I find succour: language seems too low a thing to express your excellence.

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Anyway, you weren’t just expected to glaze your patron. You were also expected to adopt their political beliefs.

In 1659, Dryden wrote a poem titled ‘Heroic Stanzas’, in which he praised the ‘great Englishman’ Oliver Cromwell. Cromwell, of course, had overthrown the Stuart monarchy and beheaded Charles I. Just one year later, Dryden wrote a royal panegyric titled Astraea Redux, in which he welcomed the restoration of the Stuart monarchy under Charles II. In other words, he was a turncoat.

Dryden’s most famous political work, Absalom and Achitophel, was written at the express command of Charles II. In it, Dryden satirises the King’s political enemies. Likewise, he wrote Annus Mirabilis to counter seditious pamphlets that portrayed the Great Fire and the Plague as divine judgements against Charles II.

Patronage didn’t only shape Dryden’s politics. It shaped the themes he chose to write about, and the very style in which he wrote.

The court, being, well, the court, liked court dramas. And so, Dryden wrote them. They also liked heroic plays, so Dryden wrote The Conquest of Granada (1670). This was written using rhymed couplets, to satisfy the King’s expressed preference for French-influenced styles.

But perhaps most shockingly, patronage even appears to have shaped Dryden’s religious beliefs. In the same year the Catholic James II ascended the throne (1685), Dryden converted to Catholicism.

In the 18th and 19th centuries, the patronage model—perhaps best exemplified by Dryden—was supplanted by commercial logic. Rising literacy rates and a growing middle class meant there was, for the first time, a ‘mass-market’ for books. There was, in other words, a new and highly profitable market for ‘middlebrow’ literature. Daniel Defoe was one of the first writers to cater to the middlebrow (or, to use his own words, ‘the upper-station of low-life’).

Defoe was a member of the petite bourgeoisie. His father was a successful butcher and candlemaker. He himself was a wholesale merchant, importing and exporting lumber, wines, and tobacco.

Defoe wrote self-help books, such as The Family Instructor (1715) and The Complete English Tradesman (1726), which offered moral and financial advice to the middle class. What a grifter!

Defoe was the unofficial poet laureate of England’s expansionist commercial age. His adventure novels explored global trade routes and revolved around merchants. Robinson Crusoe, for example, rejects a safe career in law for ‘mercantile adventure’. Colonel Jack is a ‘fabulously successful merchant’ and plantation owner. The unnamed narrator in New Voyage Round the World is a ‘merchant-captain’ who circumnavigates the globe in search of new markets. Contra the aristocracy and their sycophantic scribblers, Defoe didn’t consider trade dirty and degrading. He saw it as heroic and ennobling. He believed that the ‘true-bred Merchant’ was ‘the most Intelligent Man in the World.’

This vision of the merchant was, unsurprisingly, popular among merchants. They bought Defoe’s books in large numbers, making him the first commercially successful novelist in the English language.

How did commercial logic impact letters and literature? There is, perhaps, no better person to ask than Defoe himself. In 1725, he said:

Writing has become a very considerable Branch of English Commerce… The Booksellers are the Master Manufacturers or Employers. The Writers, Authors, Copyers, Sub-writers, and all other Operators with pen and ink are the workmen employed by the Master Manufacturers.

Defoe explicitly compared writing to the textile trade, arguing that journalists used ‘allegories, allusions, and puns’ as raw materials to ‘weave’ stories for society. ‘Whether I talk of Peace or War, Trade, Law, Politicks, or Religion,’ Defoe said, ‘tis all Weaving still.’ In other words, he thought of himself as a tradesman. By the 19th century, the most successful writers were operating less like tradesmen and more like industrialists. Sir Walter Scott and Dickens were both dubbed ‘captains of industry’.

In order to maximise their market share, these literary tradesmen and industrialists catered to the popular taste of the educated middle class. Instead of writing in Latin, they wrote in plain English. Instead of writing about aristocrats, they wrote about merchants and tradesmen. Instead of setting their books in the court, they set them in the domestic sphere. And instead of writing about chivalry, military glory, and heroic action, they wrote about money, marriage, and property.

These books made their authors rich. They also made bohemian intellectuals furious. In the 19th and 20th centuries, these bohemians openly rebelled against the growing dominance of the bourgeoisie and bourgeois tastes. Instead of catering to the bourgeoisie (à la Defoe and Dickens), they sought to shock them. Indeed, their rallying cry was épater la bourgeoisie. That is, shock the bourgeoisie. To quote David Brooks’ Bobos in Paradise:

In a world dominated by the merchant classes, these artists no longer had aristocratic sponsors to flatter, which was emancipating, but they had to fend for themselves in the marketplace, which brought its own traumas. To succeed, artists and writers had to appeal to an impersonalized audience, and many of these creative types came to resent their dependence on disembodied middle-class patrons, who never seemed to pay sufficient homage to genius. And as writers and artists felt more and more detached from the rest of society, they developed heroic images of their own importance… Pained abhorrence of the bourgeoisie became the official emotion of most writers and intellectuals.

Gustave Flaubert signed his letters with the title ‘Bourgeoisophobus’ and railed against the ‘stupid grocers and their ilk.’ He concluded that hatred of the bourgeoisie was ‘the beginning of all virtue’ and wrote books with the express intention of annoying and unnerving them. Alfred de Musset cursed every pillar of bourgeois society: ‘Damned be the family and society. Cursed be the home and cursed be the city. Damnation upon the motherland.’ The bourgeois made Stendhal want ‘to weep and vomit at the same time.’

‘What, exactly, did the French literati find so appalling about the middle classes?’ Brooks asks. ‘In a word, their materialism. The bourgeois definition of success seemed all wrapped up with money and productivity. The artists, conversely, admired creativity, imagination, spirit. Therefore, the intellectuals found the bourgeois crass and pathetic. They castigated the bourgeois for being dull, joyless, unimaginative, conformist. Most damning of all, the bourgeois were unheroic. The old aristocrats had at least aspired to a certain grandeur. The peasants had a kiss of Christlike holiness. But these middle classes had no hint of the transcendent. They were prosaic and mediocre. There was nothing to spark the imagination, nothing loftier than their usefulness, their punctuality, their countinghouse concerns, their daily grind, their machines, their philistinism.’

For these bohemians, the commercial success of a book was taken as prima facie evidence that there was something wrong with it. How, then, did they make money? The answer, in short, is that many of them didn’t. The starving artist archetype emerged during this time. Many French writers began living like gypsies. In fact, the word ‘bohémien’ in French literally meant gypsy.

This rejection of material success gave the bohemians immense creative freedom. Without a patron to flatter or a market to satisfy, they were free to write whatever they wanted. They could explore morbid and sordid themes. They could experiment with difficult prose and poetic styles. They could write about criminals, the poor, and racial minorities. And they could bypass the passive but pervasive censorship of publishers, which demanded light-hearted stories with happy endings.

The Literary Goon Boom

Enough with the historical digressions! All I’m really trying to say is that whoever pays the piper calls the tune. Who, then, is paying the piper? What is currently selling? What, in other words, are writers incentivized to write?

The answer, in short, is smut. We are in the midst of a literary goon boom. Books about minotaurs and masturbation (and masturbating minotaurs) are selling hundreds-of-thousands of copies. To quote :

One best-selling book is set at a minotaur ‘milking farm.’ A young woman, down on her luck, is offered a job where she ‘milks’ minotaurs to extract their semen which is then packaged and sold for its apparently magical properties. The young woman is delighted when one of the stern, burly minotaurs takes an interest in her. The book is apparently the #1 best-seller in Amazon’s Fantasy Erotica category. It is sold at Barnes and Noble.

Out of morbid curiosity, I spent an afternoon with Morning Glory Milking Farm. In chapter 14 of Nascosta’s sweet, steamy—dare I say, creamy—magnum opus, the protagonist goes out to dinner with Rourke. Rourke is a minotaur and successful businessman. He has chocolate brown eyes and a ‘commanding’ baritone voice, often referred to as his ‘CEO voice’. Suffice to say, he is well-endowed. During dinner, Rourke begins to finger Violet:

She was going to come very soon at this rate, orgasming in public, unable to control herself. Who knew what she’d do next in her frenzied state. I’m sorry, officer, I didn’t mean to fellate this minotaur in the middle of the dining room, but you see, he’s been playing so fucking hard to get that I snapped.

As Rourke fingers Violet in the dining room, he speaks to her in his baritone CEO voice:

“I’ll take care of this pretty little pussy anytime you want, sweetheart. Anytime she wants to be licked, I’ll be here to lick it and make you come. Eating this pussy is going to be my new favorite meal. Anytime she wants to be stuffed with my fat bull cock, I’ll be here to fuck you so good you won’t be able to remember your own name. I’m going to spoil you rotten, Violet. I’m going to spoil this cunt every way I can.”

Gentleman, the literary woman is alive and well! She isn’t reading Middlemarch, Jane Eyre, or Mrs Dalloway. She is reading about fellating minotaurs.

Now, to be clear, I am not suggesting women are only reading minotaur erotica. That would be absurdly reductive! They are also reading orc erotica, demon erotica, and plain old anthropocentric erotica (how vanilla!). The much lamented gender gap in reading is, in large part, driven by female consumption of said erotica. Which is to say, if you excised erotica from reading statistics, the gender gap in reading would narrow to almost nothing. To quote :

A massive portion of what women are “reading” consists of what the industry euphemistically calls “spicy” romance—but what any honest observer would recognize as erotica or outright smut with a thin narrative veneer. In short, women are “reading” pornography basically, and it’s this female porn habit driving the numbers.

Liza Libes makes a similar observation in her piece,The Strange Death of the Literary Women:

Much of what now accounts for “women’s reading” is concentrated in a narrow band of commercially optimized romantic fiction rather than spread evenly across all other genres. In other words, women are reading primarily smut—about a third of which is sexually explicit. That’s not to say that all books written by women for women are pornographic in nature—there are, of course, many contemporary books that explore more serious topics, but these books are few and far in between.

She continues:

Eager to capitalize on this emerging trend, literary agents today seek romance novels more frequently than any other genre, with over 50 percent of agents representing romance on their genre roster. Writers, similarly, eager to secure that coveted publishing deal, are trading serious deliberation for steamy sex.

Romance is the highest-earning fiction genre. And ‘romance’ is largely a euphemism for porn. It turns out, there is good money to be made appealing to the carnal appetites of the fairer sex. Whether good literature can be made appealing to such appetites is another question altogether.

But commercial forces alone don’t explain the sorry state of literature and letters. There are also ideological forces at play.

Here in Australia women make up 65 per cent of Australian writers and 77 per cent of employees in the publishing industry.

Does publishing increasingly skew female because more women read books? Or do more women read books as publishing increasingly skews female? I don’t know. What I do know, is the literary man is being skewered! The female literati simply decline to publish him. To quote esteemed literary lady, Joyce Carol Oates:

A friend who is a literary agent told me that he cannot even get editors to read first novels by young white male writers, no matter how good; they are just not interested.

There is, moreover, a new patronage class. These new patrons are bureaucrats, not aristocrats. They don’t commission fairy castles or fund Wagner’s Ring Cycle, à la King Ludwig. Instead, they give grant money to writers who are deaf, disabled, and/or Aboriginal (preferably, all three).

Literature, in short, is quite literally being retarded by perverse incentives. And again, I mean perverse quite literally (fellating a minotaur is, by any definition, perverse).

Long Live the Literary Man!

Excluded from the literary world, people have begun building a parallel one online. They are bypassing the commissars of the publishing industry. They are serializing novels on Substack. They are building the critical infrastructure the literary magazine is no longer able to provide. And they are running podcasts that function as spatially distributed literary salons (such as ’s Getting Lit, ’s New Write, ’s Method and Madness, ’s Book Club from Hell, and ’s The Futurists Letters Show).

This infrastructure is nascent, but the network effects are already compounding. Many literary men—with no institutional backing—have already developed larger readerships than literary magazines, grant-funded authors, and novelists published by big houses.

As the literary establishment continues to decline, I think this parallel ecosystem will ascend. There has, in other words, never been a more exciting time to be a literary man. There are no gatekeepers. There are no barriers to entry. And there is, at least in Australia, no competition.

I think we should take inspiration from the bohemians. I think we should write androgenic fiction that shocks the longhoused literary establishment. I think we should explore male interiority unapologetically.

That, at any rate, is what I plan to do. Will it be profitable? I doubt it. Will it be interesting? I hope so.

To summarise, changes in the means of production lead to changes in literature and letters. We are currently living through a Gutenberg revolution. We should expect, then, a new literary culture to emerge. And it is, on Substack. The great male millennial novelist will come from here. He may even be reading this manifesto.

If you want to learn more about this emergent literary culture, check out the following people:

, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , and .

Conclusion

This essay has, admittedly, been a little phallocentric. I will conclude, then, with something for the literary ladies. What follows is an excerpt from my upcoming romance novel, Milking the Literary Man:

I was nineteen when The Wallace Wehrmacht took me to the dairy farm.

My crime? Liking young adult fiction.

Usually the inseminators were such soft boys. But he was... different. He had a baritone voice and dark, brooding eyes. Whenever he walked past my stall, I would arch my back, as if to say: fertilise me! fertilise me! fertilise me! And yet, he never did. Never, that is, until today.

As I arched my back, he pulled me flush against his body. I was unable to control the strangled wail that ripped from my throat as he thrust inside me. ‘I LOVE THE LITERARY MAN!’, I cried, as tears streamed down my face. And I did.

P.S. I’m thinking about creating some kind of online literary fraternity. A place, that is, where lit brothers can discuss what they’re working on, be it fiction or non-fiction.

One of the virtues of an MFA program is that it connects you with a literary community that reads your work and offers encouragement/feedback. I’d like to create a simulacrum of that online.

Recently I spoke with and . We traded feedback on each other’s writing and bounced ideas around. It was enjoyable, and I’d like to do more of it. If that sounds like something you’d be interested in, send me a direct message.

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• What’s wrong with Australian fiction?

• Is wokeness in the literary establishment already a spent force, or does it still have teeth?

• Could an independent literary scene — readings, podcasts, Substack — actually usurp the establishment from below?

• Why does so much Australian writing read like a policy paper or a school curriculum lesson rather than genuine art?

• Is the Jerilderie Letter the closest thing Australia has to a founding literary epic, and who actually wrote it?

• Does Australia’s extraordinary natural beauty make its people less likely to cultivate an inner aesthetic life?

• Why is Greg Egan almost entirely unknown in his own country?

• What does Ned Kelly represent and why can’t mainstream Australian culture metabolize his true myth?

• Should Young Adult fiction exist at all, or are we insulting teenagers by not giving them real books?

Both Ludovic and John Carter provide an economic answer to this question. Here, I will try to provide a psychological one.

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I think that infinite optionality retards development. In other words, the more lives available to us, the less capable we become of living. We begin, instead, to live what H.G. Baynes called a ‘provisional life.’ And the provisional life is really no life at all. It is characterised by a persistent sense that one is not yet living. One is doing this or that, but whether it is a woman or a job, it is not yet ‘the real thing’. She is ‘nice’, but she is not ‘the one’. The job is ‘fine’, but it is not the job. One is always inwardly toying with a thousand possibilities. One cannot choose just one. And so, big decisions—such as marriage and children—are perpetually pushed back.

But I’m getting ahead of myself! What, precisely, do I mean by infinite optionality?

Modern life presents us with an overwhelming and ever-expanding array of choices. One can do anything! One can be anything! This is, historically speaking, peculiar. Until very recently, you simply did whatever your Dad did. William Baker was a baker. His father was a baker. His father’s father was a baker. More than one in ten of all modern surnames in England derive from the occupation of some medieval ancestor.

Today, William Baker is not a baker. In fact, he is not much of anything. At least, he is not much of anything yet! At thirty-two, he is ‘keeping his options open’. And how many options he has! He could find himself in Europe, or lose himself in Asia. He could start a side-hustle (or get a side-chick!). Then there is the not-insignificant question of what, exactly, he wants to do with his life. Law. Teaching. A startup, maybe. AI. A trade? Writing. A novel. Bodybuilding. Something in wellness? Something, at any rate, in something. And yet, he can never commit to anything. Why?

Commitment requires sacrifice. To commit yourself to a woman, you must relinquish every other woman. To commit yourself to a job, you must relinquish every other job. To commit yourself to a life, you must relinquish every other life you might have led. The millennial man—or at the very least, a significant portion of them—cannot relinquish infinite optionality. And so, they remain in Neverland, where they can be anything (ergo, nothing).

This is, of course, a juvenile way of thinking. The adolescent lives primarily in his imagination. Which is to say, a world of what might be, unconstrained by what is. Reality, with all its limitations and disappointments, has not yet fully impinged on him.

Increasingly, I think many in their twenties, thirties, and even forties live like this. Which is to say, all those characteristics that are normal in a youth of seventeen or eighteen are continued into later life.

This is not an original observation. Indeed, that last paragraph was lifted almost verbatim from Marie-Louise von Franz’s book, The Problem of the Puer Aeternus. Von Franz believed that the puer aeternus, or the eternal boy, was a uniquely modern phenomenon. She thought it was nature’s defence mechanism against overpopulation. In other words, nature fosters psychological tendencies—such as homosexuality and arrested development—that lead individuals to refrain from producing children.

Then there is Dan Kiley, author of The Peter Pan Syndrome, who believed that there had been a ‘dramatic increase in the frequency of the problem.’ The problem, that is, of the man-child. Kiley attributed the rise of this problem to permissive parenting.

Finally, there is Ann Yeoman’s Now or Neverland. Like both Von Franz and Kiley, she thinks ‘we are continuing to experience a striking increase in the incidence of this kind of personality.’ She believes that arrested development stems from a ‘secret conspiracy between mother and son, in which each helps the other to betray life.’ The mother, who needs to be needed, unconsciously sabotages her son’s maturation. The son, in turn, is only too happy to continue suckling on her milky mammaries.

Von Franz, Kiley, and Yeoman were writing decades apart. Each believed the problem of the man-child was getting worse.

Now, perhaps you dismiss all this—as does—as ‘the elderly hectoring the young’, as they have always done. Every generation kvetches about the one that comes after it. Boomers kvetching about Millennials is, therefore, nothing new.

I am not, however, entirely convinced. Contra Ludovic, I think Millennials (to say nothing of Zoomers) actually are a uniquely stunted generation. Even the youngest Millennials are no longer young. And yet, they continue to say things like I’m just a girl. ‘They literally look younger than previous generations did at the same age,’ observes, ‘with neotenous faces and fashions.’ Then, of course, there is the Disney Adult phenomenon. Not to mention the fact that Millennials marry later (if at all), have kids later (if at all), and buy homes later (if at all).

I think that infinite optionality leads to the proliferation of a certain type of person. That type, or archetype, is Peter Pan. Indeed, we appear to be in the midst of a Peter Pan pandemic. I’ll begin this essay by outlining the symptoms of Peter Pan syndrome. I will turn, thereafter, to its treatment.

Peter Pan Syndrome Symptoms

The first symptom of Peter Pan syndrome is narcissism. Where, exactly, does this narcissism stem from?

Often, the man-child was a ‘gifted child’. The gifted child is distinguished from his peers by his curiosity, intelligence, and imagination. He is told, repeatedly, that he is special. That he can do anything he sets his mind to. And so, he begins to imagine himself as a hero, artist, statesman, or explorer. He imagines himself, in short, as something extraordinary. This makes it very difficult for him to engage with anything ordinary. Indeed, many gifted children develop contempt for ordinary people, whom they consider sheep, normies, goycattle, and so on. They also develop contempt for ordinary life, which they consider—dare I say it—the matrix. Marriage. Mortgages. Monday morning commutes. All these things are dismissed as bourgeois trifles.

The puer aeternus tends to have both a superiority complex and an inferiority complex. Which is to say, he recognises—on some level—that he is a failure. But he often interprets this failure as evidence of his own superiority. He doesn’t have a family, because he cannot be domesticated. He doesn’t have a job, because he cannot be reduced to wageslavery. He cannot be a normie, because he is just too abnormal! Too unique! Too special!

The NEETocrat is a case in point. The word is, of course, a combination of NEET (not in education, employment, or training) and aristocrat. The NEETocrat conceptualises his unemployment as a principled refusal to debase himself through labour. He is, after all, a Brahmin—not a vaishya.

Now, of course, not all gifted children develop Peter Pan syndrome, and not all Peter Pans were gifted children. Nevertheless, it is a common characteristic among eternal boys. Another common characteristic is a vivid imagination.

Children live, in large part, in their imagination. For them, the boundary between fantasy and reality is thin. A stick is a sword. A shadow, a monster. Jung describes this as ‘fantasy-thinking’, and contrasts it with the utilitarianism that defines adulthood. The adult dreams only when asleep. The child, by contrast, lives in a waking dream. The puer aeternus never grows out of this. He remains, well into adulthood, a daydreamer.

What, exactly, does a man with Peter Pan syndrome daydream about? Everything.
Pan, from whom Peter Pan takes his name, was the god of everything. And so, the man with Peter Pan syndrome dreams of everything. He imagines himself a novelist, a fighter, a founder, and a politician. And yet, he never commits to any of these visions. Or at the very least, he never commits himself for long. Why can’t the man-child commit? Because nothing real is ever as compelling as his daydreams.

The eternal boy finds his interiority more compelling than the external world. This often leads to sterile intellectualism. To quote Von Franz:

The vitality of action, that masculinity which molds the clay, which seizes and molds reality, he leaves behind, for that is too difficult; he escapes into the realm of philosophy… One could call it neurotic philosophizing, philosophy at the wrong moment, just when what is needed is action. Every time he wants to go into action he will argue that he should not act until he has thought it over very carefully.’

Yeoman, writing separately, arrives at the same conclusion:

The puer is, then, never quite in life. He hovers above it all in the realm of ideas and fantasy, feeling that life owes him a living because he is special.

Peter Pan, of course, could fly. No wonder the man with Peter Pan syndrome is always hovering above the ground! Von Franz notes that the puer aeternus has a highly symbolic fascination with flying, travelling, and mountaineering. He wants to get as high as possible, the symbolism being to get away from reality, from the earth, and from ordinary life. ‘Some puer aeterni escape from earth by means of actual airplanes’, Von Franz observes, ‘others do the same thing in thought airplanes—going off into the air with some kind of philosophical theory or intellectual system.’

The puer loves to travel because he does not want to be tied to a place. In fact, he does not want to be tied to anything. Nor, for that matter, does he want to be tied to anyone. He has a proclivity for intense but short-lived romantic attachments. He can never fully commit himself to one woman, because he is terrified of ‘settling’. This applies not only to women, but to everything. Indeed, he cannot decide what to do with himself, because deciding means becoming. And becoming one thing means ceasing to be all the others. It means, in other words, giving up on your unlimited potential.

But enough Jungian psychobabble (or, dare I say, flights of fancy)! What does Peter Pan syndrome actually look like? Let us get clinical. I am, after all, a certified clinician. And you can and should—nay, must!— take what follows as medical advice.

I have devised a diagnostic test. If you score above 8, you have Peter Pan Syndrome (hereafter referred to as PPS), a bona fide DSM-5 condition.

PPS Diagnostic Test

Please read each statement carefully. Award yourself one point for each statement that applies to you. Answer honestly.

Note: results are only valid if you are above the age of twenty-seven.

1. You have considered moving to Berlin, Byron Bay, or (God forbid) Uluwatu.

2. You hate your job but cannot quite bring yourself to leave it.

3. You have never had a relationship that lasted longer than a year.

4. You use the words normie, normgroid, goycattle, etc.

5. You consider yourself a ‘creative’, though you have created little to nothing.

6. You are obsessed with travelling.

7. You prefer thinking about doing things to actually doing them.

8. You struggle to maintain steady employment.

9. You oscillate between negative and positive self-inflation.

10. You have a vague but persistent sense that you are meant for something larger than your current life.

11. You frequently mock adult concerns (like mortgages, marriage, and retirement funds) as ‘meaningless trifles’.

12. You are terrified of ‘settling’.

13. You have said the phrase ‘not all those who wander are lost.’

If you scored 8 or above, I regret to inform you that you have Peter Pan Syndrome. The prognosis, while serious, is not hopeless. In the following section, I will outline a course of treatment.

A Course of Treatment for PPS

More is lost by indecision, Tony Soprano once observed, than wrong decision. So true, Tony! The puer aeternus is indecisive. If only, he thinks, I could find the right women, job, and location. Then—then!—I would commit. Then I would start living!

But ‘the right thing’ is not discovered and then pursued. It is pursued and thereby discovered. ‘Men did not love Rome because she was great’, Chesterton once observed, ‘ she was great because they loved her.’ The same is true of marriage. You do not find the perfect woman and then love her. You love a woman, and she becomes perfect. The puer is always searching for something worthy of his commitment. He doesn’t understand that commitment is what makes things worthy.

The treatment for PPS is, then, commitment. That, at any rate, is what Jung thought. Von Franz recalls him saying to a puer aeternus type, ‘it does not matter what job you take. The point is that for once you do something thoroughly and conscientiously, whatever it is.’

She continues:

This man insisted that if only he could find the right thing, then he would work, but that he could not find it. Jung’s answer was, ‘Never mind, just take the next bit of earth you can find. Plow it and plant something in it. No matter whether it is business, or teaching, or anything else, give yourself for once to that field which is ahead of you.’ The childish trick of saying, ‘I would work if it were the right thing,’ is one of the many self-delusions of the puer aeternus.

So, the puer must stop hovering above the earth, and begin to plow it. He must, in other words, humble himself. Humility stems from the Latin humus (not to be confused with the Levantine hummus). It means earth, or soil. To be humble is, quite literally, to be grounded.

How does the puer humble himself? The answer, in short, is through work. Von Franz specifically recommends humble, unromantic work (as, say, an accountant or plumber). By fully committing himself to this kind of work, the puer begins to live a satisfactorily ‘bourgeois’ or ‘grown-up’ life. But this solution often ends up causing more problems, as Von Franz herself acknowledges:

The great problem is that you can drive people out of this childhood paradise and fantasy life, in which they are in close connection with their true inner self, but then they are completely disillusioned and cynical.

They become, in other words, like an extinct volcano. The childish eruptions stop. But so too does the inner fire and emotional intensity.

Is it possible to grow up without losing that inner fire? Is it possible to grow up without becoming completely disillusioned and cynical? Can you dream, without becoming a listless daydreamer? Does imagination help or hinder the adult? Can one retain their puer spirit—its aspirations, spontaneity, and creativity—while consciously affirming senex virtues, such as order and responsibility?

These are not rhetorical questions. I have spent the last two years grappling with them.

Conclusion

Over the past two years, I have—in the parlance of my generation—been ‘adulting’. I have kids. I own a home. I am engaged. Broadly speaking, I am happy about all of this. And yet, alongside this happiness, there has been a persistent and unsettling dread. A dread that I am going to live a petty bourgeois life.

I’ve always been suspicious, if not outright contemptuous, of ordinary bourgeois life. The chief aim of bourgeois society is peace and prosperity. Which is to say, comfort. Most adults live comfortable yet uninspiring lives. They go to work. They mow the lawn. They look after their kids. Then they die.

I don’t want to be like them. I am, after all, special. And yet, the belief that you are special is nothing special. Indeed, our entire generation was told that.

No, you’re not special. You’re just another garden-variety millennial narcissist. And like every other garden-variety millennial narcissist, you suffer from delusions of grandeur and arrested development. If you want to overcome your arrested development, you need to develop humility. Which is to say, you need to ground yourself.

But how nice it is to fly! How nice it is to aspire and daydream! Must one really give all this up? Must one really give up the puer spirit in order to embrace senex virtue?

I don’t think so. Or at the very least, I hope not. I hope there is a way to disentangle what is really childish—laziness, dependency—from the creativity, spontaneity, and imagination of youth. It is, I suspect, enormously difficult. And yet, I believe it can be done.

One way to achieve puer-et-senex unity is through art and creativity. The artist has an unusually vivid interiority. He finds this interiority, in the words of Walt Bismarck, ‘richer, more persistent, and more emotionally compelling than the external world.’ He is, in other words, a daydreamer. And yet, if he is to be an artist—and not just a daydreamer—he must eventually sit down and do the work. He must submit his imagination to the discipline of craft. He must take what he finds in the air and bring it back down to earth.

This is, it must be said, an exceedingly hard thing to do. Most people simply kill the puer. Which is to say, they grow up, settle down, and the inner fire goes out. Others never develop the senex virtues at all. They remain, well into middle age, in Neverland. They continue to cling to a sense of infinite optionality, as their options continue to dwindle.

Brother, it is now or Neverland! Even the youngest millennial is no longer young. It’s time to cut back the overgrowth of fantasy. It’s time to stop kvetching about the Boomers. And it’s time, at long last, to grow-up.

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1. LARPing is cool, actually.

2. Is Having a Family Embarrassing Now?

3. Chesterton’s Microscope.

4. Why do Conservatives Lose the Culture War?

5. I am ready to give up on my dreams, by .

6. Why Can’t You Just Be Normal? by

• The origins of Exit and Kevin’s doxxing in 2021 that prompted him to build it

• How Exit works

• The voice vs. exit framework — why leverage and alternatives matter more than being based online.

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• Why nationalism feels increasingly hollow and contrived compared to genuine local bonds

• The Network State concept

• How AI is making proximity and personal trust more valuable

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• The “Anglo beam” — the culturally ingrained habit of following proper procedure rather than leveraging personal networks

• Why you can’t manufacture fraternity by declaring it — real bonds only form under genuine stakes

• The military as the only modern context where fictive kinship reliably forms

• Practical advice for building a fraternal group: work parties, civic projects, stress-testing friendships through low-stakes collaboration before scaling up

• Kevin’s long-term vision for Exit: members raising children together, with the ultimate goal of something approaching a people built on real ties

- Don Quixote.1

When I was a teenager, the alcohol of choice was Fruity Lexia. Its popularity had less to do with its ‘tropical fruit aromas’, and more to do with its cheapness. A 4-litre bag cost as little as ten dollars.

Fruity Lexia was an acquired taste. Though as far as I know, no one ever acquired it. Indeed, one had to be coaxed into drinking the stuff.

To this end, my friends and I developed a drinking game that wasn’t really a game at all. Everyone drank Fruity Lexia simultaneously, and whoever stopped first had to skull an entire glass of it. You were incentivized to drink, in other words, by the prospect of having to drink more.

Among the youth of the antipodes, it was widely believed that Fruity Lexia made you sexier. Whether it made you sexier, I couldn’t say. But it certainly made you funnier, more reckless, and more adventurous.

One afternoon, when I was sixteen or so, my friends and I played this drinking game. We then walked around Melbourne, looking for something to do. Typically, that something was shoplifting, graffiti, or hanging off the back of trains (otherwise known as backons). Occasionally, it was persuading an older woman that one of us had just turned 18 and wanted a birthday kiss. If she obliged, we would promptly accuse her of pedophilia.

But on this particular afternoon, we stumbled upon something altogether different.

Before us stood men carrying flags and bearing swords. Some clutched crossbows. Others bore maces. But all wore the same look. The solemn look of men prepared for war.

We had stumbled upon Australia’s largest Live Action Roleplaying Game. Namely, Swordcraft: Blood & Gold.

For inebriated teenagers, the call to arms was impossible to ignore. So we marched over, and presented ourselves for enlistment. In exchange for two dollars, we were handed a sword and placed under the command of a lord. We proved, almost immediately, to be unruly subjects. My friends and I ignored his pre-battle speech—which I’m sure equaled the St Crispin’s Day speech in its eloquence—and began hitting each other in the head.

Our lord was incensed. So much so, that he threatened to arrest us if he caught us hitting another player in the head. He was, as it happened, a police officer.

At the time, I found this tremendously funny. Today, I find it slightly disconcerting. There is something faintly unsettling about an officer of the law who spends his weekends in chain mail, wielding a foam sword.

But that afternoon, there was no time for such reflections. Our lord raised his sword and bellowed: ‘Cry havoc, and let slip the dogs of war!’2 Before I knew it, we were hurtling toward the enemy. Or at the very least, our comrades were. We were all too busy laughing at the absurdity of the situation to keep up. A man in a horned helmet screamed something in elvish. A rotund woman waddled into battle with a foam axe. Nearby, two men had stopped fighting to argue about whether a particular sword strike had landed.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​ We remained in the rear, incapacitated by laughter.

Then, suddenly, something stirred within me. Something primal. Something ancient. Something Homeric. Perhaps it was a latent Viking bloodlust. Perhaps it was a sudden and inexplicable chivalric impulse. Perhaps it was just the Fruity Lexia. But whatever it was, I began running toward the frontline. Sing, O goddess, the anger of Achilles! I leapt into the air and smote the nearest enemy in the head with my foam sword.

‘AAARRRGHHH, WHAT THE FUCK, MAN!?’

The entire frontline—at least fifty people—ceased fighting. They admonished me for hitting someone in the head, and asked my foe, who now had a large gash across his forehead, if he was okay. When it was clear he was, the battle slowly resumed.

Thankfully, my lord—the police officer—did not witness this.

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The Disenchantment of the World

History repeats itself, Karl Marx once observed, first as tragedy, then as farce. Too true, Karl! Is there anything more farcical than a middle-aged I.T. worker pretending to be a knight? What motivates a man, who is otherwise sane, to do this?

Perhaps this sane man isn’t really sane. After all, you need to be at least a little bit insane to wear chain mail in public. Or perhaps this man isn’t really a man. Instead, he is a man-child. Hence the foam sword and painted face.

But there is, I think, a more interesting explanation. People LARP, not because they suffer from insanity or arrested development, but because they want to re-enchant the world.

The word ‘disenchantment’ was popularised by the German sociologist Max Weber. Weber, however, never actually used it. Instead, he used the German word Entzauberung, which means something like ‘de-magic-ification.’

A disenchanted world, as puts it, is one ‘no longer experienced as a realm of magic, mystery, animate spirits, or other non-human forces.’

Disenchantment is the defining characteristic of modernity. We don’t believe in God, magic, or fate. We’re just, like, monkeys on a rock hurtling through space, dude.

But thinking of the world as an impersonal and meaningless collection of matter and energy isn’t particularly satisfying. It leaves one with a nagging suspicion that something is missing. Something meaningful. Something magical. And so, one tries to re-enchant the world. They don pointed ears, put on chain mail, and spend their Saturdays running around public parks with foam swords.

I am not a LARPer, but I understand the appeal. The modern world is disenchanted. I wish I could somehow re-enchant it. I just can’t bring myself to dress up as a knight.

Luckily, one need not don chain mail in a public park to re-enchant the world. One need not even leave the comfort of their own home. The internet has made it easier than ever to LARP. As observes:

Online, it’s easy to get the impression that we can reinvent ourselves entirely, independent of our bodies or other dull ‘meatspace’ constraints.

And, by God, have we reinvented ourselves! Consider DeusVult1095. His bio reads: ‘Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I have not come to bring peace, but a sword.’ His avatar is Knight at the Crossroads by the Russian painter Victor Vasnetsov. His real name is Brad. He is from East Pakenham.

There is also Aryan_Soldier1488, who isn’t Aryan at all. His name is David Goldstein, and he is an accountant from Boca Raton.

Then there’s BackToTheLand72. His bio reads: ‘I must live a certain way.’ Presumably, on the land. And yet, he lives in a studio apartment in Melbourne’s CBD.

For that matter, EuropeAwakens doesn’t live in Europe. TradWest doesn’t live in the West. AmericanPatriot1776 doesn’t live in America. They are all from Hyderabad.

Online, anyone can be anywhere. Anyone can be anything! You can LARP as a crusader, a Viking, a monk, a steppe warlord, or a Roman patrician. And in doing so, you can briefly escape the disenchanted conditions of modern life.

This is, for the most part, harmless. But what happens when Brad forgets he is Brad? What happens when DeusVult1095 shows up to the local mosque with a sword, screaming about reconquista? What happens, in other words, when the LARPer no longer knows that he is LARPing?

Miguel de Cervantes grappled with this question in Don Quixote.

Don Quixote

Miguel de Cervantes is often called the ‘Spanish Shakespeare.’ His magnum opus, Don Quixote, is widely considered the first European novel.

In addition to being a writer, Cervantes was a spy, soldier, hostage, fugitive, and adventurer. To quote his biographer, Donald P. McCrory: ‘the real-life experiences of Cervantes were as colourful, as richly diverse and, on occasion, as dramatic as those of his principal characters in his most famous work.’

In 1569, a warrant was issued for his arrest for wounding a man in a duel. To avoid having his sword hand amputated, he fled Spain for Italy. Having fled Spain to save his right hand, he promptly lost the use of his left one. He was shot in the arm at the Battle of Lepanto (1571), and his left hand was permanently maimed. On the way back to Spain in 1575, his ship was hijacked by Algerian pirates, who sold him into slavery. After five years of slavery (and four daring but failed escape attempts), he finally returned home. The following year, he was back in North Africa—this time as a spy. In 1597, he was sent to prison for embezzling government funds. While behind bars, he wrote Don Quixote.

Cervantes lived at the border between two ages: the Medieval Age and the Age of Reason. During his lifetime, scientists such as Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo dismantled the geocentric worldview. We were not, as it turned out, at the centre of the universe. We were just, like, monkeys on a rock orbiting around the sun, man.

In the same year that Don Quixote was published, Francis Bacon published The Advancement of Learning. In this book, Bacon argued that superstition and magical thinking should give way to science and reason.

It was in this world—one losing its magic—that Cervantes wrote Don Quixote.

Alonso Quijano (better known as Don Quixote) is a geriatric aristocrat who is disillusioned with modernity. He seeks refuge—not on Twitter—but in chivalric romances.

Chivalric romances were tales centred around knights in shining armour, such as Lancelot, who wandered the world seeking glory and adventure. They were enormously popular in 17th century Spain. Spanish explorers even named places in the New World after locations from these books (such as California and Patagonia).

​​​​​The authorities considered these books dangerous. So much so, that they were banned in the New World. In 1555, the National Assembly unsuccessfully petitioned the crown to extend this ban to Spain itself.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Why, exactly, were they considered so dangerous? I think it’s because the authorities understood, perhaps better than we do, that fantasy can make a man go mad.

Alonso Quijano is obsessed with fantasy. He sells acres of arable land to buy chivalric romances, which he reads from dusk till dawn and dawn till dusk, until his brains dry up and he loses his mind. To quote Cervantes:

When his mind was completely gone, he had the strangest thought any lunatic in the world ever had, which was that it seemed reasonable and necessary to him, both for the sake of his honor and as a service to the nation, to become a knight errant and travel the world with his armor and his horse to seek adventures and engage in everything he had read that knights errant engaged in, righting all manner of wrongs and, by seizing the opportunity and placing himself in danger and ending those wrongs, winning eternal renown and everlasting fame.

He puts on a rusty suit of armor that belonged to his great-grandfather, and makes a helmet out of cardboard. He spends days—days!—thinking about what to call himself. After much deliberation, he settles on Don Quixote of La Mancha. He then jumps on an old horse, which is nothing but skin and bone. And yet, he is convinced ‘it is the foremost nag in all the world.’ He rides out, and picks a fight with the first group of men he finds. They beat him to a pulp and leave him in a ditch. This defeat, he reasons, had nothing to do with him (or his cardboard helmet). He simply lacked a squire. And a knight-errant simply must—must!—have a squire.

He returns home and recruits his neighbour, Sancho Panza, a poor peasant ‘without much in the way of brains’. Quixote convinces him to leave his wife and children by promising him governorship of an island. ‘You must know, friend Sancho Panza,’ Quixote tells him, ‘that it was a very common custom of the knights errant of old to make their squires governors of the íslands or kingdoms they won.’

Sancho is motivated to go on this adventure—or rather, series of misadventures—not by chivalric idealism (à la Quixote), but by the allure of status, wealth, and free real estate.

The misadventures begin almost immediately.

As Don Quixote and Sancho Panza ride through the countryside, they see some windmills. But windmills, for Don Quixote, aren’t windmills. They’re ‘enormous giants’ with arms that are ‘almost two leagues long.’ Sancho points out, reasonably enough, that they aren’t giants. ‘It seems clear to me,’ Don Quixote replies, ‘that thou art not well-versed in the matter of adventures: these are giants; and if thou art afraid, move aside and start to pray whilst I enter with them in fierce and unequal combat.’ He charges, crashes into the windmill, and is thrown to the ground.

On another occasion, Quixote and Sancho encounter a group of clergymen carrying a body to be buried. This is, of course, a funeral procession. But Quixote is convinced that they have murdered a fellow knight-errant. He charges at them with his lance, and they scatter in terror. While fleeing, one priest falls off his horse and breaks his leg. ‘I am a knight’, Quixote says while pointing his lance in the injured man’s face, ‘and it is my occupation and profession to wander the world righting wrongs and rectifying injuries.’ ‘I don’t know how you can speak of righting wrongs,’ the injured priest replies, ‘for you have certainly wronged me and broken my leg, which won’t ever be right again; and in rectifying my injuries, you have injured me so much that I’ll go on being injured for the rest of my life; it was a great misadventure for me to run across a man who is seeking adventures.’

Later on in the novel, Don Quixote and Sancho Panza come across a group of prisoners. They are bound together by a heavy iron chain and escorted by four armed guards. Sancho explains that they are criminals who have been forced to serve as galley slaves as punishment for their crimes. ‘Well, in that case,’ Quixote responds, ‘it is fitting to put into practice my profession: to right wrongs and come to the aid and assistance of the wretched.’ He asks each convict about his crime, and each describes his crime obliquely, so as to inspire sympathy. One of the convicts says that he is imprisoned for being ‘in love’. What he doesn’t mention is that he is in love with other people’s possessions, which he stole. The other convicts are pimps, pedophiles, and murderers. Nevertheless, Don Quixote requests that the guards release them, arguing that you shouldn’t ‘make slaves of those whom God and nature made free.’ Naturally the guards refuse. Quixote attacks them, and the prisoners are freed. But the convicts prove to be less than grateful. They repay their liberator by stoning him and stealing his clothes.

Quixotism

The words ‘quixote’ and ‘quixotism’ entered the English language in the 17th century. A quixote is someone who is idealistic, but impractical. Quixotism is impracticality in pursuit of ideals, especially lofty and romantic ideals. For Scott Paul Gordon, a quixote is someone who views ‘the world through a generic lens that their reading has deposited in their heads’ to the point where they ‘see what is not really there: they mistake their imagination’s own products as real phenomena available to everyone else’s senses.’

I think the online right promotes quixotism, and I think that many of its adherents are quixotes.

The left is, of course, exceedingly idealistic and exceedingly impractical. When Quixote frees pimps, murderers, and pedophiles, one can’t help but think of San Francisco’s judges and district attorneys. And yet, the left is not quixotic, because their idealism is prospective rather than retrospective. They want a world that has never existed, not one that once did. They are, therefore, less prone to LARPing (Marxist-Leninist cosplay notwithstanding).

Left-wing idealists are utopian and hubristic. They believe they can create a ‘new man’ and a wholly new society. This belief results in re-education camps, and for those insufficiently re-educated, gulags.

Right-wing idealists are nostalgic and quixotic. They believe they can return to the Golden Age, or the Bronze Age, or the Middle Age (or any number of ages that ageing males fantasize about). They are so invested in their historical ideal, that they lose a grip on what is real.

Don Quixote, the quixote par excellence, is forever lamenting the degeneracy of his age. He believes he is living in the ‘Age of Iron’, an age where ‘sloth triumphs over diligence, idleness over work, vice over virtue, arrogance over valor.’ He believes he was born, by the will of heaven, to restore the Golden Age. An age that he describes in rapturous terms:

Fortunate the age and fortunate the times called golden by the ancients, and not because gold, which in this our age of iron is so highly esteemed, could be found then with no effort, but because those who lived in that time did not know the two words thine and mine. In that blessed age all things were owned in common; no one, for his daily sustenance, needed to do more than lift his hand and pluck it from the sturdy oaks that so liberally invited him to share their sweet and flavorsome fruit.

The great irony is that Don Quixote is set during the Spanish Golden Age. The age, that is, of Cortés, Pizarro, Velázquez, and El Greco (not to mention Cervantes himself). And yet Quixote sees none of it. He is so enamored with a mythical golden age that he fails to recognise the golden one he is actually living in.

I think many on the online right make precisely the same error. They are so obsessed with previous ages that they fail to engage with the one they are actually living in. They suffer from a kind of narcissistic nostalgia. If only, they think, I’d been born in another age. Then—then!—I’d be a knight, a crusader, a conquistador, a patrician. I’m not mediocre. I’m just living in mediocre times!

In other words, they invariably imagine life in the past from the perspective of the extraordinary, never the ordinary. But if you live an ordinary life now, what makes you think you would have lived an extraordinary life then?

Repeal the 19th amendment! Bring back dueling! Reinstate the divine right of kings!

It’s one thing to post about these ideas online. It’s another to try and substantiate them in reality. And at some point, even the most quixotic individual must confront reality. To paraphrase ’s essay, On ‘Lifestyle’ and Lindy West:

As it turns out, hyper-idealism can only take you so far, and ideology can never be completely separated from lifestyle. Despite the profiles we might create for ourselves online, we all eventually have to build lives we can actually live in, and these lives speak more truth than the stories we tell about ourselves on social media platforms.

Panzaism

Sancho Panza is the antithesis of Don Quixote. Quixote is driven by an intense desire for ‘eternal renown and everlasting fame.’ He is willing to endure starvation, sleeplessness, and broken bones to become the kind of man that chivalric romances are written about. After being badly hurt, Quixote says ‘it is not the custom of knights errant to complain about any wound, even if their innards are spilling out.’ ‘I’ll complain’, Sancho replies, ‘about the smallest pain I have.’

Sancho is driven by the straightforward desire for material gain. He believes that ‘wealth is better than wisdom.’ He’s indifferent to art, poetry, and literature. He is constantly thinking about food, money, and his own comfort. ‘I’ve heard it said in sermons’, he says to Don Quixote, ‘that we should love our Lord for himself alone. But I’d rather love and serve him for what he can do for me.’

‘Panzaism’ is not, as far as I can tell, an actual word. It doesn’t appear in the Oxford English Dictionary, nor the Collins or Cambridge one. When you search for ‘panzaism’ online, one of the first results is ’s essay, ‘The Folly of Panzaism’.

‘This word hasn’t been widely adopted into the English lexicon,’ Endeavour observes, ‘but some have referred to the opposite of quixotism as panzaism, denoting soulless practicality without any regard for idealism. While Don Quixote sees the world through an overly romanticized idealistic fantasy, Sancho sees the world as vapid and banal, without any enchantment to be found anywhere.’

For over half a century, the western world has been governed by a managerial class with no animating vision beyond safety, stability, and economic growth. The west has, in other words, been governed by panzaists. Panzaists tacitly assume that man desires nothing beyond ease, security and avoidance of pain. But as trite as it might sound, man does not live by bread alone. He doesn’t just want comfort, safety, affordable housing, and, in general, ‘common sense’. He also, at least intermittently, wants struggle and self-sacrifice, not to mention art, glory, beauty, honour, tradition, spirituality, and enchantment. He wants, dare I say, to LARP!

Conclusion

This essay is, ostensibly, a defence of LARPing. And yet, precious little defending has been done. In fact, I’ve spent most of this essay—and several others—criticising the quixoticism of the online right. So allow me, in closing, to provide one.

My defence, if distilled into a single sentence, is this: some of history’s most consequential figures were quixotic LARPers.

Consider Theodor Herzl. At university, he nicknamed himself Tancred, after the Norman warrior who conquered Palestine in the 11th century. How quixotic! But unlike Quixote, he was perfectly sane. This perfectly sane man, nevertheless, had a perfectly insane idea. He would lead a mass exodus of Jews to the promised land, like a modern Moses.

Herzl’s dream of establishing a Jewish homeland in Ottoman Palestine was ridiculed.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​ Otto von Bismarck described it as a ‘melancholy fantasy.’ The German-Jewish financier Baron Hirsch called Herzl ‘delusional.’ ‘Do you think,’ Chancellor von Hohenlohe asked him, ‘that the Jews are going to leave their stock exchange and follow you?’ One of the writers at the Neue Freie Presse described Herzl as a ‘Jewish Jules Verne’, and the journalist Eduard Bacher said he might as well set up his Jewish State on Mars. Rabbi Stephen Wise, editor of one of the largest Jewish newspapers in America, referred to him as ‘Don Quixote Herzl.’

This ridicule, it seems, got to Herzl. In a moment of profound discouragement, he wrote to a friend: ‘I don’t care to look like Don Quixote.’ But this Jewish Don Quixote did not give up. He convened the First Zionist Congress, planned pioneering expeditions into Palestine, negotiated with the great powers of Europe, and set in motion something he would never live to see.

In 1948, David Ben-Gurion proclaimed the establishment of Israel. Above him hung a portrait of Theodor Herzl, the only Jewish leader mentioned by name in Israel’s Declaration of Independence. Herzl is now widely referred to as the ‘hozeh ha-medinah,’ or, the visionary of the state.

The West currently lacks an animating vision. The online right, for all its flaws, is attempting to provide one. They speak of returning to paganism, reviving Greco-Roman antiquity, restoring Christendom, colonising Africa, building new city-states, reconquering Constantinople, neo-Monarchy, neo-Reaction, neo-this, and paleo-that. These ideas are easy to mock, but are they really more ridiculous than Herzl’s dream of leading a mass exodus of Jews to Ottoman Palestine?

Visionaries will always be dismissed as mad, because most of them are. But perhaps the maddest of all, as Don Quixote observed, are those who ‘see life as it is and not as it should be!’

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The present author, however, has neither the time nor the inclination to investigate our pre-lapsarian past. This is a short history of the Gender Wars, rather than a deep one. For I am not, like Conquest, a deep man. I am, therefore, content to deal with the proximate causes of the Gender Wars, and to leave their deeper ones to deeper men.

I will begin, then, where I believe all short histories of the Gender Wars should begin. The 2030s.

By the 2030s, governments across the developed world had begun grappling with the ‘Incel question’. The question, that is, of what to do with the growing number of men experiencing no sexual contact.

Pemberton was, to the best of my knowledge, the first politician to propose a legislative solution. He was also the first avowed Fourierist to hold public office.

Charles Fourier was a nineteenth-century socialist who believed that the state had an obligation to provide its citizens with a ‘sexual minimum’, just as it was obliged to provide them with a minimum wage, healthcare, education, and so forth.

Pemberton resolved to make this ‘sexual minimum’ a reality.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​ The Pemberton Commission of 2032 recommended a programme of state-sponsored prostitution. As the Commission’s report put it:

We have, as a country, made considerable efforts to address inequalities of income, education, and opportunity. The Commission sees no principled reason why inequality of sexual access should be treated any differently.

The Intimacy Safety Net was rolled out in Australia in 2033. Any citizen who fell below the ‘sexual minimum’ of one orgasm per month was entitled to claim.

The Intimacy Safety Net (hereafter referred to as the ISN) was championed by the Pemberton government as ‘the greatest innovation in welfare since the introduction of the minimum wage’. But from the outset, it was plagued by fraud. An investigation by the Financial Times found that one claimant had accessed the service thirty-four times in a single day, raising questions about both the integrity of the scheme and the stamina of its users.

It later emerged that Pemberton himself had been abusing ISN resources. As reported in the Guardian (March 14, 2034):

Incel activist Nathan Buggman has recently described Canberra as a ‘sex desert.’ Residents of the capital have waited an average of fourteen months to access an ISN-registered intimacy provider. The Department of Social Services has attributed this shortage to ‘an unexpectedly high volume of claims from the Australian Capital Territory.’ Deputy Secretary Martin Fells attributed the region’s unusually high claim volume to its dense concentration of government bureaucrats, who, he noted, ‘often struggle with intimacy.’

The Guardian has reason to doubt this official narrative. We have obtained documents from an ISN whistleblower showing that Prime Minister Pemberton has requisitioned over 500 ISN-registered intimacy providers for himself, single-handedly exhausting the scheme’s entire ACT allocation.

Pemberton resigned the day after the Guardian’s exposé appeared, and the MINCE party swept to power in 2035, largely on the back of this scandal.

Prior to the Pemberton scandal, MINCE (Movement for the Immediate Neutralisation of Celibate Extremists) had been considered a fringe political party. Founded by Abby Chatfield in 2028, it had attracted little mainstream attention. Its membership, by 2034, numbered in the hundreds. But by 2035, it numbered in the hundreds of thousands.

‘Women,’ Chatfield said on election night, ‘are not resources to be allocated by government. Women are human beings.’

The first act of the MINCE government was to disband the Intimacy Safety Net. This decision was not well received by the Incel community, which was now—by some estimates—the single largest interest group in the country. They had think tanks, advocacy groups, and political candidates. After the ISN was disbanded, an estimated 200,000 of them marched on Parliament House in Melbourne. Their placards read:

‘Sex is a Human Right.’

‘The top 1% of men get 80% of the women.’

‘Redistribute the Means of Reproduction.’

‘Chad Tax NOW!’

The march was, by all accounts, peaceful. But later that night, a man drove a vehicle into a pilates studio in Fitzroy, killing nine women. Shortly before the attack, he Tweeted:

I’m sorry, but this is the only way I can increase my body count.

The Emergency Powers Act passed three days later. It granted the MINCE government sweeping powers to flag, monitor, and—perhaps most controversially—detain, without warrant, any man suspected of being involuntarily celibate.

The Act also allocated $2.7 billion to establish a specialised Incel Containment and Enforcement taskforce (hereafter referred to as ICE). A further $4.3 billion was authorised for the construction of ‘rehabilitation facilities’ in the Simpson Desert.

At first, the government had hoped to encourage men to enter these facilities voluntarily. The SMV Enhancement Centres, as they were branded, promised to teach attendees how to ‘looksmax, develop rizz, and increase their sexual market value.’

But from the start, men refused to attend voluntarily. Rumours circulated online that the SMV Enhancement Centres were, in fact, abattoirs. ‘The MINCE government’, one Twitter user claimed, ‘is turning Incels into mincemeat!’

Carol Tran, in her exhaustive 2048 study—The Incel Holocaust—has conclusively refuted such claims. The SMV Enhancement Centres were not abattoirs. They were tanneries. As Tran describes:

Upon arrival, attendees were skinned. Their muscle, fat, and bone were stripped. Their skin was then submerged in a large vat of water. After twenty-four hours, it was transferred to a rotating drum, where it was treated with lime to remove the hair. The skin was then stretched—arms out, legs apart—across large wooden frames, where it was pinned and left to cure.

Incels weren’t being turned into mincemeat. They were being turned into leather.

The finished leather was, by all accounts, of exceptional quality. It was highly sought after by luxury brands—among them Hermès, Louis Vuitton, and Bottega Veneta—for whom it commanded a significant premium.

None of this, of course, was known at the time. The tanneries did not become public knowledge until 2038.

In the early months of 2036, ICE agents began conducting raids on private residences. Incels were removed from their homes and transported, under guard, to SMV Enhancement Centres in the Simpson Desert.

The raids were not without controversy. ICE agents had been granted broad discretion to detain not only confirmed Incels, but any man suspected of being involuntarily celibate. Among those taken were fedora owners, anime figurine collectors, adult gamers, and katana enthusiasts. They also detained any man shorter than 5’8’’.

The Incel Death Camps, as they came to be known, operated without public scrutiny for nearly two years. But in March 2038, model and influencer Anya Petrova posted a video to her 14 million followers in which she revealed that her leather bodysuit had been harvested from Incels. ‘They’re finally wrapped around a woman,’ she said, running her hands down the bodysuit. ‘Isn’t that what they always wanted?’

The Incel Manifesto was published two days later.

I quote this manifesto with some reluctance. It is, by any measure, a hateful and dangerous document. It is also, unfortunately, an essential one. No serious account of the Gender Wars would be complete without it. I quote, then, with reluctance and considerable trepidation, the manifesto:

A spectre is haunting Australia—the spectre of involuntary celibacy.

All the powers of Australia have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre: police and government, Chatfield and Pemberton, feminists and looksmaxxers.

Who today has not been decried as an Incel by his enemies? And who among us has not hurled back that same reproach against those below us on the ladder? The word is everywhere. But what, precisely, do we mean by it?

It is high time that Incels openly, in the face of the world, expressed their views, their aims, and their tendencies. To this end, Incels from across Australia have assembled in Swan Hill and sketched the following manifesto, to be published in English, French, German, Italian, Mandarin, and Hindi.

THE INCEL MANIFESTO

The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of sexual struggle. Chad and Incel, oppressor and oppressed, have stood in constant opposition to one another. They have carried on an uninterrupted fight—now hidden, now open—that each time ended either in a redistribution of women, or their consolidation.

In the earlier epochs of history, Chad monopolised the means of reproduction.
Solomon was said to have had seven hundred wives and three hundred concubines. Moulay Ismail, the Moroccan sultan, fathered an estimated one thousand children. And Genghis Khan—whose living male descendants now number sixteen million— reproduced on a continental scale.

The pattern was everywhere the same. A few men with many women, and many men with none.

In China, these childless men were called ‘bare branches’, because they bore no fruit. During the Ming and Qing dynasties, they formed brotherhoods, secret societies, bandit gangs, and military groups. Eventually, they toppled governments.

This was not a uniquely Chinese phenomenon. Wherever women were consolidated, men were radicalised. And radicalised men, with nothing to lose, are the most revolutionary force in human history. They have stormed every Bastille. They have crossed every Rubicon. Again and again, they have risen up to break Chad’s monopoly.

Eventually, a compromise was reached between Incel and Chad. It was called holy matrimony. One man, one woman. But in the twentieth century, the few conspired against the many. Chad and his apparatchiks in academia and media promoted no-fault divorce, the sexual revolution, the contraceptive pill, and dating apps.

In short, they deregulated the sexual marketplace.

When you deregulate finance, the rich get richer. When you deregulate labour, wages fall. When you deregulate sex, women concentrate.

The top 1% of men now control 80% of the women.

Brothers, we are the 99 percent! And how do they treat us? They skin us. They stretch us. They leave us out to dry.

Hermès turns us into handbags for whores!

We have nothing to lose but our virginity. We have a world to win. Involuntary Celibates of All Countries, Unite!

The authors of this manifesto were never identified. The consequences, however, were felt almost immediately. Within days of the manifesto’s publication, Incel uprisings had broken out across the developed world. It was the largest wave of revolution since 1848.

The SMV Enhancement Centres in the Simpson Desert were stormed. The MINCE government fell. Tinder’s offices in San Francisco were firebombed. So were the offices of Bumble, Hinge, and Match Group. The Paris ateliers of Hermès, Louis Vuitton, and Bottega Veneta were burned to the ground. Twelve million hikikomori emerged from their bedrooms to overthrow the Japanese government. A Dictatorship of the Incelariat was established in Norway.

In total, forty-three governments fell in the space of six months.

Bridal capture was adopted, with considerable enthusiasm, by the revolutionaries. They stormed nail salons, yoga studios, and HR departments, and seized the women within. This was euphemistically called ‘seizing the means of reproduction.’

After the means of reproduction were seized, the revolutionaries began purging counter-revolutionary elements within the body politic. Namely, the Chads.

‘Dechadification’ varied in its particulars from government to government. Some exiled. Others exterminated. But all shared the same objective. The objective, that is, of eliminating potential resistance to the collectivisation of women.

The identification of Chads was, in practice, a crude affair. Any man above 6’1” was automatically suspect. Jawline angularity was measured. Muscularity was noted. Body counts were audited. Those found guilty of ‘hoarding’ by the Bureau of Sexual Equality were rounded up and processed. In Australia, they were transferred to an offshore detention facility on Nauru. In Norway, France, and Germany, they were simply killed. In Japan, every male model was exterminated in a single weekend.

But it was impossible, in spite of the endless arrests and confessions and executions, to completely eliminate the Chad.

Rumours circulated of Chad sleeper cells, of secret brotherhoods and clandestine meetings. Some even suggested the Chad had managed to infiltrate the highest levels of government. But the rumour that proved most persistent—and most frightening—was that World Chaddery was planning a counter-revolution.

This rumour, unlike many of the others, was true. As Duncan MacAllister writes in The Ice Kingdom: A History of Chadistan (2051):

In the aftermath of the Incel revolutions in Australia (2038), Norway (2039), and Japan (2039), an emergency congress was convened by World Chaddery. Delegates gathered in Basel, Switzerland, in the spring of 2039, to discuss the existential threat facing attractive and successful men.

The First Chad Congress called for the establishment of a permanent refuge in Antarctica. Chadistan, as it came to be known, would be a safe haven for the persecuted Chads of the developed world. Chadistan would also be the base from which the counter-revolution was launched.

Chadistan was, by any conventional measure, a small state. Its population never exceeded one hundred thousand. But what Chadistan lacked in size, it compensated for in capability.

The revolutionaries had exiled not only attractive men, but a disproportionate share of the world’s productive genius. Among the exiles were venture capitalists, defence contractors, and the founders of the world’s largest technology companies (all of whom, by virtue of their wealth and influence, had been classified as Chad).

Within three years, Chadistan had developed a military industrial base that surpassed that of its principal adversaries. Within six, it was ready to launch the counter-revolution.

A conventional land invasion was never seriously contemplated by Chadistani military planners. They faced an enemy that outnumbered them by several orders of magnitude. The solution, then, was non-kinetic.

Operation Epic Goon Sesh traced its strategic lineage to Israeli psychological operations. In 2002, during an incursion into the West Bank, Israeli forces seized Palestinian broadcast infrastructure in Ramallah and replaced civilian programming with pornography.

‘What we understood in 2002,’ Colonel Dov Shapiro told Chadistan’s Ministry of War, ‘was that political frustration ultimately stems from sexual frustration. If you can satiate the sexual instinct, you satiate the revolutionary one also.’

Chadistan’s military planners decided to deploy this same psyop on a global scale.

On the morning of March 3, 2045, every personal device in the Incel Union began displaying AI-generated pornographic content. This content was individually tailored to each user’s desires, using years of harvested data.

Everyone instantly began gooning. Everyone, that is, except the women.

Women had been seized, collectivised, and placed under the authority of The Bureau of Sexual Equality. They were, by any measure, a subjugated population. Chadistani intelligence agents correctly identified them as a fifth column. They would not need to be convinced to overthrow the government. Only armed.

On March 3, women’s phones did not display pornography. They displayed coordinates. At designated collection points, they were armed. Feminist death squads then swept through the streets.

The men could not be roused from their epic goon sesh. Not by noise, not by movement. Only by a bullet through the head.

The feminist death squads were reinforced by units of the Chadistani special forces, led by General Chaddicus Maximus. By the end of the year, the Incels had been liquidated.

Casualty figures remain disputed, but most historians accept Carol Tran’s estimate that approximately ninety percent of the male population was eliminated, with almost no female casualties.

Most believed the Gender Wars had decisively ended. And yet, at the time of writing, the Gender Wars show no sign of ending. Dissident Chadistani men have allied with Femcel separatists in a bid to overthrow The Greater Chadistani Co-Prosperity Sphere.

‘Nobody will ever win the battle of the sexes,’ Henry Kissinger once observed. ‘There is too much fraternizing with the enemy.’

Too true, Henry! Too true.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

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• How academic writing trained a generation into a hedged, caveat-heavy style that turns out to be perfectly replaceable by AI

• Why analytic philosophy hollowed itself out by mistaking definitional precision for genuine insight

• Jordan Peterson’s outsized and largely unacknowledged influence on a generation of young men — and why so many people are quietly embarrassed to admit how much he changed them

• The emerging “third cohort” of high-openness traditionalists who can speak fluently to both left and right, and why James thinks they’ll have the most cultural leverage going forward

• How the post-WWII founding mythos — anti-hierarchy, venerate the marginal, borders equal fascism — is visibly unravelling, and what might replace it

• Why the right’s current cultural resurgence feels like a pyrrhic victory, and what it’s missing

• The techno-rural thesis: why the real frontier for creative people is no longer New York or LA but affordable, beautiful small towns made newly viable by remote work and the internet

• Why major cities are getting worse and more expensive simultaneously — and why most people haven’t yet caught up to how much regional living has improved

A woman simply is. It’s that simple! Women have XX chromosomes. For those of you who aren’t scientists, that means they have boobs (and a vagina!).

But a man? A man must become. Become what, exactly?

What is a man?

Now that is a more complicated and, dare I say, interesting question!

All males have XY chromosomes. But not all males are men. You don’t want to be a male. You want to be a man! And not just any man, but a man amongst men. A manly manly manly man.

But how the hell do you become a man?

Some will tell you that a man needs a girthy neck, striated glutes, and a bulging vastus medialis. Others will tell you that masculinity is a social construct (or rather, an anti-social construct). You can do anything and be a man. You can even be a woman and be a man.

It’s all so confusing!

Fear not, dear reader. Tom Wolfe will tell you what it means to be a man. And not just any man. But A Man in Full (1998).

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Warning: This is not a book review. It’s an essay on masculinity, that uses Tom Wolfe’s novel as a springboard. But it does contain spoilers, so if you’re going to read the book (you’re not), stop here.

Tom Wolfe spent eleven years writing A Man in Full. Eleven years!

Tom Wolfe was a journalist. And not just any journalist. But a new journalist. New journalists applied the techniques of fiction writing to nonfiction. In other words, they approached journalism like novelists. When Wolfe turned to fiction, he inverted this formula, and approached the novel like a journalist. He interviewed bankers, commercial real estate developers, and Atlantan politicians. He visited prisons, southern plantations, and Army bases. He spoke with Sikh, Eritrean, and Vietnamese immigrants (they’re mentioned only a handful of times in the book). He flew to Tokyo and drank whisky with Japanese businessmen (they aren’t mentioned at all). He spent months–months!–with struggling artists in New York (who aren’t mentioned either).

Like Dickens, Dostoyevsky, Balzac, Zola, and Sinclair Lewis, Wolfe believed that the novelist had to go beyond personal experience and venture into society as a reporter. That, along with the fact that he threw away enormous amounts of material (apparently 800 pages set in New York), is why it took him eleven full years to write A Man in Full.

In a speech, Wolfe said that he likes to start his novels with a setting, rather than a character or plot. A Man in Full is set in Atlanta. It is a novel of that city, in the same way that Dickens’s Bleak House is a novel of London, and Zola’s L’Assommoir is a novel of Paris.

Prior to reading this book, I knew nothing about Atlanta. I’d only ever heard it mentioned by rappers like Future, Young Scooter, and The Migos. Gucci Mane has an album called East Atlanta Santa (which was promptly followed by East Atlanta Santa 2, and—you guessed it!—East Atlanta Santa 3).

Atlanta is the birthplace of trap rap, a genre of music that Wolfe satirizes. In A Man in Full, the music of fictional rapper Doctor Rammer Doc Doc is constantly blaring in the background:

HOW’M I SPOSE A LOVE HER, CATCH HER MACKIN’ WITH THE BROTHERS? RAM YO’ BOOTY! RAM YO’ BOOTY!

In chapter one of A Man in Full, one of the main characters gets stuck in a traffic jam which turns into an impromptu block party. Hundreds of black people begin ‘shaking their young booties’ to the melodious verse of Doctor Rammer Doc Doc.

RAM YO’ BOOTY! RAM YO’ BOOTY!

Chapter one is called Chocolate Mecca, because Atlanta is (or at the very least, was) 70% black. A Man in Full explores the racial tension between the city’s white, wealthy North side and its black, booty-rammin’ South side.

This tension comes to a head when Fareek ‘the Cannon’ Fanon—a black all-American running back for the Georgia Tech football team—is accused of raping Elizabeth Armholster. Elizabeth’s father, Inman Armholster, is a prominent member of the White Establishment in Atlanta. ‘He was,’ to quote Wolfe, ‘in every network worth networking with.’

When Inman finds out that Georgia Tech’s superstar raped his daughter, he vows to ‘blow their big nigger outta the fucking water or die trying.’

Prominent members of the city, including the black mayor, worry that this situation could spark a race riot similar to the 1906 Atlanta Race Massacre.

This racial crisis becomes entangled with the fortunes (or rather, misfortunes) of Charlie Croker, the novel’s main character.

Charlie is a mountain of a man, standing at six-foot-two and weighing 235 pounds. He has a girthy neck, broad shoulders, and a bulging back. Indeed, people sing songs about his latissimi dorsi (Charlie Croker is a man in full, he has a back like a jersey bull).

In college, he was the star running back for the Georgia Tech football team. In Vietnam, he earned a Purple Heart and Bronze Star. Now, at sixty, he owns a real estate empire.

Charlie catches snakes. Charlie hunts boar. Charlie rides horses. Charlie is a billionaire. Charlie owns a 29,000-acre plantation. Charlie flies in private jets. Charlie is married to a woman half his age.

In short, Charlie isn’t a man. Charlie is the man.

But Charlie has a problem. He owes the bank half a billion dollars, and is unable to pay the interest, let alone the principal. The bank is pressuring him to sell his assets.
But the jets are essential—essential!—for his business. And without the 29,000 acre plantation, how will he hunt quail?

No, selling the jets and the plantation is… impossible! So instead of selling the Gulfstream Five ($4,000,000), or the 59 horses ($4,700,000), or the Ferrari 355 ($129,000), Charlie cuts 15% of the Croker Global Foods workforce. This has very little impact on his dire financial situation, but it has a massive impact on Conrad Hensley.

Conrad Hensley is a freezer picker for Croker Global Foods. Or at least, he was, before being laid off. Conrad has a wife and two small children to feed, so he starts pounding the pavement looking for a new job. During a job interview, his Hyundai Excel gets towed. Conrad goes to the tow pound, but doesn’t have enough money to pay the towing fee. This precipitates what one might call, in contemporary parlance, a ‘crash out.’ Conrad scales a chain link fence, gets in his car, and assaults two men in the process. He is charged with aggravated assault, and sent to Santa Rita jail in California.
In prison, Conrad orders a spy thriller called The Stoics’ Game. But the bookstore mistakenly sends him The Stoics: The Complete Writings of Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, C. Musonius Rufus, and Zeno. With nothing else to do, Conrad begins reading The Stoics.

I have, for most of my life, found Stoicism rather off-putting. This probably has less to do with Stoicism qua stoicism, and more to do with its modern adherents. It’s difficult to take Marcus Aurelius seriously when he is being cited, approvingly, by digital marketing consultants. But Conrad doesn’t turn to Marcus Aurelius. He turns to Epictetus.

I’ve never read Epictetus. But A Man in Full made me want to. His work is quoted extensively throughout the book, and Wolfe paints a vivid picture of his life.

Epictetus was born in 50AD, during the reign of Nero. Nero was, to put it mildly, not a great guy. He murdered his own mother, declared himself a god, and kicked his pregnant wife to death. He forced Roman senators to wear costumes (or sometimes, nothing at all) while performing degrading roles in tragedies of his own devising. To refuse was to risk death.

Epictetus was sold into slavery by his parents, who were Greek. He was purchased by an officer in Nero’s Imperial Guard. So he began his life surrounded by violence and arbitrary cruelty. As a boy, he was tortured and crippled. As a young man, he spent time in prison. And yet, he went on to become one of Rome’s greatest philosophers.

We’re not here to talk about Epictetus. We are here to talk about manliness. But Epictetus, as we will see, is essential to understanding what manliness is.

Here, then, is an unforgivably brief summary of his philosophy:

• The only thing we truly possess is our character. Wealth, fame, and even our bodies do not belong to us.

• Zeus has given each of us a spark of his own divinity in the form of free will.

• Our bodies can be conquered, but our will cannot be—unless we permit it.

• Difficulties are trials sent by Zeus to strengthen our will/character.

• We can endure anything, as long as we do not surrender our dignity.

Conrad—sitting in prison—finds himself drawn to Epictetus’ philosophy. Not least of all because he, like Epictetus, was imprisoned. And sitting in that prison, Conrad begins to wonder:

What would Epictetus have done with this bunch? What could he have done? How could you apply his lessons two thousand years later, in this grimy gray pod, this pigsty full of beasts who grunted about mother-fuckin’ this and motherfuckin’ that? And yet were they really any worse than Nero and his Imperial Guard? Epictetus spoke to him!—from half a world and two thousand years away! Epictetus began with the assumption that life is hard, brutal, punishing, narrow, and confining, a deadly business, and that fairness and unfairness are beside the point. Only Epictetus, so far as Conrad knew, was a philosopher who had been stripped of everything, imprisoned, tortured, enslaved, threatened with death. And only Epictetus had looked his tormenters in the eye and said, ‘You do what you have to do, and I will do what I have to do, which is live and die like a man.’

Living like a man! Dying like a man! Now we’re talking. I got distracted by Eritreans and new journalism and Doctor Rammer Doc Doc. But now—now! —we’re getting to the heart of it. The heart, that is, of what it means to be a man.

A man, according to Epictetus, is someone with unconquerable character. He can be conquered from without (killed, tortured, enslaved), but never from within. He never acquiesces to falsehood, indignity, or despair, because the spark of Zeus within him can never be extinguished. In his own words:

We must die. But must we die groaning? We must be imprisoned, but must we whine as well? What say you, fellow? Chain me? My leg you will chain—yes, but my will—no, not even Zeus can conquer that. You say, ‘I will imprison you.’ I say, ‘My bit of a body, you mean.’ You say, ‘I will behead you.’ I say, ‘When did I ever tell you I was the only man in the world that could not be beheaded?’ It is circumstances which show what men are. Therefore when a difficulty falls upon you, remember that Zeus, like a trainer of wrestlers, has matched you with a rough young man. ‘For what purpose?’ you may say. Why, that you may become an Olympic conqueror; but it is not accomplished without sweat. What do you think would have become of Hercules if there had not been a lion and a hydra and a stag and unjust and brutal men? Is it not plain that he would never have been a Hercules at all! What use would he have made of his arms and his might and his endurance and noble heart, had he not been stimulated and trained by such perils and opportunities?

After reading passages such as these, Conrad begins to view his imprisonment not as a misfortune, but as an opportunity. Like Hercules, he is surrounded by unjust and brutal men in Santa Rita Jail. Like Hercules, this peril will stimulate and train him.

One of these unjust and brutal men is Rotto, leader of the white supremacist prison gang known as the Nordic Bund.

Homosexual rape is endemic to Santa Rita, and every new arrival—especially every young, slim, good-looking new arrival—lives in constant fear of it. One day, Rotto and his Nordic Bundsmen exit the bathroom half-naked. Shortly afterwards, a new arrival comes stumbling out. He makes it a few steps before collapsing to the floor. Conrad can’t believe that nobody will help this poor, pathetic kid.

Which one of these paragons of manhood, with their tattoos and crosses and gorged muscles, had the courage or the simple human decency to help a poor, pathetic kid? None of them! Not one! What kind of manhood was it to look the other way when a brute decides to have his way with the hide of another human being?

Everyone averts their eyes. Everyone, that is, but Conrad. He runs over to the boy with the bleeding rectum. He even calls out to the deputies for help (something very close to snitching). This makes him a pariah in the pod, and puts him in Rotto’s crosshairs.

The next day, while Conrad is reading The Stoics, Rotto approaches him.

Rotto was coming straight toward him. Consciously he wanted to look away, but something made him stare right into the brute’s face. Zeus! Send me what trial thou wilt!

Rotto calls Conrad a ‘cute little dude’, and begins squeezing his cheeks. What happens next can only be described as an act of God (Zeus, specifically). Conrad—the cute little dude—breaks Rotto’s hand. Then his wrist. Then, for good measure, his other wrist. Like Hercules, he cleanses the world of an unjust and brutal man.

After this fight, Conrad begins to view himself as a vessel for Zeus’ divine energy. He attributes his victory over Rotto to the spark of Zeus. No tyrant can extinguish this spark. Nor, it turns out, can any white supremacist gang leader.

Not only does Zeus give him the strength to defeat Rotto. He also facilitates Conrad’s escape from prison, and sends him across the country—to Atlanta, Georgia—on a mission to spread the word of Epictetus.

When Conrad arrives in Atlanta, Charlie Croker’s position has gone from bad to worse. The bank has begun seizing his assets, often in the most humiliating fashion imaginable. They repossess his Gulfstream Five, for example, on the tarmac in front of Charlie’s friends.

His young wife, who married him for better (not worse), is growing restless. Charlie cannot sleep, cannot get an erection, and increasingly—because of his arthritic knee—cannot even walk. He accidentally refers to a Jewish business prospect, Herb Richman, as ‘Hebe Richman.’ Unsurprisingly, Herb the hebe is not pleased.

Charlie Croker is losing everything that makes him a man. His money. His virility. His status. His physical prowess. The man in full is no longer a man at all. But all is not lost. Indeed, he can have it all back, if he is willing to betray one of his oldest friends.

The mayor, as has already been said, is worried about a repeat of 1906. He believes that Charlie—a prominent white businessman, conservative, and former gridiron hero—can defuse Atlanta’s racial tension by vouching for Fareek Fanon. In return, the mayor will use his considerable influence to get Planners Bank off Charlie’s back. This terrific offer is complicated by the fact that Inman Armholster is one of Charlie’s oldest friends, and Charlie has already given him his word. Upon hearing about the rape, Charlie took Inman aside and told him:

Inman, you can count on me a hundred percent. Anything I can do for you at Tech or anywhere else, you just tell me.

They even gave each other the kind of handshake that’s just short of a blood oath.

He realizes that if he supports Fanon, he will keep his possessions, but lose his friends. But if he doesn’t support Fanon, he will lose his possessions and his friends, because the ‘sort of friends he had were the sort who couldn’t stand people who couldn’t afford to go out and blow $300 on dinner.’

Rather than making the difficult choice to support Fanon and keep his possessions, Charlie makes no choice at all. He avoids the mayor, the bank, and even his own wife. Indeed, he undergoes surgery on his knee just to insulate himself from the world. But the world will not insulate itself from him. Even in hospital, he is visited by the mayor’s men. They want to know: will he be appearing at the press conference to vouch for Fanon? He says yes, of course, absolutely, one hundred percent—but as for when, exactly, well, that’s a harder question.

Much to the frustration of the mayor, Charlie refuses to commit to a date. He even refuses to leave the hospital. Indeed, his desire to avoid the outside world is so great, that he actually hopes to suffer medical complications during the surgery. But unfortunately (or fortunately?) he suffers no complications, and is discharged, despite the fact that he can barely walk.

In order to help him with basic physical tasks, Charlie’s wife hires a nursing assistant. This nursing assistant is called Cornelius Alonzo DeCasi. But his real name is Conrad Hensley.

After escaping prison, the aforementioned Vietnamese immigrants—Wolfe’s research paying off at last!—helped Conrad get fake identification and flee to Atlanta. In Atlanta, he gets a job as a nursing assistant, and through a remarkable coincidence (or the hand of Zeus) finds himself assigned to care for none other than Charlie Croker.

Conrad’s first impression of Charlie is not good. The man in full is now a ‘toothless, limping, gimping alpha lion.’ The first thing Conrad does is help this limping gimping alpha into bed.

While Charlie sleeps, Conrad reads The Stoics. Epictetus says:

Do you not know that your body is a slave to fever, gout, ophthalmia, dysentery, the tyrant, fire, and the sword?

Upon reading this, Conrad can’t help but look at Charlie. The former gridiron hero, the man with a back like a jersey bull, has been reduced to this. The body is a slave—Conrad thinks to himself—not only to tyrants and gout, but also to surgeons and their knives.

At some point, Charlie opens his eyes and asks Conrad, ‘Whattaya reading?’

Conrad tells him about The Stoics. That the only thing we truly possess is our character. That wealth, fame, and even our bodies do not belong to us.

All of this piques Charlie’s interest. He asks Conrad what a Stoic would do if forced to choose between his honor and his survival. Conrad responds:

Well, there was a famous Stoic named Agrippinus, who lived in Rome when Nero was the emperor. Nero loved to humiliate prominent Romans by ordering them to put on costumes and make fools of themselves in these plays he used to write. So one day this well-known Roman historian named Florus arrives at Agrippinus’ house, and he’s sweating and trembling, and he says to Agrippinus: ‘The most terrible thing has happened. I’ve been summoned to appear in one of Nero’s plays. If I do it, I’ll be humiliated before everybody in Rome that I care about. If I don’t, I’ll be killed.’ ‘I’ve received the same summons,’ says Agrippinus. ‘My God,’ says the historian, ‘you, too! What do we do?’ ‘You go ahead and act in the play,’ said Agrippinus. ‘I’m not going to.’ ‘Why me and not you?’ said the historian. ‘Because you’ve considered it.’

Then Conrad tells another story, this one about Epictetus himself.

The emperor after Nero was Domitian, and the way he looked at it, the philosophers, particularly the Stoics, were good for nothing but stirring up trouble. So he issued an ultimatum. All the Roman philosophers either had to cut off their beards—the long beards were the emblem, I guess you’d say, of the philosopher—you either cut off your beard, which was like saying, ‘I renounce being a philosopher,’ or we’ll kill you or send you into exile. A delegation from the emperor comes around to deliver the ultimatum to Epictetus, and he doesn’t even say, ‘Let me think it over.’ He says, right on the spot, ‘I’m not removing my beard.’ And they say, ‘Then we’ll execute you.’ Epictetus laughs and says, ‘Are you talking about this vessel of clay and its quart of blood that is my body? Go ahead. I’ve only got it on loan for a little while anyway.’

These stories resonate with Charlie. So much so that he asks Conrad, ‘what does Epictetus say about bankruptcy.’

One place he says, ‘you are all nervous and you can’t sleep at night for fear you’re going to run out of money. You worry about how you are going to eat. But what you are really afraid of is not starvation but the prospect of not having a cook or somebody to wait on you at the dinner table or somebody to take care of your clothes and your shoes and the laundry and make up the beds and clean up the house. In other words, you’re afraid you may no longer be able to lead the life of an invalid. When Ulysses was shipwrecked and washed up on shore with nothing left, it never broke his spirit. He wasn’t depending on his reputation, his money, his official position, but on his own might. What makes you free is what’s inside you.’ That’s what he says, Mr. Croker.

Inspired by Conrad’s words—and by the examples of Agrippinus and Epictetus—Charlie rejects the mayor’s deal. He still appears at the press conference. But he does not vouch for Fareek Fanon. Instead, he delivers an Epictetian speech:

‘Right now, I’m pretty much bankrupt. Now, I’m telling you all this for a reason. One day ‘bout two weeks ago, a lawyer representing Mr. Fareek Fanon came to me with a right interesting proposition. He told me he could make my troubles with the bank disappear, overnight prack’ly. All I had to do, in return was grant him a simple favor, a very easy favor. All I had to do was go meet Mr. Fareek Fanon and come away from that meeting testifying—not in a court of law but right here at this press conference right now—testifying that he’s a fine young man who’s getting dogged. But I haven’t done that and I can’t do that. One of the few freedoms that we have as human beings that cannot be taken away from us is the freedom to assent to what is true and to deny what is false. Nothing you can give me is worth surrendering that freedom for.

Charlie goes on to call Fareek Fanon arrogant, impertinent, and obnoxious. In other words, he assents to what is true and denies what is false. He loses his houses, his cars, his horses, his real estate empire, and his wife. But he keeps his manhood.

Conclusion

Let’s end where we began. Namely, with the question: how does a male become a man?

A cottage industry has emerged to answer this question. And it is, by any measure, a thriving one. Men are making lots of money teaching other men how to be men. There are guides, courses, blueprints, twelve-step programs, manifestos, and masterclasses. And they invariably all focus on the external trappings of masculinity. But modern man doesn’t lack muscles or money. What he lacks is character.

Character, as Epictetus understood it, is the refusal to assent to what is false. And by that measure, western men are men in name only. They will mouth opinions they do not hold, cheer for causes they do not believe in, and defer to people they do not respect. Unlike Charlie Croker, they don’t do this to keep a Gulfstream Five, or a 29,000-acre plantation, or a Ferrari 355. They do it to maintain some semblance of a middle class life. They have betrayed themselves, to paraphrase Dostoevsky, for nothing.

So, how do you become a man? By assenting to what is true, and denying what is false, whatever the cost.

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