The manosphere (referring to the loosely-affiliated ecosystem of small web publishers writing for men and running discussion forums) as a market phenomenon exists owing to censorship in the professional press, where anyone who deviates from the leftist party line winds up ostracized and unable to be published steadily, apart from a few exceptions here and there.
Christopher Hitchens, for example, was able to publish articles about why women aren’t funny in magazines like Vanity Fair, but probably only because he had spent decades contributing to magazines like The Nation and acting as the standard-bearer for atheism. The original piece is apparently no longer even hosted on the Vanity Fair website, although there are countless rebuttals to it.
If even a long-time Trot like Hitchens can’t get away with the mildest criticism of female equality, no one really can. However, reality keeps on being real, even if the way that our cultural organs try to depict reality is blatantly at odds with the thing itself. The manosphere grows in the absence created by censorship and the interference in the creation and maintenance of all-male organizations.
It’s, in effect, occupying a grey market niche, and reaping profits from it.
Part of what the men do with this grey market is to air grievances that get no hearing from other sources. The state has decided, as a comprehensive campaign, to level society across gender lines. To achieve this, it needs to hobble men, saddle them with legal risks, defame them constantly, and create a New Egalitarian Man at least in concept in order to achieve its political goals. Many, many more men aspire to be the New Egalitarian Man than the older version, because professional propaganda tends to be of higher grade than the gray market stuff.
It also needs to suppress and belittle the grievances that come up with respect to this raft of policies to make them appear to be more popular and successful than they really are.
Because egalitarianism is a revolt against nature — it works against natural impulses rather than channeling them — it’s very resource-intensive to maintain.
Grievances against the sovereign that come to be aired — but go unresolved — tends to frustrate people, especially because the democratic psychology expects those grievances to be heard by the sovereign, and then acted upon by that sovereign. When grievances are aired but ignored, to the democratic mind, it seems like the universe isn’t operating as it’s supposed to. It’s ‘supposed’ to go whine -> complain -> protest -> wise legislator passes reform.
In particular, some hope that family law will be reformed.
This will never, ever, ever happen, because egalitarianism has a certain historical momentum (‘leftward drift’) that must accelerate or it must implode. A perceived halfway reversal would threaten the entire sensibility of modern democratic civilization, so even a prudent reform isn’t possible.
The griping can also be seen as an attempt to coordinate during a time when the state (as it ought to in order to protect itself) is working hard to prevent such coordination. Because the state doesn’t want (and shouldn’t want) a competing culture to emerge within its own territory, the people in the alternative men’s media who succeed the most tend to be the ones who encourage men to coordinate to become better parasites on the shuddering carcass of what was good ol’ Western Civ.
They create a bandit culture which praises excellence in banditry. Which would make sense, because we’re in conditions which are conducive to banditry as a strategy.
Parasitism is adaptive, however, until it isn’t. Americans tend to believe that ‘economics is cyclical,’ believing in narratives of ‘stock market recoveries’ which exceed every downturn. But civilizations and economies more often go through profound phase changes which aren’t cyclical at all. The ‘business cycle’ can be more like a one-way ratchet of dysfunction, and the same goes for the other social phenomena.
Without religious consolation, Americans instead have psychological consolation: they believe things like “everything happens for a reason,” “it will all turn out OK,” “I’m OK / You’re OK,” “there’s someone out there for everyone,” “It gets better,” “50 is the new 30,” and a whole lot of other gibberish that acts to ease the pain of existence.
Actually, it’s not going to be OK, most of you aren’t going to make it, it’ll all be terribly unfair, the new 50 is probably worse than the old 50, and you squandered your opportunities in your 20s, and few people even like you, much less love you. Also, you’re going to become old, die, and you’re probably not going to a good place, either, after that’s done with.
Much of the griping in the manosphere is an attempt to gain consolation for individual despair by spreading despair to others as well. The justification sometimes goes that if everyone is demoralized enough together, something positive will happen. The only thing that results in that is that people just come together in their misery — feeling less alone in their individual unhappiness, but doing little to resolve anything.
At some point, Westerners will have to start recognizing that there’s less of a ‘we’ in this than we’re accustomed to thinking. Many Western countries aren’t going to make it. Many regions aren’t going to make it. Many religious groups aren’t going to make it. For small groups of men to solve problems, the problem space has to be shrunk down to a manageable level. Fixing the US isn’t possible; salvaging a portion of it is.
Great article. Unfortunately, after a promising start, the Manosphere has largely devolved into a get-rich-quick scheme for PUAs and perpetual bitching with no solutions actually posed. A lot of these disaffected men don’t know what to do with themselves because the future seems hopeless, but they cannot bring themselves to Reaction. That’s too far.
The refrain is something like:
“Hey… i just want a level playing field. I’m not a Patriarch! That’s Taliban stuff!”
It’s a great example of half-think, where people get distracted in the nether zone between ideological poles, never quite working things out to their logical conclusions.
We should point out that the Taliban is still doing pretty well, while the US forces ROTC candidates to march in heels.
>For small groups of men to solve problems, the problem space has to be shrunk down to a manageable level. Fixing the US isn’t possible; salvaging a portion of it is.
Sure, correct. I came to this conclusion some time ago. For the last several years of my service in the US military, I was hoping that there would be some sort of coup. Reading Henissart’s Wolves In The City and his account of the abortive French coup, I realized that anyone in the system with the leverage to launch such a coup had been progressively and redundantly selected for to be a sort of moral eunuch. So the answer had to be organic, to start small and grow naturally.
Corollaries: for a small group of men to solve problems, they have to be united by a belief in something greater than themselves. They also need to be geographically and socially rooted, with families and the ability to provide for them. And they need to be intellectually rooted.
Overall, I think that the mania for humanitarianism acts as the main filter in the elite to ensure that no one particularly dangerous winds up in a position of authority — which creates that sort of moral eunuch quality. You would think that just lying about humanitarian intentions would be enough, but the expectations are so high that even professional liars like Bill Clinton wind up dedicating large portions of their lives appearing to be humanitarians.
>Corollaries: for a small group of men to solve problems, they have to be united by a belief in something greater than themselves. They also need to be geographically and socially rooted, with families and the ability to provide for them. And they need to be intellectually rooted.
Belief being quite important, because personal loyalties are unstable and people are perishable.
Belief being quite important because there is nothing else that will let people overcome their self-interest. Stoicism is only available to a tiny percentage of humanity.
The main filter for the pointy end of the Cathedral is the constant need to lie to oneself and one’s superiors (who demand to be lied to,) the endless focus on minutia and degrading ceremony (reflective belts are iconic,) and of course the backstabbing which ensures you can’t fully trust more than a few people. And then you have the promotion system. At every stage, you are selected for not having pissed anyone off. Promotion from colonel to general requires a board to vote UNANIMOUSLY for you. That means you can’t have stepped on anyone’s toes who is connected to that board since you were a captain 15 years prior. Anyone with a low tolerance for that kind of shit leaves as a captain, major, lieutenant colonel…or whatever the GS equivalents are.
Yep you make e8 and above and 05 and above based on your politicaly reliability vs battlefield success.
Odd thing is, the outside world views the military as some sort of bastion of traditional values.
Per what you’ve written concerning demoralization and atomization, the following discusses Soviet re-education of Christians in Romania. At 6:30, the narrator quotes Dumitri Bacu’s The Anti-Humans:
“Everything of the past which could offer any kind of refuge was to be muddied and denigrated. This included the heroes of history and the folklore of Christian inspiration. Then, to be given special attention, was the destruction of love for family, in order completely to isolate the victim in his own misery, bereft of religion, love of country, and family. This would break the chain that links together a community of national thought and gives meaning to a national struggle. When the individual was thus cut off from his history, faith and family, the ultimate step in “re-educating” him was to destroy his existence as a personality — an individual. This, to the victim, was to prove the most painful step of all and was called his “unmasking. ”
The goal was of course to deconstruct man, to make him into an animal and rob him of his transcendent qualities and potential qualities. The Soviets just felt that Liberalism wasn’t doing it fast enough.
Notice that the destruction of legends and heroic tales of old was both a feature of Lenin’s Revolution, and the original Enlightenment thinkers. It cannot be said that this was in the pursuit of some profane ‘truth’ since both Liberals and Communists have a long track record of altering and revising history, ‘erasing’ those ‘problematic’ figures in paintings and photographs. Truth doesn’t really concern the Modern, what concerns him is the agenda, the never-ceasing war against that which enables man to be more than he already is, that which inspires in him true greatness.
De Maistre’s “shrouded foundation” of society birthed these legends, these meta-histories that brought out man’s better nature. From the new foundations of Liberalism, supposedly the cult of ‘reason’, we have seen nothing but despair and desolation.
http://www.returnofkings.com/62716/the-damaging-effects-of-jewish-intellectualism-and-activism-on-western-culture
Looks like the manosphere just touched the JQ.
The control matrix and power structure of this world based on unnecessary usury is centuries old in it’s development phase. Democracy has been a sham even in countries like the US from the 1860s on.
When Gallup CEOs mention openly on CNBC that if they would question government statistics then he would “disappear”, then how much chance will the average citizen have.
The manosphere at least rejects many paradigms like the left-right one as well as many others. But essentially the ‘sphere is actually focused on Game and inter-gender relationships. The knowledge within can be used also to create stable relationships, but ultimately except for individual help it won’t affect the collective state we are in.
On the other side there are countless foundations, lobbying firms, corporations and government agencies which are building their One World Government Dystopia – they have unlimited funding and work 24/7. Those few splintered guys from the ‘sphere don’t matter one bit.