Fearless

According to the Way of Men, the four defining masculine virtues are strength, courage, mastery, and honour. As the foundations of masculinity, I am going to link these virtues to scripture and the Christian life as a basis for Christian masculinity. Today I will focus on courage.

So have no fear of them, for nothing is covered that will not be revealed, or hidden that will not be known. What I tell you in the dark, say in the light, and what you hear whispered, proclaim on the housetops. And do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Rather fear him who can destroy both soul and body in hell. Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? And not one of them will fall to the ground apart from your Father. But even the hairs of your head are all numbered. Fear not, therefore; you are of more value than many sparrows. So everyone who acknowledges me before men, I also will acknowledge before my Father who is in heaven, but whoever denies me before men, I also will deny before my Father who is in heaven. (Matthew 10:26-33, ESV)

A hallmark, the hallmark, of Christian masculinity is fearlessness.

A Christian man should have faith in God that He will meet his needs. From this faith the Christian man should develop a fearlessness to the world around him, for if God’s got your back, what else could there possibly be to worry about?

There is nothing earthly worthy of fear and of the otherworldly entities worthy of fear, one is our leader and the other has already been defeated. There is nothing to fear.

Our courage, our fearlessness is grounded in our faith in God. A Christian man who lets fear control his actions or thoughts is failing in his faith and needs to renew his faith.

The Christian beta is not nice, he is not humble, he is lacking faith. He is guided by fear.

• He lacks confidence because he lacks the faith God is with him.
• He is “nice” instead of honest because he lacks faith in the truth.
• He is afraid to approach the cute girl at church because he lacks the faith God is in control.
• He worries of other’s opinons because he lacks the faith God’s opinion is the only one that truly matters.
• He doesn’t stand up for what he knows is right because he lacks faith in his godly convictions.
• He is desperate because he does not have faith in God’s plan for his life.
• He doesn’t take risks because he doesn’t have faith God will protect him.
• He refuses to lead his wife because he doesn’t have faith in God’s plan for marriage.
• He is afraid to chase his godly desires because he lacks faith God will provide.

These passive, beta behaviours do not come from any sort of holy motives, but from fear born out of a a lack of faith. He should have no fear for he already knows the final destiny of his soul, and all else is simply temporal detail.

The Christian man needs to replace his fear with limitless confidence born of faith.

The confidence of secular game comes from pride. The PUA has irrational self-confidence for he’s basing his confidence on his own self, which is limited. It is irrational because he thinks to highly of himself. Hence the need for the PUA to always remind himself to maintain frame. He has created an irrational bubble of self-confidence that is not based on reality. If he fails to maintain frame, the false front of his irrational self-confidence becomes clear.

The confidence of the Christian man should come from a fearlessness grounded in faith in a limitless God. Once he has it, it can never be taken away, for it is based in the reality that God is in control and His control is absolute. There are no limits to his confidence because God is limitless. His frame is unbreakable for it is fully rational and is based on the unconquerable Almighty.

The first step of developing yourself as a man is to recognize where you lack faith. Any place where you fear, you are lacking faith. So ask yourself, what do you fear? Of whom are you afraid? When do you let fear control you?

The second step is conquering your fear by developing faith. Recognize that God is in control.

Afraid of approaching that girl?

Have faith. Overcome your fear and approach her. If God means her to be yours, you can’t fail. If it doesn’t work out, God never meant her to be your wife, so it is well.

Don’t know what to say?

Have faith. If success is necessary, God will provide any words needed; simply start talking and say whatever comes to mind.

Are you lowering your standards for a woman out of desperation?

Have faith. If you are meant to be married, God will provide. If you are not, marrying a low quality girl will lead to your destruction.

Are you afraid of your wife and letting her control your marriage?

Have faith in God’s plan for marriage and take your rightful place as head of the family.

No matter what you fear, remember that it is nothing next to the God who is with you.

Have faith. Be fearless.

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Know that faith is an active process, not a passive process.

When I say have faith, I do not mean you should avoid acting or wait passively. Having faith means giving yourself to action. When I say God will provide, I don’t mean you should simply let life slip by waiting. I mean that God will give you the strength to take what you need.

Many churches and Christians make the error of mistaking non-action for faith, especially in the realm of marriage. The advice to wait on the Lord to provide a spouse is horrible, possibly even sinful, when used incorrectly, as many Christians do.

Having faith that God will provide a spouse, means having the courage to act fearlessly in pursuing one. It means having the faith in God to strengthen you while you improve yourself as a man to be worthy of the wife God will provide you.

If you are a woman, having faith the Lord will provide does not mean simply praying and hoping. It means actively preparing yourself for marriage by developing your womanhood. It means actively putting yourself out there for godly men to pursue.

If you think have faith means simply waiting for God to provide, you are gravely mistaken. To fail to act is to show a lack of faith. To have faith is to act without fear:

And what more shall I say? For time would fail me to tell of Gideon, Barak, Samson, Jephthah, of David and Samuel and the prophets—who through faith conquered kingdoms, enforced justice, obtained promises, stopped the mouths of lions, quenched the power of fire, escaped the edge of the sword, were made strong out of weakness, became mighty in war, put foreign armies to flight. Women received back their dead by resurrection. Some were tortured, refusing to accept release, so that they might rise again to a better life. Others suffered mocking and flogging, and even chains and imprisonment. They were stoned, they were sawn in two, they were killed with the sword. They went about in skins of sheep and goats, destitute, afflicted, mistreated—of whom the world was not worthy—wandering about in deserts and mountains, and in dens and caves of the earth.

And all these, though commended through their faith, did not receive what was promised, since God had provided something better for us, that apart from us they should not be made perfect. (Hebrews 11:32-40, ESV)

Male Friendship

I came across these two discussions of the lack of friendship among males, particularly white, heterosexual males. The dearth of male friendship is a serious problem in our modern world. The average American has only 2 close friends. While, as per the Salon article above, white, heterosexual males have the fewest friends.

This lack of friendship comes from a variety of factors, but there are three specific to men. The first is the confluence of both philia and eros under the word love, and the resultant conquering of love by eros. Due to this, in our present language “manly love” might as well mean queer. Related to this is the rise of the homosexual lifestyle in popular culture.

The Slate article almost gets this:

Chalk this heart-squeezing shift up to our limiting ideals of masculinity, which define themselves in opposition to all things feminine. Friends are empathetic, affectionate, not afraid to leave their tower of self-reliance for occasional support. You know who else is like that? Women. “Being a good friend…as well as needing a good friend, is the equivalent of being girly,” Wade writes, so the boys end up opting out.

Wade doesn’t mention the rainbow elephant in the room, but I wonder whether men are less afraid of girliness here than homosexuality. In many ways, it’s a distinction without a difference, since homophobes tend to imagine gay men as effete. But if a man ever is allowed to relax his stone face, it’s around his romantic partner. Being open, communicative, vulnerable—all of these behaviors evoke love relationships. It makes a sad kind of sense that boys trying to assert their masculinity would steer clear of playing the “boyfriend” around other guys.

But as usual, they miss the mark, and make a demonstration of the third reason:

Friends are empathetic, affectionate, not afraid to leave their tower of self-reliance for occasional support. You know who else is like that? Women. “Being a good friend…as well as needing a good friend, is the equivalent of being girly,

Affectionate and empathetic? It just sounds queer.

The reason this sounds queer is these are not masculine friendships, these are feminine friendships.  (Not that the feminine mode of friendship is wrong; it’s good, but for women).

The third reason for the decline is male friendship is the colonization of the language of friendship by the feminine. The words used to describe friendships in the above articles are good examples of this: empathy, affection, intimacy, emotional support, etc. are all womanly or would be reserved for your lover; to apply these to a masculine relationship sounds gay.

If this is what friendship is painted as, of course men are going not going to have friendships. Who the hell wants to gather around in a sob circle with their male friends?

But by defining friendship as the feminine, the modern world is pushing out (has pushed out?) the ability to express male friendship through the English language.

To reestablish male friendship, we need to reestablish masculine relationships. We need to retake friendship, retake philia, retake manly love.

(Bro is a decent attempt at this, but bromance just sounds retarded and queer).

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For the theoretical framework of masculine friendship we can go back to Jack Donovan’s Way of Man. Male social bonds were formed as a part of the gang. Men bonded through hunting and war parties. They bonded not through faggy emoting, but through shared action, shared virtue, shared goals, shared suffering, and shared victory. They built each other up to work together against the common foe.

Obviously, we can’t go back to the old warband model. There’s no opposing tribes to make war against anymore outside of the ghetto (at least not until the happening), and if you tried to do so, you’d go to jail. But men can attempt to rebuild the same pattern through the creation of a gang. Read the Way of Man for more on this.

We can rebuild the male friendship without the need to go murdering our neighbours. Aristotle outlined the virtuous male friendship many centuries ago:

Perfect friendship is the friendship of men who are good, and alike in virtue; for these wish well alike to each other qua good, and they are good themselves. Now those who wish well to their friends for their sake are most truly friends; for they do this by reason of own nature and not incidentally; therefore their friendship lasts as long as they are good-and goodness is an enduring thing. And each is good without qualification and to his friend, for the good are both good without qualification and useful to each other. So too they are pleasant; for the good are pleasant both without qualification and to each other, since to each his own activities and others like them are pleasurable, and the actions of the good are the same or like. And such a friendship is as might be expected permanent, since there meet in it all the qualities that friends should have. For all friendship is for the sake of good or of pleasure-good or pleasure either in the abstract or such as will be enjoyed by him who has the friendly feeling-and is based on a certain resemblance; and to a friendship of good men all the qualities we have named belong in virtue of the nature of the friends themselves; for in the case of this kind of friendship the other qualities also are alike in both friends, and that which is good without qualification is also without qualification pleasant, and these are the most lovable qualities. Love and friendship therefore are found most and in their best form between such men.

But it is natural that such friendships should be infrequent; for such men are rare. Further, such friendship requires time and familiarity; as the proverb says, men cannot know each other till they have ‘eaten salt together’; nor can they admit each other to friendship or be friends till each has been found lovable and been trusted by each. Those who quickly show the marks of friendship to each other wish to be friends, but are not friends unless they both are lovable and know the fact; for a wish for friendship may arise quickly, but friendship does not.
…
The friendship of the good too and this alone is proof against slander; for it is not easy to trust any one talk about a man who has long been tested by oneself; and it is among good men that trust and the feeling that ‘he would never wrong me’ and all the other things that are demanded in true friendship are found. In the other kinds of friendship, however, there is nothing to prevent these evils arising. For men apply the name of friends even to those whose motive is utility, in which sense states are said to be friendly (for the alliances of states seem to aim at advantage), and to those who love each other for the sake of pleasure, in which sense children are called friends. Therefore we too ought perhaps to call such people friends, and say that there are several kinds of friendship-firstly and in the proper sense that of good men qua good, and by analogy the other kinds; for it is in virtue of something good and something akin to what is found in true friendship that they are friends, since even the pleasant is good for the lovers of pleasure. But these two kinds of friendship are not often united, nor do the same people become friends for the sake of utility and of pleasure; for things that are only incidentally connected are not often coupled together.

Barring the fact that love in this case indicates philia, but likely comes across sounding closer to eros due to our fallen language in this modern age, does this sound gay? Does it sounds womanly?

No. These are not friendships of men getting together to whine about their woes. These are friendships of men testing each other for shared virtue and working towards the mutual good.

This is manly friendship. This is what we men need to return to: a masculine view of friendship based around shared virtue and goals, rather than emotionalizing.

We need to start speaking of friendship in words that don’t sound faggy. We need to move the language of male friendship from that of a romance or an AA support-group to that of a warband. ‘Bonds of brotherhood’ and ‘shared virtue’ rather than ‘affection’ and ‘intimacy’ and ‘test’ and ‘shared suffering’ rather than ’emotional support’ and ’empathy’.

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Now the question becomes, how do we retake male friendship?

We can’t on the cultural level, other than using masculine language for male friendship to reclaim manly love and friendship from homosexuals and women.

But you can do some things on a personal level. Start a gang.

First, you need to find some good men. If you’ve got some good, reliable friends already, that’s excellent. If you don’t, look through your church, your activities, your social groups, and find men of good character and virtue with whom to bond.

Try to avoid half-men, scalzified weiners, psychological eunuchs, pc nutjobs, those lacking virtue, emos,the easily offended, and the like.

Second, start some specifically manly activities together; exclude women from these activities. Some good ones are hunting, fishing, camping, shooting, poker, gaming, etc.

Third, when at these activities talk, but not just of girls, video games, and beer; talk of deeper things. Don’t get all emotional about it, but talk of philosophy, religion, metaphysics, goals, ambitions, virtue, politics,

Once you’ve gotten close to some men, you can talk of emotional things. Again, don’t get all sobby and faggy about it, but there’s nothing out of place with a matter-of-fact discussion of emotions that may be afflicting you once a close enough bond has been formed.

The goal is to build a solid group of men who have your back and whose back you have.

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As for myself, some of us our in a book club; when my choice of book comes it will be the Way of Man, to help put the idea of forming a gang in explicit turns in my social circles. I already have a couple solid guys I’ve been friends with for over a decade and whom I’m close to. This will form the core of the gang and there’re others whom could be a part. Over the summer I tried to arrange days in the woods shooting to move some of my friends towards a more warband-esque grouping; it never turned out, but one of the core is planning to buy a gun and the other really wants to but hasn’t been able to on the planned days; others have expressed interest in shooting as well. So come spring, I should be able to get some days in the woods going, and maybe even convince a few to hunt with me next fall. But beside that, we’ve started fishing over summer, we go camping once a year, and we game regularly. So things look well in that respect.

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So, go an do likewise. Read the Way of Man to develop an idea of masculine friendship, make some solid male friendships, and try to make those male friendships you do have into a stronger, deeper bond. Form your own gang, your own warband.

For friendship is important, and every man needs his comrades-in-arms.

Response to the 70’s Show Dude

I’ve come across this video a number of places now, most recently at Sis’. It annoyed me the first time I watched it out of curiousity, but I ignored it. But it keeps coming up, so now I want to say a couple words on the great philosophical musings of the guy who played a stoner on that show about the 70’s:

He makes three points (starting at about 2 mins in). The first and third points are unoriginal but good, opportunity comes from hard work and  build your own life, but everybody is ignoring those two. The one point everybody is focusing on is # 2:

The sexiest thing in the world is being really smart, thoughtful, and generous.  Everything else is crap, I promise you.  It’s just crap that people try to sell to you to make you feel like less, so don’t buy it!”

The first objection is that it is simply not true.

Intelligence is not sexy. If being smart was sexy, awkward nerds would would get the hot girls, engineers would be rolling in poon, Stephen Hawking would dominate People’s Sexiest Men, and porn videos would be indistinguishable from Khan’s Academy. We all know how true that is. (Protip: It’s not). Likewise, being thoughtful and generous are not sexy. Saying otherwise is just deluding the gullible.

Just because something is good, does not mean it is sexy.

But the bigger problem is not the untrue conflation of intelligence and sexiness, that’s the type of relatively minor white lie which our society so does love.

The bigger problem is that to the punked stoner sexiness is the goal of intelligence. The axiom of point #2 is a basic assumption shared by stoner dude, his screaming, teenage fans, and everybody throwing this video around is that sexiness is the the primary goal one should aspire to.

Intelligence is not lauded because it advances civilization. It is not lauded for the glory of God, or even the glory of man. It is not lauded for the good it may bring others. It is not lauded as tool for finding and acquiring virtue.

No we should not be virtuous for virtue’s sake or the greater good. We should not expand our capabilities for the betterment of man. No, you should be intelligent because it will engorge Jimmy’s dick and will make Janey tingle.

Welcome to the new hedonism, where aspiring to be a sex object is inspirational.