Jack Donovan’s speech from Become Who We Are (October 31, 2015).
Jack Donovan’s speech from Become Who We Are (October 31, 2015).
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Author: Jack Donovan
When a man on the far side of thirty-five decides to learn how to fight, he’s got some reasons. He doesn’t do it because he’s already good at it, and he doesn’t do it on a whim. He’s not trying to keep his lunch money away from the school bully and it ain’t about impressing girls.
Originally published at Jack-Donovan.com
I downloaded Jonathan Gottschall’s The Professor in the Cage: Why Men Fight and Why We Like to Watch and started reading it the morning it came out. I stopped two chapters in, because I had to head to my boxing class.
Gottschall and I aren’t the same, but we know something about each other.
When a man on the far side of thirty-five decides to learn how to fight, he’s got some reasons. He doesn’t do it because he’s already good at it, and he doesn’t do it on a whim. He’s not trying to keep his lunch money away from the school bully and it ain’t about impressing girls.
When you’re in your twenties, if you have any sense of self worth, you figure you could to do just about anything if you really put your mind to it. After that, you start to realize that doors are closing behind you, and you can see more closing doors in front of you. Thirty and forty aren’t nearly as old as they seem when you are twenty, but they aren’t twenty, either. You can probably still do almost anything, and you can still surprise yourself, but you know that you can never go back and do some things as well as you could have if you’d started earlier. Fighting is one of those things.
Gottschall did two courageous things in the process of writing The Professor in the Cage. First of all, the man took a fucking MMA fight. That takes a plumper sack than you’ll find between four average football fans. It doesn’t matter if he won or lost. And that courage only reached its pinnacle in the octagon. As he wrote in one of my favorite passages, it would have been much safer to avoid training altogether:
“The very last thing I feel like doing most nights after dinner is getting in a series of fistfights with a bunch of twenty-year-olds — is doing anything requiring strapping armor to my genitals. But since I began work on this book , trading punches with twenty-year-olds has kind of been my job , and so I drag myself to the gym like a shift worker dragging himself to the factory. I limp onto the mat feeling tired and old, and after I warm up and get going . . . I have so much fun. The blubbery, congested sensation of incipient middle age gives way, and I feel young again, and strong. When I’ve competed well, and especially when I’ve held my own in the sparring, I leave the gym feeling so awake, my whole system revving with something purer than a runner’s high. I drive home knowing that I’ve been going through life half asleep, and I feel a euphoric gratitude for my living muscle and bone and blood.”
The visceral joy of a man being a man, of this beautiful thing that we are losing and that fewer and fewer men will ever feel or know or understand — it is right there, exposed and palpable.
The book wasn’t all like that. Gottschall’s accounts of his fears about training and fighting felt overplayed to me, and were a little cringey in spots. It even seemed like he wanted to lose his fight — like it was a kind of good-guy writer’s martyrdom. But he still fought, and I’d buy him a beer for that.
Social courage, on the other hand, is a lesser form of courage, but the metaphorical beatings come from more angles and the bruises hang around longer. If only the bitchy snipings of critics were as clean and simple as a punch in the face…
The second courageous thing Gottschall did was dismiss a lot of civilized groupfeel about gender, men, and violence. While he unconvincingly argued that manly bloodsport is no threat to the feminist project, he convincingly argues that men are and have always been more inclined to violent competition than women, and that it has as much to do with nature as it does with nurture. The increased male tendency to pursue violent competition is not merely verifiable in our species, it is consistent with animals with similar reproductive abilities and behaviors throughout the natural world. “Across species,” he writes, “most male aggression is ultimately tied to a shortage of female reproductive supply relative to male demand.” We do a lot of the same “monkey dances.”
And humanity hasn’t “evolved” past the point where this sort of male violence is no longer necessary, as many spoiled and sheltered airheads like to believe — it is simply contained and suppressed by state-sanctioned violence.
Wrapping up one of several entertaining and informative tangents in the book, this one on the rise and fall of dueling culture, Gottschall makes the point that the disappearance of the kind of honor cultures that made fighting and dueling a normal part of life is not owed so much to the “evolution” or “moral enlightenment” of modern people as it is to the rise of the efficient Leviathan. The highly policed state protects families and property, and punishes men who take matters into their own hands, so demonstrating publicly that you will stand up for yourself is not only unnecessary, but potentially more costly than doing nothing. In early America and pre-20th Century Europe, this was not the case, and it is not the case in failed or weak state pockets of the world where honor cultures thrive in various forms.
In several statements sure to be deemed heretical by his Chardonnay-sipping academic peers, Gottschall sketches out a familiar definition of masculinity that is rooted in both biology and evolutionary psychology. It’s not different everywhere, or completely subjective. The differences are differences of degree. He writes, “Masculinity is simply strength and toughness— of body and mind. There are many valid ways to be a man, things that cultures respect or disrespect, but there is no masculinity without strength.” Check. “…in every culture, men were seen as more active, adventurous, dominant, forceful, independent, and strong. And in every culture except for one (but not always the same one), males were seen as more aggressive, autocratic, daring, enterprising, robust, and stern.” Check. Further:
“stereotypes about masculinity became so entrenched for a reason: they are mainly true. To be timid, muscularly weak, and emotionally shaky is now and has always been unmasculine. Masculinity is not a cultural invention. It is not the result of a conspiracy by men against women. It is a real thing that has evolved over millions of years as a response to the built-in competitive realities of male life.”
Strong, Courageous and Able. He also notes that, everywhere and always, masculinity has been something that needed to be proved through rites of passage. Women simply became women through reproductive maturity, but, “To earn the status of a real man, not an ersatz one, a guy must prove he has the right stuff.” That is to say, he must prove himself to other men. He must earn his reputation, and be willing to defend it. He must have some sense of… Honor. The Professor in the Cage is the first mainstream book I’ve read that verifies the cross-cultural reality that the tactical virtues I listed in The Way of Men — Strength, Courage, Mastery and Honor — are the most basic components of human masculinity as a universal concept.
Gottschall also explores the connection between masculinity and violence, and the lingering desire in men to find something to fight, even if they don’t have to. He compares modern men to Don Quixote. “They conjure dragons just so they can try to kill them,” because somethi
ng in them still wants to prove, “they have inherited the legacy of their grandfathers, the pure stuff of manhood: courage and strength.”
The Professor in the Cage is supposed to be about MMA, but it is more about masculinity than mixed martial arts. MMA fighters and fans won’t find much they don’t already know, though they may walk away with some academic ammunition for arguments about why they do what they do and like what they like. As a narrative about a nerd learning to fight, I enjoyed Sam Sheridan’s more straightforward and less self-deprecating A Fighter’s Heart more. But as Gottschall and I are in the same age range, his experience was useful in helping me reflect on my own. As a book about masculinity, it deserves a place on a shelf right beside Harvey Mansfield’s Manliness and James Bowman’s Honor: A History. Like Mansfield’s Manliness, though, it ultimately seems to have been written more for women and fellow academics than for a general male audience. It’s more apologia than manifesto, explaining to “others” why men, despite strong efforts to turn them into nice little girls, still persist in being…masculine. It’s not because we fear the mystical power of women, or because we secretly hate women and want to oppress them. Men still want to behave like men because we like ourselves better that way.
I won’t ruin the story of Gottschall’s fight for you, but it is worth noting that the book wasn’t just a stunt. He may never take another real fight, but he’s going to keep training and sparring until he finally leaves the gym on a stretcher.
I’d buy him a beer for that, too.
Illegal immigration might not be so bad after all.
Originally published November 2012 at Jack-Donovan.com
I had an epiphany a couple of months ago.
After looking over their shoulders, some co-workers started complaining about all of the illegals in our industry. As their go-to right-wing ideologue, I smiled, took a deep breath, and mentally arranged my collection of completely legitimate complaints, theoretical objections, snarky cheap shots and racist laughs.
Then it hit me.
Illegal immigration might not be so bad after all.
Sure, every group is defined by its borders, and you can’t make rational decisions—let alone collective decisions—for a group if you don’t know who is in and who is out. It doesn’t matter if the group is a team, a tribe, or a nation. If your group has open boundaries, it really isn’t a group at all. Your group, if it is even your group, is loosely “whoever shows up at any given time.” That makes it virtually impossible to maintain security or do any kind of meaningful long-term planning. People who simply come and go as free agents share no common culture or connection. Everyone, at least theoretically, is just passing through. It doesn’t make sense to run any group that way.
“Who’s on your football team?”
“I guess those guys out there.”
“Do they know the plays?”
“I doubt it.”
“Do they know the rules of football?”
“Can’t be sure.”
“Can you talk to them?”
“I can try. Oh, wait. There’s another one. And those two look like they’re leaving.HEY! You guys!”
(Points and gestures.)
“This is going to be a great game.”
Illegal immigration also hits me where I live. I like to do simple, honest jobs. I drive a delivery truck so I don’t have to swindle people, or tell lies, or send passive-aggressive emails cc-ing someone’s supervisor. I can write what I want and I don’t have some prissy Human Resources busybody reading my blog. The thing about simple, honest work, though, is that it generally doesn’t require a lot of experience or educational background, and usually requires some physical labor. In most places in America, that puts me in direct competition for jobs with illegal immigrants.
Illegals are happy to work 60 hours a week. They’ll take split shifts and split days off. They’ll work days and nights and graveyard shifts. They’ll do whatever you tell them to do, whether it’s the job you hired them for, or scrubbing a toilet. Illegals will let you talk to them like morons, whether they’re morons or not. They’ll whistle while they work like good little dwarves, they’ll stick around forever, and they’ll do it all for peanuts.
Why?
Because they don’t have a lot of other options.
Who cares if they can’t speak English at an elementary school level? They’re cheap!
Lift-o, the boxes-o!
Ándale! Ándale! Arriba! Arriba! Arriba!
The presence of “undocumented workers” or illegals with fake paperwork in an industry translates to worse hours and lower pay for anyone else working in their industry. Illegals raise an employer’s expectations of how much his labor dollar will buy, and lower what he expects to offer in terms of benefits and accommodations. Why should he treat you with respect when he can treat Pedro like shit and get the same work done, and for half as much money?
Uncontrolled immigration is bad for security and long-term planning. It lowers quality of life for working people. It creates disharmony and ethnic tension. It grinds my gears because I want things to make sense, and poorly managed immigration just doesn’t make sense for a nation if you want the best for the people of that nation—if you want that nation to succeed.
But, what if you don’t want it to succeed? What if you want your nation to fail?
If, as Richard Spencer recently wrote, one’s aim is to “actively disengage from this equally evil and stupid political system,” and the idea is to hasten the failure of that system, then why get your chonies in a bunch about a big, fat wrench in the works like illegal labor?
Instead of blustering on about all of the ways that it darkens the nation, I’ve decided to look for the bright side of illegal immigration.
Because it has failed to secure its borders and enforce its own immigration laws to protect the interests of its citizens, the United States government has undermined its own authority and created a nation of bourgeois criminals. Instead of respecting the rule of law, millions of average, hard working Americans have chosen to ignore the law and abandon any sense of community and allegiance to each other. To make a profit, they hire foreigners because it’s cheaper and easier than hiring their neighbors’ kids and the people they grew up with. In a sane country, we’d hang these people for treason—or at least socially shun them—but America stopped making sense a long time ago. One wonders if a nation built on merchant morality and short-term profit seeking ever made much sense.
You can’t even blame illegal immigration on big, global corporations. Small businesses might hire the document challenged to compete with big business prices, but hiring illegals isn’t GloboCorp’s game. GloboCorp has enough pesos to outsource labor anywhere in the world. GloboCorp screws over working people and undermines the state in completely different way.
No, the businesses that create a market for illegal labor—the businesses that lure illegal immigrants into America—are small businesses. It’s mom and pop who are hiring Juan instead of John. Conservatives love to condemn about illegal immigrants and sing the praises of small businesses, but it is small businesses who hire workers under the table and build their whole business models on breaking the law. Then they call their confessions to drive time talk show hosts and look for absolution by complaining that in a country with a high unemployment rate, they simply can’t find any Americans who are willing to do hard work. I’m not saying a lot of young Americans aren’t lazy or entitled, but if as an employer you feel entitled to treat your employees like refugees from a Third World Country, why would any First World workers want to work for you? The grass gets cut both ways when you pay minimum wage (or less).
I’ve been in a lot of snazzy restaurant kitchens over the years. I know for a fact that at least twenty percent of the folks washing your dishes and prepping your $30 entrees can’t pass The Roy Rogers Test.
(If you can’t say the R’s in Roy Rogers, you probably weren’t born on this side of the Rio Grande, and if you’re washing dishes, you probably didn’t go through the lengthy and complex legal immigration process. The Roy Rogers Test is probably about as accurate as E-Verify.)
Illegals with fake paperwork are stocking your warehouses and picking your potatoes and setting up the white tents for your fairy tale weddings. So many people are somehow involved in turning a blind eye to illegal labor. It’s not just some swaggering dickhead plantation owner with a big brass belt buckle; it’s also his sweet old accounting lady and the chipper bilingual stooge he hired to manage the operation. It’s Bob the Builder with his pickup truck. It’s all of the regular white guys like me who just shrug their shoulders, accept it as reality, and end up teaching their customers words like “celery.” We all know what’s up. As with Prohibition, almost everyone is somehow wink-and-nod complicit in this crime that unde
rmines the rule of law in America. And, instead of enforcing the law and protecting the interests of the nation as a whole, every President from Reagan to Obama has allowed this middle class anarchy to flourish. They even dangle amnesty in front of illegals every few years to reassure them that crossing the border was a swell idea, after all.
Illegal immigration may be slowing down, but it’s still happening, and millions of legitimate American citizens remain out of work while employers hire illegals instead of Americans.
People try to say that America is simply “changing,” but that’s the liberal language of passive resignation. It’s like convincing yourself that getting prison-banged by Bubba is merely “changing” the shape of your lower intestine. America isn’t simply “changing.” It’s getting torn apart from the inside, it’s bleeding internally, everyone is looking the other way, and no one is coming to help.
Illegal immigration is killing my grandfather’s America, but that America is never coming back. The bright side I see is that this is all part of the process of creating a failed state—a state where no one believes in the system, where the government is just another shakedown gang, where no one confuses the law with justice. A state where there is no such thing as a law-abiding citizen, a state full of middle class criminals. A state where overregulation and corruption, combined with a lack of the will and the resources to enforce the law, leads to widespread civil disobedience.
In a failed state, we go back to Wild West rules, and America becomes a place for men again—a land full of promise and possibility that rewards daring and ingenuity, a place where men can restart the world.
Yippee ki-yay, motherfuckers.
Ego-inflating rhetoric is everywhere. At work, at school , and at the mall, Americans expect everyone to tell ‘em how special, talented and important they are. In our inverted world, the weak are somehow strong, everyone who survives a hangnail is “brave,” and every bean-counter who works for the Department of Defense is a goddamn hero.
Originally published July 2012 for Alternative-Right
Ego-inflating rhetoric is everywhere. At work, at school , and at the mall, Americans expect everyone to tell ‘em how special, talented and important they are. In our inverted world, the weak are somehow strong, everyone who survives a hangnail is “brave,” and every bean-counter who works for the Department of Defense is a goddamn hero.
At GloboCorp, the human resources department tries to convince every John and Juanita that they are absolutely essential to the success of the organization. Everyone’s creative talents are valued, and everyone from the janitor to the CEO is capable of making tremendous positive contributions. In his recent book about the value of work, Matthew B. Crawford argued that modern corporations devalue meaningful achievement when they pander to us and speak as though everyone were some sort of Einstein.
Americans like to be told that they are brilliant and brave, but as a people these aren’t our highest values anymore. Who can name five legitimate, recent war heroes? The hoi polloi don’t care too much about who is smart, either. They only care about science when they want to lose weight, win an argument on the Internet, or find out how the world is going to end. If you can name ten guys doing hard science right now, you’re probably a scientist.
Most people know they aren’t Einsteins, and they really don’t care. They have a more pressing concern.
What they’re really asking themselves is, “Am I hot, or not?”
Beautiful people are the brightest beacons in our floating world. Attractive models and actors get far more praise and attention than Medal of Honor recipients. People love technology, but they use it to keep up with the Kardasians. They pack into gyms, but strength and fitness are by-products of their desire to be desired. A six-pack has a higher value than a powerful bench press or a heavy squat. No one cares how much Tatum Channing or Brad Pitt lifts, or how fast they can run, or what they can build, or how many men they could defeat in combat. They’re admired for being desirable.
It used to be that only young women worried excessively about being desired. In traditional patriarchal societies, a woman who no one wants as a wife becomes a burden on her parents. An unwanted woman could never become a mother or run a household. She remained forever a dependent daughter or an independent, lonely spinster. For women of marriageable age, attractiveness had a very high value, and while the importance of attractiveness decreases with age, most men would still rather have a pretty wife than an ugly one. Whether by habit or by nature, many women tend to enjoy painting and adorning themselves to appear youthful, fertile, feminine and appealing.
However, the woman who cares the most about being desired is the harlot, because her survival depends on her ability to lure men into her loins.
Some will point to male ornamentation as a counter-example, but the motivation behind male embellishment has traditionally been different. When men decorated themselves, they did it to appear more fearsome or to communicate status. Samurai wore rouge, and like many finer points of samurai grooming, they did it so that their enemies would respect them as virile opponents even after they were dead. They didn’t tart themselves up to get laid. They did it to gain the respect of men.
Last weekend, a movie about male strippers made $39.2 million dollars at the box office. America’s come a long way since Flashdance.
In The Way of Men, I used Bonobos and Chimpanzees to compare the female-oriented society to the male-oriented society. People aren’t exactly the same as apes, but I think Chimps and Bonobos make revealing metaphors for where we’ve been, and where we seem to be headed.
Bonobos live luxuriously, with access to as much food as they need. Female coalitions check male aggression, and males rarely form tight-knit groups. Males don’t know who their fathers are, only their mothers. Sex is, as a bar whore once said to a pal of mine, “like shaking hands.” Homosexuality is commonplace because sex is a social activity, and everyone has sex with everyone. It’s not about reproduction; sex is about mutual masturbation and having a good time. Sex is a major part of bonobo life. Bonobos are said to be peaceful, and while that may not be completely true, they’re definitely matrilineal and exceptionally horny.
Chimpanzees form patriarchal hunting groups. The males stick together, and the females end up moving from group to group. Sex is a reproductive activity. Homosexuality is rare. Males dominate females and the males at the top of the male hierarchy control the group.
America is fast becoming a “Bonobo Masturbation Society,” devoted to pleasure and organized primarily to serve the interests of females. More and more men are raised by single mothers, and males are discouraged from organizing without female supervision. Sex is social, and the majority of the hard, dangerous work that men used to do is either done by machines, idiot-proofed, or outsourced to countries where life is cheap. Women and dishonorable men micromanage male aggression with endless laws and lawsuits, and bad boys who can’t pay big lawyers are drop-kicked into a multi-billion dollar prison industry that boasts the highest incarceration rate in the world.
In our Bonobo Masturbation Society, fucking is one of the only things men are encouraged to do that actually makes them feel like men.
Throughout the Alt-Right, several writers have criticized “pick-up artist” culture and “game.”
Because just about the only manly thing that most men are allowed to do is bang, I am more sympathetic. I see what many call game as a kind of gateway masculinity. Game is essentially assertiveness training for a generation of young men who spent most of their lives playing “mother may I?”
Manliness is like a talent. Some males are more gifted than others, but like any talent, masculinity has to be pushed and developed to amount to anything impressive. Boys who were raised by single moms or overprotective parents and put through the public school feminist brain-washing system were never tried or trained by groups of hard men. You can’t hand a hen-pecked boy a high school diploma and expect him to spit like Clint Eastwood.
When they talk about game, men in the Manosphere are shoveling through the bullshit that the system tells boys about girls. This is work that needs to be done. If average young guys believe the official malarkey they are told about sex and relationships, they’ll be used and abused by entitled American girls for the rest of their lives. And, as they unpack feminist myths about the sexes, I’ve seen a lot of those guys start to wonder what it really means to be men. This is an important conversation. However, it almost seems like a safer route in today’s cultural climate to make chasing poon a long-term lifestyle choice. That’s where the positive mean slides toward a negative extreme.
Andy Nowicki wrote that if men really wanted to undermine the matriarchy, they would stop fucking. He may have his own (possibly religious) reasons for saying so, but I think he has a point.
Our feminist, globalist handlers would love nothing more than to keep young men — the most dangerous and potentially revolutionary group in any civilization – completely distracted by tang. And while it may feel like asserting dominance (in conveniently the most harmless way possible), if everything you do is designed to make you more appealing to women, you’re an eager vibrator. When your muscle is just for show, when everything you do is to make yourself more desirable, you’re playing the female role. When your worth as a man depends on how many women you can lure to your loins, you’re just a gigolo.
As Hunter S. Thompson noted, sex is the most fun for amateurs. It’s great when you’re young, pretty, naïve and carefree — but “old whores don’t do much giggling.”
Mark Simpson had a lot of this figured out when he coined the word “metrosexual” way back in 1994. The metrosexual is not necessarily gay or effeminate in the flamboyant sense of the word — that’s just the way people picked up the word. Simpson’s idea of the metrosexual is a “mirror man” whose highest narcissistic concerns are pleasure-seeking and being regarded as “desirable.” He may be in love with himself, but that, too, is a shallow kind of love. He cares more about how he looks and how well he fucks than what he has achieved or how well he is respected. It’s a harlot’s vanity.
Hugh Hefner was far ahead of his time. It was homosexual men who pioneered the bonobo lifestyle en masse. Before today’s PUAs were in pre-school, homos were doing it for the numbers, looking for validation, basing their self-worth on how many and how hot. Homosexual men rejected traditional male roles and expectations, and channeled all of their masculine aggression into sex for the sake of sex. Their idea of masculinity became masturbatory — a pumped up Tom of Finland caricature of masculine form without function or honor or virtue. Homosexual men, because they were men, set the cultural stage for objectifying men the way that men have always objectified women.
As pilot bonobos, the homos discovered the downsides of harlotry. An experienced player was bound to acquire a handful of STDs, and AIDS practically wiped out an entire generation of “sexually liberated” men. For many, there are also psychological costs. Being desired is a drug, and it’s addictive. When it’s your highest value, it becomes your identity. One of the problems — and this has always been a curse to women — is that sexual attractiveness is linked to the mating instinct, and it peaks in the young. Men mature more flatteringly than women, but most men who trade on their sex appeal won’t relax into the confident, secure, middle-aged manhood of their forefathers. Like homos and movie stars, I wonder how many of today’s players will chase steroids and sex drugs and eventually convince themselves that maybe that Kenny Rogers face lift will look better on them than it does on him. (It won’t, fellas. You’ll still look like an old lesbian who can’t blink.) There’s something particularly desperate, sad and undignified about a man of a certain age who spends too much time looking for sexual validation.
What’s worse is that straight men aren’t in the market for men, they’re in the market for women, so biology puts them at a major disadvantage. Game strategist Heartiste recently posted about an online dating experience where together, the two best looking guys managed to get a total of 50 messages from women, while the most attractive woman got over 536 messages from men in the same time period. That playing field will never be close to equal, but game is gaining popularity because men see that disparity and want to increase their odds.
Good-looking men with some game may be able to keep at it for most of their lives, and they’ll end up with some good stories. A small minority of men have always been libertines, and some men are probably particularly well suited to it. Some will have regrets, and some won’t.
The problem isn’t what happens to a few players, but what we become as a society when everyone wants to be a player. Libertinism used to be a form of rebellion, but increasingly, it’s part of the program. In a society where sex and attractiveness are the highest values, what happens to the other two-thirds of the curve?
The flesh won’t be democratized. Attractiveness isn’t any more evenly distributed than strength, size, or IQ. The world is full of fat, ugly people. People can improve their lot with diet and exercise and grooming — and they should — but you can only put so much lipstick on a pig. Some men and women just aren’t that great looking. A lot of people are actually pretty repulsive. A few should probably avoid daylight altogether, because they frighten small children.
Women have always been aware of the cruel elitism of beauty’s natural hierarchy. In societies where other virtues had higher value, they could focus on piety or simply being good mothers. When women were “sexually liberated,” some feminists (usually the fat, ugly ones) thought they could rely on social conditioning to give us all permanent beer goggles and make every bloated hag as desirable as Heather Locklear. If only Barbie had realistic proportions, or we were forced to watch more morbidly obese people on television, then fewer tears would tumble into buckets of ice cream. They keep pushing for “fat acceptance” and keep telling us that “big is beautiful.” When that doesn’t work, they barrage us with bad clichés and try to convince us that beauty is either in the eye of the beholder, or “on the inside.” We might patronize them, or try to be more sensitive, but pretending everyone is equally beautiful is just as absurd and untrue as pretending everyone is an Einstein.
No one wants a Barbie doll with cankles, and the de-objectification of women is at odds with the Zeitgeist of our oversexed Bonobo Masturbation Society. Andrea Dworkin lost, and more teenage girls than ever are watching hardcore porn to learn how to twist, stroke and swallow like the pros. I go to the gym and I see young guys who aren’t there to lift or get big. They’re following routines to “cut up” and build a body “for the ladies.” Those ladies are tanning, getting boob jobs, and trying to look like strippers. A friend who teaches at a high school in California said they had to cancel Halloween dress-up days because the kids didn’t want to be scary or cute anymore. Boys and girls alike used the holiday as an excuse to come to school as close to naked as possible.
People used to have decent aspirations. They wanted to have families. They wanted to do good work. They wanted to be good citizens, good Christians, good people. Now everyone wants to be a player and a porn star. Everyone wants to be the kind of monkey that all of the other monkeys wants to rub up against.
We call this matrilineal hump-fest “progress,” and seek our moral redemption in recycling.
Sex may be natural, and it sure is fun, but
it’s just a part of life. A society that over-emphasizes sex to the point where it seems like the only thing in life that means anything is grotesque and degraded, and for most people it delivers more emptiness than ecstasy.
In healthy patriarchies, men push themselves to earn the respect and admiration of other men. They work to prove their strength, courage and competence to each other. Men pride themselves on their reputation for mastery of their bodies, their actions, and their environment. They want to be known for what they can do, not just how well or who they can screw. And they sure as hell don’t waste their time trying to figure out what they can do to bedazzle bimbos.
Hell, in some places, when a man is ready to take a wife, he just picks one andkidnaps her. Men used to get married and get on with their lives. It seems like a healthier life path to me, and I’ve previewed what the other side has to offer.
Recently, I watched Restrepo, a documentary about soldiers fighting in Afghanistan. There was this scene in it where the Americans had to negotiate with local tribal elders. The elders were a bunch of dead serious-looking old dudes and their long beards were dyed bright red with henna.
Our tribal “allies” in the graveyard of empires have their problems. They shit in their hands and rape little boys. Their customs leave room for improvement.
However, as I watched their grave eyes, I wondered if any of these men had spent much time wondering, “Am I hot, or not?”
Working-class white men vote Republican because the Democrats have made it clear that they care about representing the interests of everyone but working-class white men.
Originally published at Jack-Donovan.com
Amanda Marcotte recently wrote that “White men, as a group, vote Republican because they vote their resentments.”
The New York Times article she cited didn’t say or even imply anything about resentment. It did say that straight, working-class white men vote Republican because the Democratic Party has devoted the majority of its resources to appealing to women, gays and the various groups of less-white men who are nostalgically referred to as “minorities.” The Democratic Party has been on the opposite side of issues that working-class white men have cared about for decades, and according to the Times piece, many strategists within the party think it’s a waste of time trying to win them over.
Working-class white men vote Republican because the Democrats have made it clear that they care about representing the interests of everyone but working-class white men.
These guys vote Republican because Republicans actually make an effort to tell them what they want to hear.
Basically, white men vote Republican because they’re suckers.
The likes of Marcotte say that working-class white men are motivated by fear and resentment, but the majority of people who vote Democrat are doing it for nobler reasons.
They’re not. Most of them are voting for their own short-term self-interest.
Sure, there is a small class of progressive white men who make a big show of putting everyone else’s interests first. They demonstrate their moral superiority by standing up — mostly online — for whatever “rights” they believe that women or blacks or illegal immigrants or transsexuals or chickens are somehow entitled to.
Everyone else is just voting for stuff they want.
Women vote Democrat because they understandably want the convenience of being able to kill their unwanted children. They vote Democrat because they want free birth control and they want free healthcare for the kids they decide to keep. Women also vote for Democrats because Democrats offer special programs to help women get education and jobs.
Women have always depended on men for protection, but they’d rather depend on many men than just one or a few, so they are happy to vote for measures to increase “security.” As a group, women don’t like or understand guns, so they vote Democrat because Democrats promise to take guns away from men — usually those working-class white men — and give them to the big group of men in the government.
Men have historically been suspicious of what big groups of men will do when they have all of the weapons.
Blacks vote Democrat because they are smart and racist. They were going to vote for Obama no matter what he did because he was black, and like sensible people they figure it is better to have one of your own in power. Democrats, as a group, are known for caring more about giving free stuff to black people. Blacks are smart, because they know that it is always better to get something for free than to pay for it.
Blacks also know that you don’t need a permit to buy a gun. You just go buy one from that guy down the street and, you know, take care of business. White men are afraid to buy guns without following the rules, so more rules means less white men with guns. This is good for black men, because they like the convenience of being able to wear a hoodie in the rain without getting shot by nervous white men with guns.
Latinos vote Democrat because their families came to America to take advantage of employment opportunities and all of the benefits and protections that America offers to its citizens. They figure more benefits and protections are better than less, and Democrats always offer more benefits and protections.
In places with a lot of Latinos, Democrats say that you shouldn’t have to go through the trouble of becoming a citizen to get those benefits and protections. This is convenient for Latinos who are not citizens, because using a dead person’s social security number can sometimes be inconvenient.
Gay people vote Democrat because Democrats offer gay people stuff they think they want. Aside from marriage and the sadistic thrill of being able to force Christians to make wedding cakes, this includes free healthcare. Free healthcare comes in handy when you’re a man who occasionally has sex with guys he met 30 minutes ago on Grindr, or a lesbian who occasionally gets drunk and has sex with men. (See the first point about women above.)
Transsexuals vote Democrat because they want the government to pay for the very expensive cosmetic surgeries and hormones that are necessary for them to become who they really are. Also, they are confused about which bathroom to use, so they want more special bathrooms for confused people.
(Chickens are not technically allowed to vote yet, but we hear they want to be free range, which sounds libertarian.)
As Gari Day, the white male bus driver featured in the Times article said, “Republicans make you work for your money, and try to let you keep it.”
He probably doesn’t understand how the government can afford to keep giving everyone free stuff forever. He probably does figure that some of that money for the stuff other people want is coming out of his earnings. But he’s not alone in that — I’ve yet to see a successful Democrat turn down a tax break. No one actually wants to pay more taxes.
Aside from voting to keep more of their own money and to keep the guns they bought, a lot of these straight, white, working-class men are not asking for anything. They’re too proud for that.
As old-fashioned voters, they see themselves as part of the government. They’re not just trying to get more stuff from the government and come up with reasons why they deserve it. They’re voting for a society that works the way they think things should work.
And that’s why they’re suckers.
Democratic and Republican politicians, like everyone else, see the government as a way to get what they want. Politicians want power and status. To get elected, they accept money from regular people, from rich men, from businesses, and probably from foreign countries. In return, they promise favors. That’s how the system works.
People who don’t want anything from the government are useless to politicians, because they are difficult to manipulate and impossible to please. The government, like every big bureaucracy, is in the growth business. Making the government smaller isn’t in the short-term interest of any ambitious bureaucrat. Contraction only makes political sense when you’re trying to reduce an opponent’s sphere of influence.
Democrats promise more government, and more free stuff. Republicans promise less free stuff for poor people, and promise to lower taxes in return, but they rarely manage to lower taxes for anyone but rich guys who — let’s be real — were usually born into money and didn’t work any harder than the guys driving buses. Many of the wealthy elite are white guys, true, but they care about as much about the working-class white guys as the Democratic Party leadership.
White men are suckers because they haven’t figured out that the America they believe in is already gone, and that they are the only ones who aren’t asking for whatever they can get while the gettin’s still good. They’ll vote reliably Republican as long as the Republicans keep talking about self-reliance and how things should work, and that will free up Republican politicians to do favors for people who actually want stuff.
The beast won’t starve. The beast is still getting seconds, and dessert, and a nip off that dusty old bottle of port from the cellar.
Originally published at Jack-Donovan.com
So, you’re going to refuse to buy something from company x, even though it would be to your immediate advantage to do so.
You want to “starve the beast,” or “refuse to support a company that __.”
That’s nice.
NO ONE CARES.
Sure, if a small business has a handful of customers, and half of them stop buying in protest, you can really force an owner to re-think his policy. It’s standard procedure for leftists to bully mom and pop shops into baking lesbian wedding cakes, or run them out of business by smearing them as “racists” or “sexists” or some other offense to the People’s Revolution of Hand-Holding Vegan Transvestites. Happens all the time.
But a company operating in a national or global market isn’t going to notice if 1,000 radical weirdos switch brands of shampoo. Unless you manage to shame them in the mainstream media and your objection goes viral, no one will even notice. You’re a rounding error.
The beast won’t starve. The beast is still getting seconds, and dessert, and a nip off that dusty old bottle of port from the cellar.
Your refusal to open your precious little purse is not only pointless, it’s also reductive. If your critique of modernity is that it reduces us all to bank accounts and units of labor, then why reduce your protest of modernity to a financial transaction? You may say, “to hit ‘em where it hurts,” but since it doesn’t hurt, then why bother?
I understand not wanting to luxuriate in the tasteless decadence of Wal-Mart, but if they have the lowest price on something you need for your survival or to advance your own concerns — GO BUY THAT SHIT.
No shot-callers care about your personal boycott, which matters about as much as your fringe vote, so refusing to buy something you could use or paying more to buy it elsewhere is self-destructive asceticism at best, and vapid in-group social posturing at worst. You’re not starving the beast. You’re starving yourself, or starving your cause.
Use the system. Use it like a whore. Take what you want from it and leave the rest for the rats.
And what’s more — instead of boycotting, turn the whole thing around.
Don’t worry about withholding money from the people you don’t like. Concentrate on putting resources into the hands of people doing things you enjoy or believe in.
Don’t go out of your way to avoid buying something from a company you hate. Go out of your way to buy something from a company you like.
And don’t let perfect be the enemy of good. It’s good practice in Portland to assume that everyone I come in contact with is some kind of Progressive, if not a complete hippy fruitcake. If I worried about that, I could never support anything local. If they’re doing something I think is essentially good, but for all of the wrong reasons, that’s probably still better than most of the alternatives.
Money is only a means — a way to achieve an end. Withholding money is a passive-aggressive scold, not a positive path forward. If you want to exert a positive influence, instead of being a miserable bastard who is always against everything, show people in your sphere how you are using money as a means to support ideas that matter to you.
This, too, can be obnoxious once it catches on, as you well know if you’ve listened to SWPLs (or urban elves, as I call them) brag about buying recycled toilet paper or “free trade” coffee beans.
It does, however, seem to be more effective than bitching all the time, or financially handicapping yourself by refusing to buy trivial things at the lowest price.
There may be a collapse. It could happen. It could happen tomorrow. Vengeful gods could hurl boulders from the sky, cleansing the earth with fires and floods. There could be blood in the streets and gnashing of teeth. A plague of locusts or killer bees, some Chinese flu, or the Zombie Apocalypse. Your debit cards might run empty and your “smart”phones might get real dumb. We may be forced to band together in primal gangs and fight for survival. We may be forced by circumstances beyond our control to rediscover lifeways more familiar to our species—to our ancestral brains—than this endless, banal sprawl of corporate parks and shopping malls.
Or you may just get that one day as a lion, to die like you were born, kicking and screaming and covered in someone else’s blood.
It has a certain appeal.
The following was delivered as a speech at the second National Policy Institute’s conference, which was held at the Ronald Reagan Building in Washington, DC, on October 26th.
There may be a collapse. It could happen. It could happen tomorrow. Vengeful gods could hurl boulders from the sky, cleansing the earth with fires and floods. There could be blood in the streets and gnashing of teeth. A plague of locusts or killer bees, some Chinese flu, or the Zombie Apocalypse. Your debit cards might run empty and your “smart”phones might get real dumb. We may be forced to band together in primal gangs and fight for survival. We may be forced by circumstances beyond our control to rediscover lifeways more familiar to our species—to our ancestral brains—than this endless, banal sprawl of corporate parks and shopping malls.
Or you may just get that one day as a lion, to die like you were born, kicking and screaming and covered in someone else’s blood.
It has a certain appeal.
But while any or all of that could happen (and it could all happen tomorrow), it is also possible that this broken, corrupt system could limp along for a very long time.
Yes, it should fail catastrophically. It deserves to fail. But no matter how much the world needs a reckoning or a reset button, it’s a lot easier on a day-to-day basis for people at every level of society to keep patching it together and doing the best they can until they run out of duct tape.
So . . . until that day comes . . . until everyone runs out of duct tape . . . Until then, almost everyone, even American leaders, seems to agree that America is in decline.
And during that decline, we can expect to see more of what we’ve already been seeing. For most people, that will mean a “progressive” ratcheting down of quality of life, and the lowering of expectations.
What we won’t see is some “great awakening” or a dramatic change in leadership or direction. The people who run America aren’t going to “come to their senses.”
As America declines and becomes a failed or failing state, the corporations and businessmen and bureaucrats who run it will continue to preach globalism and multiculturalism and feminism.
They will continue to condemn anything that could be considered racism or tribalism—especially among whites—until they are safely in the minority. They will continue to condemn “male sexism” and continue to promote any kind of go-girl female sexism that emasculates or devalues men. They will continue to promote reverence for their own academic priest class while condemning as “extreme” any religious belief that challenges the moral authority of progressive beliefs. They will continue to promote dependence on the State for security and income and healthcare—for life itself.
And, no matter how many “conflicts” they escalate or how many people they kill or imprison or how militarized their police state thugs become, they will officially continue to condemn “violence.”
They will continue to do all of this because it makes perfect sense for them.
If you were the rulers and toadies of a nation in decline, whose people were bound to lose wealth and status and you wanted to protect your own interests and keep your heads, why would you not want to keep those people separate, emasculated, weak, dependent, faithless, fearful and “non-violent?”
Figureheads may come and go, but I see absolutely no reason why the message will change.
Many of you may see yourselves as civilized men. Sane men in an increasingly insane, vulgar and barbaric world.
But you’re wrong! You are the new barbarians.
The official message will continue to be that:
• If you believe that all men are not created equal
• If you believe that free men should have access to firearms
• If you believe the government cannot be trusted to regulate every aspect of your life
• If you believe that race means blood and heritage — not just “skin color”
• If you see that men and women are different and believe they should have different roles
• If you believe that men should act like men
• If you believe that gay pride parades and gay marriage are ridiculous
• If you believe in some “old time religion”
If you believe any or all of those things, then, according to the State and corporations, the Academia and the media, you are a stupid, psycho, hillibilly, Neo-Nazi, woman-hating, wife-beating, homophobic throwback, reactionary Neanderthal.
You know it. Dance to it. Make it a techno remix. Because make no mistake: you are dangerous, traitorous and quite possibly seditious.
Well, I’m reminded of the words of rapper Eminem:
I am whatever you say I am
If I wasn’t then why would I say I am
In the paper, the news, every day I am
Radio won’t even
play my jam
It doesn’t matter what you think you are. You are whatever they say you are. They control the message. No matter how reasonable you think your message is, the radio is not going to play your jam. No matter what you think you are, to them, you are the barbarians. So own it… be it. And, if you’re going to be the barbarians, then start thinking like barbarians.
What does that mean? What does it mean to be a barbarian? Classically speaking, a barbarian is someone who is not of the State, of the polis. The barbarian is not properly civilized — according to the prevailing standard of the State. His ways are strange and tribal. The barbarian is an outsider, an alien.
How must a man’s thinking change, when he is alienated by the State of his birth?
How does a man go from being a man of the polis to an outsider — a barbarian — in his own homeland?
These are important questions because if you see no viable political solution to the inane and inhuman trajectory of the progressive state — and I don’t — then any meaningful change is going to require a lot more than collecting signatures or appealing to the public’s “good sense” or electing the right candidate.
What you need is to create a fundamental change in the way that men see themselves and their relationship with the State. Don’t worry about changing the state. Change the men. Cut the cord. And let them be born to a state of mind beyond the state.
Show them how to become barbarians and break the sway of the state. How do you do that? Well, that’s something I’m going to be thinking and writing about for the next few years.
But I can offer four lines of thinking that I think could be helpful.
1. Separate “us” from “them”
This conference is about the future of identity. Which identity? Who are we talking about? Who is we? When I talk to guys about what is happening in the world right now, they’re quick to tell me what we should do about it, but who is this we?
You and the corporations that sell you garbage food, ruin your land and outsource your jobs? You and the “expert” shills who turn your values into “psychological problems?” You and the paid-for media that mocks you? You and the Wall Street bankers who financialized the economy for their own short-term gain? You and the bureaucrats who want to disarm you and micromanage every aspect of your life? You and the politicians who open up the borders and fall all over themselves to pander to a new group of potential voters instead of working for the interests of the actual citizens of the country they swore to represent?
That “we?”
Americans, especially, are used to speaking in terms of “We the people.” But there are 300 million people in the United States and that’s a lot of “we.” Be more specific.
Be more tribal.
One of the best pieces of writing advice I ever got was this: never say “people” when you mean “men.” Well, my advice to you is to never say “we” when you mean “they” and never say “us” when you mean “them.” Stop using democratic language. Stop pretending that we are all on the same team, because we’re not. And we don’t have to be. Decide who you really care about. Figure out what you have in common. Define your boundaries. Decide who is in and who is out. The people who are in are “us.” Those people are “we.” Everyone else this “they.”
2. Stop getting angry because things don’t make sense!
Almost nothing you read or hear in the news today seems to make any sense at all.
People get so angry, so frustrated, so betrayed. It’s like “our leaders” are crazy or stupid, or both. It doesn’t make sense to put women in the infantry. That’s obviously crazy! It doesn’t make sense to encourage kids to take out college loans they’ll never be able to pay back. It doesn’t make sense to invite people into the country when you cannot afford to care for the people who are already here. That’s nuts!
It doesn’t make sense to start wars and then say you’re trying to “win hearts and minds.” War is not a good way to win hearts and minds! And worrying about hearts and minds is not a good way to win a war!
It doesn’t make sense that bankers and CEOs get golden parachutes and go on vacation or get jobs in the administration after knowingly and intentionally destroying companies, jobs, lives, the environment — whole segments of the economy!
But if you realize that they — the people who run the country — are doing things to benefit them and not you, everything makes perfect sense.
Consider the possibility that America’s leaders really don’t care if American soldiers live or die. Consider the possibility that American colleges and bankers don’t care if you live the rest of your life in debt to them. They’d probably prefer it. Consider the possibility that American politicians care more about keeping their jobs in the short term and looking good in the media than they do about what happens to the people of their country in the long term. Consider the possibility that “you” are not part of an “us” that “they” care about. I promise that if you meditate upon this, things will start to make a lot more sense.
If you let go of the idea that these people are supposed to care about you or the country, and you allow yourself to see them as gangs and individuals working to further their own interests, you can relax and appreciate their crafty strategy.
Let go of foolish expectations about what these people should be doing. Step back and see them for what they are. Don’t be mad. Don’t be outraged. Be wise.
As Nietzsche recommended: be carefree, mocking, and violent.
3. De-Universalize morality
Men who were raised with American, Egalitarian, “Late-Western” values want to be “good men.” They want to be fair and just, and they want to be just to everyone. This can be absolutely paralyzing.
It really creates an internal conflict for men—good men—who are especially athletic or who have some kind of military or police background. They were taught and they believe in good sportsmanship and equal justice.
They want to do the “right thing,” no matter what. They want to be Batman.
However, it is also in the nature of these men—even more than other men— to think vertically, hierarchically, tribally, to think in terms of “us” and “them.” To evaluate others naturally, primally, by the masculine, tactical virtues of strength, courage, mastery and honor.
But as soon as the football game or the superhero movie is over, progressive America goes back to hating and punishing those virtues. Progressive America goes back to hating and punishing men who act like men. These “good guys”… these guys who want to be heroes get blamed and played and dumped on and treated like garbage.
No matter what the progressive American message is, when it comes to men who act like men—especially white men—no one really cares if they get treated justly or fairly.
Still, these “good guys” don’t want to exclude women from anything because it seems unfair they have sisters and mothers and they want everyone to have a chance. But women—as a group—don’t care when men feel excluded.
In fact, when men object to anything, groups of women are the first to call them “whiners” and “losers.” “Good” white guys as a group care about what happens to black people as a group. They want to make sure that blacks are being treated fairly and equally and they go out of their way to make sure they aren’t “discriminating.”
Do black people as a group care what happens to white people as a group? Does a Mexican dad with three babies care whether or not some white kid from the “burbs” can get a summer landscaping job?
The problem with these late Western values is that they work best as intra-tribal values.
They only work when everyone else is connected and interdependent. Fairness and justice and good sportsmanship promote harmony within a community. But at some point, you have to draw that line. You have to decide who is part of that community and who is not.
You cannot play fair with people who don’t care if you get wiped off the map. You don’t have to hate everyone who isn’t part of your tribe, but it is foolish to keep caring about people who don’t care about you.
These heroic types are the natural guardians of any tribe, but their heroic natures are wasted and abused when they are asked to protect everyone, even enemies and ingrates and those who despise them.
If Western Barbarians are going to hold onto any portion of their western heritage and identity, they need to resolve these moral conflicts.
They don’t necessarily need to abandon morality or moral virtue, but they need to pull in their aegis and become, as in Plato’s Republic, ”noble dogs who are gentle to their familiars and the opposite to strangers.”
Be morally accountable. But only to the tribe.
If they are going to prosper and endure in a failing nation, the New Barbarians must give up the tragic, misunderstood hero routine and realize that they aren’t Batman. Why would anyone want to be?
4. Become independent from the State, and interdependent between each other
The United States of America and its parent corporations offer a wide range of products and services. All of them have strings attached and the more you depend on them, the easier it is to control you.
It is not really much of a threat to them if you get online and “like” a naughty page or vent your lonely, impotent rage, so long as the rest of your identity folds neatly into the bourgeois American lifestyle.
So long as you still go to a make-work job at some big company and keep yourself busy for 40 or 50 or 60 hours a week so you can purchase their wide range of products and services.
And then, in the time you have left, you go online and you get to be Orthodox guy or Roman guy or Odinist guy and post cool pics of Vikings and Centurions and Crusaders.
But that’s not a real identity or a real tribe or a real community. By all means, use the Progressive State and take whatever you can from it while there is still something left to take, but if you truly want some kind of “alternative lifestyle” to what the state has to offer, if you want to maintain some kind of tribal identity that can endure America’s decline and collapse—also known as a sudden absence of adequate products and services—instead of “community organizing” on the Internet in your underwear or retreating to a country compound with the wife and kids, bring some of those Internet people close to you and live near each other. Take over a neighborhood or an apartment complex, start businesses and provide services that people really need.
It’s great to have writers and thinkers, but you also need mechanics and plumbers and seamstresses. Serve everyone, but be loyal to people “in the family” and make them “your own.”
It doesn’t have to be some formal thing. Don’t issue a press release. Just start quietly building a community of like-minded men and women somewhere. Anywhere.
Don’t worry about creating some massive political movement or recruiting thousands or millions of people. Don’t worry about changing the state. Barbarians don’t worry about changing the state. That’s for men of the state — who believe in and belong to the State.
Shoot for 150 people. A small, close-knit community of people working together to become less dependent on the State and more dependent on each other.
Recent immigrants—many of whom are literally “not of the State”—can serve as examples. It wasn’t long ago that the Irish and Italians lived in insular communities. Think of Russian parts of town.
Look at places like Chinatown in San Francisco: every few blocks, you see these buildings marked. Something . . . something . . . something . . . “Benevolent Association.”
Sounds nice, right? Could be a front for Triad Gangs. Could be there to help Chinese schoolchildren. I have no idea. But I am sure that it is for Chinese people. There are also doctor offices and law offices and repair shops and grocery stores. There is a whole network there of people taking care of their own people first.
There is a community there of people who are exclusive, insular and interdependent. They go to each other first for what they need. They are harder to watch and harder to control. They are less dependent on the State and more dependent on each other. And when the collapse comes, they’ll take care of each other first, while everyone else is waiting for the state to “do something.”
Whoever your “us” is, whatever your “tribe” is, it’s just an idea in your head until you have a group of truly interdependent people who share the same fate. That’s what a tribe is. That’s what a community is. That is the future of identity in America.
Land belongs to those who take it and hold it. And this land is no longer your land or my land — officially it’s their land. You may not be able to reclaim it, at least not just right now, but you can become and live as happy Barbarians, as outsiders within, and work to build the kinds of resilient communities and networks of skilled people that can survive the collapse and preserve your identities after the Fall.
***
Readers who want to learn more about Jack Donovan should check out his site: Jack-Donovan.com.