The Way of Men

by Jack Donovan

Flamboyant

Flamboyant dishonor

Honor is a powerful concept because it is connected to every man’s primal need to demonstrate that he is of value to the group—that

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.

In a war or in an emergency, these virtues would still be of primary importance, and all other virtues would be comparatively incidental.

there is less hunting and fighting to do, men attempt to increase their value to other men by showing that they are good people or good citizens—good members of the tribe. They try to show that they are good men.

We care what other men think of us, first and foremost, because men have always depended on each other to survive.

Men want to believe that they are right, and that their enemies are wrong. To separate us from them, men find moral fault in their enemies and create codes of conduct to distinguish themselves as good men.

Most men want to see themselves as good men fighting for something greater than survival or gain.

Many have written about our tendency to dehumanize our foes. Emasculating them is another aspect of that—it adds insult to injury. We also want to puff ourselves up and psych them out. It’s good strategy. Insulting a man’s honor—his masculine identity—is a good way to test him. It’s a good way to get his blood up. It’s a good way to pick a fight.

Being good at being a man is about being willing and able to fulfill the natural role of men in a survival scenario. Being good at being a man is about showing other men that you are the kind of guy they’d want on their team if the shit hits the fan. Being good at being a man isn’t a quest for moral perfection, it’s about fighting to survive. Good men admire or respect bad men when they demonstrate strength, courage, mastery or a commitment to the men of their own renegade tribes. A concern with being good at being a man is what good guys and bad guys have in common.

In dire times, men who are not good at being men won’t last long enough to worry about being good men. Strength makes all other values possible.

Men who have accomplished the first job of being men—men who have made survival possible—can and do often concern themselves with being good men. As the bloody boundary between threat and safety moves outward, men have the time and the luxury to cultivate civilized, “higher” virtues.

man who is more concerned with being a good man than being good at being a man makes a very well-behaved slave.

One of the basic ideas of evolutionary psychology is that because human evolution occurred over a very long period of time, and then an explosion of technology thrust us into the modern world in a comparatively short period of time (recorded history), humans are more adapted physically and psychologically to the world as it was than they are to the world as it is today.

Our minds and bodies are adapted to function in a harder world.

Sometimes there is a good reason to make war, to identify them and mobilize our men against theirs. Sometimes there isn’t. Every generation of young men can’t be guaranteed a great crisis or war simply to give them an opportunity to explore their “demonic” primal nature or give their lives a sense of meaning. 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.

Most of the time, men seek out substitutes for fighting. In tribal societies, this was probably easy enough. Hunting is something like fighting, and that’s why men still do it even though they don’t have to. Play fighting—sparring—is part of learning to fight, and men ritualize play fighting with sport.

James acknowledged that men seemed to be perpetually in want of some “campaigning” way of life.

Like energy, gang masculinity isn’t created or destroyed. This “demonism” is part of what men are and what they’ve evolved to do. It’s always there; it just takes on different forms.

Gang masculuinty is defined in the previous page

When men are materially invested in a society—when they believe there is more of what they want to gain by working for the group than by working against it—men will control and redirect their energies in the service of a prosperous society.

When men are emotionally invested in a society—when they feel a strong connection to the group, a strong sense of us—men will control and redirect their energies in the service of a peaceful society as long as the most aggressive men (the men who are better at being men) are provided with desirable “equivalents” to gang aggression.

Primal gang aggression and gang bonding are directly simulated through participation in military service, police service, and similar “guardian” activities.

Primal gang aggression and gang bonding are experienced through participation in ritualized and symbolic gang activities like team sports or cooperative gaming.

Primal aggression, competitiveness and the need to prove masculinity to the group are channeled through participation in individual sports, survival games, or individual competitions that req...

Economic aggression and gang activity – men or groups of men compete to outwit each other through economic competition.

As opportunities for men to do what they evolved to do decrease, greater emphasis is placed on simulated, vicarious, and intellectualized channels of masculinity to maintain order and cultural unity. Men still get to feel like men, but the threat that men pose to order, to established interests, and to the interests of women is mitigated.

These men tend to get into a lot of trouble in higher civilizations—they fill our prisons and often have problems with substance abuse—whereas they’d probably do pretty well in a survival scenario.

Men compete for status, and they want to feel like they are winning.

Men are dropping out and disengaging from our slick, easy, safe world. For what may be the first time in history, the average guy can afford to be careless. Nothing he does really matters, and—what’s worse—there is a shrinking hope of any future where what he does will matter.

The introduction of women into a field of competition short-circuits its viability as a substitute for male gang activity. Competition doesn’t satisfy the same primal need in most men when women are involved—no

a general rule, if you introduce women into the mix, men either shift their focus from impressing each other to impressing the women, or they lose interest altogether and do just enough to get by.

where everything they do will really matter.

The emotional needs of men are not being met by a world that repudiates The Way of Men, but so long as their material needs are being met, men may choose not to make war against the world. As long as they have enough stuff, enough food, enough distractions—men may be content to dull their senses, tune out, and allow themselves to become slaves to the interests of women, bureaucrats and wealthy men.

and I promised them women. Because women mean a future.”

Men want to be remembered, they want their tradition to survive, and they want sex. Ultimately, these psychological mechanisms and desires will allow them to pass on their genes.

When there is competition for resources—including women—it is good strategy for a gang of men to create a patriarchal hierarchy, eliminate neighboring rival gangs, take their women, and protect the women from rival gangs. This is exactly what many primitive tribes do. This is the basic strategy of the gang.

Wrangham and Peterson argued that in spite of cultural determinist theories and a lot of wishful thinking about peaceful pre-historic matriarchies—the evolutionary, archaeological, historical, anthropological, physiological and genetic evidence overwhelmingly suggests that humans have always been a patriarchal, male-bonded party-gang species that engaged in regular coalitionary violence. This was a brave conclusion, because both authors seemed to be whole-heartedly against violence.

As a metaphor for what happens to men living in a secure peace of plenty like our own, the bonobo way looks eerily familiar. Aren’t most men today spoiled mamma’s boys without father figures, without hunting or fighting or brother-bonds, whose only masculine outlet is promiscuous sex?

Average men know more about collegiate basketball than they know about a given overseas conflict.

The human body is made to work hard. When there is no work to do, our physical health deteriorates. Doctors have to tell people to walk like it is some kind of breakthrough exercise technology.

The goal of civilization seems to be to eliminate work and risk, but the world has changed more than we have. Our bodies crave work and sex, our minds crave risk and conflict.

As physical competition for resources has decreased, sex has become increasingly social, as it is for the bonobos. Men and women hook up to satisfy their primal drive to reproduce. To the chagrin of masculinity’s reimaginers, women still respond sexually to the kinds of “alpha” traits and behaviors in men that would have made them good hunters and fighters. Displaying strength, courage and mastery signals genetic superiority and high male status to women—even women who have no plans to reproduce. Men seek out women who appear to be hearty and fertile, and women trick men’s monkey brains with lipstick, liposuction and breast implants. Sex today is increasingly disconnected from mating, and for many it has become a matter of “masturbating with someone else’s body.”

Our world isn’t offering men more paths to virile fulfillment or vital experience. What the modern world offers average men is a thousand and one ways to safely spank our monkey brains into oblivion.

The future that our elite handlers have in store for us advertises more of the same. More detached pleasure, less risk, freedom from want, more masturbation. Reimaginers of masculinity offer us metaphorical battles to fight, but in the real world the most meaningful battles will be “fought” between elite bureaucrats and experts and wealthy managers who believe they know what is best, while the rest of us shuffle off to boring, risk-free jobs to do idiot work and stare at the clock, waiting to go home and furiously indulge ourselves in whatever form of vicarious or virtual primitive experience gets us off.

Cosmopolitan journalists from elite schools like Betty Friedan filled women’s imaginations with fantasies of exciting big-city careers that only a few could ever hope to attain. For every woman living that fantasy today, there are a bunch of women scanning merchandise through a checkout line at some big-box retail store, or doing repetitive data-entry in some gray office. In the East, women are answering our phone calls or performing monotonous assembly line tasks in factories. This is called “progress.” Many of those women would probably rather be spending more time actively engaged in the lives of their children, but they no longer have the choice to stay home.

Only a couple hundred years ago, many of these men now destined for clerkdom would have learned a trade from their fathers and mastered it, whether it was farming or some other kind of engaging work that they could be proud of. They would have been valued members of a smaller community of people who cared whether they lived or died. Some would have spent their lives with gangs of men on ships, but most would have been bound to provide for and protect their families—their own small clans. This was a workable compromise between gang life and family life. A few generations ago, these men would have had meaningful responsibilities and their actions would have had the potential to do more harm than merely hurting someone’s feelings or causing them to be inconvenienced. They would have had pressing reasons to try to be good at being men, but also to be good men. Not so long ago, these men would have had dignity and honor.

In the future that globalists and feminists have imagined, for most of us there will only be more clerkdom and masturbation. There will only be more apologizing, more submission, more asking for permission to be men. There will only be more examinations, more certifications, mandatory prerequisites, screening processes, background checks, personality tests, and politicized diagnoses. There will only be more medication. There will be more presenting the secretary with a cup of your own warm urine. There will be mandatory morning stretches and video safety presentations and sign-off sheets for your file. There will be more helmets and goggles and harnesses and bright orange vests with reflective tape. There can only be more counseling and sensitivity training. There will be more administrative hoops to jump through to start your own business and keep it running. There will be more mandatory insurance policies. There will definitely be more taxes. 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. There will be more micro-managed living, pettier regulations, heavier fines, and harsher penalties. There will be more ways to run afoul of the law and more ways for society to maintain its pleasant illusions by sweeping you under the rug. In 2009 there were almost five times more men either on parole or serving prison terms in the United States than were actively serv...

If you’re a good boy and you follow the rules, if you learn how to speak passively and inoffensively, if you can convince some other poor sleepwalking sap that you are possessed with an almost unhealthy desire to provide outstanding customer service or increase operational efficiency through the improvement of internal processes and effective organizational communication, if you can say stupid shit like that without laughing, if your record checks out and your pee smells right—you can get yourself a J-O-B. Maybe you can be the guy who administers the test or authorizes the insurance policy. Maybe you can be the guy who helps make some soulless global corporation a little more money. Maybe you can get a pat on the head for coming up with the bright idea to put a bunch of other guys out of work and outsource their boring jobs to guys in some other place who are willing to work longer hours for less money. Whatever you do, no matter what people say, no matter how many team-building activities you attend or how many birthday cards you get from someone’s secretary, you will know that you are a completely replaceable unit of labor in the big scheme of things.

Likewise, skills must be mastered and practiced to be truly useful. Talent will only get you so far. If you are never truly challenged in a meaningful way and are only required to perform idiot-proofed corporate processes to get your meat and shelter, can you ever truly be engaged enough to call yourself alive, let alone a man?