Pygmalion and the Anime Girl

Byproducts of Sexual Dysfunction

“Young men, let me make a suggestion to you: Why don’t you turn off the computer, log off the porn, and go ask a real woman on a date. How ’bout that? Just a thought. Ask her out. Young men, why don’t you be the ones who do the asking, how ’bout that? Don’t wait for her. You go ask — show her a little respect. 

And then you take her out, and you treat her right. How ’bout that?

Don’t make her cater to your whims. 

Treat her right. Treat her right. 

Treat her like what she is: a woman! A person of incredible significance, created in the image of God. And you know what, you treat her right, and then one day you do her the honor and show her the respect of asking her to marry you. 

And then you go get married. And you have children.”

—Senator Josh Hawley, 

Turning Point USA, December 18th, 2022

“The Pharisees and the teachers of the Law are experts in the Law of Moses. So obey everything they teach you, but don’t do as they do. After all, they say one thing and do something else. They pile heavy burdens on people’s shoulders, and won’t lift a finger to help.”

—Matthew 23:2-4

I: Porn as Scapegoat

Years ago, I heard a joke about politicians: “When a politician finds a parade, he rushes to the front of the crowd, and pretends he was always leading it.”

Citizens place their trust, hopes, and dreams in elected leaders. 

Mostly, this leads to disappointment. 

Revolutions happen every generation. But entrenched institutional players are usually the last people to adapt. 

Afterwards, politicians rewrite history, and reframe their actions in service to whatever zeitgeist has replaced the previous status quo. 

It’s a mistake to expect dynamic leadership from Machiavellian social climbers: men who calculate every outfit, practice smiling in the mirror, manicure their nails for television, select their wives based on external social approval, curate private beliefs through the lens of political expediency, and view personal relationships from a transactional perspective. 

Their entire lives are rehearsed. 

Fueled by covert intrigues, masked by sanctimonious morality. 

In this particular speech, Josh Hawley adopted the mannerisms and aesthetic of a Protestant Christian youth pastor, in order to connect with the audience as a “man of the people”. His customary suit (indigo jacket, cerulean button-down shirt, and a two-tone tie) was abandoned in favor of a casual T-shirt. The Senator pretends to be spontaneous as he stands onstage, reciting a prepared speech. He preaches of duty, honor, and masculinity. 

But if you look at his thin, scrawny arms, it’s obvious Senator Hawley rarely lifts weights. Even a short, three-month regimen would be enough to improve his physique. 

There’s a certain irony to this kind of performative masculinity, where an effeminate legal scholar stands onstage and insults ordinary men as porn-addicted losers. 

It’s typical of modern Christian churches. 

Today, preachers frequently ignore the Scriptures, and claim that “women were made in the image of God”. This is a small, but meaningful omission of Genesis 2, the story of Adam and Eve. According to the Scriptures, which superficial, feminist Christians pretend to believe, men were created in the image of God… and women were created in the image of man.

The apostle Paul makes this point explicit in 1st Corinthians 11:7-9:

“A man ought not to cover his head, since he is the image and glory of God; but woman is the glory of man. For man did not come from woman, but woman from man; neither was man created for woman, but woman for man.”

These are tedious, legalistic considerations. God loves all his children.

But these details are noteworthy, because purposeful distortions of basic truths are weaponized to advocate a fake, predetermined conclusion.

Historical evidence is rearranged to conform to industrial feminism.

Religion has been quoted dishonestly, seeking to shame men.

Women are praised. Men are scorned. These dynamics are increasingly detached from reality, in a world where Tinder has replaced traditional courtship, average women reject average men, and no-fault divorce bankrupts families. Workplace romances have been de facto outlawed by sexual harassment laws, enforced by the bitter, envious old women of Human Resources. 

It’s delusional to claim that women are catering to the whims of men, when they reject 95% of their options at first glance.

Even a cursory examination of statistical data invalidates Senator Hawley’s position. Ignorance is no excuse. He’s smart enough to research the contemporary dating scene. During 2007 and 2008, Josh Hawley clerked for the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. That position requires brilliance, ambition, precision, eloquence, a grueling work ethic, and an encyclopedic reading schedule.

Women reject the vast majority of men, and chase fruitlessly after a small handful of conceited, womanizer jerks (such as myself).

Frantically, desperately competing for the same narrow batch of playboys encourages those ego-inflated bachelors to avoid commitment.

Feast, or famine. There’s no middle ground.

Women enjoy rejecting men, especially handsome men; the power to select or spurn suitors based on arbitrary reasons, mercurial moods, is fun. It provides a validational ego boost.

These truths are politically unpopular.

As a result, Senator Josh Hawley feigns ignorance, and blames men.

Scapegoating men (and porn) for the destruction of the family feels righteous, and cathartic. But nearly 70% of divorces are initiated by women. 

Porn is, of course, a digital sedative, a dysfunctional form of escapism. But the question is never asked — what are porn users escaping from? 

Viewers immerse themselves in a curated, parasocial simulation of an obedient, enthusiastic harem — an impossible fantasy, where women cost nothing, never complain, and disappear on command. This is sybaritic and unproductive. Drugs mask pain, escapism numbs grief, and modernity’s Lotus Eaters drown themselves in hedonistic dreams, wallowing in self-pity. But the larger problem is the grim reality of living in a dying civilization.

Politics is downstream of culture.

Culture is downstream of economics. 

Economics is downstream of technology. 

Porn is a convenient scapegoat for the entrenched, intractable problems of modernity.

The end of cheap energy bleeds into social dysfunction. And personal misfortunes.

Marriage has become a luxury product.

There is an economic gravity… an incremental heaviness inflicted by five consecutive decades of inflation, offshoring, credentialism, globalization, housing bubbles, urban crime, and mass immigration. Traditional lifestyles are still available — if you can afford them. Every year, the price appreciates by a tiny margin.

Widespread usage of intense, high-resolution, cinematic pornography is a symptom of our culture’s sexual dysfunction, which inflicts many second-order effects. 

Not the cause. 

In this society of atomized consumers, romance and passion and authenticity are purposeful acts of rebellion. Happy relationships are often destroyed by our poisoned ecosystem. Natural impulses have been hijacked, funneled into various forms of self-destruction. 

Community itself has become a commodity. 

Emotions, and experiences are designed, packaged, marketed, and sold as consumable products.

Casual human interactions have been monetized, and paywalled.

There is a fundamental absence of meaning. 

Brotherhood is forbidden. When you speak with a veteran soldier returning from Afghanistan or Iraq, he will speak wistfully of the fraternity of those days, which he cannot find anywhere as a civilian. Perhaps he volunteers as a firefighter, or plays sports, as a pale surrogate for the brotherhood he lost. 

Freedom of association (and the authority to reject outsiders) has been outlawed by the Trojan Horse of Civil Rights, which seized power sixty years ago.

Women are lonely, men are depressed, and the distance between them is widening. There have always been acute tensions between men and women, and there always will be adversarial friction, because men and women dream, build, and love in different ways. 

This is the eternal tragedy of the human condition. Our desires exceed reality. Life rarely matches imagination. 

And yet, this modern jungle of Tinder… hookups… birth control… and no-fault divorce is a particularly dehumanizing, desolate wasteland. Intimacy bleeds a slow, excruciating death. Heartbreak has become common. 

Love brings meaning to life. 

Life is about people, and relationships, and it’s tragic how far our culture has decayed. The real horror, which terrifies me, is understanding how much worse Soviet America can be. And will be. Nightmares are emerging. Our current suffering is not even close to the bottom of the human condition. 

Tent cities of drug addicts are expanding across the slums of major cities. But this is an early, mild indicator of more serious potential sorrows.

The vapid prostitutes of OnlyFans will birth monstrous predators.

Incel Adolph Hitler is sketching artwork this evening, dreaming of nihilistic revenge, while his sister models as a cam-whore in her bedroom upstairs, teasing frustrated Simps for monthly subscriptions.

Porn brought us the social contagion of troons, and the psychological contamination of autogynephilia on broad scale.

What deranged abominations will OnlyFans summon? Or Instagram, and TikTok? What exotic mental disorders will breed and multiply?

This pain is real.

The technological demons of the Internet are real, but their arrival lags behind the mass adoption of social media.

Digital opium destroys focus by providing instant gratification. Willpower is eroded by an excess of easy pleasures. Cheap distractions saturate our surroundings.

Psychological diseases are invisible, asymptomatic during the early stages of mass formation psychosis. Contamination is subtle. Novel strains of mania, and hysteria build in quiet isolation.

These are industrial contagions.

Look at the cartel violence of Mexico, or the violent favelas of Brazil, to gain a hint of where this road can take us.

Imagine a crime novel populated by dirty cops and gangbangers, infused with the macabre horror of Stephen King, illuminated by the cyberpunk delirium of Philip K. Dick, or William Gibson. Masked, muscular squads of steroid-laced criminals leaping from vans, kidnapping celebrities, livestreaming beheadings onscreen.

Feral barbarism.

The gulags of our future will be hideous mazes of despair, if they are allowed to happen. 

We can do better. 

Sexual dysfunction deserves to be explored in a serious way, intent on solutions, rather than scapegoats.

The fissure between men and women runs deep through the heart of this dying civilization. The psychosexual frustrations of ordinary women, and the emasculated melancholy of ordinary men, are together one of the main catalysts fueling our descent into poverty, misery, barbarism. 

Operatic tragedy stirs.

Romance is beautiful, marriage is meaningful, and they deserve to be recaptured, rediscovered, reinvigorated. 

II: Dollar Shave Masculinity

“Sex is to civilization what gasoline is to modernity. Gasoline should not be forsworn, because it is a useful tool when controlled. When sex is channeled and harnessed properly, civilization reaches great heights. Gasoline is not a substance that should be given liberty unless you are trying to destroy an enemy, in which case you coat them in napalm.”

—Aidan MacLear, The Center

“Today, love is being positivized into a formula for enjoyment. Above all, love is supposed to generate pleasant feelings. It no longer represents plot, narration, or drama — only inconsequential emotion and arousal. It is free from the negativity of injury, assault, or crashing. To fall (in love) would already be too negative.

…

The performance principle that dominates all spheres of life today also encompasses love and sexuality. Thus, the heroine of the bestselling novel Fifty Shades of Grey is surprised when her partner construes their relationship as “a job offer. It has set hours, a job description, and a rather harsh grievance procedure.” The performance principle cannot accommodate the negativity of excess and transgression. Accordingly, the “agreements” the “submissive” pledges to observe include plenty of exercise, healthy meals, and ample rest. She is not allowed to eat anything other than fruit between meals. She must avoid immoderate consumption of alcohol and may not smoke or use drugs. Even sexuality bows to the commandment of health. Every form of negativity is prohibited. Even the negativity of real or symbolic dirt is eliminated… The sadomasochistic practices the novel describes amount to nothing more than sexual diversions. They lack the negativity of overstepping… Thus, the partners determine in advance that they will not exceed “hard limits.” So-called safewords guarantee that activities do not go beyond certain boundaries. The overuse of the adjective “delicious” throughout the novel points to the dictate of positivity, which transforms everything into a formula for enjoyment and consumption. Even torture can be “delicious” in Fifty Shades of Grey. This world of positivity admits only things that can be consumed. Pain itself is supposed to be enjoyable. 

…

Love is not simply being “feminized.” Rather, in the course of a positivization of all spheres of life, it is being domesticated into a consumer formula devoid of risk and daring, without excess or madness. All negativity, all negative feeling, is avoided. Passion and pain are giving way to pleasant feelings and inconsequential arousal. In the age of the “quickie,” the casual encounter, and sex as stress-relief, sexuality is losing all negativity, too. The wholesale absence of negativity is degrading love into an object of consumption, a matter of hedonistic calculation. The desire for the Other is giving way to the comfort of the Same. The aim is to procure the comfortable and, ultimately, dull immanence of the wholly identical. Modern love lacks all transcendence and transgression.

…

Today, the defense of bare life is intensifying into the absolutization and fetishization of health. The modern-day slave prefers it to sovereignty and freedom… Where bare life is hallowed, theology gives way to therapy. Or therapy becomes theological.”

—Byung-Chul Han, The Agony of Eros

Senator Hawley is powerful compared to the average citizen, but powerless when compared against the permanent bureaucracy. 

His role is symbolic, and ceremonial, as a vestigial performer of the dead Republic, the frayed illusion of democracy which protects the federal bureaucracy from external discontent, and popular rebellion. 

My analysis interrogates this symbolism. 

The dynamics of misdirection… and the implications of enduring cultural deceit.

Politicians are supposed to be cynical, dishonest opportunists — I respect the hustle, and hate the game, not the player. 

There’s a lot to admire about Josh Hawley: he’s tall, handsome, clever, accomplished, disciplined, hardworking, wealthy, and well-connected. On a personal level, he’s secured a comfortable sinecure during an era of widespread poverty and despair. Any man would be proud to father such beautiful kids, and to successfully insulate his family from the inevitable tragedies of a crumbling Empire. 

But what fascinates me about this man, and the slick breed of lawyers he represents, a coterie of arrogant, unimaginative losers who have dominated the Republican Party since the days of Reagan, is their remarkable stubbornness. 

On some level, I admire their blind, delusional commitment to ignore reality. 

No matter how many icebergs this sinking ship collides against, the GOP (controlled opposition) continues along the same course, rushing full speed ahead.

The conventional wisdom of the Republican Party is 28 years behind the times, and shows no signs of adjusting to three decades of consistent, predictable failure. 

In 1994, the neoconservative military strategist Edward Luttwak wrote an article entitled, “Will Success Spoil America?” His analysis was published in The Washington Post… the biggest newspaper read by the American political class. Even then, these current tragedies seemed obvious, and Edward Luttwak punctured the entrenched dogmas of the Republican political class, observing:

“Republicans of the “family values” persuasion should have been the first to recognize that more disruptive change has been inflicted on working lives and entire industries… As it is, only a few paleo-conservatives of Pat Buchanan’s persuasion have recognized the far-from-mysterious economy-society connection. Hence in the standard two-part Republican political speech, Part One still celebrates the virtues of dynamic economic growth, propelled by technological progress, deregulation, and free trade, while Part Two mourns the decline of the family and community “values” eroded precisely by the constant dislocations caused by our turbo-charged economy.”

WILL SUCCESS SPOIL AMERICA? - The Washington Post

Edward Luttwak is not a fringe intellectual — he was one of the most famous neoconservatives from the 1990s. 

But these very simple and obvious realizations have been condemned to the cultural periphery. 

Problems caused by economic growth cannot be solved by more economic growth. 

Everything has a price, including tradition. 

Globalization’s short-term prosperity brings long-term social decay.

The ideals of community, and the future careers of young American men, have been sacrificed for cheap labor. Mass immigration has flooded the domestic labor market with unskilled warm bodies. This deliberate policy has ushered in the anxiety and volatility of the Gig Economy, a caste of precariat serfs trapped in an unrelenting treadmill of debt, rent, and consumption.

Stressful hypercompetition. 

Poverty, and instability. 

To avoid downward mobility, teenage Americans flung themselves into a parallel, debt-fueled arms race seeking college credentials, chasing after a dwindling supply of white-collar jobs. 

Consequences accumulated.  

If we examine his basic argument, Senator Hawley contends that American men lack VIRTUE. He shames the men among his audience, and demands a renewal of classical masculine chivalry, generosity, honor, and courage. 

But what he fiercely, stubbornly neglects is any examination of the origins, and incentives of Patriarchal virtue — why men ever bothered to respect, and cherish women. Once again, he willfully ignores the historical record, neglecting thousands of years of Western tradition and documented legal precedents.

In a world of nominal equality, where men and women are supposedly identical peers, and therefore financial competitors scrambling for the same narrow spectrum of profitable careers, why do men owe anything, to anyone?

Helping your competitor is a fatal mistake.

In an era of feminism, birth control, and antibiotics, why are men expected to perform traditional responsibilities? Especially when women have abandoned motherhood.

Men and women are rivals for a shrinking pool of white-collar, high-prestige jobs. Many traditional careers have been offshored, eliminated, or automated.

Both in legal terms, and practical terms, women are “empowered” by preferential treatment. 

What courtesy should men extend to their rivals? Western Civilization is dying, and there’s a limited number of lifeboats.  

But this logic is grotesque, and inhuman. 

It would be cruel to punish women for the crime of being women, and force them to carry the same stress and hardships we expect from men. 

Nobody accepts the theoretical equality between men and women, or seriously considers their status as vicious rivals during recessions, despite the lip service paid to these absurd fantasies. Feminists would be shocked if men ever competed against them with real intensity. No deference. No ethics. No sympathy. No mercy. And we see this abstract theory, expressed in rare glimpses of brutality, when Trans athletes demolish female competitions. 

Life imitates art.

Senator Josh Hawley laments the disappearance of masculine virtue. 

But as always, the best test of integrity is the trial of Kyle Rittenhouse. War forces friends and enemies to sort themselves, to abandon their habitual pretensions.

Corrosive hatred simplifies, dissolves polite facades, and provokes clarity.

During the trial of Kyle Rittenhouse, Senator Hawley remained silent, and allowed the brightest example of masculine virtue to be persecuted. After the verdict was delivered, affirming Kyle’s innocence, the Senator criticized social media censorship — but said nothing about Kyle. 

How curious.

This American Empire sends brave warriors all around the world to bleed and die atop nameless dunes of sand. Our nation prefers convenient pawns. When our warriors express discontent, or develop ambitions, they’re shunted aside. 

Real courage, real honor, real integrity leads to some uncomfortable questions.

Elected politicians are symbolic performers who prop up a tattered, threadbare illusion, and the civic mythology of this splendid Republic is less persuasive than ever before. 

They don’t want men. 

Or heroes. 

They want slaves, sculpted into a compliant, convenient simulation of masculinity.

III: Roasties versus Romanticism

“Since, Pygmalion had seen them leading their lives in wickedness, 

is offended by their countless vices, which nature

gave to the minds of women, celibate he lived

for many years without a partner of his bedchamber.

In the Meantime he sculpted white ivory happily

with wondrous art and wondrous skill, and gave it form with which 

no woman is able to be born, and he fell in love with his own work. 

It is the image of a true maiden whom you may believe is living

and, without modesty in the way you may believe she wants to move.

So much his art hides his own art.”

—Metamorphosis, Book Ten, by Ovid

According to Greek legend, the king Pygmalion was a talented sculptor who observed the promiscuity of local prostitutes. He witnessed how cheaply they sold their bodies. Intense disgust bloomed inside him. 

The ugly reality of women fell short of his romantic ideals. 

Lonely and enraged, the king Pygmalion refused sex with women, and instead focused on his artistic craft.

The magic of Aphrodite breathed life into his sculpture of an idealized, perfect woman more beautiful than any real woman ever could be. Her name was Galatea. Together they married, raised a family, and founded a city, called Paphos. 

Pygmalion was a fairy tale Incel, who poured his sexual frustrations into marble and stone, and was rewarded with a Happily Ever After, blessed by the sex goddess herself.

The story of Pygmalion is obscure compared to more popular Hellenistic adventures, such as the Iliad, the Odyssey, Prometheus, Pandora, Theseus and the Minotaur, Jason and the Argonauts, or the Labors of Hercules. But this myth has impacted a small handful of notable stories. 

Pinocchio riffs on the same premise; a childless woodcarver wishes for a son, and the magic of the Blue Fairy breathes life into his idealized wooden puppet. Pinocchio is a rebellious, reckless, and carefree child who stumbles and strays into a series of foolish adventures. Rather than sex, “The Adventures of Pinocchio” explores the relationship between parents and their children — illustrating the neurotic anxiety of parents as they watch their children learn, play, and suffer from impulsive mistakes. 

Repeatedly iterating upon failure is a necessary component of maturing into a competent adult. 

No matter how much this troubles concerned parents. 

In 1871, the playwright W. S. Gilbert (part of the iconic duo, Gilbert and Sullivan, who together created many of Britain’s best musicals) showcased a popular comedy based on the ancient myth, “Pygmalion and Galatea, an Original Mythological Comedy”. He presented a humorous love triangle, in which a married Pygmalion is tempted by an innocent and beautiful sculpture fashioned in the image of his wife. 

The comedy was a huge success. 

Numerous imitators rushed to the stage. 

The most famous spiritual heir arrived decades later, when George Bernard Shaw staged the 1913 musical “Pygmalion”. Today, this musical is known as “My Fair Lady”, and features a romance between a clumsy, unpolished florist and the pompous phonetics professor who educates her. Eliza Doolittle achieves a hypergamous ascent in wealth and prestige, as a social climber delighting in Edwardian Britain. And Professor Henry Higgins enjoys a masculine fantasy, which is to take a gorgeous, trusting ingénue and shape her like clay into his dream wife — passionate, sensual, sophisticated, charming, and properly submissive. 

Together, they share their dreams, and build a blissful, prosperous future. 

This plot structure was later adapted into the 1990 romantic comedy, “Pretty Woman.” But here, what began as a male fantasy (escaping from reality by designing the Platonic ideal of femininity) was subverted into a female fantasy. After an emotional breakup, a disillusioned Gigachad billionaire hooks up with a tacky, forgettable roastie. He gravitates towards this diseased streetwalker, and hires her to give him “the Girlfriend Experience”. 

She becomes his spiritual muse, his unkempt Yoko Ono, introducing danger and aggression into his pacified life, reawakening his inner animal (Jungian shadow), and energizing the jaded, depressed billionaire so that now he can conquer the corporate world. He buys her clothes, spoils her with unfamiliar opulence, and teaches her how to disguise herself as an American aristocrat — a woman raised among elegance, and refinement. 

Depressed Gigachad billionaire had planned to retire and sell off his company. But now, inspired by this clumsy prostitute, the talented corporate raider asserts control over his expansive business empire, culminating in a scene where Gigachad billionaire violently assaults, humiliates, and fires a subversive executive.  

This brief, violent showdown is a lek mating ritual. 

A flamboyant, superficial demonstration of brutality. A dance. Ostentatious, and inefficient. 

The excited prostitute watches this sadism, gasping and panting. Her hair is tousled, disheveled. She is frightened, and fiercely aroused. Dripping wet.

Afterwards, the sly roastie rejects her dream man, and the film ends with the billionaire begging for her forgiveness, pedestalizing the whore. 

Wat means?

What is the purpose of this history lesson?

Why bother to trace the origins, progression, and viral mutation of these stories, as they pass from myths… to plays… to pop culture?

There’s a few takeaways. 

It’s fascinating that a legend that began with a king disgusted by prostitutes, handed down generation after generation, can mutate into the feminized romance of a modern king (a corporate warlord, who specializes in hostile takeovers, the financial conquest and plundering of Wall Street conglomerates) mesmerized by prostitutes. 

From Hellenism to Hollywood, traveling from mythology to movies, this moral parable was twisted into a complete mockery of its original intent. 

This incremental subversion reveals on some level the adversarial motives which drive men, and women. And how persistent those dueling ambitions remain, enduring after thousands of years.

Men desire a beautiful, submissive woman with a low body count. 

Women desire an invincible warrior king willing to overlook her body count.

But the more illuminating epiphany is to compare the singular figure Pygmalion against the contemporary Incel phenomenon, a decentralized generation of directionless young men who repeat the same embittered loneliness — on a much larger scale.

Today, porn is confused with the Anime waifu. 

But these are disparate phenomena, despite frequent overlap. 

Porn is sexual, physical. 

The anime waifu is emotional, idealistic. The spiritual heir of Pygmalion’s ivory sculpture, Galatea. She represents an impossible dream, a Platonic ideal of feminine perfection — she is a creature of beauty, youth, and elegance, but most of all she symbolizes INNOCENCE.

The Japanese cartoon waifu is always kind, always faithful. Fundamentally loyal.

She will never be a thot. 

She will never be disrespectful, vulgar, or unappreciative. 

The modern environmental stimulus of primordial disgust is delivered through a novel mechanism: Social media. 

Ancient compulsions are expressed through exotic technologies. 

The rage, loneliness, bitterness, and despair of the Western Incel trapped in a rusting industrial landscape is a spiritual descendent of Pygmalion, and Adam, and Tarzan, and Frankenstein’s monster — men who expressed a keen, melancholy hunger to be loved, admired, and adored. 

Hunger for a beloved partner.

Their spiritual loneliness yearns for a companion. 

What’s disturbing is how widespread such sadness has become. 

The rare, isolated unhappiness of a heroic king from ancient Greece is growing to become the standard default of Industrial Civilization’s young men. 

Blatant promiscuity celebrated on Tinder, Instagram, TikTok, and OnlyFans is fueling widespread discontent. This discontent feeds itself, intensifying into a hideous feedback loop. 

You can lead a whore towards honor, but you can’t make her think.

Porn and the anime waifu inevitably converge, because men project their accrued fantasies onto their dream woman, and that singular woman eventually personifies all women… she will be simultaneously idealized, and sexualized. Both Madonna, and whore. 

Praised as partner, and paramour. 

Duality intercuts with ebbs and flows, contrasting the polarity of physical lust layered upon a more abstract, intellectual hunger. 

It’s disappointing the authorities of Western Civilization don’t understand this widespread, festering Sexual Dysfunction. And it’s regrettable our supposed leaders are unprepared to implement any sort of timely solution.

Dilemmas compound.

But elites are insulated from these sharpening, darkening realities. They will be the last people to wake up. 

The anime waifu should be understood for what she is: a symbolic, philosophical response to a constant barrage of unrepentant (and unpunished) promiscuity broadcast across every available bandwidth. 

Anguish vented with a cartoon aesthetic.

The gargantuan, ponderous breasts of the cartoon coquette have come to personify the quiet, popular despair of young men reckoning with unsatisfactory options. She offers the refuge of an intangible dream. She is a safe abstraction of beauty.

Promiscuity provokes disgust. 

That disgust is inspiring a retreat into misdirected idealism. 

More than ever, men desire innocence. 

IV: Female Exhaustion

“The terrible predicament of a beautiful girl is that only an experienced womanizer, someone cynical and without scruple, feels up to the challenge. More often than not, she will lose her virginity to some filthy lowlife in what proves to be the first step in an irrevocable decline.”

—Michel Houellebecq, The Elementary Particles

“The number of hours women devote to housework has not changed since 1930, despite all the advances. All the vacuum cleaners, washer-dryers, trash compactors, garbage disposals, wash-and-wear fabrics… Why does it still take as long to clean the house as it did in 1930? Because there haven’t been any advances. Not really. Thirty thousand years ago; when men were doing cave paintings at Lascaux, they worked twenty hours a week to provide themselves with food and shelter and clothing. The rest of the time, they could play, or sleep, or do whatever they wanted. And they lived in a natural world, with clean air, clean water, beautiful trees and sunsets. Think about it. Twenty hours a week. Thirty thousand years ago… I want people to wake up. We’ve had four hundred years of modern science, and we ought to know by now what it’s good for, and what it’s not good for. It’s time for a change.”

—Michael Crichton, Jurassic Park 

“The advent of the smartphone and the new constant connection to artificial reality quickly emerged. With this came apps geared to ‘social purposes’. Arguably, the most disruptive of all was the advent of Tinder. Online dating, which in the computer days practically carried a stigma, was now fully mainstreamed. The sting of loss and rejection diminished by the knowledge that a dozens more ‘matches’ laid just a swipe session away. The classic pickup came to be regarded as creepy and weird. Approaching, or being approached by a stranger is now unusual in many of the big cities, but exchanging nudes from behind a screen is de rigueur.

As all of this roared into reality, the rise of fourth-wave feminism and the archetypal girlboss/bad bitch had led to a purge of more traditionally feminine modes of expression from the mass culture. The fruits of recovery largely accrued to women — the economic impact of the recession lingered for men. Suddenly women were outpacing men, but still naturally wanted one who outranked them in salary and status, which led to an ever-shrinking pool of suitable prospects, who then basically flipped the script on them by becoming selective. Adding fuel to the fire was of course the excesses of #MeToo, which quickly moved beyond the lecherous behavior of fat old men to begin indicting young men for the regrets of the women who willingly slept with them. Its effect on romance was chilling, with men having to worry about even innocuous advances being labeled as sexual harassment, and women suffering the psychological distress of wondering if the latter weren’t flirting with them as much because they were no longer desirable. True passion thus became countercultural…”

—Benjamin Braddock, IM1776: Lana

IM — Lana (im1776.com)

It’s worth considering the female perspective, briefly. 

Women are natural conformists. 

Their personalities and beliefs are near-infinitely malleable. 

Logic is no barrier to mass adoption of religiously-mandated viewpoints. The vaccines and masks of Covid are an obvious example of how women rejoice in obeying authority. 

This is a historically useful trait. 

But in our suicidal, entropic civilization dominated by a fanatical death cult which celebrates criminality, victimhood, and an inverse hierarchy that punishes virtue, women are being mimetically guided into sterile, unsatisfying futures which betray their instincts. 

The average man is struggling too much to care. He can barely help himself, much less reprogram a confused feminist. 

Dating apps are designed for women.

Nightclubs often permit women to enter for free, because beautiful women are the bait who draw the fish — women function as an economic loss leader, but horny men buy them drinks, and compete for their approval. 

Without seductive women dancing and strutting around in sleek, slim dresses, nightclubs cannot exist. 

Dating apps function with a similar business model. Every negative interaction, rejection, unpleasant emotion, cost, or externality is offloaded onto men, if possible. 

The reason is simple: Women can’t handle rejection. Even a horrifically ugly woman needs to feel beautiful (in comparison with her dismal results in real life) on Tinder, or she will get depressed, delete the app, and if this happens enough, the decentralized Tinder nightclub will be out of business. 

There’s no need to delve into the mechanics of the ELO matchmaking system Tinder uses to sort attractive singles from unattractive singles. 

TLDR: ugly women are boosted, handsome men are handicapped, average (or below average) men tend to blackpill when they discover how the ranking system works. 

And yet… 

There’s a famous poem, called “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”, about a doomed crew of sailors dying of thirst while surrounded by the ocean’s salt water. Samuel Coleridge wrote, “Water, water, everywhere, and not a drop to drink.”

Women face a similar dilemma when they log on to dating apps; “Matches, matches, everyday, and not a man to mate.”

What good is it to have thousands of choices, when all (or the vast majority) of the options are bad?

Women gravitate towards passion, and adventure. These qualities are in short supply.

Only a handful of men are charming, handsome, accomplished, and can afford to raise a family on a pragmatic timeline. These men are highly coveted, and therefore see no reason to settle down. 

Poverty and promiscuity are related, in the sense that a shrinking pool of charming, high-earning bachelors provokes intense sexual competition.

Ironically, women have destroyed the market for husbands. 

Women receive preferential hiring, retention, training, and promotion in white-collar companies. The credentials, and job prospects of men are lagging behind. On some level, women priced themselves out of marriage. But the broader economy was already rusting, and worsening for reasons unrelated to feminism — specifically, the self-cannibalizing wealth extraction of a global American empire. And the end of cheap energy.

After a few years of heartbreak, meaningless flings, and dead-end dates, women tend to either withdraw into a sort of monastic seclusion, or become short-tempered, embittered, and vicious. Chronic, noncommittal sex will either fatigue women into a tragic state of self-pity, or erode them into neurotic, feral madness.

Neither outcome should be interpreted as a dealbreaker. 

Women are malleable; even an enraged roastie can be shaped and guided to become a wonderful wife, in an optimal environment, paired with an incredible husband (who she respects and admires).

As Shakespeare would suggest, any shrew can be tamed, spanked, caressed, and impregnated.

Our short-term impulses are designed to trick, and entrap us into long-term commitments. Mounting “the beast with two backs” often begins with spontaneous, passionate sex that leads to a more mature, less exhilarating, and deeply meaningful future between husband and wife.

But this follows the general trend — everything is more difficult than it used to be. 

Costs are rising steadily.

In a thousand small respects, life has become harder, more expensive, more stressful, precarious, and time-consuming. Normal expectations to secure a profitable job, romance an affectionate wife, and raise a wholesome family have become abnormal, treasured outliers.

Marriage functions best when a happy couple nests in a stable, supportive community. Good luck finding that.  

In the aggregate, every year is harder, more expensive than the year before. 

Broken dreams litter this nation.

V: Social Contract

“When you invent the ship, you also invent the shipwreck. Every technology carries its own negativity, which is invented at the same time as technological progress.”

—Paul Virilio

“In the televisual age, the collapse of empire more closely resembles a mass mental illness event than a kinetic conflict.”

—J. PresentWitness

Sexual dysfunction speaks to the secret shame of our culture. 

Moral ideals are used to avoid discussion of underlying economic tensions. 

Economic decay fuels social anxieties, and personal grief. 

Poverty is embarrassing to a generation of children who were raised to believe they would rule the world as the privileged elites of the American empire — they were misled, and misdirected, into a dismal future as barren janissaries suffering the dual humiliations of downward mobility, and cultural stagnation. 

Many pretend to be temporarily embarrassed aristocrats. Their tangible achievements fall short of childhood expectations.

Tradition erodes. 

Community corrodes. 

These bleak financial trends spark the arrival of a new form of communal decay, which is the celebration of grotesque, sterile degeneracy. Detached promiscuity is advertised as the highest expression of individual freedom: the liberty to enjoy sex without consequences. But this is cope. Huge numbers of Americans remain oversocialized children into their thirties, lacking wealth, and their celebration of sexual deviancy is a poor substitute for their repressed instinct to reproduce, a psychological sublimation of natural ambitions. 

Expedience is reframed as freedom. 

Nihilism circulates.

Prolonged adolescence is fueled by economic disappointment, which manifests in learned helplessness paired with narcissistic denial. “Someday I will be rich and famous”... this is their furtive, unspoken belief. 

Building a family costs more each year. 

Happy marriages are an endangered species. 

The decline of marriage, courtship, and romance has created a vacuum of love and affection. 

A monstrous flood of misdirected, confused sexual instincts have been poured into that romantic vacuum. What these oddities share in common is an absence of fertility, and an absence of authentic love. A lack of children, and commitment. 

Circus freaks parade across the television, and computer screen… grotesque kinks, sexual deviants of every persuasion. 

Androgynous monsters.

Superficial degeneracy is celebrated, trapped in an epoch of puritanical emptiness, but the reality is widespread loneliness and despair; poverty and sterility; misery and entropy. 

Advertisements rarely feature happily married couples of one pretty, graceful woman, and one handsome, muscular man. 

It’s much easier to find commercial promotions of a flamboyant menagerie of perverts, prosthetics, medicated misfits, and exotic aberrations. Hideous self-destruction is encouraged. 

We live in an ugly, dishonest culture. 

Beauty, strength, and intelligence are despised. 

Courage, honesty, and integrity are punished.

The official narrative is that “everyone is having passionate sex — except you.” 

“Incel” is a slur, because the corrosive environmental pressures of genuine romance in a deindustrialized economy are never acknowledged. 

Isolation has become common. 

Accidental romance, and spontaneous flirtation, rarely occur because physical interactions have plummeted. If you try to make subtle eye contact, the other person is staring down, preoccupied, distractedly skimming their phone.

In the words of my friend Paulos MythPilot, in-person social community has been replaced by “Digital Entombment”, where lonely individuals shutter themselves inside, relying upon the intermediation of smart phones, computers, Netflix instead of engaging in face-to-face conversations. Awkward and desensitized multitudes lay depressed in their bedrooms, avoiding contact.

Outside sits the urban necropolis.

Here we examine one of the fundamental pillars, and fundamental deceits of Industrial Western Civilization — the overlap of individualism, sexual freedom, financialization, and scientific idolatry. 

Dissecting the mechanics, and failures of SEX in the modern West is a useful proxy for reverse-engineering the pathological failures of GloboHomo. The Technocapital ascendancy of Gay Race Communism expressed as a feminine tyranny… a comfortable, distracted, sedated prison of hysterical ostracism and relentless digital surveillance. Scaling the ideals of the Enlightenment to a transnational empire has resulted in a social nightmare.

Clownworld.  

Every civilization shares a myth, an aspirational story that unifies disconnected citizens into a common tribe. One nation, under _____. Fill in the blank with the ceremonial story that is delivered by the church-media-academia-government. 

During the past hundred years, the American Empire refined methods to harvest the smartest, most ambitious children and funnel this human capital into an embryonic social caste. 

Meritocracy. 

The self-acclaimed meritocracy was composed of all the handpicked students filtered through an extremely efficient maze of selection mechanisms. Together, they conquered the world, erected the “postwar neoliberal rules-based order”, and established a cohesive managerial, bureaucratic aristocracy. 

Assortive mating reinforced, and calcified this selection process, birthing an arrogant, stagnant priesthood.

This priesthood justified their control of the global American Empire through scientific innovation, the miracles of technology and empiricism. Democracy reinforced their predetermined consensus with popular consent. 

This elite caste destroyed tradition, community, and numerous industries when they rose to power. Old customs impeded progress. Geographic bonds were liquidated by newfound social mobility — young Americans traveled hundreds of miles to find profitable employment, which required leaving their family, friends, and neighborhoods behind. 

The managerial priesthood dreamed of a more efficient world, a mechanized future, where humans were interchangeable along the assembly lines of a civilizational factory. Humanity would be homogenized, domesticated, sedated, reeducated, and deracinated. Inconvenient religions would never be formally prohibited, merely squeezed into irrelevance.

Painful tradeoffs were never acknowledged. 

The priestly aristocracy, this managerial oligarchy, abolished the traditional bonds (and cumbersome, regional loyalties) of the previous era. Decentralized power structures were folded into a federal, and later transnational, apparatus. What they created was a cultural playground, where every man had a price, any customized fantasy could be purchased, and everything was for sale. Social climbers from any nation or ethnicity could ascend to the heights of power by purchasing status, and sharing a public confession of faith affirming the civic religion. 

Money, and obedience in the form of social conformity, permitted entry into the managerial consensus. 

There were huge advantages to this imperial, geopolitical hegemony. Human talent was harvested with tremendous efficiency, and tremendous results, from all around the globe. But the seed of destruction was planted by the American Empire, during those halcyon days. Ambitious social climbers pooled together and built a winner-take-all economy, where ordinary families and rural, blue-collar heartlands were neglected because they were condemned to be low-status. 

Geography determined proximity to the imperial treasury. Coastal cities flourished. The rest of the empire starved.

Consumption replaced production.

Intellectual luxuries displaced physical action. 

This is the fundamental deceit of a winner-take-all society, where only the winners of a corrupt system deserve respect. Decaying, impoverished communities that were betrayed by their leaders are now castigated for moral decadence, and a lack of VIRTUE. 

Cope is confused with causation. Porn numbs men from romantic failure. But porn is blamed for their loneliness. Opioids numb men from unemployment. But drugs are blamed for the deindustrialization of small towns. Underemployed NEETs and Incels must “respect women”. Abandoned Americans must “Learn to Code”. 

Impractical advice is given to globalism’s economic victims, as a pretext for elites to ignore their suffering — and continue offloading externalities. None of this advice is sincere, or useful. Young American men have been emasculated by convergent macroeconomic trends (specifically inflation, automation, mass immigration, the Cantillon effect, petrodollar hegemony — Triffin’s dilemma, global labor arbitrage, and deindustrialization).

Eventually, repeating this strategy dipped into diminishing returns. The imperial economy began to devour itself.

GloboHomo remains addicted to expansion. The bestial demands of empire are relentless… and merciless.

When factories reached their physical limits… and natural resources were tapped… and domestic industries had been outsourced, fraudulent financial schemes emerged on paper, and flickered across digital spreadsheets, to siphon wealth. 

Productive sectors of the domestic economy were consumed to feed the financialized aristocracy.

In recent decades, the once-dominant scholarly priesthood has ossified, and atrophied into an incompetent, stagnant coalition which prioritizes compliance instead of talent. Blind loyalty is promoted, at the expense of competence. Factories rust. Shopping malls are shuttered. Our empire is crumbling. The logic of conquest has been superseded by a desperate, frantic struggle for managerial self-preservation. 

Geopolitical decay is reflected in fractal patterns, echoed by personal heartbreaks, suicides, bankruptcies, divorces. 

Individual tragedies are merely casualties of the broader, historical trend. Gentle, quiet ripples amid an ocean of suffering.

And this is the story I strive to emphasize, seeking to illustrate how the loneliness of promiscuous young women, contrasted alongside the sadness of impotent young men, parallels the decline of a major world power, their isolated grief unfolding in the shadow of imperial decomposition. 

This epic tragedy wears a thousand masks. 

The bright promise of meritocracy has dimmed, faded. 

But the story of meritocracy reveals the history of the past century, a typical chronicle of the rise and fall of an idealistic crusade that atrophied into a fraudulent, parasitic bureaucracy. 

When the communal rituals of America were abolished, and the managerial winner-take-all aristocracy birthed, science was used as the rhetorical justification for the annihilation of ancient customs. 

SEX provides a stark example of the broader trend. 

Antibiotics empowered promiscuity by repressing venereal diseases. Birth control encouraged short-term sexual flings, by reducing accidental pregnancy. Housewives purchased vacuum cleaners, dishwashers, ovens, stoves, washing and drying machines, these incredible gadgets that performed routine housework. 

Thousands of leisure hours became available to women. Those excess hours were funneled into factories, stores, and cubicles. For the first time in history, women could compete in the workplace against men as financial equals, then superiors. That newfound competitive leverage led to persistent political renegotiations in how marriage was enforced as a legal contract. 

Feminism triumphed, and families were destroyed.

Politics is downstream of culture.

Culture is downstream of economics.

Economics is downstream of technology. 

Technological miracles transformed every facet of civilization. Industrial feminism arrived as an unintended consequence.

The social and psychological functions of traditions remained important, but their physical limits were eliminated, and this sudden, unexpected prosperity sparked a generational orgy. A Dionysian bacchanal. 

Consider the idea of meritocracy.

The basic promise of meritocracy is that anyone can succeed, anyone can get rich, if they are willing to sacrifice, study, chase risks, and invest many years into grueling effort. Anyone can be a winner. You get what you deserve.

Ambition is celebrated as the highest form of virtue. Incidentally, this desire to succeed at all costs is the same ethos that motivates a sociopath. The word “striver” has become a euphemism for a social chameleon who is willing to flatter, steal, deceive, betray, and mold his personality to function as a reliable sycophant. 

Strivers spend years on empty, moralistic posturing in order to pad their resumes. Charity work becomes a hollow pursuit dedicated to seizing indirect, managerial authority. 

The beautiful theory of Meritocracy (government by the best, brightest, kindest), when applied, has been sociopathic.

The flipside of this aspirational logic is obvious (in hindsight). 

If anyone can be a winner, hard work is always rewarded, and you always get what you deserve, then losers deserve to lose. Suffering is earned. Poverty is justice. Failure is a form of karmic retribution, perhaps for laziness, or a cowardly aversion to risk-taking.

ZeroHPLovecraft explains in his book review of Sadly, Porn:

“There’s a trap where if you play the victim, you’re a loser, and if you make an honest accounting of your grievances with “the system”, you’re “playing the victim,” so you’re never allowed to complain. That’s why it takes someone like Donald Trump, someone who everyone knows isn’t a loser, who has wealth, women, fame, and property, to stand up and talk about these things. Even then they try to paint him as a loser…”

This attitude creates a lack of curiosity among transnational, managerial decisionmakers. Personal incompetence is never separated from aggregate, communal stagnation.

“People who fail in the neoliberal achievement-society see themselves as responsible for their lot and feel shame instead of questioning society or the system… under the regime of auto-exploitation, people are turning their aggression against themselves. This auto-aggressivity means that the exploited are not inclined to revolution so much as depression.”

—Byung-Chul Han, Psychopolitics

Downward mobility is not attributed to imperial decay crushing an entire generation — rather, individual poverty and underemployment is caused by a lack of HUSTLE. Motivational quotes on Instagram laud the importance of embodying your GRINDSET. On YouTube, glossy Ted Talks preach the joys of “entrepreneurship”. The stress of running a competitive, efficient business is reframed as a relaxing, spiritual adventure.

Greed is worshipped.

The confused grief of downward mobility, and a measurable decrease in living standards, is reframed as entitlement, basic laziness, and a lack of VIRTUE.  

These kids, they just don’t hustle enough. 

Relentless asset inflation has protected Boomers from the struggles of their children.

Après moi, le déluge.

Perhaps the most delusional aspect of this civic religion was the idea that each specific person would creatively design their own life, their own community, discover personal self-actualization, and become a Sovereign Individual™ who customized their daily routine to accommodate their own personal, aesthetic philosophy. Normies were treated as serious intellectuals.

Self-authorship is a luxury belief.

Total freedom was extended to every feature of mundane existence. 

False prophets flaunted tantalizing illusions.  

Education promised to unlock the full potential of individual citizens, and unleash a miraculous Renaissance that would transform software, mathematics, engineering, literature, cinema, chemistry, a thousand simultaneous fields of research, precipitating a transhuman utopia. Supposedly this latent, underappreciated human capital was the world’s most valuable market inefficiency.

“Funny how the government is always inefficient, but their promotion of college was an instant hit. Of course it was, in a democratic society without caste or guild, nobody wants to settle in the second class.”

—Spandrell

Naturally, telling ordinary people they were all potential millionaire Gigachad celebrity rockstars was quite a popular narrative. This false promise appealed to their latent narcissism. Secretly, every citizen believes he is a diamond in the rough. “I could’ve been a contender,” he tells himself.

Or, as Chuck Palahniuk wrote in Fight Club:

“We are the middle children of history. We’ve all been raised on television to believe that one day we’d all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars. But we won’t. And we’re slowly learning that fact. And we’re very, very pissed off.”

In practice, implemented on an industrial scale, this dream has been a complete disaster. 

Science, sex, choice, democracy, academia, feminism, freedom, individualism, tolerance, and globalism have failed to live up to their extravagant claims. These ideological crusades have been exhausted. Now their demoralized believers and tarnished prophets deny their original forecasts ever happened. But the fools who trusted them were betrayed, and wasted their lives chasing empty, sterile dreams that led to various forms of romanticized self-destruction.

Tradition was jettisoned for an inferior replica. 

The proposition of personal freedom was based on a mechanical interpretation of human psychology. The economics of a factory were applied to the human brain. 

In the real world, creativity is exhausting. 

Ingenuity should be budgeted emotionally, and invested into intense, focused obsessions. 

Ordinary citizens never possessed the talent to become grandiose dreamers in the tradition of Nietzsche, Socrates, Rousseau, Baudrillard, Aquinas, Confucius, Foucault, Voltaire. The proposition that common men would pioneer their own lifestyles and become self-motivated, world-class performers was always unrealistic. 

A purposeful deceit.

Today, the obvious failures of the education system are masked, and disguised, and statistically contorted into ever-changing metrics that are intended to prevent comparisons between the future that was predicted, and the future that has arrived. 

These delusions were always sponsored by a dishonest coalition, who hid behind the optics of “saving the children” in order to embezzle countless billions of dollars, and seize power for themselves. 

Skeptics were slandered, and persecuted.

Forensic accountants and sporadic whistleblowers were crushed, isolated, silenced.

Individualism remains romanticized, and misrepresented. 

Liberty has always been a lovely temptation. In practice, the glamorized freedom to pursue your own future American Dream™ has meant a total lack of support from an atomized community, stressful competition inside a crumbling Darwinian economy, and suffocation beneath the immense weight of an Imperial Leviathan which oscillates between malice and neglect. 

Meritocracy was a beautiful dream, championed to mask an ugly reality, which was the emergence of a financial, managerial priesthood who parasitically preyed upon vulnerable populations of gullible citizens, and purposefully ignored the costs inflicted by maintaining the status quo.

Quiet, subtle tyranny.  

There’s a huge gulf between the public image of wise Experts, an elite caste of Confucian scholars and insightful scientists, versus the sordid reality of nepotism, conformity, laziness, and mediocrity. The perceived expertise of academia is undercut by the fraudulence of peer review, and the scientific replication crisis, in which basic research fails to be repeated outside of the original study.

Neoliberal abandonment of aristocratic responsibility was marketed as mass adoption of personal sovereignty. 

Previous eras understood the necessity of “noblesse oblige”. 

Tycoons like Andrew Carnegie amassed private fortunes, then donated hundreds of beautiful, hospitable, and helpful public libraries so that poor Americans could access knowledge in a timely fashion. 

Oligarchs like Carnegie, Vanderbilt, and Rockefeller understood that if the rich completely ignored the poor, eventually this prolonged indifference would destabilize their nation. 

Perhaps that charity was motivated by guilt, vanity, self-preservation, cynicism, atonement, or a desire for attention… their motives remain a mystery to me. But their generosity dwarfed the parochial austerity of our current managerial elite.

That’s a long story.

Our modern crisis didn’t arrive overnight. These tensions have been building for seven consecutive decades. 

The causes of American decay are tangled, and interconnected. Misfortunes have layered, then compounded.

Let me condense these macroeconomic trends into a single sentence:

After the military triumph of American Empire, technological innovation prompted the emergence of industrial feminism and the meritocratic bureaucracy, which coincided with imperial decay, energy stagnation, and the arrival of novel digital stimulations, which inflicted exotic mental disorders upon an unprepared audience.

VI: Practical Solutions:

“Man cannot remake himself without suffering, for he is both the marble and the sculptor.”

—Alexis Carrel

“Much has already been written in the conservative press in condemnation of the sexual revolution, of course, but in my view most of the criticism is worse than worthless because it is simply an expression of male rescue fantasies rather than an informed and rational assessment of the situation. Thus, there are calls for greater protection for women whose chief problem is that they are overprotected to begin with. Lonely bachelors who could easily find a wife in a monogamous society are portrayed as dangerous predators upon female innocence when the only reason they remain bachelors is that women are furiously competing to join the harems of a few unusually handsome and successful men. Hard working men are berated for failing to provide for women who enjoy preferences in hiring and advancement at their expense and have better economic prospects than they do.

Conservatives who cannot heap enough ridicule upon Rousseau’s doctrine of the natural goodness of man are often among the most naïve in asserting the natural goodness of woman. This is a kind of ideology, with an ideology’s characteristic capacity to ignore or explain away conflicting evidence. Many men continue to insist, in defiance of all the evidence of women’s actual behavior, that women are pining away for morally upright men to love, honor, and obey, and that the poor dears cannot find happiness only because other men (never the writer himself, of course) are selfish, irresponsible cads.

…

It is indeed baffling that any woman could prefer the barren existence of the career woman to having a home with a devoted husband and offspring to care for. I once heard a man observe that if young women had any sense they would be in the streets demanding the return of the meal ticket that marriage once gave them. But actions speak louder than words, and obviously this is not happening. The short-term incentives of independent incomes, material self-indulgence, and transitory “relationships” with attractive men are visibly winning out over the long-term benefits to women of marriage and family. It is past time for men to wake up to this reality.

…

Far from women being naturally monogamous, as our fathers were often encouraged to believe, the family probably first came into being when men forcibly imposed monogamy upon women in order to insure their own paternity and minimize sexual competition. But, once established, the benefits of the system were so great that women came to appreciate it as well.”

—F. Roger Devlin, Sexual Utopia in Power: 

Chapter Six: Back to Africa: Sexual Atavism in the Modern West

“The breakdown of the family, which so preoccupied midcentury sociologists as a problem peculiar to the black community, has now spread to all but the educated elite… As young men and women anxiously retreat from each others’ lives and men drop out of the college circuit — soon two-thirds of college graduates will be women — we appear to be comfortably returning to premodern patterns of male success, in which the clear majority of men fail to reproduce, without a whisper of social upheaval… At work here is a logic much deeper than material decline: it is the increasing inability of men and women to reach an attractive settlement of life.

…

Over half of Americans now suffer from a chronic illness.

…

The “slow life history strategy” — later marriages, smaller family sizes, more resources per child, longer developmental processes — which Twenge postulates as a response to competition and technological progress is evidently failing to make up for institutional decay and health decline. In fact, boys and girls are now showing physiological responses that are more characteristic of a “fast life history strategy” — in which adolescents, under the stress of a resource-rich but also hostile and uncertain environment, mature more quickly in order to reproduce early and often. Since the middle of the twentieth century, the average age of onset for puberty has dropped by 1.5 years in boys, while the average age of breast budding in girls has dropped by roughly two years (making depression among teenage girls more likely). Obesity can explain some but not all of these changes; the more likely culprits are endocrine disruptors. Lastly, the rapid fertility decline in men and women alike, perhaps the most grim piece of evidence for ongoing biochemical disruption, makes it more difficult to delay family formation. The tradeoff between quantity and quality — the linchpin of demographic transition theory — is now squeezed from both sides: people are having fewer children, but those children are still made sick by an inhospitable environment.

Physiologically and socially, young people are forced into a sort of perverse adaptation. Sexual maturity comes early (even if its consummation is an increasingly rare thing), but mental maturity comes very late — if ever. Under the strain of this uneven maturation, young people are taught to transact with each other in a sort of mutually paranoid emotional surgery. A strange new ethic of detachment is emerging: one must never allow oneself to feel, to commit, to sin or to repent, to stake one’s ground. Options must remain open. As the structures which have lent direction to the individual fall away — civil society, family, courtship, apprenticeship, citizenship, patronage, education, belief — the self is at once bared to the world and made limp. Masks drop, relations flatten — and the walls around the heart and mind draw tight in defense. Just as our social order preempts any stirrings of personal development in the individual, so too must emotions be cauterized at the source. To be mature now is to fend off any incursions of the world on the self. The central task of the therapeutic system is to suspend this state indefinitely, to manage an increasingly feeble impetuousness of life…

…

We are united in our general frustration with life, and yet incapable of imagining ourselves advancing a concrete task of civilization or self-governance. Our frustrated energies thus turn inward. Social controls intensify in service of a vague and predictable resentment. Decorum is endlessly renegotiated. New forms of authority and litigiousness come to dominate human affairs and yet hold to no positive law. The young person is given the choice between participation in this stilted pantomime of discourse on the one hand and resigned disengagement on the other. 

…

Considering the immense amount of attention, analysis, jealousy, resentment, and hope that the leading lights of our social order accord to the problem of youth, it is remarkable how little they actually have to say… Our salvation is to be achieved by going outside, spending time with family and friends, attending regular therapy sessions, sleeping, eating a diet high in omega-3 fatty acids, “avoiding rumination,” and — naturally — putting down the phone. One finds little to negate here. A social animal should eat, sleep, and socialize, just as he should also breathe and excrete. How all of this is to be accomplished is anyone’s guess. You cannot simply tell people to live.

“Put down the phone,” says Twenge, “and do something else” — but what? Commentators of every stripe have tried to insert their preferred schemata into the space opened by this question, without success. A recent selection will suffice: community, movements, organizing, values, culture, identity, tradition, vitality, new religions, new cultures, new elites — nearly all without reference to particular factions or goals. These are mundane delusions of the kind that can only sit comfortably in the mouths of the educated and over-educated. Such a groping recourse to the highest level of abstraction, to such an unimaginative social functionalism, is the generalized equivalent of telling a depressive to find meaning in life. You cannot simply tell a society to live. In all of this we see what Spengler called “the horror of values supervening from nowhere.” 

…

For the last fifty years, we have been sliding back into a muck of such intractability that it threatens to restore the historical norm of permanent stagnation… We are slipping into a world of caste, superstition, and quiescence. It will be a sweet and stupid world, and a long time will pass before it comes to ruin. Against this there is demand for a renewed settlement of life, but it is still inchoate — and the shape of an era is usually negotiated only once.”

—Isaac Wilks, The Zoomer Question

https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2023/05/the-zoomer-question/

https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2023/05/the-zoomer-question/

There is no escape from the human condition.

There’s no escape from citizen-devouring, sanity-disorienting, tradition-liquidating TechnoCapital.

Nobody is coming to save us. 

We must swim, or drown. Unprepared boys must learn to be self-reliant men, and warriors, scholars, builders, fathers, husbands, brothers, friends, in defiance of a broken culture, negligent elders, distasteful women, and a collapsing economy. 

Soon.

We are living in a slow-motion trainwreck. 

Many of our friends and neighbors will be ruined. That’s tragic. And inevitable. 

These are hard years. These are the times that try men’s souls. 

These are bleak, unforgiving days that break summer soldiers, and sunshine patriots. 

Every man must look himself in the mirror, find a reason to live when so many dreams are drifting out of reach. 

All of us will be tested by the crucible of the next decade, the gasping, epileptic convulsions of this dying global system. 

Women want to be loved, yes. But women desire many conflicting impulses, counterproductive ambitions they struggle to prioritize, and first impressions matter — how you enter a relationship is how your girlfriend, paramour, or wife will remember you forever. 

“Focus on yourself, king”... deep truths are always circulated through common aphorisms. Everything starts on the path to building yourself into the man you admire to see, and desire to be. 

I like to joke, "I have good news and bad news. The American Empire is going to die, but the good news is that it's going to be hilarious."

Social media brings us cartoon tragicomedy, scattered among a thousand ephemeral sources, streaming in 4k resolution. 

The direction of historical events is obvious at this point: Entropy; poverty; misery; chaos in the aggregate. 

But the timeline of events, the velocity and sequential progression of macroeconomic and geopolitical unraveling, is beyond my ability to predict. 

The relevant mental model which maps onto the global decline of the Woke Empire, and the accelerating domestic repression of Soviet America, is to study engineering, and the mathematics of a prolonged cascade failure. 

Systems break at their weakest point. But during the early stages of a cascade failure, resources are redirected to patching prominent threats. 

There is a psychological element to this process, inherently volatile, and the failure mode is when huge numbers of citizens lose trust in the political legitimacy of the status quo. 

Empires fear mockery, and apathy.

Laughter and indifference are our best weapons:

Symbolic blasphemy against the dishonesty of the civic religion.

Nothing rivals the destructive power of a well-executed joke, viciously lacerating: “You will never be a real woman… It’s okay to be White… Learn to Code… Poast physique… [Euphemisms] could be here, he thought, I hate [Euphemisms]… She could lose weight… Six million? Sounds a little high.”

This is the New Normal™:

Permanent crisis, downward mobility, crumbling infrastructure, media hysteria, logistical delays, debased currency, cultural erosion, rampant crime, and a diminished standard of living will consume the foreseeable, short-term future.

These grim realities are discouraging. 

Normies prefer denial. Ordinary men quit. 

Survival amid the poisoned ruins of a decaying civilization demands wisdom, courage, faith, and resilience. 

Limited options lead to a narrow set of optimized solutions. Chasing personal excellence in a dysfunctional, unreliable community culminates in some very predictable habits. Any self-help guru will offer the same basic advice: men must lift weights, jog, diet, read books, accumulate wealth, romance women, embrace discipline, advance in some sort of durable career, earn confidence, cultivate charisma, and learn how to fight. 

This advice is banal, and incessantly repeated, but useful. 

Obstacles emerge. There are social, chemical, physical, environmental, and financial difficulties designed to prevent this sort of aspirational self-reliance from emerging among ordinary citizens en masse. 

But the real challenge is psychological. 

An internal question of identity. 

There’s an intense spiritual battle. Searching for purpose, struggling to find a coherent life script.

Somehow men must find a reason to live.

Somehow men must embrace the coming hardships — either with stoicism, fatalism, romanticism, or a wild, narcotic eagerness which animates the passions of a fanatic.

A sense of urgency is less important than inhuman discipline, and a serene, relaxed patience which accepts the destruction of the world as easily as it accepts the tragedies to come, the crucible which awaits, the heartbreaks and disappointments and regrets of knowing that none of these disasters needed to happen, human agency and human stupidity and human expedience has led us to this historical crossroads when so many better, alternative paths were rejected.

Modern America, and the peripheral satrapies of Western Civilization, are a behavioral sink of comfortable exhaustion, cultural erosion, and communal disintegration… designed to provide a comfortable funeral, a comfortable death to the geriatric ruling coalition.

The collapse of a global empire is a slow-motion trainwreck.

Decades elapse, and there is a sense of futility in understanding what is happening, to study and measure the glacial progress of tectonic plates sliding together, kissing, embracing, bending, climaxing, collapsing into a shared continent of suffering and misery.

These days reflect the limits of wisdom, and frustrations of ambition.

Some problems are too big for any one man to solve — or escape.

Some long-delayed macroeconomic crises refuse to arrive, or finish their prolonged, diffused havoc on a convenient timeline.

Even now, the American Empire could be saved, as God offered redemption to Ninevah, as the same Lord bargained with Abraham concerning the intended destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. These fools and liars could still repent. Even now, truth could be confessed, justice could be administered, the Chemical Poisons of sugar and fentanyl and endocrine disruptors could be eliminated, incompetent diversity hires could be fired, the federal budget could be balanced, the fake economy could be audited and bankrupted, shuttered factories could be rebuilt — there are a thousand solutions available. Talented men are ready on the sidelines, pale and brilliant and hardworking. Intense creativity, passion, and ingenuity is currently suppressed, and could erupt with volcanic force to transform the dysfunction and feminization of our pitiful era. None of these solutions will be adopted, discussed, or considered, because of some very basic human stubbornness, and stupidity, and pride, and malice, and greed, and resentment…

We are ruled by parasites, addicted to dysfunction, blinded by ideology, softened by comfort, distracted by extravagant spectacles.

The outcome becomes predictable.

A mathematical certainty.

But God has given us this time to prepare, and gain strength, and say goodbye to the old world which soon shall be Gone with the Wind.

Only the memory of that antebellum past endures.

VII: Honor in a Dishonorable World

“While it is always better to be prepared than it is to be unprepared, most men who do nothing will be fine. Nothing is going to happen to them. The statistics favor the lazy.

Men today are free to be weak and afraid and inept in all of the ways that their ancestors were not. Those who say that masculinity is no longer necessary are correct. Those who say that circumstances no longer require the average man to be stronger than the average woman are correct. Those who say that average men don’t need to be any more courageous than average women are correct. There is no particular set of skills that average men need to acquire more than average women in order to survive.

…

Pushing yourself toward an ideal is hard. Most people will choose the easy way if it is acceptable, and today, it is.”

—Jack Donovan, A More Complete Beast

“Any man who has friends immediately and intuitively realizes the value inherent to being true to one’s word and backing your friends up in a fight. Yet in the world of A Song of Ice and Fire, the most ruthless come out on top, betrayal is as common as breathing, and the few characters who abide by codes of honor are brutally punished for it. 

This is exemplified in the character of Eddard Stark, the seeming protagonist of the first novel. He’s a dutiful Lord, loyal to his King, who he served with in war, called from his remote borderrealm to replace the King’s main advisor and investigate his suspicious death. The first novel ends with him being betrayed by a conspirator and sentenced to death for treason. His son makes a similar mistake and gets betrayed and murked in a similar way. From then on, the smartest and most cunning conspirator wins, and betraying one’s allies is the de facto state of politics. A good reactionary should see the problem here: If everyone is defecting, a small alliance that is actually loyal to each other is highly adaptive. A loyal and honorable force cuts through an uneasy alliance of defectors like a hot knife through butter. Indeed, this is how feudalism began in Europe, how tiny Rome took over the Italian peninsula, and so on. Martin is categorically incapable of seeing the value in a cohesive group of honorable men; honor evolved for a good reason! 

The reason being that it defeats weak anarchy…

Polygamous tribal societies have murder rates of 30%. If you’re not the alpha, you fight and die to try and get there. Still works that way in the urban ghetto. And that’s instability. A cohesive warband of loyal men will slaughter a tribe of infighting polygamists like sheep.”

—Aiden MacLear, Culture Meet Axe: Game of Thrones

“Values that cause employees to prioritize projects to develop high-margin products, cannot simultaneously accord priority to low-margin products. The very processes and values that constitute an organization’s capabilities in one context, define its disabilities in another context.

…

The list of leading companies that failed when confronted with disruptive changes in technology and market structure is a long one. At first glance, there seems to be no pattern in the changes that overtook them. In some cases the new technologies swept through quickly; in others, the transition took decades. In some, the new technologies were complex and expensive to develop. In others, the deadly technologies were simple extensions of what the leading companies already did better than anyone else. One theme common to all of these failures, however, is that the decisions that led to failure were made when the leaders in question were widely regarded as among the best companies in the world. 

There are two ways to resolve this paradox. One might be to conclude that firms such as Digital, IBM, Apple, Sears, Xerox, and Bucyrus Erie must never have been well managed. Maybe they were successful because of good luck and fortuitous timing, rather than good management. Maybe they finally fell on hard times because their good fortune ran out. Maybe. An alternative explanation, however, is that these failed firms were as well-run as one could expect a firm managed by mortals to be — but that there is something about the way decisions get made in successful organizations that sows the seeds of eventual failure. 

The research reported in this book supports this latter view: It shows that in the cases of well-managed firms such as those cited above, good management was the most powerful reason they failed to stay atop their industries. Precisely because these firms listened to their customers, invested aggressively in new technologies that would provide their customers more and better products of the sort they wanted, and because they carefully studied market trends and systematically allocated investment capital to innovations that promised the best returns, they lost their positions of leadership. 

What this implies at a deeper level is that many of what are now widely accepted principles of good management are, in fact, only situationally appropriate. There are times at which it is right not to listen to customers, right to invest in developing lower-performance products that promise lower margins, and right to aggressively pursue small, rather than substantial, markets.

…

When the performance of two or more competing products has improved beyond what the market demands, customers can no longer base their choice upon which is the higher performing product. The basis of product choice often evolves from functionality to reliability, then to convenience, and, ultimately, to price.

…

The boundaries of value networks do not completely imprison the companies within them: There is considerable upward mobility into other networks. It is in restraining downward mobility into the markets enabled by disruptive technologies that the value networks exercise such unusual power… Rational managers, as we shall see, can rarely build a cogent case for entering small, poorly defined low-end markets that offer only lower profitability.

…

The most vexing managerial aspect of this problem of asymmetry, where the easiest path to growth and profit is up, and the most deadly attacks come from below, is that “good” management — working harder and smarter and being more visionary — doesn’t solve the problem.”

—Clayton Christensen, The Innovator’s Dilemma

If there’s any reason to thank God for these tragic present circumstances, it’s this: that the utter decay, utter despair, utter defeat, utter ruin of the American heartland likewise reveals with utter clarity the truth and trajectory of the American Empire. 

Remarkable clarity.

A sharpness of vision. 

Amid these times of exhaustion and futility, amid this corruption of institutional structures and dismantled traditions, the truth becomes clear that Western Civilization has been conquered, the American Dream has been replaced by a sterile, degenerate Babylon, and our crumbling federal government is hopelessly contaminated, teeming with swarms of maggots, locusts, parasites. 

Grotesque infestations of biotrash. 

Surveying the previous century of American Empire, and realizing that today’s modern ecosystem was built beneath the shadow of World War Two, sculpted by the echoes and tremors and anxieties of that bloody nightmare, it becomes obvious that life has changed. The past is a foreign country; America today scarcely resembles the nation of decades past. Exuberance has soured to exhaustion. Conquerors have softened, slackened, degenerated to consumers. Soldiers have traded their artillery for shopping carts. 

There is an irony embedded in the core of every Western film. A tragic irony. Cowboys and gunslingers roam the savage frontier, shepherding vulnerable caravans and settlements, enforcing savage justice upon raiders and bandits, bringing civilization to the untamed wilderness. Courage is praised. Honor is respected. Speed with a pistol marks the difference between survival and extermination. Masculinity thrives, and is cultivated among tough men who remember old wounds, old scars, old griefs, old wars. 

Western cinema valorizes iconic killers played by John Wayne, James Arness, Clint Eastwood. 

But the cowboy is a twilight predator, skirting the boundaries of legality and morality, imposing force upon the uncharted hinterlands, raiding and romancing, hunting and herding, pursuing revenge to the ends of the earth. Danger personified. Strength solidified. Grim ferocity fashioned into a proud, lonely silhouette which stalks the shadows of the bison-haunted prairies, the arid desert canyons. He tames the wilderness, and when victorious, he destroys his own hunting grounds, rendering his own courage obsolete in the tamed urban marketplace — a land where money is more important than muscle. 

Total victory eliminates the need for security.

Warriors who secure peace, a real and lasting peace, banish themselves to poverty and obscurity. Their martial sacrifices are rapidly ignored by impatient, distracted civilians.  

Civilization is inherently feminine; barbarism and the wilderness are inherently masculine. Social hierarchies adapt to these environments with slow, incremental adjustments over the course of generations. Vestigial traditions are forgotten, obsolete virtues are abandoned, and the character of a nation rots without the reminder of an external threat. 

This is the meaning of the classic film, “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence”. A frontier cowboy kills the local villain. A civilized, soft-spoken politician steals the credit — and the hero’s girlfriend.  

One man symbolizes the frontier cowboy, the other man represents the debonair merchant. The priest. 

Fortune is a woman; print the legend instead of the truth; civilization rewards parasites rather than builders. 

Good and evil never changes. 

Socially approved patterns of behavior change quite often. 

Social morality is largely determined by expedience, inherited from environmental conditions, and this chaotic environment is constructed from the convergence of technology, politics, economics, regional tensions. Popular morality is shaped by convenience. Ideological justifications, and rationalizations, are invented later. 

Today America is soft. Boys have been emasculated, domesticated from their earliest years. Warriors are no longer needed, and peace has ushered in a feminized culture of passive-aggressive grievances, jealousies, and victimization. 

Speaking basic truths is punished swiftly, with draconian lawsuits, local ostracism, and corporate retaliation. 

Governments have forbidden honest discussion of crime, race, sexuality, art, economics, geopolitics, immigration, empire, anything sensitive to the existing power structure. 

To identify, and then explain female psychology has become vulgar, and borderline criminal. 

But romance, sexual passion, and the foundation of building a family impact the most important, meaningful aspects of human life.

These are crucial, vital truths. 

Precious insights.  

So it should be no surprise that a new breed of men emerged who are vulgar, and borderline criminal, or even self-admitted managers of disciplined stables of prostitutes, in order to repeat suppressed insights, forbidden observations into the mechanics and dynamics and psychology of seducing women. 

No man with a sterling reputation and a profitable, prestigious career wants to go anywhere near a public conversation about what arouses women, charms and befriends and connects with a beautiful young girl who might be an alluring, enticing wife. 

Into this ideological vacuum came a flood of peacocking sleaze, exaggerated bravado, swaggering pranks, as a direct result of social prohibitions, media suppression, and cultural taboos which in a few short decades have acquired a demonic religious significance. 

Lomez describes Andrew Tate as a consequence of feminism. Along with his imitators. 

This is exactly correct. 

The social contract offered by the incumbent power structures of Western Civilization has mutated into a miserable, sterile lifestyle defined by conformity, submission, deceit, and a lack of meaning, a lack of passion, a lack of romance, a lack of anything that even hints towards an aspirational future. Equality between men and women results in a sad codependence, the absence of dominance and submission and sexual polarity, a pairing of two androgynous insectoid drones who chirp and rub and stridulate with no consequence. Consequences punctuate life, death is the gift which makes life itself treasured, pain contrasts against joy — to avoid suffering is to glide complacently into a sedated, prolonged slumber. 

Power offers a Faustian bargain. But today, even selling out has lost its appeal. Marriage to an embittered career woman is perhaps worse than death. 

Certainly more nagging is promised. 

Dating coaches and masculinity gurus, underemployed life coaches and cringe Instagram gymbros, these sordid and unimpressive figures were the only men willing to suffer reputational damage… because their reputations were already tarnished beyond repair. Some converted to a performative Digital Catholicism, or Judaism, or Orthodox Christianity, with laughable results. But God chooses weak and pitiful instruments, to emphasize his power. And through these tarnished instruments, suppressed truths were popularized and disseminated, Promethean fire was reintroduced to a cold and barren world of drugged Girlbosses popping amphetamines to focus on fraudulent desktop spreadsheets inside their color-coded cubicles, a cold and barren world defined by below-replacement-fertility.

As the apostle Paul wrote in 1st Corinthians 1:26-29:

“Brothers and sisters, think of what you were when you were called. Not many of you were wise by human standards; not many were influential; not many were of noble birth. But God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise; God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong. God chose the lowly things of this world and the despised things — and the things that are not — to nullify the things that are, so that no one may boast before him.”

God delights in speaking through children and outcasts, losers and rejects, criminals and apostates, to shame the proud and sanctimonious. 

Rebellion gathers. 

Stormclouds convene.

And in these days of scarcity and severity, a bleak future beckons. Political decay; distrust and bitterness; when shouting turns to shooting.

The Gospel of Andrew Tate was a stump speech of basic truths… once obvious, now forbidden.

Women crave danger and excitement; lifting weights summons epigenetic benefits; society is designed to crush decent men; sexless marriage is a common source of misery; digital prostitutes exploit loneliness rather than physical arousal.

“Power is the ultimate aphrodisiac.”

Who said that?

Was it Andrew Tate, the disgusting and provocative kickboxing pimp?

No, it was Henry Kissinger, the honorable and respected statesman, geopolitical architect of normalizing trade between America and China.

This fake and ghey modernity we inhabit today was designed, engineered, administered by ruthless sociopathic schemers like F. D. R., Lyndon Johnson, J. Edgar Hoover, Ted Kennedy, Alan Dulles, Henry Kissinger — ambitious criminals who understood ugly truths, and the darkness beneath civilization’s diseased underbelly. Men of this squalid breed seized power ruthlessly, plunging into the worst aspects of human nature. To protect their earthly paradise, they taught and promoted a dishonest Imperial Monoculture, which denied basic psychology and genetics, imported foreign ethnic clients to replace proud citizens, and constructed a school-media-academia network of manufactured consensus.

“We hang the petty thieves, and appoint the great ones to public office.”

—Aesop

“One lawyer with a briefcase can steal more than a hundred men with guns and masks.”

—Mario Puzo

"Laws are like cobwebs, which may catch small flies, but let wasps and hornets break through."

—Jonathan Swift

Heraclitus declared that “No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river, and he’s not the same man.”

The same is true of nations. 

Today’s America is inferior in almost every respect to the America of the 50s, the 60s, the 70s, even the 90s. Every reform which wrecked this country was advertised as a kindhearted, charitable solution… During the debate concerning the 1965 Hart-Cellar Immigration Bill which swamped the American heartlands with something like a hundred million foreigners (the official data is fake) in the past six decades, Senator Ted Kennedy promised, “The bill will not flood our cities with immigrants. It will not upset the ethnic mix of our society. It will not relax the standards of admission. It will not cause American workers to lose their jobs.” President Lyndon Johnson agreed, “It does not affect the lives of millions… It will not reshape the structure of our daily lives or add importantly to either our wealth or our power.”

In his Farewell Address, President Eisenhower spoke of social advances which would deliver Human Betterment — in retrospect, these deceptions are laughable. Cartoonish absurdities. Polite, elegant ballroom dancing has been replaced by obese single mothers twerking in thongs atop stranded police vehicles, while perplexed law enforcement officers observe the scene from a safe distance. 

Civilization is built upon Prosocial impulses. 

The mathematical logic of win-win game theory. Cooperation between men and women was enforced by tradition, religion, community, and proud fathers equipped with shotguns. No-fault divorce did not exist, there was no financial bounty to declare “emotional abuse”. 

Communities have disintegrated, laws have sharpened with adversarial fangs, social life has turned precarious, and the result is an Antisocial incentive gradient.

The mathematical logic of defect-defect game theory. 

Without a prosperous external community to bless, reinforce, and reward a faithful marriage, the calculus of romance has descended into a vicious negative feedback loop, a Hobbesian nightmare of paranoia and distrust, heartbreak and betrayal, loneliness and despair, tension and grief. 

Entropy gnaws at the roots of civilization… nibbling deeper, deeper, deeper.

Feminism defected first, but the global celebrity of Andrew Tate signals the first signs of broad-scale masculine retaliation. Mutual rage, bitterness, evasion, deception, and scapegoating. 

All is fair in love and war…

If love is a battlefield, the onset of widespread antisocial perspectives heralds a phase shift in the equilibrium of this generational conflict: Prolonged, brutal trench warfare between the sexes. Romantic attrition of a grim variety. 

Certainly there is more than enough blame to go around. Minor slights will spark major wounds; unhappy molehills will summon forth mountains of Discontent. 

This is a deeper stage of cultural exhaustion… avoidance of sex, romance, heartbreak… avoidance of life itself. 

A desecration of the human spirit. 

Enervation, social fatigue of widespread hopelessness that any romantic partner will ever measure up to pornographic, cinematic ideals — and even if a woman finds her suave Prince Charming, or a man finds his unadulterated Rapunzel, the prospect of meeting someone who exceeds your wildest dreams provokes a different strain of anxiety… the sobering thought that you can never measure up to the reciprocal expectations of someone so enchanting, so marvelous, so breathtaking.

Why bother to try.

These heartbreaks seem inevitable. 

A spiritual wasteland. 

Civilization is fractal; a nation’s resilience is paralleled by the resilience of its communities and their families. 

Divorce and sterility damage the soul of America. Contaminating both the spiritual, and industrial core. 

Edmund Burke famously observed, “To be attached to the subdivision, to love the little platoon we belong to in society, is the first principle (the germ as it were) of public affections.”

Likewise, Ernst Junger remarked, “Long periods of peace foster certain optical illusions: one is the conviction that the inviolability of the home is grounded in the constitution, which should guarantee it. In reality, it is grounded in the family father, who, sons at his side, fills the doorway with an axe in hand.”

A nation cannot fight when its people no longer believe in their right to live, and breed, and build with passion. 

All these problems are visible even now, but the American Empire is a wealth pump which extracts precious treasure from its satellites. The incumbent power structure conforms to an entropic death cult, but the economic cravings of the Cathedral’s myriad branching tentacles are characterized by ravenous, mercenary hunger to devour and feed and bloat into a calcified, hypertrophied protrusion. Expansion or death… the decentralized hunger of each branch of the bureaucracy-NGO-university never stops. 

Soon this vast Leviathan will begin feeding upon itself. 

Minor branches will be consumed. Intersectional feuds will brawl in courts, and schools, and corporations — featuring comedic absurdity. 

Already these brush wars have been ignited; lawsuits concerning Harvard’s racial admissions, and the proper distribution of scholarships between overrepresented groups.

Silicon Valley has been infested with sinecured Woke commissars who cannot write functional code, who merely simulate productivity, and this past year’s layoffs are a foretaste of rising percentages of white-collar unemployment, downstream of the Federal Reserve’s interest rate hikes. That kind of financial turbulence is a public symptom of the American Empire buckling. Debt cannot remain the main product of the deindustrialized American economy. Layoffs will continue. Loyal Woke zealots will find themselves unemployed, abandoned by the same merciless engine which discarded the Rustbelt, and the Appalachians. 

The difference between mercenary parasites and religious zealots will be revealed, provoking bitter factional splits. 

Our fake economy grinds itself down.

In the Wolf of Wall Street, Leonardo DiCaprio stands in front of a crowd of desperate, unscrupulous telemarketers, and he shouts, “I want you to deal with your problems, by becoming RICH!!!”

In one sentence, one commandment, that exhortation sums up the message of Andrew Tate: Western Civilization is regressing into pitiless, tribal anarchotyranny, an accelerating descent into a rigid, adversarial caste system of winners and losers. Sexual dysfunction results, as lonely women flock to dwindling elite men, ignoring multitudes of ordinary citizens who waste away in a numb, dissociated sedation provided by drugs; porn; video games; junk food; electronic distractions. Andrew Tate’s solution is that individual men learn how to survive in the irradiated ruins of this wasteland by peacocking with muscles, money, clothes, charisma.

That’s a good first step. 

There’s definitely an aspirational quality to what Andrew Tate, Kevin Samuels, The Rational Male, and other “masculinity coaches” have advocated. Solid advice, which delivers useful, measurable results. Blended with a perceptive analysis of the gulf between what women think, say, and do. It’s true that men need to be strong, reject demoralization, accept accountability, and transform themselves into winners — because church, academia, government, and pharmaceuticals have all failed the average man. 

But individual strength, guided by individual wisdom, represents an incomplete social program which fails to solve the larger problem of technological stagnation, civilizational decay, economic fraud, communal regression, ethnic fragmentation, romantic dysfunction, and personal grief. 

Our dreams must be bigger. Our ambitions must be bolder. Our hatreds toward this feminized, nihilistic modernity must be ferocious and unforgiving, fueled by a contemptuous refusal to submit to this hysterical surveillance state.

Andrew Tate has offered a more cogent and intelligent response to modernity than possibly any other public Namefag intellectual — this is intended as a backhanded compliment, less a celebration of the infamous, kickboxing pimp than a scornful indictment of the various philosophers, professors, preachers, and politicians who have alternatively struggled with the ethical questions imposed by modernity’s perverse incentives.  

The flaws and limitations of Andrew Tate’s philosophy are demonstrated in stark terms by his recent arrest, imprisonment, and persecution by the government of Romania. 

No one man is strong enough to challenge the modern, global Leviathan. 

It was dumb to publicly announce during his podcast tour, time and time again, that he had bribed the Romanian government, and to brag that he was above the law of a corrupt, provincial backwater. 

It’s highly likely these public claims contributed to his arrest. 

But if we ignore the cause, and instead focus on procedure, the asymmetrical power dynamics which dominate the relationship between modern bureaucratic governments and their individual citizens are made clear. 

Andrew Tate was a dangerous professional athlete, guarded by armed security, accompanied by a loyal, hulking brother — and his personal fortune amounted to tens of millions of dollars. Dozens of adoring women surrounded him. Luxury sports cars gleamed bright in his garage. He owned multiple mansions. 

None of this protected him. 

The Romanian government sent armored squads to seize Andrew Tate along with his brother — and the kickboxing warlord folded. He surrendered without a fight. The bodyguards paid to protect him stood aside. 

And there was no “due process”. He was held for months without any explicit legal charges. Defense attorneys were prohibited from meeting with him in-person. His assets were seized and inspected, and perhaps stolen forever. 

Alone, men are weak. 

Brotherhood is the solution. 

The despair, anguish, and monstrous resentments of a collapsing, imperial, winner-take-all society result in random violence, factional prosecutions, selective justice or injustice, widespread poverty, shameless nepotism, depressed obesity, overcrowded favelas, and a loss of everything that defines a functional nation. 

The first step is to gain individual strength, wisdom, wealth, and discipline. But this personal strength must then be leveraged into a new generation of social networks among like-minded men. 

Tradition and religion are the shepherds of ordinary men. Tradition functions precisely because nobody understands it. Vague faith prevails. A cloud of reason. Culture is most successfully inherited with a certain naivete, an oblivious trust that old solutions are good because trusted ancestors also trusted them. Simply that, nothing more.

Tradition is automatic… instinctual.  

One of the best insights of Bronze Age Pervert was that paganism is dead today because the shriveled remnants of pagan belief are expressed in a self-conscious, intentional, articulate, intellectual fashion. Mysticism needs mysteries. Mysticism craves uncertainty. Science has illuminated so much of the world that there are no longer enough dark, terrifying shadows to hide religious faith. 

Tradition works because it’s inherited without consideration, without inspection; the forced effort of self-conscious discipline cannot rival instinctual inspiration. 

Postmodern epistemology threatens faith, belief, and the foundations of all great movements, by seeking the intellectual foundations of any prestigious institution — and discovering weakness, ambiguities, philosophical tradeoffs at the core of every trusted convention. Outliers, anomalies, and edge cases which invalidate a culture’s most sacred rules.

H. P. Lovecraft was troubled by the arrival of too much science, too much truth:

“The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.”

—H. P. Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu 

Knowledge banished Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden. 

The price of wisdom… is the loss of innocence. 

And for the same reason, America cannot simply ban Tinder, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, TikTok, OnlyFans… outlaw every porn website and every social media platform. The innocence and naivete of functional tradition is gone, forever.

Or at least, gone for the duration of contemporary lifetimes. No doubt later generations will benefit from the aspirational traditions we build during these years.  

Civilization rests upon a fragile scaffolding of belief. And part of that fragile scaffolding, which has been gnawed by termites, shredded by chainsaws, incinerated by flamethrowers, buried beneath landfills, is the mutual love and affection that men and women once expected from each other. 

Paranoia dominates, rather than kindness and charitable sentiment. 

During the expansionary years of American empire, even during the subsequent decades of consolidation and economic cannibalization, Western Civilization was characterized by unwavering resolution and exuberance. That confidence is gone. Today the ambient mood reflects impotence, emasculation, and exhaustion.

Popular belief in feminism, technology, globalization is dead. 

A strange despair circulates.

People are too tired to dream, too impoverished to hope, too passive to build, too comfortable to rebel, too stressed to reproduce. These trends are worsening. 

But the spread, and entrenchment of exhaustion, emasculation, misery, and despair will summon forth a new equilibrium — when men of action can birth fearsome legends, men with fire blazing in their eyes and hearts, legions of focused, disciplined autodidacts.

A new era of warriors, and warlords.

Barbarism and secret societies; feudal loyalties and trusted friends; the resurgence of a sacred Mafia omerta — the masculine code of silence. 

Today we live in the dimming, softening twilight before the coming of a new Dark Age, and in the feral darkness of that grim impending Night, there will be mysteries and shadows to cloak the motion of dangerous predators stalking and carving out their territories. Everything is surveilled and watched and recorded, today. Every acre of arable land is owned by some distant multinational conglomerate. Every street is occupied. 

Ownership is elusive.   

When millions, tens of millions of compliant, obedient men have submitted to despair, fattened and drugged and distracted themselves into technological slavery, disassociated serfdom, bland celibacy, sterile consumption of prefabricated lifestyles, the weight of this vast pitiful retreat will create a withered, ruined husk of civilization. And among those ruins, nightmares stir.

Small numbers of stubborn, focused, disciplined autodidacts become massively impactful when aggregated millions of ordinary men choose to sleep through a simulated pantomime of authentic life. 

Brotherhoods will form, pulled by a gravitational magnetism. 

Women will be fascinated and enticed by such brotherhoods… confident, suave, muscular warriors contrasting against the broader population of effeminate, obese, submissive, oversocialized cattle. 

The historical stasis of the past eighty years is coming to an end. Once again, men of destiny will trample the earth. Caesars and Napoleons. 

Such is the future. 

But in the meantime, these crimson dreams of carnage and smoke are irrelevant, and distant. Mere intellectual curiosities. 

Conservatives lost control of America for many reasons, and one of their main psychological weaknesses was a delusional sense of how historical achievements are delivered in practical terms. 

There is no magical instant turnaround… no silver bullet… no Gordian knot to be slashed in a single dramatic stroke of audacity. No enchanted, glimmering Excalibur waiting to be drawn from petrified stone to restore the glory of Camelot. 

Above all, winning is boring. Rare moments of triumph, euphoria, and the fun of finishing a conquest are outweighed by the patient, daily tedium of continual sacrifice and marginal iteration which is necessary to be a champion.

Conservatives were impatient, and undisciplined… as a whole, on a large scale, they were never willing to do the work, the boring labor of examining procedural mechanics which govern the distribution of power, the economics of patronage, the subversion of media, the subtlety of education, the conquest of foreign territory. They have no clue how bureaucratic governments operate. And they lack the curiosity to seek answers. 

Today is still the time of Pygmalion and the Anime Girl… individual men wrestling with the problem of romancing individual women amid civilizational decline, social despair. 

Defect-defect equilibrium promotes betrayal, infidelity, divorce, heartbreak, and broken families. 

Normality has been criminalized; romance has been forbidden; sexual deviance has been championed by a grotesque coalition of disturbed misfits… and in an age where normality is criminalized, the normal man must adopt the mindset of a criminal to escape punishment from a hostile tyranny. 

Romance and passion brings color to life; without love, without adventure, there is little purpose to living itself, and existence waits to die a cold, lonely end. 

Even now, during this epoch of supposed Human Betterment, which is in reality a time of Human sickness, ugliness, mental illness, irritation, and deformity, the world is full of gorgeous, elegant, trusting women who would be admirable wives. And the path to securing an aspirational future involves discernment (filtering bad options, identifying quality) and then committing to romance with a sensual, irrational confidence — a fearless embrace of personal ambitions, oriented in stubborn defiance of an environment designed for men to be legally, financially, professionally, romantically destroyed.

A new age is coming. 

An age of repression, repression which will fuel the assembly of covert social networks to guarantee steady employment, and these covert brotherhoods will form the bedrock of a parallel economy, an underground community, a profitable black market, a shadow civilization born inside the dying carcass of the American Empire.

Through the convenience of completely legal methods of organization, and transaction — gyms, book clubs, business references, creative guilds — a resilient brotherhood will drift into alignment. 

A brotherhood of honorable men, defiant against a dishonorable world. 

The task any man should ask himself is: When I look at myself, today, am I the kind of man I would want to join my team — in business or church, in war or peace, in friendship or danger; a man for ALL SEASONS. The days are coming when men will be drawn together with a gravitational pull, in brotherhood. The despair and exhaustion, poverty and misery, incompetence and malign neglect of the future will empower small, coordinated, aspirational teams of men to sculpt the salvaged ruins of empire into a playground where their sons can grow to be strong, dangerous men. Warriors who are both foxes and lions. 

And if the answer is no, get to work.