M astery

Men have always recognized themselves in animals. They have worshipped animals and claimed totemic lineage from animals. Men have traced their origins to gods who were like animals, part animal, or who could change into animals. Heracles was depicted wearing the skin of a powerful lion he killed. Norse berserkers wore the skins of wolves and bears to intimidate their enemies and inspire ferocious courage in battle. In the Aztec military, it was the elite Jaguar Warriors who went to the front. Military units and sports teams around the word adopt the names of formidable animals to represent their own gameness and strength.

Throughout this book, I have compared men to dogs and to chimpanzees. However, in sport and in war and in life, there is another manly virtue that is universally and specifically human because for the most part it requires human intellect.

Animals succeed or fail largely due to a combination of their circumstances and their inborn genetic fitness for a given situation. An animal who is stronger, nimbler or more game will triumph over an inferior animal. We have to project our own humanity onto animals to make them masters of strategy. In all but the most intelligent animals like higher primates and orca or dolphins, what we read as skill is most often instinct—not the product of thinking or tinkering or trial and error. The desire and ability to use reason and to develop skills and technologies that allow one to gain mastery over one’s circumstances—over oneself, over nature, over other men, over women— is a human virtue, although it is also man’s Achilles heel.

If you ask men what it means to be good at being a man, you’ll often get answers that start to sound like a set of minimum skill proficiencies in a job description.

While the job description for men undeniably changes according to time, place and culture, the primal gang virtue that unifies them all is “being able to carry your own weight.”

Women are more comfortable with accepting the benevolent aid of the group because they have always required it. A healthy adult woman must accept aid from the group if she is to carry a child, give birth and care for an infant. And, especially when men have achieved a level of security and prosperity beyond mere survival, women have been evaluated by men based less on their utility than on more nebulous qualities like attractiveness and social charm. When they have the means, most men will happily support a woman who seems to be carefree, pretty and charming.

This has not been the case with men. It is far rarer for women or men to volunteer to support a grown, able-bodied man. It is rarer still for them to support him without resentment. There is no point in an adult male’s life when he can be excused from carrying his own weight, except when he is sick, injured, handicapped or old. Human societies accommodate all of these exceptions, but competency has always been crucial to a man’s mental health and sense of his own worth. Men want to carry their own weight, and they should be expected to. As Don Corleone might put it, women and children could afford to be careless for most of human history, but not men. Men have always had to demonstrate to the group that they could carry their own weight.

Until you can function as a competent member of the group and carry your own weight, you are a supplicant and a drag on the collective. A child is a child, but an incompetent adult is a beggar. One of the problems with massive welfare states is that they make children or beggars of us all, and as such are an affront and a barrier to adult masculinity. It has become clichéd comedy for men and women to laugh at men who are concerned with being competent. The “men refuse to stop and ask for directions” joke never seems to get old for women, who are more comfortable with dependence, or socialist types, because reducing men to a childlike state of supplication and submission to state bureaucrats is required for big-government welfare states to function. Masculine loathing of dependence is a bulwark to the therapeutic mother state.

Dependency is powerlessness. Yet, men have always been cooperative hunters, and in a survival scenario they will fall into hierarchies based on strength and gameness. Men have a certain natural comfort with interdependency. Claims of complete independence are generally bullshit. Few of us have ever survived or would be able to survive on our own for an extended period of time. Few of us would want to. A child is completely dependent and powerless. It has no control over its own fate. Controlling one’s own fate within the context of group give-and-take has to do with figuring out what you bring to the table and making yourself valuable to the group. The bare minimum required for moving from dependence to interdependence is competence and self-sufficiency—the ability to carry one’s own weight.

Becoming an interdependent, rather than completely dependent, member of the group means mastering a set of useful skills and understanding some useful ideas. We send children to school to master a set of skills and a body of knowledge that we think they’ll need to carry their own weight in society and function as adults. Most militaries send men to boot camp. At boot camp, men learn a basic skill set and body of knowledge necessary to function within the military. Boot camp graduates can theoretically be expected to at least carry their own weight in an offensive or defensive scenario.

Understanding The Way of Men means understanding how men evaluate each other as men, and how they accord status to men within the context of a primal history common to all men. The amoral masculine gang ethos is tactical and utilitarian. It’s kind of like picking men for a sports team. Before people care about whether or not you’re a good person, they want to know if you’re a good player. Speculating about the morality of professional athletes is a popular form of male social gossip, but when the athletes take the field, what matters most is how they can contribute to a team’s success. Men want to know if they have the physical ability, the gameness and the mastery of the skills necessary to help the team win.

The Way of Men, the gang ethos, and the amoral tactical virtues are fundamentally about winning. Before you can have church and art and philosophy, you need to be able to survive. You need to triumph over nature and other men, or at the very least you need to be able to keep both at bay. Winning requires strength and courage, and it requires a sufficient mastery of the skills required to win.

Stated as a manly virtue:

Mastery is a man’s desire and ability to cultivate and demonstrate proficiency and expertise in technics that aid in the exertion of will over himself, over nature, over women, and over other men.

Advanced levels of mastery and technics allow men to compete for improved status within the group by bringing more to the camp, hunt or fight than their bodies would otherwise allow. Mastery can be supplementary—a man who can build, hunt and fight, but who can also do something else well, be it telling jokes or setting traps or making blades, is worth more to the group and is likely to have a higher status within the group than a man who can merely build, hunt and fight well. Mastery can also be a compensatory virtue, in the sense that a weaker or less courageous man can earn the esteem of his peers by providing something else of great value. It could well have been a runt who tamed fire or invented the crossbow or played the first music, and such a man would have earned the respect and admiration of his peers. Homer was a blind man, but his words have been valued by men for thousands of years.

Women also earn their keep through mastery of one kind or another, and mastery is by no means exclusive to men, but mastery does have a lot to do with competition for status between men. If necessity is the mother of invention, it is the need to compete for status and peer esteem—to find a valued place in the group—that drives many inventors to invent. The drive to gain control over something is part of the drive to master nature.

Strength, courage, and honor make a tidy triad, because they are all directly concerned with violence. But the picture of how men judge men as men is incomplete without some concept of mastery. Strength, gameness, and competition for status are all present in animals, but it is the conscious drive to master our world that differentiates men from beasts. Whether you’re a benevolent king or a ruthless gangster, a man with a special skill, talent or technology can be as valuable as or exponentially more valuable than your toughest thug. It is mastery more often than brute strength that allows the elite to rule. Masculinity can never be separated from its connection to violence, because it is through violence that we ultimately compete for status and wield power over other men. However, mastered skills and technology provide deciding advantages in fighting, hunting and surviving for human men.