Men want to engage in righteous combat:
They want it more than they want sex or VP titles. They fantasize about getting the casus belli to defend themselves against armed thugs that will never come, they spend billions of dollars on movies and TV about everymen in implausible circumstances where EA calculus demands they use supernatural powers for combat, they daydream about fantastical, spartan settings where war is omnipresent and fights are personal and dramatic and intellectually interesting, and they’re basically incapable of resisting the urge to glorify their nation and people’s past battles, even the ones they claim to disagree with intellectually. You cannot understand much of modern culture until you’ve recognized that the state’s blunt suppression of the male instinct for glory has caused widespread symptoms of pica that dominate our politics, media, and online interactions.
And make no mistake — our half-hearted policy of deeming all such tendencies “toxic masculinity”, and refusing men the option to engage in reciprocal or consensual violence against each other, has been a bigger failure than the war on drugs. Lots of ink has been spilled on sphere of influence conspiracy theories that attempt to interpret America’s foreign adventures as rational power-seeking behavior. But the real truth is that men naturally form gangs, political cliques, and military theologies that attempt to justify violence within their existing legal and moral landscapes independent of any external incentives to do so. What they really want from all this is not some policy outcome but the self-actualization that comes from fighting the enemy, and the dearth of opportunities for them to challenge their opponents’ honor on the battlefield in a rights-respecting way is a much more important misandrist failing than child custody bias or divorce law or anything I’ve seen red pill people argue on the internet about. Men who are down especially bad will take absurd pay cuts to join artificial and economically unmotivated criminal sects, solely so they get the opportunity to pick mortal battles with other people who’ve opted into the same social systems they have.
There is no true modern substitute for these ambitions, with all of their cultural and social significance.
What?
Isn’t that just yet another Kaczynskiite surrogate activity? It would seem to substantially differ only in that it is an unusually explicit characterization uncommonly close to the truth of what the activity is in fact surrogate of:
War bands.
Everyone wants state formation to be more accessible and warlord positions to be more plenty, but no one wants to take an underwear bomb to the boys for the divine calling of Butlerian Jihad. Sad!
I think it’s hilarious that modern Lefties are finally rediscovering masculinity. Naturally, they’re studying it as if it were from Mars.
Aside: What do they think football is?
Aside aside: This is what happens two generations after schools institute “zero tolerance”, AKA punishing boys for defending themselves from bullying.
This is eternal human nature.
And they banished for a time nature but HE returns.
And I’m LMAO…