If I could define masculinity in one word, it would be control. A man is not defined by his muscles, aggression, circumstantial resources, or even his intellect. Muscles are the easiest thing to acquire - those who obsess about their physique are usually gays (males with female insecurities) or just insecure at best.
A man is defined by his ability to control his immediate environment, his life, his destiny, and more importantly, his own will.
A woman adores a man, and she doesn’t even know why she admires him. She does so because he signals control, first of himself (insecurities, desires, emotions, drive), and second, of his entourage. His tonality, pacing, body language, demeanour, face expression... everything demonstrates that he knows he is in control of himself and his immediate environment. He radiates confidence in his proven ability to anticipate and overcome danger, and to use his surroundings to his benefit, if he chooses to. A man always looks like he’s in control of his environment, of his passions, of every social interaction, of his own reactions to petty provocations and temptations. This is what women see in a man, but can’t quite put their finger on. It’s his steadfast conviction in himself, which makes her feel safe next to him. She needs a man she can count on. Conversely, no woman feels safe next to a twitchy insecure and emotionally unpredictable soy boy.
A man is in control of his emotions, and he allows no one to manipulate them against him. His calm comes with an air of readiness to respond to threat, an unwavering confidence to resolve matters in his own favour. He is so confident in this moral consistency that he does not allow anyone to use his good nature against him. No one can accuse him of “being a racist,” none can make him feel insecure about his conviction, and so render him desperate to prove otherwise by supplicating.
A man’s confidence in his conviction is steadfast and audacious in the face of deliberately withheld manipulative approval.
For a man to be a man, there is one prerequisite: freedom to fight and compete.
In the natural environment, humans are apex predators on top of the food chain. Male humans can control their micro-environment with ease, and unless they are faced with an act of God, they can dominate all around them - even each other. This is the problem; mental slavery, the taming of the maverick by despicable despots and manipulative collectivist hyenas.
Predators don’t do well in captivity. It is not only the physical oppression that breaks the will of the lion, but the mental subjugation, the “justification” of his oppression, the love for his masters.
The government, and all types of authority structures, condition males to be subservient and to acquiesce control of their destiny. This begins from state schooling, which denies agency into children’s own life decisions, and renders them passively docile and reliant upon state handout and direction. No wonder infantile adults with children’s minds still look towards a parent-figure government to solve all their problems for them.
Don’t het me wrong: By “authority” I don't mean naturally occurring hierarchies based on voluntary attribution of respect and recognition. Authority is the arbitrary attribution of perceived threat-based power based on the bluff of state legitimacy. Authority, as in the exclusive moral right to monopolize the initiation of threats of violence, exists only in fantasy. There is no moral right for such authority.
From school, restless young males are told when to sit, when to stand, when to talk, when to stand up. Pavlovian school bells conditions them to respond to directive cues, just like tamed animals do. Traffic lights are slower for traffic, more dangerous, and more costly than roundabouts, yet governments insist on using the red-orange-green hypnotism to instill instinctive obedience to mere colours. No car coming from either direction? No matter. You must obey the red regardless. We can’t have you retain self-ownership by using your own judgment in roundabouts, now can we?
I am not advocating chaos. I am advocating organic rules than make sense. The state’s rules almost never make sense, except for the slave-mind conditioning they yield.
The state conditions males to be unmanly, subservient, constantly afraid of the state and its goons. But the worst of it all is the internalized submission, the Stockholm syndrome of treating submission to authority as a virtue, treating “respect for authority” as some kind of heroic act, when in fact it’s slimy passive servitude the likes of Wormtongue, Renfield and Uncle Tom. The state has made obedient will-less automatons out of lions.
This is how we get weak males -with delusions of manhood- falsely assuming that it is somehow manly to “respect authority” and to be an obedient servant boy to their big bad fairy daddy-government.
A typical modern male is not a man. He is a caged lion, a shadow of his unrealized potential. He cannot gaze past the bars of government mandates. He just sits and gives up, a hidden sadness behind his eyes. As he loses body and drive, he loses his intellect too. He fails to understand the source of his debilitation. He then imagines other reasons for it: the opposing political party, a bad presidential candidate, a foreign threat, a social issue, “climate change,” or whatever. He imagines panaceas for his debilitation; deluded idealisms and blanket canonizations. He fails to see that his willing submission to authority, his Uncle Tom-ness, is his greatest enemy, the disease that eats away at his physicality, intellect and spirit.
So, he sits and rolls and performs party tricks for the government’s amusement. He reluctantly obeys government dictates enforced only by the threat of violence, not the reward of incentive. He lives under constant threat of being brutalized by power-tripping thug-cops, ever-expanding corrupt regulations, and man-hating divorce laws. He is told that “the military will turn him into a man” when all that the military does is humiliate him, break him, and then rebuild him into the perfectly psychotic mindless pawn, pathetically treating his subservient obedience as a “virtue.” At least some slaves knew they were slaves. The most pathetic slave - the one who deserves his slavery - is he who imagines his submissive obedience as good and virtuous.
A man cannot be without freedom. The cage renders him docile, unmotivated, denied of self-ownership and self-actualization.
Still, there can be hope. A captured lion reluctantly surrenders to superior force, but cannot accept his fate set for him by others. He cannot internalize his oppression. The price of retaining even the smallest remnants of his manhood is to keep punishing himself for his dire fate. He cannot allow himself to come to terms with his denied masculinity, lest he become complicit in this denial. He must suffer to keep holding on to at least the ideal of masculinity. He holds on the the masculine ideal even if he cannot reach it. He knows that, if he stops resisting his mental enslavements, and if he internalizes it by accepting it, he will stop suffering. By cowardly giving up striving for the masculine ideal, even if he can’t reach it, he will become complacent in servitude and taming. And many do just that. But many others don’t. They’d rather keep holding on to at least the idea and ideal of manhood, even if they can never reach it, even if it torments them to keep holding on.
Maybe we all need a bit of pain as currency for dignity. Maybe that pain is the tinder we need to break free.
The next time you wonder “where have all the men gone,” ask yourself how complicit you are in perpetuating the deluded need for government.
“Everything that is really great and inspiring is created by the individual who can labor in freedom.” - Albert Einstein
Thank you for reading.
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My target audience is people who haven’t been born yet.
Just fantastic. Another fantastic piece. I love how quickly you sum it all up, here: "He is told that “the military will turn him into a man” when all that the military does is humiliate him, break him, and then rebuild him into the perfectly psychotic mindless pawn, pathetically treating his subservient obedience as a “virtue.”"
"What every single military wants is men who fight with the fury of a thousand dying suns." Understanding began dawning on the faces of Lord Rin first and then some of the others, yet I continued anyway. "It is the kind of fury that would consider no price too high to pay to win. You cannot create that kind of fury. It must come from deep within the fighter in question, and he must knowingly harness that fury into goals. Such a fighter fights with the purest of love for what is behind him and the vilest of hatred against that which is in front of him. You cannot rent such fury with any amount of currency, fake or real. You cannot force anyone with such fury to do anything save to turn it against you. This fury, this life-saving dealing of death, can only be granted by the willing to the worthy. And it can only be turned against a vile soyciety that hates everything we love."
Clown World corrupts everything.