Longtime reader and friend of the blog Eduardo the Magnificent had an interesting comment to add to my last post about the MGTOW movement:

Vox gets half the equation right. While MGTOW has its points, its not a movement that’s going to solve any problems. It’s a bitch fest, that while may be a normal part of grieving, should be a final destination.

However, being the sigma he is, Vox doesn’t have any solution s [sic] except to bash these men as cowards. That’s not going to work, because these men have been kicked plenty and aren’t going to step into any situation that just gets them shit on more.

Remember, the Marines always build you up after they tear you down. We’ve become experts at the tearing, and have no clue how to do the building. A sigma like Vox isn’t going to have a subject like that cross his mind, evidenced by the fact that if you want to do business with him you better have your shit 100% together because he doesnt have time to teach you anything.

Telling these men to ‘be alpha’ and ‘man up’ isn’t going to work. It’s fairly hard for most couples to stay married of their own volition. You need a support system: family, friends, a church, and a culture that values marriage IN ADDITION to strong game and a career. Wake me when we start talking about that instead.

Unlike the response from a certain assclown who stopped by just to be a crybaby Gamma, this is a serious and sober reply, and deserves a serious and sober examination.

If I may summarise briefly, Eduardo makes the following points:

1. MGTOWs just complain and don’t solve problems;
2. Our beloved and dreaded Supreme Dark Lord (PBUH) doesn’t have any solution either, except for calling MGTOWs cowards;
3. His Voxness also doesn’t have a clue how to go about building better men; and
4. You cannot tell men to get married and stay married without changing the broader culture.

Let us address each of these points in turn.

The first is self-evidently true and I agree entirely with it. The MGTOW movement has, indeed, devolved significantly from where it used to be. There was a time when men like our own good friend Aaron Clarey called themselves MGTOWs.

Cappy himself has this to say about the current state of MGTOW:

Like millions of other men I am one, but once the movement was co-opted by weaker men who were looking for a religion or an excuse to excuse their cowardice and laziness when it came to women (and life), I abandoned the term as it became a pejorative, much like the word “feminism.” However, to this day me and millions of other men remain your classical MGTOW – we re-prioritize our own personal lives over women and do not put them or the pursuit of them at the top of our lives.

This created a schism between those real men who took what philosophical value they could from MGTOW and moved on in life versus those who are cultish about it and use it as a religion. This “Cult of MGTOW” has received much mockery and ridicule from those outside the cult because it’s painfully obvious how they are “abusing MGTOW.”

They use it as a religion/crutch in life because they (typically, though not always) have nothing else in life.

Some are overweight and unattractive, but too lazy to do what is necessary to become physically fit, and thus attractive, and thus provide what women are looking for in a man. This laziness is more powerful than their biological drive to pursue women, but does not eliminate their desire for women. This is why they MIRE in the ideology, rather than just pursue a monastic life of celibacy and asexuality. They may put MGTOW first, but they ironically obsess about the thing they’re too lazy to get – women.

Remember that Aaron was MGTOW before it became fashionable to be one. He tried hard to work within the system, and he absolutely hated it. So he decided to do his own thing. And he extracted a LOT of value from creating his own lifestyle that works for him.

Here’s the thing, though – Aaron put his money where his mouth is.

The guy is an atheist who isn’t an asshole, which is somewhat astonishing by itself. He has written books designed specifically to help men claw themselves out of poverty and despair and into financial security, stability, and life satisfaction. As far as I am aware, he is not particularly crazy about marriage and he really doesn’t want kids – he got a vasectomy specifically to avoid having them – but he has actually been with the same woman for years. (I could be wrong about that one, but he was the last time I checked.)

In other words, Aaron is telling men to be cautious and is trying to get them to insulate themselves against a nation and a culture gone positively batshit insane.

If someone like him, an old-school MGTOW if there ever was one, is saying that the Cult of MGTOW is poisonous, then I’m certainly not going to argue with him.

And that brings us on to the second and third points, about what His Voxness actually said.

I recommend watching the video again carefully:

Vox is not bashing the men who got married, got divorce-raped, and lost everything, as cowards, per se. As he points out very clearly in his Darkstream, he has sympathy and empathy for those who went through that process, and he genuinely feels sorry for them, as we all should.

He is bashing them for spreading a message of despair and cowardice.

That’s the key.

I disagree with Vox Day when he criticises military men who have served and lost everything and then get angry about it. I cannot and will not go so far as to criticise those men. I don’t have it in me to do so. From my perspective, those men served the system loyally and it betrayed them.

I know that feel, bro. I suffered something similar myself, albeit on a far less personal level.

I do agree with His Voxness about the rest of the MGTOW crowd who have not served, yet still preach the gospel of despair. They are dishonest because the actual data prove them to be so. They are cowardly because they often refuse to take the risk of so much as dating, in many cases, let alone getting married and having kids. And they insist on infecting other men with a particularly nasty and virulent disease.

Let’s put this in military terms. What is the correct and appropriate punishment for pusillanimous conduct in the face of the enemy?

Yep. That is a capital offence and officers in the field are not only given the power to execute such men, they are required by law to do so.

Why?

Because cowardly conduct is infectious to those around them. If not dealt with swiftly and severely, it can incapacitate and destroy a military unit’s ability to function in battle.

Need I remind you, gentlemen – especially the Christians among you – that we are in the middle of a war? One that predates us, and one that will rage on long after we are dead?

Now, for those on the short bus, I am NOT arguing that non-military men who preach abandoning masculine roles and responsibilities be taken out and shot. Don’t be stupid.

Nor am I arguing that EVERY man should sack up and get married. That is a very personal decision and each man should make it only when he is ready to do so. If some men decide that marriage and children are not for them, hey, that’s fine. I bear them no ill will and certainly do not criticise them for that decision.

But I cannot agree any longer with those who go around saying that marriage is dangerous, stupid, and just not worth it. I have defended monogamous marriage for years, and the passage of time has only confirmed to me that the nuclear family is the literal foundation of civilisation.

It is one thing to get married, lose everything, and spend your life teaching men to avoid specific kinds of women or to avoid getting stuck in certain nasty situations. We have no shortage of examples of such men. Several of them read this blog.

Adam Piggott, the Gentleman Adventurer – who got divorced 8 months ago from a woman that he genuinely thought was the real deal and with whom he had a mostly very happy marriage for 10 years, is one such.

He got divorced. He lost everything. He carries on. And he believes that marriage and children are Good Things, even as forked up as the West is today.

My friend and fellow shitlord Last Redoubt is another. You should read his story about what his ex-wife did to him, and to his son.

He got divorced. He lost almost everything. He carries on. And he got remarried.

It is an entirely different thing to go around spreading gloom and doom, black-pilling everyone like Denethor did in The Return of the King, telling everyone to flee for their lives in the face of the enemy. Remember what Gandalf the White did to him? He was quite right to do so.

So that deals with the second point: His Voxness is not calling those who were already chewed up and spat out by the system cowards, just because they got chewed up and spat out. He is calling them cowards for spreading the disease.

Like I said, I cannot go as far as he does in condemning that entire group of men. But I certainly think that many of them who have not faced the dangers that others have, should be condemned for trying to frighten away the rest of us.

What about the third point?

It is objectively untrue that our beloved and dreaded Supreme Dark Lord (PBUH) has no solutions to offer. He patently does.

Remember that Vox Day was once an Omega – locked out of the socio-sexual hierarchy and totally indifferent to that fact. He changed over time through his own hard efforts and natural gifts. And he put those lessons together into a guide for other men over time to improve and beautify their own lives.

All you have to do is look at Appendix C of Jordanetics: A Journey into the Mind of Humanity’s Greatest Thinker (latest edition) to find his version of Jordy’s 12 Rules for Life:

1. Embrace the iron. Lifting weights will not only help you stand up straight, it will make you stronger, healthier, and more confident. The iron teaches the weak to be strong and it teaches the strong to be humble.
2. Take the wheel. You are the ultimate architect of your own decisions and actions. Even if you were dealt a bad card by life, even if your genetics are inferior, your upbringing was terrible, and your instincts are suboptimal, you are the only one who can improve yourself. You are driving and only you can determine the destination.
3. Be the friend that you want to have. Smiles are contagious. Loyalty inspires loyalty. Stand by those who stand by you. Give every friend who fails you a second chance. Only abandon those who have repeatedly proven they cannot be trusted and do not wish you well.
4. Envision perfection and pursue excellence. You will never achieve perfection. But if you envision it and you strive for it, you may well achieve success, and perhaps even excellence.
5. Put a ring on it. Marriage is the manifestation of love. Children are the manifestation of hope. Raising a family to serve as the foundation of future generations is how Man rebels against an uncaring universe, a fallen world, and the spirits of despair and destruction. Yes, there are real risks, especially in the current social and legal environment. But they are well worth taking nevertheless.
6. Set your face against evil. You will encounter evil within and evil without on a daily basis. Stand against all of it, without fear, without hesitation, and without remorse. And when you fail, when you give into temptation, when you are defeated, regroup, repent, and rise again.
7. Do what is right. Learn to listen to the still, small voice of conscience. Do what you know to be right, not what you can rationalize, justify, or excuse. If you have to talk yourself into something, then you probably already know in your heart of hearts that you are doing the wrong thing.
8. Tell the truth in kindness. It is too hard and too exhausting to spend all your mental energies trying to keep track of an ever-growing multitude of exaggerations, false narratives, self-serving spins, and outright lies. Just tell the truth, as you best understand it, without taking pride in it or using it to hurt others.
9. Learn the easy way. You will always encounter those who are stronger, smarter, and more successful than you are. Rather than envying them or attempting to tear them down to make yourself feel better, do your best to learn from them and apply those lessons to your own life. It is considerably easier and more efficient to learn from the mistakes of others than it is to make all of those same mistakes yourself.
10. Believe the mirror. The most reliably self-destructive mistake you can make is to lie to yourself about who, what, and where you are, because doing so precludes any real self-improvement. Be ruthless with your self-assessments, without wallowing in self-pity or despair.
11. Get back on the horse. Perseverance is one of the most important skills a man can develop. There is absolutely no substitute for the confidence and the courage that comes from the certain knowledge that you will get up again after an opponent, or life, knocks you down.
12. Find a best friend. Dogs teach us many things, perhaps the most important of which is what unconditional love is. No matter how rich and successful a man may be, there is no life that the addition of a dog would not considerably improve. And yes, all dogs go to Heaven, obviously, because Heaven would not be paradise without them.

Are those rules perfect? No. They are the product of a human mind, albeit an extremely intelligent one. They cannot be perfect.

Are they pretty good?

Yeah. They are.

Those rules are permutations and combinations of things that I have written about for six years and change. Those rules have vastly improved my own life. I am a better man today because I followed them, long before they were in written form like that, and because I consistently read the works of the Supreme Dark Lord (PBUH) and tried, however badly (and it was usually extremely badly), to put them into action.

Let me put it another way: I used to espouse a lot of the same things that the Cult of MGTOW does. I still say and wholeheartedly believe that Western women are an absolute disaster and that you’d have to be a few cards short of a full deck to get married in the West without taking some serious steps to protect yourself.

And yet, I went from being an atheist to a Christian, and from being someone who didn’t want marriage and for a very long time didn’t even want to date, to being quite open to both.

The Supreme Dark Lord (PBUH) did a lot to change my mind on both fronts because of his writing.

Look, at the end of the day nobody has to take a single word that I write on this subject seriously. I’m not married. I don’t have kids. My dating history involves women who are as far removed from my birth-culture as a Martian, and who let me know this in absolutely no uncertain terms. I’m not a Westerner, I just happen to love Western civilisation. I’m a Christian, but I’m not baptised.

In other words, I don’t have skin in the game the way that a lot of men who risked, and lost, do.

You can argue with great justification that I have no right to lecture other men on the need to get married and have kids.

Except, that’s not what I’m doing. And that’s not what Vox is doing either, if you actually listen to what he said.

What we are doing is basically saying, “stop spreading despair”. It’s not as bad as you think.

Yeah, there is a lot of craziness and nonsense in the West, and yeah, it’s a terrible time to get married and have kids. If you don’t want to get married, fine, that’s your decision and I respect it.

But, answer me this one question: can any of you name a good time to get married?

Look at the whole course of human history, and what do you see? An endless procession of wars, famines, plagues, disasters, and insanity. Who in their right mind would possibly want to bring children into that Hell?

Well, evidently every past generation of men before us thought it was a good idea, because here we are, you and I.

Also, note that these days we remember the 1950s in America as the height, the apex, the pinnacle of Western civilisation. And it was very much an idyllic time in American history, one full of muscular confidence, stability, security, and optimism.

It was also a time when just about every schoolchild in America lived in mortal fear of nuclear obliteration at the hands of the Soviets. The “Red Scare” was everywhere, especially later in the decade.

Can you imagine what would have happened if people simply stopped having kids back then, just because they were terrified that they might bring children into a world about to be bombed back beyond the Stone Age?

And that brings us on to the fourth and final point about changing the culture.

Here I agree completely that if you get married in a culture that devalues marriage and monogamy, you exponentially increase your odds of failure. The risks involved in marriage are enormous, make no mistake. I have never denied this and I never will.

However, this introduces a major chicken-or-egg question.

Which comes first – the men who change the culture, or the culture that changes the men? Who is going to go and square that particular circle?

Moreover, if you do not introduce new blood into a culture gone completely insane and do your damnedest to right that sinking ship – even if you fail completely and miserably – what use is it to then stand around and yell that the ship is sinking when you won’t even so much as hand out PFDs or direct people to life rafts?

It has been known and remarked on for years that religious communities in the United States of America are vastly outbreeding secular ones. I am now seeing books and articles predicting a Christian future for at least some of the various constituent nations that will occupy the footprint of the once-American nation after the collapse of the American empire.

And that is because religious communities in the USA, whether Amish or Mennonite or Evangelical or Catholic or orthodox Jewish or whatever, consistently report happier marriages and considerably more robust sex lives, with vastly lower divorce rates, and much higher fertility and childbirth rates than secular counterparts.

The religious folks are out-marrying, out-breeding, and out-satisfying their secular cousins. The future belongs to them, because they are simply showing up and getting on with living.

I know this from personal experience. I used to know a few Orthodox Jews back at the beginning of my career. One of them was newly married and had his first child within two years of his marriage – and he was about 25 at the time. I’m sure he has gone on to have at least 3 more sprogs. His two older compatriots had like 5 kids each. Those communities exist, they are real, and they are very fecund.

And, here’s the thing: you can’t just rock up and try to get into one of those communities and marry a debt-free virgin with no tattoos.

Those communities have serious screens in place. I wouldn’t get in to them anytime soon even as a strongly pro-Western, pro-masculinity, pro-Christian male. Not gonna happen. That credibility has to be earned.

And, guess what: the process of earning it transforms you into a better man.

Moreover, remember that the culture of the United States in particular, or the West in general, IS NOT MONOLITHIC.

One of Aaron Clarey’s best ever posts points out that if you really want to go back to the mostly-white, heavily Christian, deeply patriotic and very high standard culture of the 1950s, you could do it anytime you want.

You just have to be prepared to make some sacrifices.

Are you prepared to make them?

No?

Well… then I can’t really help you. And neither can anyone else.

Half of the US population lives in a very small number of counties and urban centres:

That half is more or less boned – and even within those counties there are large variances in marriage and divorce rates.

But there is a whole vast country out there, full of riches and wonders. You, as Americans and Westerners, have the right and the ability to go wherever you want in that amazing country and create whatever future you want.

You have rights that guys like me would kill for. And yet, the MGTOW Cult doesn’t want you to exercise those rights because you’re scared that you might lose everything.

Bitch, please.

I did lose just about everything. I saw my standard of living plummet, literally overnight. I lost my job, my apartment, my second family, my right to stay in a civilised country, and my ability to support myself.

Don’t lecture me about losing everything. I’ve been through that Hell. I’m still going through it.

And I’m still willing to go for the risk of marriage and family.

I’m not trying to shame anyone into getting married. I’m not going to tell men to “man up”, because that would be intensely hypocritical of me. And I’m not going to tell guys to just jump into marriage with a girl, without being very very careful about examining themselves and the woman in question first.

If you don’t want to get married and/or never want to have children, no problem. You still have my respect and fellowship. Just understand that this is your choice, and I choose differently.

What I am trying to do is to tell men not to despair. It’s not as bad as you think. Yeah, it’s pretty bad, but there have been much worse times, and there will be much worse times, for certain. The times are dark and getting darker, and that won’t stop anytime soon.

The message of this blog, and the message of our Supreme Dark Lord (PBUH), is actually one of hope. It is one of joy. It is one of courage and strength and a better future for ourselves and our posterity.

That is because our worldview is informed by our faith in something much bigger and greater than ourselves. That something sees all of the madness, degeneracy, and utter evil that exists, has existed, and will ever exist – and still it commands us to go forth and multiply.

Why?

Because that something has a solution for evil. It is the solution for evil.

Tell me, my friend, what can possibly be more hopeful, more joyous, than seeing your child in the arms of your wife? What could possibly give you more courage, more strength, to fight for yourself and your family, than to see your woman and your own flesh and blood depending on you for protection and sustenance?

That, my brother, is why we fight.