[From the article The Way of Men - Formatting in original]
Bro! The Carlyle Club is hogging the remote, refusing to ask for directions, and generally manning up for some guy talk on masculinity. (No girls allowed.)
[...]
Jack Donovan is an anti-feminist, anti-modernist, anti-populist anarcho-fascist who “moonlights as an advocate for the resurgence of tribalism and manly virtue.” And what is “manly virtue”? The Way of Men is Donovan’s answer:
For decades, people have been talking about a “crisis” of masculinity. Our leaders have created a world in spite of men, a world that refuses to accept who men are and doesn’t care what they want. Our world asks men to change “for the better,” but offers men less of value to them than their fathers and grandfathers had. The voices who speak for the future say that men must abandon their old way and find a new way. But what is that way and where does it lead?
As I came to understand The Way of Men, I became more concerned about where men are today, and where they are headed. I wondered if there was a way for men to follow their own way into a future that belongs to men.
That’s the path of this book. My answers may not be the kind of answers you want to hear, but they are the only answers that satisfied my inquiry.
Ultimately, it boils down to this:
Relieved of moral pretense and stripped of folk costumes, the raw masculinity that all men know in their gut has to do with being good at being a man within a small, embattled gang of men struggling to survive.
The Way of Men is the way of that gang.
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Evola’s thought can be considered one of the most radically and consistently antiegalitarian, antiliberal, antidemocratic, and antipopular systems in the twentieth century.
Franco Ferraresi
(He says that like it’s a bad thing!)
The Sicilian Baron Julius Evola (1898–1974) was one of the most influential reactionary philosophers of the 20th century. Evola’s core trilogy comprises
[LIST=1]
[*][I]Revolt Against the Modern World: Politics, Religion, and Social Order in the Kali Yuga[/I] in 1934 (PDF here),
[*][I]Men among the Ruins: Postwar Reflections of a Radical Traditionalist[/I] in 1953 (PDF here, audio book here), and
[*][I]Ride the Tiger: A Survival Manual for the Aristocrats of the Soul[/I] in 1961 (PDF here).
[/LIST]
(Would that every writer had the Baron Evola’s gift for subtitling.)
Most relevant to the Way of Men, Donovan’s way of the gang, is the Baron Evola’s conception of the Männerbund, introduced in Men among the Ruins, Chapter 2.
According to an old view, the State derives from the family: the same principle responsible for shaping the family and the gens, having been integrated and extended, allegedly gave rise to the State. Whether or not this is the case, it is possible, from a logical point of view, to trace the origins of the State to a naturalistic plane only by committing an initial mistake: to assume that in ancient civilized areas, and especially those populated by Indo-European civilizations, the family was a unity of a purely physical type, and that the sacred, together with a well-articulated hierarchical social system, did not play a decisive role in it. [—] But if the family is thought of in naturalistic terms, or in the terms in which it presents itself today, the generating principle of the properly political communities must be traced to a context that is very different from the one typical of the family: it must be traced to the plane of the so-called Männerbünde.
Männerbund (plural Männerbünde): German. Literally band of men. An all-male warrior band or gang.
Among several primitive societies, the individual, up to a certain age, being regarded as a merely natural being, was entrusted to the family and to maternal tutelage, since everything related to the maternal, physical aspect of existence fell under the maternal-feminine aegis.
We’re a generation of men raised by women.
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“What would happen,” Jack Donovan asks in Chapter 11, “if men got spoiled, gave up and gave in to women completely? How would that society operate?” Well, we already know, because we’re living in it. Welcome to the Bonobo Masturbation Society.
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Our society has almost no tolerance for unsanctioned physical violence. Children are expelled from school for fighting, and something as historically common as a weaponless, drunken brawl can land men in court or in jail.
A recent headline in Silver Spring, Maryland: ‘Boy, 6, suspended over finger gun’ (UPI). Not worth a headline in Silver Spring: ‘Lawless mobs periodically loot convenience stores’ (Unamusement Park).
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Recall how Jack Donovan had to bring us outside civilized society to find “the raw masculinity that all men know in their gut.” He invites us to imagine ourselves as “part of a small human group fighting to stay alive. — You could be our primal ancestors, you could be pioneers, you could be stranded in some remote location, you could be survivors of a nuclear holocaust or the zombie apocalypse.”
Whether you believe we’re living at Fukuyama’s End of History or restarting history from Evola’s Kali Yuga, — whether we’re Jack Donovan’s mindless, masturbating bonobos or Tyler Durden’s pissed-off “middle children of history,” — surely it bears consideration that one of the most popular shows on television depicts a zombie apocalypse and mankind’s forced return to that prehistoric condition of “raw masculinity,” “relieved of moral pretense and stripped of folk costumes.”
Ask yourself: why would the Last Man watch The Walking Dead? Not to mention Dawn of the Dead, Shaun of the Dead, Land of the Dead, Left 4 Dead, 28 Days Later, 28 Weeks Later, World War Z, Resident Evil, the Zombie Research Society, ‘5 Scientific Reasons a Zombie Apocalypse Could Actually Happen’ ([I]Cracked[/I]), ‘10 Essentials for Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse: A Practical Guide’ ([I]The Huffington Post[/I]), ‘Preparedness 101: Zombie Apocalypse’ (the CDC, for God’s sake), ‘Montana TV Station Warns Of Attacking Zombies’ (NPR), ‘“Canada will never be a safe haven for zombies,” Foreign Minister John Baird tells House of Commons’ ([I]National Post[/I]), ‘Zombie apocalypse cancelled by Quebec government’ (CBC), and of course the Walking Dead zombie swimsuit calendar.