The Warrior Poet Way: A Guide to Living Free and Dying Well

by John Lovell

These seemingly contradictory pulls in my life were confusing, but I knew there was something true and paradoxical in my desire to be both dangerous and good. From a young age, I had within me both a romantic poet and a savage warrior.

Reminds me of King David.

To be a good man, you must become a paradox: strong but self-controlled, violent but gentle, ready to go to war one minute and prepared to give piggyback rides the next.

Battening down what makes you dangerous won’t make your longings any quieter. It only adds fuel to the fire. A man who doesn’t find a challenge worthy of his strength will find another outlet. He’ll lose himself in sports teams, work, pornography, or going to the gym. He’ll obsess over the next NFL game or some new video game or the next career goal, never quite satisfied with what’s in front of him.

As long as a man trades his warrior instinct for entertainment, his soul will not be satisfied. He will be perpetually bored, searching for a way to kill time and quell his longings. A man who’s consumed by his mission, however, who knows what life is about and his part to play, doesn’t need a distraction. His life is the adventure.

Tyranny looks different now than it did centuries ago; much of the oppression we experience today is subtle, sneaking into our lives through compromise. It’s the proverbial frog slowly being boiled to death. How do you destroy a man’s freedom? By slowly taking away his ability to choose. Make no mistake, though: What follows political oppression is inevitably brute force. We must be ready.

This is our ideal: a man who is dangerous enough to kill and just might, but who is never out of control—a sacrificial savage. Such a man loves well and fights well, able to discern what is needed. To hold these two seemingly polar opposites seems contradictory to many, but this is what true masculinity is and has always been. We must be radically safe for those under our care and protection, strong and gentle. Balanced.

Engage in the war of ideas. Speak the truth and do not self-censor your speech in fear. Live as if you are free, and you will be.

The author G. Michael Hopf wrote, “Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. And, weak men create hard times.”

As psychologist and bestselling author Jordan Peterson writes, “A harmless man is not a good man. A good man is a very, very dangerous man who has that under voluntary control.”

There is nothing wrong with being afraid, of course. What you do with it is what separates the cowards from the heroes.

When we make small compromises in our integrity over time, we slowly begin to abandon the part of ourselves required for the next battle.

This!

We live in easy times, times that protect us from the harshness of the world. I am saddened to see many men giving in to the pressures of their culture and circumstances. The ease of a good life can soften a man to the point of making him vulnerable to all kinds of attacks and exploitation.

Truth is now considered relative, and we are all free to believe whatever we want. Which is just a way of saying the truth no longer exists. But this belief is dangerous and not without consequence. The moment we believe it, true philosophy is dead, and that simply cannot be.

When we express our ideas in a way that is not congruent with the whims of culture, we may be shamed, cast out, attacked, or even silenced. Cancel culture is not just a bully; it’s authoritarianism disguised as “progress.”

Self-sufficiency is the act of not relying on any government, institution, or organization to take care of you. It means that you can provide for your family’s basic needs without being dependent on a supply source controlled by someone else.

So long as people are dependent on a system, they can be bullied by that system into complying. If a system provides you with all the things you need to survive, then that same system has the power to take away what you need to survive. In other words, if you are not self-sufficient, you are only as free as others decide you are.

Staying a free man, then, is not only your right; it is your responsibility.