The Way of Men

by Jack Donovan

Being good at being a man has more to do with a man’s ability to succeed with men and within groups of men than it does with a man’s relationship to any woman or any group of women.

Female approval has regularly been a consequence of male approval.

there are biological differences between men and women that have little to do with pregnancy or breastfeeding. On average, men are bigger and stronger than women. Men are more daring, probably more mechanically inclined, and generally better at navigating. 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.[1]

If you give the wrong person the wrong job, that person could die, you could die, another person could die, or you could all die. Because of the differences between the sexes, the best person for jobs that involve exploring, hunting, fighting, building, or defending is usually going to be a male. This is not some arbitrary cultural prejudice; it is the kind of vital strategic discrimination that will keep your group alive.

the strength of the bonds between men will increase as the size of the unit decreases. In smaller groups, men are more loyal to one another.

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.[3] That’s about the size of a military company, but also about the size of a typical primitive human tribe, and roughly the number of “friends” most people

contact regularly through social networking sites.

The fireteam-to-platoon sized gang is the smallest unit of us. Beyond us is them, and the line that separates us from them is a circle of trust.

The first job of men in dire times has always been to establish and secure “the perimeter.”

hard times, agreements between groups fall apart. 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. This was famously illustrated by Muzafer Sherif’s “Robbers Cave Experiment.” Social psychologists separated two groups of boys and forced them to compete. Each group of boys created a sense of us based on what they liked about themselves or how they wanted to imagine themselves. They also created negative caricatures of the other group. The groups became hostile toward each other. However, when the researchers gave them a good enough reason to cooperate, the competing gangs were able to put aside their differences and join together in a larger party. 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.

men who are good at the job of being men—will earn the respect and trust of the group. Those men will be honored and treated better than men who are disloyal or undependable. The men who deliver victory at the moments of greatest peril will attain the highest status among men. They will be treated like heroes, and other men—especially young men—will emulate them.

Men respond to and admire the qualities that would make men useful and dependable in an emergency.

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.[4] Demonstrating virtus meant showing strength and courage and loyalty to the tribe while attacking or defending against the enemies of Rome.

The virtues that men all over the world recognize as manly virtues are the fighting virtues.

Epics and action movies translate well because they appeal to something basic to the male condition—a desire to struggle and win, to fight for something, to fight for survival, to demonstrate your worthiness to other men.

Strength, Courage, Mastery, and Honor. These are the practical virtues of men who must rely on one another in a worst-case scenario.

The tactical virtues are unconcerned with abstract moral questions of universal right or wrong. What is right is what wins, and what is wrong is what loses, because losing is death and the end of everything that matters.

Men aren’t wired to fight or cooperate; they are wired to fight and cooperate.

The

strength has been a masculinity defining quality always and everywhere.

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.

strength—means increasing your ability, as an individual, a gang or a nation, to do as you wish with relative impunity. What is freedom, if not the ability to do what one wishes?

Physical strength is the defining metaphor of manhood because strength is a defining characteristic of men. An increased aptitude for physical strength differentiates most males from most women, and this difference, though less important in times of safety and plenty, has defined the role of men for all of human history.

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 implies a risk. It implies a potential for failure or the presence of danger. Courage is measured against danger. The greater the danger, the greater the courage. Running into a burning building beats telling off your boss. Telling off your boss is more courageous than writing a really mean anonymous note. Acts without meaningful consequences require little courage.

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. In his Nicomachean Ethics, the brave man is a man who, “is fearless in the face of a noble death, and all of the emergencies that involve death; and the emergencies of war are in the highest degree of this kind.”

He also made the point that men who are forced to fight are less courageous than those who demonstrate courage i...

“In military contexts virtus can denote the kind of courage required to defend the homeland, but more often it designates aggressive conduct in battle. In non-military situations courageous virtus usually refers to the capacity to face and endure pain and death.”

“Look upon me and realize what a paltry thing the body is for those who seek great glory.”

For both Aristotle and the Romans, courage—and manliness—was the will to heroically risk life and limb against a danger to the people of one’s own tribe, especially in the context of war with another tribe. Aristotle’s most noble form of courage was a willingness to take a necessary risk to ensure the survival of the group.

It is not the strongest man who will necessarily lead, it is the man who takes the lead who will lead.

Feigning gameness can be an effective strategy, so long as no one calls your bluff. Gameness can be feigned through body language, through vocal inflection and through word choice. Creating a sense that you are ready to push as hard as necessary to get what you want is a way to establish authority, whether you are a prisoner, a businessman, a law enforcement professional, a parent or someone trying to discipline a dog. Most people will not test someone who is feigning gameness

Delusional gameness is only possible when there is almost no danger of violent escalation. In less secure, less luxurious times and places, assertiveness must be accompanied by physical courage and daring. When there is no expectation that you will be “saved” or that most people fear the violent retribution of the state, it is foolish to provoke a dangerous looking man unless you are prepared to fight him.

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).

If you ask men what it means to be good at being a man, you’ll often get answers that start to sound like a set of minimum skill proficiencies in a job description. While the job description for men undeniably changes according to time, place and culture, the primal gang virtue that unifies them all is “being able to carry your own weight.” Women are more comfortable with accepting the benevolent aid of the group because they have always required it. A healthy adult woman must accept aid from the group if she is to carry a child, give birth and care for an infant. And, especially when men have achieved a level of security and prosperity beyond mere survival,

This has not been the case with men. It is far rarer for women or men to volunteer to support a grown, able-bodied man. It is rarer still for them to support him without resentment. There is no point in an adult male’s life when he can be excused from carrying his own weight, except when he is sick, injured, handicapped or old. Human societies accommodate all of these exceptions, but competency has always been crucial to a man’s mental health and sense of his own worth. Men want to carry their own weight, and they should be expected to. As Don Corleone might put it, women and children could afford to be careless for most of human history, but not men. Men have always had to demonstrate to the group that they could carry their own weight.

Until you can function as a competent member of the group and carry your own weight, you are a supplicant and a drag on the collective. 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. It has become clichéd comedy for men and women to laugh at men who are concerned with being competent. The “men refuse to stop and ask for directions” joke never seems to get old for women, who are more comfortable with dependence, or socialist types, because reducing men to a childlike state of supplication and submission to state bureaucrats is required for big-government welfare states to function. Masculine loathing of dependence is a bulwark to the therapeutic mother state.

Winning requires strength and courage, and it requires a sufficient mastery of the skills required to win.

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.

Advanced levels of mastery and technics allow men to compete for improved status within the group by bringing more to the camp, hunt or fight than their bodies would otherwise allow. Mastery can be supplementary—a man who can build, hunt and fight, but who can also do something else well, be it telling jokes or setting traps or making blades, is worth more to the group and is likely to have a higher status within the group than a man who can merely build, hunt and fight well.

Like in companies the one who is the skilfullst and can bring the most value will be compensated the most

If necessity is the mother of invention, it is the need to compete for status and peer esteem—to find a valued place in the group—that drives many inventors to invent. The drive to gain control over something is part of the drive to master nature.

Strength, gameness, and competition for status are all present in animals, but it is the conscious drive to master our world that differentiates men from beasts. Whether you’re a benevolent king or a ruthless gangster, a man with a special skill, talent or technology can be as valuable as or exponentially more valuable than your toughest thug. It is mastery more often than brute strength that allows the elite to rule. 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. However, mastered skills and technology provide deciding advantages in fighting, hunting and surviving for human men.

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

Hobbes noted that men honored each other by seeking each other’s counsel and by imitating each other. Caring about what the men around you think of you is a show of respect, and conversely, not caring what other men think of you is a sign of disrespect.

Deficient masculinity is simply a lack of strength, courage or mastery.

No one is the strongest, most courageous and the smartest or most masterful man—though some men are closer to the ideal or perfect “form” of masculinity than others. Masculinity in the perfect ideal is aspirational, not attainable. The point is to be better, stronger, more courageous, more masterful—to achieve greater honor.

dependency is slavery),

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.