The Way of Men

by Jack Donovan

In a complex, cosmopolitan, individualistic, disunited civilization with many thin, à la carte identities, The Way of Men is unclear. The ways touted by rich and powerful men are tossed with the ways of gurus and ideologues and jumbled with the macho trinkets of merchants in such a mess that it’s easy to see why some say masculinity can mean anything, everything, or nothing at all.

Relieved of moral pretense and stripped of folk costumes, the raw masculinity that all men know in their gut has to do with being good at being a man within a small, embattled gang of men struggling to survive.

Humans are mammals, and like most mammals, a greater part of the reproductive burden will fall on women. That’s not fair, but nature isn’t fair.

When you put together a team—any kind of team—the raw skills of your candidates aren’t the only factors you have to consider. You also have to consider the team’s social dynamic. Which people will work best together? As a leader, you want to create synergy, reduce distractions, and avoid conflicts within the group.

Your role at the bloody edges of the boundary between us and them supersedes any role you have within the protected space. Yours is a role apart, and your value to the other men who share that responsibility will be determined by how well you are willing and able to fulfill that role.

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.

Strength, Courage, Mastery, and Honor are the alpha virtues of men all over the world. They are the fundamental virtues of men because without them, no “higher” virtues can be entertained.

If no one is coming to save you, you’d better be tough or look tough, and you’ll probably want some tough guys ready and willing to get your back.

The manly virtues represent concepts so universally appealing that even the weak, cowardly, inept, and dishonorable struggle to find ways in which they too can feel that they embody these virtues.

Strength is an aptitude. Strength is an ability that can be developed, but as with intelligence, most people will have a certain natural range of potential beyond which they will be unable to progress.

Humans are unequal in their aptitudes. This is one of the cruel but fundamental truths of human life.

Physical strength is the defining metaphor of manhood because strength is a defining characteristic of men.

The experience of being male is the experience of having greater strength, and strength must be exercised and demonstrated to be of any worth.

Strength is the ability to move or stand against external forces. Courage is kinetic. Courage initiates movement, action or fortitude.

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

These heroes have a push inside that keeps them coming back again and again after others would have given up.

A man who is obviously game can step ahead of a man who is not, simply because he can expect the man who is less game to yield to him. Some people talk about masculinity by attempting to determine who is “alpha” and who is “beta” in a given situation.

Both men and women can be game, but status for human females has rarely depended on a woman’s willingness to fight.

Courage is not only the desire to leap into battle or move up in a hierarchy, it is also about defending position.

Courage is the animating spirit of masculinity, and it is crucial to any meaningful definition of masculinity. Courage and strength are synergetic virtues. An overabundance of one is worth less without an adequate amount of the other.

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). In its most developed, civilized and moral form courage is the considered and decisive willingness to risk harm to ensure the success or survival of a group or another person (courage, virtus, andreia).

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.

When they have the means, most men will happily support a woman who seems to be carefree, pretty and charming. 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.

Dependency is powerlessness.

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

Becoming an interdependent, rather than completely dependent, member of the group means mastering a set of useful skills and understanding some useful ideas.

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.

Women also earn their keep through mastery of one kind or another, and mastery is by no means exclusive to men, but mastery does have a lot to do with competition for status between men.

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.

Americans have a strained relationship with the idea of honor. They have always been a little drunk on the idea that “all men are created equal” and politicians have spent two centuries flattering every Joe Schmoe into thinking his opinion is worth just as much as anyone else’s—even when he has absolutely no idea what he is talking about.

Honor is a concern for one’s reputation for strength, courage and mastery within the context of an honor group comprised primarily of other men.

Masculinity in the perfect ideal is aspirational, not attainable. The point is to be better, stronger, more courageous, more masterful—to achieve greater honor.

They are not good men, but they are good at being men.

Men want to be good men because good men are well regarded, but being a good man isn’t the same as being good at being a man.

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

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.

Cultural repudiation of The Way of Men extinguishes the dream of virile action and makes its equivalents seem hollow and base. It erases the secret hope of men—the fantasy that one day they will be tested, that one day they will be thrust into a dire world at the bloody edge between life and death 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.

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.

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.

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.

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 dismiss biology and “outdated” ideas about masculinity and argue that men can change if they want to. Men do have free wills, and they can change to some extent, but men are not merely imperfect women. Men are individuals with their own interests, and they don’t need women to show them how to be men.

“Can men change?” is the wrong question. Better questions are: “Why should men change?” and “What does the average guy get out of the deal?”

Men cannot be men—much less good or heroic men—unless their actions have meaningful consequences to people they truly care about. Strength requires an opposing force, courage requires risk, mastery requires hard work, honor requires accountability to other men. Without these things, we are little more than boys playing at being men, and there is no weekend retreat or mantra or half-assed rite of passage that can change that.

Gang - A bonded, hierarchical coalition of males allied to assert their interests against external forces.

A solid friendship is just like any other relationship. It requires give and take. It requires some time and some history.

If you know some guys you can connect with, and who are on more or less the same page philosophically, make sure you make time for them. Set aside time to create that history and build that trust. Even women who are “like one of the guys” will have a chilling effect on that process. Men are not honest with each other in the same way when women are present, and establishing trust requires honesty.