The Way of Men

by Jack Donovan

A man is not just a thing to be—it is also a way to be, a path to follow and a way to walk.

Above all things, masculinity is about what men want from each other.

Men are more interested in competing for status, and when they win, their bodies give them a dopamine high and more testosterone.[1]

Men who are good at this job—men who are good at the job of being men—will earn the respect and trust of the group.

Strength, Courage, Mastery, and Honor are the virtues that protect the perimeter; they are the virtues that save us.

Strength is the ability to exert one’s will over oneself, over nature and over other people.

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.

Courage is a crucial tactical value.

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.

They could be Plato’s noble puppies, but they are chained to a stake in the ground—left to the madness of barking at shadows in the night, taunted by passing challenges left unresolved and whose outcomes will forever be unknown.

Controlling one’s own fate within the context of group give-and-take has to do with figuring out what you bring to the table and making yourself valuable to the group.

The bare minimum required for moving from dependence to interdependence is competence and self-sufficiency—the ability to carry one’s own weight.

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.

it is tactically advantageous to cultivate a reputation for strength, willingness to fight and technical mastery.

To honor a man is to acknowledge his accomplishments and recognize that he has attained a higher status within the group.

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.

Any honest student of human (and in many cases, primate) body language will be forced to recognize that the postures, gestures and intonations of males generally regarded as effeminate are in fact postures, gestures and intonations that communicate submissiveness.

This tactical reasoning goes a long way toward explaining why men who function successfully within male honor groups make a big show of rejecting and distancing themselves from males who are flamboyantly dishonorable.

Most men care about being seen by other men as being strong, courageous and competent because these tactical virtues have been essential to their role as men and their very survival for most of human history.

Gangsters are status conscious, aggressive, tactically-oriented, ballsy, brother-bonded men’s men.

When the system no longer offers men what they want, how long can you expect them to perform tricks for a pat on the head?

Strength makes all other values possible.

Feminists, pacifists, and members of the privileged classes recognize that brother-bonded men who are good at being men will always be a threat, but forget that some of those men are necessary to create and maintain order in the first place.

Starting wars for the sake of narrative seems frivolous, though I wonder if we do it subconsciously…out of sheer boredom. Sometimes men pick fights just for something to do—just to feel something like the threat of harm and the possibility of triumph.

The repudiation of violent masculinity is the murder of male identity.

Sex today is increasingly disconnected from mating, and for many it has become a matter of “masturbating with someone else’s body.”

There will probably be more Byzantine sexual harassment laws and corporate policies and more ways for women and protected identity groups to accuse you of misconduct.

Day after day, day after day, We stuck, nor breath nor motion; As idle as a painted ship Upon a painted ocean.

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.

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.

Men must have some work to do that’s worth doing, some sense of meaningful action.

Men need to feel connected to a group of men, to have a sense of their place in it.

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.

When states weaken and become “hollow” as futurist John Robb[77] believes they will, men will assert their interests through a return to their most basic social form.

The conclusion I reached while writing this book was that the gang is the kernel of masculine identity. I believe it is also the kernel of ethnic, tribal, and national identity.

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.

And, if you want to become resilient to uncertainty and chaos, you need a circle of men who you trust and who you can depend on.