By Jack Donovan
Interesting book that discusses what it means to be a man in today's society. I do not know that much about the author, but the guy certainly has pretty good insights. I might not agree with all of them, by they certainly are mind-provoking.
Amazon Page for details
My Rating: 8/10
Click Here to Read My Notes
Interesting book that discusses what it means to be a man in today's society. I do not know that much about the author, but the guy certainly has pretty good insights. I might not agree with all of them, by they certainly are mind-provoking.
Amazon Page for details
My Rating: 8/10
Click Here to Read My Notes
When someone tells a man to be a man, they mean that there is a way to be a man.
Above all things, masculinity is about what men want from each other.
Established men of wealth and power have always wanted men to believe that being a man was about duty and obedience, or that manhood could be proved by attaining wealth and power through established channels.
Men of religion and ideology have always wanted men to believe that being a man was a spiritual or moral endeavor, and that manhood could be proved through various means of self-mastery, self-denial, self-sacrifice or evangelism.
Men who have something to sell have always wanted men to believe that masculinity can be proved or improved by buying it.
The Way of Men is the way of that gang.
Men are hard wired for aggressive play. High testosterone men take more risks and seek more thrills. Men are more interested in competing for status, and when they win, their bodies give them a dopamine high and more testosterone.
Some researchers believe that the human brain can only process enough information to maintain meaningful relationships with 150 or so people at any given time.
Competition creates animosity, and men will dehumanize each other to make the tough decisions necessary for their own group to survive.
If you put males together for a short period of time and give them something to compete for, they will form a team of us vs. them.
It has always been the job of men to draw the perimeter, to establish a safe space, to separate us from them and create a circle of trust.
Vir is the Latin word for “man.” The word “virtue” comes from the Latin “virtus.” To the early Romans, virtus meant manliness, and manliness meant martial valor.
Men who did other work could satisfy their need to be seen as men among men by fighting metaphorically, showing social courage, mastering their desires, and behaving ethically.
The meaning of the word virtus and the Roman idea of manliness expanded to include values that were not merely survival virtues, but also civic and moral virtues.
You won’t want the men in your gang to be reckless, but you’ll need them to be courageous when it matters. A man who runs when the group needs him to fight could put all of your lives in jeopardy.
You’ll want men who are competent, who can get the job done. Who wants to be surrounded by morons and fuck-ups?
Strength, Courage, Mastery, and Honor.
The men who are strong, courageous, competent and loyal will be respected and honored as valuable members of team “us.”
A man of questionable loyalty, who doesn’t seem to care what the other men think of him or how their tribe is perceived, will not be trusted by the hunting and fighting gang.
Without strength, masculinity becomes something else—a different concept.
It is fashionable today to put the word “weaker” in quotations to avoid offending women when they are referred to as the “weaker” sex. Quotation marks will not alter the basic human truth that men are still on average significantly physically stronger than women.
Strength isn’t the only quality that matters. Sometimes it doesn’t matter at all. Strength is rarely a disadvantage.
Women can demonstrate strength, but strength is a quality that defines masculinity.
Greater strength differentiates men from women. Weak men are regarded as less manly, but no one really cares or notices if a woman is physically weaker than her peers.
Collectively, we don’t care whether a woman is strong or not. A woman is not considered less womanly if she is physically weak.
The Way of Men is the Way of the Strong—or at least the stronger.
One evolutionary biologist recently suggested that humans stood up because standing up gave human males a greater mechanical advantage when clobbering each other.
Strength, in the strictest physical sense, is the muscular ability to exert pressure.
Strength is an aptitude. Strength is an ability that can be developed, but as with intelligence, most people will have a certain natural range of potential beyond which they will be unable to progress.
Some individuals will have a greater aptitude for developing strength than others. Humans are unequal in their aptitudes. This is one of the cruel but fundamental truths of human life.
A person who is too weak simply cannot survive. It is strength that makes all other values possible.
Strength is the ability to exert one’s will over oneself, over nature and over other people.
Physical strength is the defining metaphor of manhood because strength is a defining characteristic of men.
The experience of being male is the experience of having greater strength, and strength must be exercised and demonstrated to be of any worth. When men will not or cannot exercise their strength or put it to use, strength is decorative and worthless.
Strength is the ability to move or stand against external forces.
Courage is kinetic. Courage initiates movement, action or fortitude.
Courage exercises strength.
Aristotle believed that courage was concerned with fear, and that while there were many things to fear in life, death was the most fearful thing of all.
He also made the point that men who are forced to fight are less courageous than those who demonstrate courage in battle of their own free will.
Aristotle framed courage as a moral virtue, as a will to noble action.
Andreia, the word Aristotle used for courage, was also synonymous with manliness in ancient Greece.
In non-military situations courageous virtus usually refers to the capacity to face and endure pain and death.”
The word courage is used cheaply today.
There is nothing wrong with acknowledging the difficulties others face, but we can also acknowledge, as Aristotle and the Romans did, that courage in its highest and purest form involves the willful risk of bodily harm or death for the good of the group. Lesser risks require greater dilutions of courage.
The strength of man is not merely a tool to be used in the service of others. Men also use strength to advance their own interests and it is foolish to expect them to make endless sacrifices without personal gain of some kind, be it material or spiritual. We should expect men to fight for themselves, to compete with one another and to look after their own interests.
Nothing could be more natural than a man who wants to triumph and prosper.
Another word is “gameness.” Sam Sheridan wrote about it in A Fighter’s Heart. Gameness is a term used in dogfighting to describe, “the eagerness to get into the fight, the berserker rage, and then the absolute commitment to the fight in the face of pain, of disfigurement, until death.”
A man who is obviously game can step ahead of a man who is not, simply because he can expect the man who is less game to yield to him.
“If you can treat another man like he is your kid brother, you are the alpha.”
Courage is the will to risk harm in order to benefit oneself or others. In its most basic amoral form, courage is a willingness or passionate desire to fight or hold ground at any cost (gameness, heart, spirit, thumos). In its most developed, civilized and moral form courage is the considered and decisive willingness to risk harm to ensure the success or survival of a group or another person (courage, virtus, andreia).
One of the great tragedies of modernity is the lack of opportunity for men to become what they are, to do what they were bred to do, what their bodies want to do.
As Don Corleone might put it, women and children could afford to be careless for most of human history, but not men.
A child is a child, but an incompetent adult is a beggar.
One of the problems with massive welfare states is that they make children or beggars of us all, and as such are an affront and a barrier to adult masculinity.
Mastery is a man’s desire and ability to cultivate and demonstrate proficiency and expertise in technics that aid in the exertion of will over himself, over nature, over women, and over other men.
Masculinity can never be separated from its connection to violence, because it is through violence that we ultimately compete for status and wield power over other men.
This is the most natural desire in the world, because honor in its most inclusive sense is esteem, respect and status.
To be honored is to be respected by one’s peers.
For Hobbes, honor was a form of deference, an acknowledgement of power and influence over other men.
According to James Bowman, there are two types of honor.
Reflexive honor is the primitive desire to hit back when hit, to show that you will stand up for yourself.
A man once said, “If I allow a man to steal my chickens, I might as well let him rape my daughters.” That’s reflexive honor.
Honor is a man’s reputation for strength, courage and mastery within the context of an honor group comprised primarily of other men.
Honor is a concern for one’s reputation for strength, courage and mastery within the context of an honor group comprised primarily of other men.
Deficient masculinity is simply a lack of strength, courage or mastery.
Deficient masculinity is undesirable and results in low status.
Men despise deficient masculinity in themselves because they would naturally rather be stronger, more courageous, and more masterful.
Deficient masculinity rarely arouses hate or anger within a male group, though it may result in some general frustration.
Flamboyant dishonor is an openly expressed lack of concern for one’s reputation for strength, courage and mastery within the context of an honor group comprised primarily of other men.
“Homophobia is the fear that other men will unmask us, emasculate us, reveal to the world that we do not measure up, that we are not real men. We are afraid to let other men see that fear.”
The only way you can increase your status within the group is to try harder and get better.
Flamboyant dishonor is a little bit like walking into that room full of men who are trying to get better at jiu-jitsu and insisting that they stop what they are doing and pay attention to your fantastic new tap-dancing routine.
The flamboyantly dishonorable man seeks attention for something the male group doesn’t value, or which isn’t appropriate at a given time.
By expelling effeminate males from the gang or by shaming them and pushing them to the fringes of a particular group, the group projects strength and unity.
The group demonstrates that “we do not tolerate unmanly men here.”
When men reject effeminate men they are rejecting weakness, casting it out, and cleansing themselves of its corrosive stigma.
Earning and keeping a reputation as a good man overlaps conceptually with honor because it is another way to add value and show worth to other men.
Still, honor at is root is about showing men that you are good at being a man and good at filling man’s first role on the perimeter.
Showing other men that you are a good man is an outgrowth of that. Being a good man is related to honor, but it is not the root of honor.
We care what other men think of us, first and foremost, because men have always depended on each other to survive.
Reducing masculinity to a handful of tactical virtues may seem crude, thuggish and uncivilized. What about moral virtue? What about justice, humility, charity, faith, righteousness, honesty, and temperance? Aren’t these manly virtues, too?
When you ask men about what makes a real man, a lot of them will get up on their high horses and start talking about what it means to be a good man.
However, if you ask the same men to list their favorite “guy movies,” many of them will include films like The Godfather, Scarface, Goodfellas, and Fight Club
Bad guys tend to operate in brutal, indelicate, and unmoderated boys’ clubs, and they seem to be particularly concerned with the business of being a man.
They are not good men, but they are good at being men.
Before film, men and boys were thrilled by tales of outlaws, pirates, highwaymen, and thieves. Whether these stories were romanticized or spun as cautionary tales, they captured the male imagination with adventurous accounts of daring and mischievous virility.
Enemies of my tribe, yes. Unmanly, no.
There is a movement to reclaim this idea of virtuous manhood—to show young men how to be good and manly men.
In 2009, venture capitalist Tom Matlack started a “four-pronged effort to foster a discussion about manhood,” called The Good Men Project. The Good Men Project currently exists as a foundation, an online magazine, a documentary film, and a book. The book is filled with stories of men who are struggling to be good men in the 21st Century, and trying to figure out what that means.
Over the past few decades, Americans have transitioned to a service economy and educators treated boys like naughty girls with attitude problems.
Males have become less interested in educational achievement, less engaged in political life, less concerned about careers, and more interested in forms of entertainment that feature vicarious gang drama—like video games and spectator sports.
Further, if the “job description” of being a man is written in such a way that the qualities which make a good man are basically identical to the qualities that make a good woman, then those qualities are more about being a good person than anything else.
It is good to be honest, just, and kind, but these virtues don’t have much specifically to do with being a man.
Manliness can’t merely be synonymous with “good behavior.”
There is a difference between being a good man and being good at being a man.
Being a good man has to do with ideas about morality, ethics, religion, and behaving productively within a given civilizational structure.
Men of ideas and men of action have much to learn from each other, and the truly great are men of both action and abstraction.
Being good at being a man is about being willing and able to fulfill the natural role of men in a survival scenario.
Being good at being a man is about showing other men that you are the kind of guy they’d want on their team if the shit hits the fan.
Being good at being a man isn’t a quest for moral perfection, it’s about fighting to survive.
Good men admire or respect bad men when they demonstrate strength, courage, mastery or a commitment to the men of their own renegade tribes.
In early mafia culture, honour meant loyalty “more important than blood ties.”
To protect and serve their own interests, the wealthy and privileged have used feminists and pacifists to promote a masculinity that has nothing to do with being good at being a man, and everything to do with being what they consider a “good man.”
Their version of a good man is isolated from his peers, emotional, effectively impotent, easy to manage, and tactically inept.
A man who is more concerned with being a good man than being good at being a man makes a very well-behaved slave.
When a civilization fails, gangs of young men are there to scavenge its ruins, mark new perimeters, and restart the world.
The story of Rome is the story of men and civilization. It shows men who have no better prospects gathering together, establishing hierarchies, staking out land and using strength to assert their collective will over nature, women, and other men.
The situations that make us happy, depressed or afraid have some sort of relationship to our ability to function in what some call the Environment of Evolutionary Adaptedness.
“Demonic males gather in small, self-perpetuating, self aggrandizing bands. They sight or invent an enemy “over there” —across the ridge, on the other side of the boundary, on the other side of a linguistic or social or political or ethnic or racial divide. The nature of the divide hardly seems to matter. What matters is the opportunity to engage in the vast and compelling drama of belonging to the gang, identifying the enemy, going on the patrol, participating in the attack.”
Calling this phenomenon “demonism” puts an immoral spin our species’ basic survival strategy.
The idea of a war on nature wouldn’t play very well today, but if it were tweaked a bit, it might be the most honest and realistic way to reimagine masculinity.
When men are materially invested in a society—when they believe there is more of what they want to gain by working for the group than by working against it—men will control and redirect their energies in the service of a prosperous society.
When men are emotionally invested in a society—when they feel a strong connection to the group, a strong sense of us—men will control and redirect their energies in the service of a peaceful society as long as the most aggressive men (the men who are better at being men) are provided with desirable “equivalents” to gang aggression.
For what may be the first time in history, the average guy can afford to be careless.
Nothing he does really matters, and—what’s worse—there is a shrinking hope of any future where what he does will matter.
As the back cover of The Walking Dead comic book reads, “In a world ruled by the dead, we are forced to finally start living.”
The introduction of women into a field of competition short-circuits its viability as a substitute for male gang activity.
Everyone is supposed to agree that violence is never the answer—unless that violence comes from the cutting edge of the State’s axe.
The repudiation of violent masculinity is the murder of male identity.
As long as they have enough stuff, enough food, enough distractions—men may be content to dull their senses, tune out, and allow themselves to become slaves to the interests of women, bureaucrats and wealthy men.
I moved us from the blockade, and I set the radio broadcasting, and I promised them women. Because women mean a future.”
When there is competition for resources—including women—it is good strategy for a gang of men to create a patriarchal hierarchy, eliminate neighboring rival gangs, take their women, and protect the women from rival gangs. This is exactly what many primitive tribes do. This is the basic strategy of the gang.
What happens when competition for resources is radically reduced?
What happens when women get their way?
Two of our closest primate relatives, chimpanzees and bonobos, illustrate some of the differences between the way of males and the way of females.
Aren’t most men today spoiled mamma’s boys without father figures, without hunting or fighting or brother-bonds, whose only masculine outlet is promiscuous sex?
It’s only a matter of time before someone comes up with a way to market a fitness craze where people run around spearing rubber mammoths.
The goal of civilization seems to be to eliminate work and risk, but the world has changed more than we have. Our bodies crave work and sex, our minds crave risk and conflict.
Many are attracted to peaceful platitudes like the ones heard in John Lennon’s “Imagine,” but people aren’t actually very good, or very interested, in imagining a future without conflict. If someone wrote a sci-fi show without conflict, would anyone watch?
In 2003, feminist Naomi Wolf and writer David Amsden wrote that the simulated sexual experience was turning many men off to sex with real women, who felt that they had to compete with pornography for the attention of men.
Our world isn’t offering men more paths to virile fulfillment or vital experience.
What the modern world offers average men is a thousand and one ways to safely spank our monkey brains into oblivion.
We were born into a peace of plenty, a pleasure-economy, a bonobo masturbation society.
Being able to read and write at a college level doesn’t mean the job you do will require much more thinking or consequential problem solving than you would have to do as a shift manager at McDonalds. It will only save you from the greasy forehead.
If that is all, if your life is all about chasing “fun,” is that enough?
Is this level of civilization—is all of this peace and plenty—worth the cost?
How long will men be satisfied to replay and reinvent the conflict dramas of the past through books and movies and games, without the hope of experiencing any meaningful conflict in their own lives?
How long will men tolerate this state of relative dishonor, knowing that their ancestors were stronger men, harder men, more courageous men—and knowing that this heritage of strength survives in them, but that their own potential for manly virtue, for glory, for honor, will be wasted?
The true “crisis of masculinity” is the ongoing and ever-changing struggle to find an acceptable compromise between the primal gang masculinity that men have been selected for over the course of human evolutionary history, and the level of restraint required of men to maintain a desirable level of order in a given civilization.
Men do love; sometimes more passionately and more unconditionally than women.
men change?” is the wrong question. Better questions are: “Why should men change?” and “What does the average guy get out of the deal?”
Feminists, elite bureaucrats, and wealthy men all have something to gain for themselves by pitching widespread male passivity.
The way of the gang disrupts stable systems, threatens the business interests (and social status) of the wealthy, and creates danger and uncertainty for women.
If men can’t figure out what kind of future they want, there are plenty of people who are ready to determine what kind of future they’ll get.
They’ll get a decorated cage.
If you decide that true happiness for men lies in the elimination of risk, the satiation of hunger, the escape of labor and the pursuit of “fun,” then our bonobo future may sound like some kind of One World Las Vegas.
Men cannot be men—much less good or heroic men—unless their actions have meaningful consequences to people they truly care about.
Strength requires an opposing force, courage requires risk, mastery requires hard work, honor requires accountability to other men.
It’s tragic to think that heroic man’s great destiny is to become economic man, that men will be reduced to craven creatures who crawl across the globe competing for money, who spend their nights dreaming up new ways to swindle each other. That’s the path we’re on now.
Sometimes men fight over women, but men have no history of fighting women.
“Only where the state ends, there begins the human being who is not superfluous: there begins the song of necessity, the unique and inimitable tune.” —Friedrich Nietzche, Thus Spake Zarathustra
Gangs form out of necessity, or to exploit opportunities.
Furthermore, gangs are proto-states. Proto-states threaten the power of larger existing states, so when men form proto-states to assert their own interests, their actions will be outlawed by those states.
If you want to follow The Way of Men, if you want to advance a return to honor and manly virtue, if you want to steel yourself against an uncertain future—start a gang.
I don’t care if your girlfriend is a Certified Ninja, she’s not worth eight men. Kill Bill was not a documentary. A strong and skillful woman will be worth more to you in a crisis than a prima donna, but she can’t replace men in your life. No woman can take the place of men in a man’s life.
Men need to set boundaries and make time for men in their lives. It’s important to their sense of identity, it’s important to their sense of security and belonging, and it’s good survival strategy.
Gang - A bonded, hierarchical coalition of males allied to assert their interests against external forces.
Proximity creates familiarity and shared identity. It creates us
Men who are separated and have no one else to rely on must rely on the State.
Men with opposing viewpoints can respect each other and enjoy civilized debates, but when it comes to forming us, it’s better to have a group of men who are on the same page about the issues most important to them.
A solid friendship is just like any other relationship. It requires give and take. It requires some time and some history.
If you know some guys you can connect with, and who are on more or less the same page philosophically, make sure you make time for them. Set aside time to create that history and build that trust.
Men are not honest with each other in the same way when women are present, and establishing trust requires honesty.
In harder times, the men that you do these kinds of things with are going to be the first men you call. They will be your gang. They will be your us
Above all things, masculinity is about what men want from each other.
Established men of wealth and power have always wanted men to believe that being a man was about duty and obedience, or that manhood could be proved by attaining wealth and power through established channels.
Men of religion and ideology have always wanted men to believe that being a man was a spiritual or moral endeavor, and that manhood could be proved through various means of self-mastery, self-denial, self-sacrifice or evangelism.
Men who have something to sell have always wanted men to believe that masculinity can be proved or improved by buying it.
The Way of Men is the way of that gang.
Men are hard wired for aggressive play. High testosterone men take more risks and seek more thrills. Men are more interested in competing for status, and when they win, their bodies give them a dopamine high and more testosterone.
Some researchers believe that the human brain can only process enough information to maintain meaningful relationships with 150 or so people at any given time.
Competition creates animosity, and men will dehumanize each other to make the tough decisions necessary for their own group to survive.
If you put males together for a short period of time and give them something to compete for, they will form a team of us vs. them.
It has always been the job of men to draw the perimeter, to establish a safe space, to separate us from them and create a circle of trust.
Vir is the Latin word for “man.” The word “virtue” comes from the Latin “virtus.” To the early Romans, virtus meant manliness, and manliness meant martial valor.
Men who did other work could satisfy their need to be seen as men among men by fighting metaphorically, showing social courage, mastering their desires, and behaving ethically.
The meaning of the word virtus and the Roman idea of manliness expanded to include values that were not merely survival virtues, but also civic and moral virtues.
You won’t want the men in your gang to be reckless, but you’ll need them to be courageous when it matters. A man who runs when the group needs him to fight could put all of your lives in jeopardy.
You’ll want men who are competent, who can get the job done. Who wants to be surrounded by morons and fuck-ups?
Strength, Courage, Mastery, and Honor.
The men who are strong, courageous, competent and loyal will be respected and honored as valuable members of team “us.”
A man of questionable loyalty, who doesn’t seem to care what the other men think of him or how their tribe is perceived, will not be trusted by the hunting and fighting gang.
Without strength, masculinity becomes something else—a different concept.
It is fashionable today to put the word “weaker” in quotations to avoid offending women when they are referred to as the “weaker” sex. Quotation marks will not alter the basic human truth that men are still on average significantly physically stronger than women.
Strength isn’t the only quality that matters. Sometimes it doesn’t matter at all. Strength is rarely a disadvantage.
Women can demonstrate strength, but strength is a quality that defines masculinity.
Greater strength differentiates men from women. Weak men are regarded as less manly, but no one really cares or notices if a woman is physically weaker than her peers.
Collectively, we don’t care whether a woman is strong or not. A woman is not considered less womanly if she is physically weak.
The Way of Men is the Way of the Strong—or at least the stronger.
One evolutionary biologist recently suggested that humans stood up because standing up gave human males a greater mechanical advantage when clobbering each other.
Strength, in the strictest physical sense, is the muscular ability to exert pressure.
Strength is an aptitude. Strength is an ability that can be developed, but as with intelligence, most people will have a certain natural range of potential beyond which they will be unable to progress.
Some individuals will have a greater aptitude for developing strength than others. Humans are unequal in their aptitudes. This is one of the cruel but fundamental truths of human life.
A person who is too weak simply cannot survive. It is strength that makes all other values possible.
Strength is the ability to exert one’s will over oneself, over nature and over other people.
Physical strength is the defining metaphor of manhood because strength is a defining characteristic of men.
The experience of being male is the experience of having greater strength, and strength must be exercised and demonstrated to be of any worth. When men will not or cannot exercise their strength or put it to use, strength is decorative and worthless.
Strength is the ability to move or stand against external forces.
Courage is kinetic. Courage initiates movement, action or fortitude.
Courage exercises strength.
Aristotle believed that courage was concerned with fear, and that while there were many things to fear in life, death was the most fearful thing of all.
He also made the point that men who are forced to fight are less courageous than those who demonstrate courage in battle of their own free will.
Aristotle framed courage as a moral virtue, as a will to noble action.
Andreia, the word Aristotle used for courage, was also synonymous with manliness in ancient Greece.
In non-military situations courageous virtus usually refers to the capacity to face and endure pain and death.”
The word courage is used cheaply today.
There is nothing wrong with acknowledging the difficulties others face, but we can also acknowledge, as Aristotle and the Romans did, that courage in its highest and purest form involves the willful risk of bodily harm or death for the good of the group. Lesser risks require greater dilutions of courage.
The strength of man is not merely a tool to be used in the service of others. Men also use strength to advance their own interests and it is foolish to expect them to make endless sacrifices without personal gain of some kind, be it material or spiritual. We should expect men to fight for themselves, to compete with one another and to look after their own interests.
Nothing could be more natural than a man who wants to triumph and prosper.
Another word is “gameness.” Sam Sheridan wrote about it in A Fighter’s Heart. Gameness is a term used in dogfighting to describe, “the eagerness to get into the fight, the berserker rage, and then the absolute commitment to the fight in the face of pain, of disfigurement, until death.”
A man who is obviously game can step ahead of a man who is not, simply because he can expect the man who is less game to yield to him.
“If you can treat another man like he is your kid brother, you are the alpha.”
Courage is the will to risk harm in order to benefit oneself or others. In its most basic amoral form, courage is a willingness or passionate desire to fight or hold ground at any cost (gameness, heart, spirit, thumos). In its most developed, civilized and moral form courage is the considered and decisive willingness to risk harm to ensure the success or survival of a group or another person (courage, virtus, andreia).
One of the great tragedies of modernity is the lack of opportunity for men to become what they are, to do what they were bred to do, what their bodies want to do.
As Don Corleone might put it, women and children could afford to be careless for most of human history, but not men.
A child is a child, but an incompetent adult is a beggar.
One of the problems with massive welfare states is that they make children or beggars of us all, and as such are an affront and a barrier to adult masculinity.
Mastery is a man’s desire and ability to cultivate and demonstrate proficiency and expertise in technics that aid in the exertion of will over himself, over nature, over women, and over other men.
Masculinity can never be separated from its connection to violence, because it is through violence that we ultimately compete for status and wield power over other men.
This is the most natural desire in the world, because honor in its most inclusive sense is esteem, respect and status.
To be honored is to be respected by one’s peers.
For Hobbes, honor was a form of deference, an acknowledgement of power and influence over other men.
According to James Bowman, there are two types of honor.
Reflexive honor is the primitive desire to hit back when hit, to show that you will stand up for yourself.
A man once said, “If I allow a man to steal my chickens, I might as well let him rape my daughters.” That’s reflexive honor.
Honor is a man’s reputation for strength, courage and mastery within the context of an honor group comprised primarily of other men.
Honor is a concern for one’s reputation for strength, courage and mastery within the context of an honor group comprised primarily of other men.
Deficient masculinity is simply a lack of strength, courage or mastery.
Deficient masculinity is undesirable and results in low status.
Men despise deficient masculinity in themselves because they would naturally rather be stronger, more courageous, and more masterful.
Deficient masculinity rarely arouses hate or anger within a male group, though it may result in some general frustration.
Flamboyant dishonor is an openly expressed lack of concern for one’s reputation for strength, courage and mastery within the context of an honor group comprised primarily of other men.
“Homophobia is the fear that other men will unmask us, emasculate us, reveal to the world that we do not measure up, that we are not real men. We are afraid to let other men see that fear.”
The only way you can increase your status within the group is to try harder and get better.
Flamboyant dishonor is a little bit like walking into that room full of men who are trying to get better at jiu-jitsu and insisting that they stop what they are doing and pay attention to your fantastic new tap-dancing routine.
The flamboyantly dishonorable man seeks attention for something the male group doesn’t value, or which isn’t appropriate at a given time.
By expelling effeminate males from the gang or by shaming them and pushing them to the fringes of a particular group, the group projects strength and unity.
The group demonstrates that “we do not tolerate unmanly men here.”
When men reject effeminate men they are rejecting weakness, casting it out, and cleansing themselves of its corrosive stigma.
Earning and keeping a reputation as a good man overlaps conceptually with honor because it is another way to add value and show worth to other men.
Still, honor at is root is about showing men that you are good at being a man and good at filling man’s first role on the perimeter.
Showing other men that you are a good man is an outgrowth of that. Being a good man is related to honor, but it is not the root of honor.
We care what other men think of us, first and foremost, because men have always depended on each other to survive.
Reducing masculinity to a handful of tactical virtues may seem crude, thuggish and uncivilized. What about moral virtue? What about justice, humility, charity, faith, righteousness, honesty, and temperance? Aren’t these manly virtues, too?
When you ask men about what makes a real man, a lot of them will get up on their high horses and start talking about what it means to be a good man.
However, if you ask the same men to list their favorite “guy movies,” many of them will include films like The Godfather, Scarface, Goodfellas, and Fight Club
Bad guys tend to operate in brutal, indelicate, and unmoderated boys’ clubs, and they seem to be particularly concerned with the business of being a man.
They are not good men, but they are good at being men.
Before film, men and boys were thrilled by tales of outlaws, pirates, highwaymen, and thieves. Whether these stories were romanticized or spun as cautionary tales, they captured the male imagination with adventurous accounts of daring and mischievous virility.
Enemies of my tribe, yes. Unmanly, no.
There is a movement to reclaim this idea of virtuous manhood—to show young men how to be good and manly men.
In 2009, venture capitalist Tom Matlack started a “four-pronged effort to foster a discussion about manhood,” called The Good Men Project. The Good Men Project currently exists as a foundation, an online magazine, a documentary film, and a book. The book is filled with stories of men who are struggling to be good men in the 21st Century, and trying to figure out what that means.
Over the past few decades, Americans have transitioned to a service economy and educators treated boys like naughty girls with attitude problems.
Males have become less interested in educational achievement, less engaged in political life, less concerned about careers, and more interested in forms of entertainment that feature vicarious gang drama—like video games and spectator sports.
Further, if the “job description” of being a man is written in such a way that the qualities which make a good man are basically identical to the qualities that make a good woman, then those qualities are more about being a good person than anything else.
It is good to be honest, just, and kind, but these virtues don’t have much specifically to do with being a man.
Manliness can’t merely be synonymous with “good behavior.”
There is a difference between being a good man and being good at being a man.
Being a good man has to do with ideas about morality, ethics, religion, and behaving productively within a given civilizational structure.
Men of ideas and men of action have much to learn from each other, and the truly great are men of both action and abstraction.
Being good at being a man is about being willing and able to fulfill the natural role of men in a survival scenario.
Being good at being a man is about showing other men that you are the kind of guy they’d want on their team if the shit hits the fan.
Being good at being a man isn’t a quest for moral perfection, it’s about fighting to survive.
Good men admire or respect bad men when they demonstrate strength, courage, mastery or a commitment to the men of their own renegade tribes.
In early mafia culture, honour meant loyalty “more important than blood ties.”
To protect and serve their own interests, the wealthy and privileged have used feminists and pacifists to promote a masculinity that has nothing to do with being good at being a man, and everything to do with being what they consider a “good man.”
Their version of a good man is isolated from his peers, emotional, effectively impotent, easy to manage, and tactically inept.
A man who is more concerned with being a good man than being good at being a man makes a very well-behaved slave.
When a civilization fails, gangs of young men are there to scavenge its ruins, mark new perimeters, and restart the world.
The story of Rome is the story of men and civilization. It shows men who have no better prospects gathering together, establishing hierarchies, staking out land and using strength to assert their collective will over nature, women, and other men.
The situations that make us happy, depressed or afraid have some sort of relationship to our ability to function in what some call the Environment of Evolutionary Adaptedness.
“Demonic males gather in small, self-perpetuating, self aggrandizing bands. They sight or invent an enemy “over there” —across the ridge, on the other side of the boundary, on the other side of a linguistic or social or political or ethnic or racial divide. The nature of the divide hardly seems to matter. What matters is the opportunity to engage in the vast and compelling drama of belonging to the gang, identifying the enemy, going on the patrol, participating in the attack.”
Calling this phenomenon “demonism” puts an immoral spin our species’ basic survival strategy.
The idea of a war on nature wouldn’t play very well today, but if it were tweaked a bit, it might be the most honest and realistic way to reimagine masculinity.
When men are materially invested in a society—when they believe there is more of what they want to gain by working for the group than by working against it—men will control and redirect their energies in the service of a prosperous society.
When men are emotionally invested in a society—when they feel a strong connection to the group, a strong sense of us—men will control and redirect their energies in the service of a peaceful society as long as the most aggressive men (the men who are better at being men) are provided with desirable “equivalents” to gang aggression.
For what may be the first time in history, the average guy can afford to be careless.
Nothing he does really matters, and—what’s worse—there is a shrinking hope of any future where what he does will matter.
As the back cover of The Walking Dead comic book reads, “In a world ruled by the dead, we are forced to finally start living.”
The introduction of women into a field of competition short-circuits its viability as a substitute for male gang activity.
Everyone is supposed to agree that violence is never the answer—unless that violence comes from the cutting edge of the State’s axe.
The repudiation of violent masculinity is the murder of male identity.
As long as they have enough stuff, enough food, enough distractions—men may be content to dull their senses, tune out, and allow themselves to become slaves to the interests of women, bureaucrats and wealthy men.
I moved us from the blockade, and I set the radio broadcasting, and I promised them women. Because women mean a future.”
When there is competition for resources—including women—it is good strategy for a gang of men to create a patriarchal hierarchy, eliminate neighboring rival gangs, take their women, and protect the women from rival gangs. This is exactly what many primitive tribes do. This is the basic strategy of the gang.
What happens when competition for resources is radically reduced?
What happens when women get their way?
Two of our closest primate relatives, chimpanzees and bonobos, illustrate some of the differences between the way of males and the way of females.
Aren’t most men today spoiled mamma’s boys without father figures, without hunting or fighting or brother-bonds, whose only masculine outlet is promiscuous sex?
It’s only a matter of time before someone comes up with a way to market a fitness craze where people run around spearing rubber mammoths.
The goal of civilization seems to be to eliminate work and risk, but the world has changed more than we have. Our bodies crave work and sex, our minds crave risk and conflict.
Many are attracted to peaceful platitudes like the ones heard in John Lennon’s “Imagine,” but people aren’t actually very good, or very interested, in imagining a future without conflict. If someone wrote a sci-fi show without conflict, would anyone watch?
In 2003, feminist Naomi Wolf and writer David Amsden wrote that the simulated sexual experience was turning many men off to sex with real women, who felt that they had to compete with pornography for the attention of men.
Our world isn’t offering men more paths to virile fulfillment or vital experience.
What the modern world offers average men is a thousand and one ways to safely spank our monkey brains into oblivion.
We were born into a peace of plenty, a pleasure-economy, a bonobo masturbation society.
Being able to read and write at a college level doesn’t mean the job you do will require much more thinking or consequential problem solving than you would have to do as a shift manager at McDonalds. It will only save you from the greasy forehead.
If that is all, if your life is all about chasing “fun,” is that enough?
Is this level of civilization—is all of this peace and plenty—worth the cost?
How long will men be satisfied to replay and reinvent the conflict dramas of the past through books and movies and games, without the hope of experiencing any meaningful conflict in their own lives?
How long will men tolerate this state of relative dishonor, knowing that their ancestors were stronger men, harder men, more courageous men—and knowing that this heritage of strength survives in them, but that their own potential for manly virtue, for glory, for honor, will be wasted?
The true “crisis of masculinity” is the ongoing and ever-changing struggle to find an acceptable compromise between the primal gang masculinity that men have been selected for over the course of human evolutionary history, and the level of restraint required of men to maintain a desirable level of order in a given civilization.
Men do love; sometimes more passionately and more unconditionally than women.
men change?” is the wrong question. Better questions are: “Why should men change?” and “What does the average guy get out of the deal?”
Feminists, elite bureaucrats, and wealthy men all have something to gain for themselves by pitching widespread male passivity.
The way of the gang disrupts stable systems, threatens the business interests (and social status) of the wealthy, and creates danger and uncertainty for women.
If men can’t figure out what kind of future they want, there are plenty of people who are ready to determine what kind of future they’ll get.
They’ll get a decorated cage.
If you decide that true happiness for men lies in the elimination of risk, the satiation of hunger, the escape of labor and the pursuit of “fun,” then our bonobo future may sound like some kind of One World Las Vegas.
Men cannot be men—much less good or heroic men—unless their actions have meaningful consequences to people they truly care about.
Strength requires an opposing force, courage requires risk, mastery requires hard work, honor requires accountability to other men.
It’s tragic to think that heroic man’s great destiny is to become economic man, that men will be reduced to craven creatures who crawl across the globe competing for money, who spend their nights dreaming up new ways to swindle each other. That’s the path we’re on now.
Sometimes men fight over women, but men have no history of fighting women.
“Only where the state ends, there begins the human being who is not superfluous: there begins the song of necessity, the unique and inimitable tune.” —Friedrich Nietzche, Thus Spake Zarathustra
Gangs form out of necessity, or to exploit opportunities.
Furthermore, gangs are proto-states. Proto-states threaten the power of larger existing states, so when men form proto-states to assert their own interests, their actions will be outlawed by those states.
If you want to follow The Way of Men, if you want to advance a return to honor and manly virtue, if you want to steel yourself against an uncertain future—start a gang.
I don’t care if your girlfriend is a Certified Ninja, she’s not worth eight men. Kill Bill was not a documentary. A strong and skillful woman will be worth more to you in a crisis than a prima donna, but she can’t replace men in your life. No woman can take the place of men in a man’s life.
Men need to set boundaries and make time for men in their lives. It’s important to their sense of identity, it’s important to their sense of security and belonging, and it’s good survival strategy.
Gang - A bonded, hierarchical coalition of males allied to assert their interests against external forces.
Proximity creates familiarity and shared identity. It creates us
Men who are separated and have no one else to rely on must rely on the State.
Men with opposing viewpoints can respect each other and enjoy civilized debates, but when it comes to forming us, it’s better to have a group of men who are on the same page about the issues most important to them.
A solid friendship is just like any other relationship. It requires give and take. It requires some time and some history.
If you know some guys you can connect with, and who are on more or less the same page philosophically, make sure you make time for them. Set aside time to create that history and build that trust.
Men are not honest with each other in the same way when women are present, and establishing trust requires honesty.
In harder times, the men that you do these kinds of things with are going to be the first men you call. They will be your gang. They will be your us