Barbarism is the Natural State of Man
Barbarism is the natural state of man. If you’re favorite masculinity guru says otherwise, he’s trying to sell you something. What does it mean to be a man? It’s to be a savage, a barbarian who goes out into the wild to hunt and kill for his tribe and family.
The more into civilization you get, the more maternal it becomes. And to become more civilized is to become more emasculated. It’s to surrender your masculine rites for safety, security, and material. It’s living in the way women think you should live. Civilization is the way of women and man has no place in it.
In the primitive tribe, it suited women to be materialistic, to favor words over action. Their job was to stay put. To make noise when danger approaches. To gather material for survival and keep the group unified.
The man went out into nature with his friends to protect the perimeter from threats and to hunt in order to provide. To survive and thrive in the wild, the man adopted different values from a woman. A woman’s values in the wild were liabilities.
Barbarians had to be self sufficient. They couldn’t depend on women to survive. They had to go out into the wild and fight. The hunter needed a different skill set. He had to be quiet so as to not scare off his prey(recommend reading James Lafond more insight on this, especially how he recounts situations where he was about to be jumped).
They needed strength and power to overcome as well as the conditioning to outlast their prey. They had to embrace the struggle. Possess the courage to go out into darkness, to face danger.
The way of men is the way of becoming predator.
The most important virtue of being a man is not talked about by almost everyone who writes about masculinity. I’ve tried to talk about this when I written on barbaric vitalism, but perhaps barbaric vitalism is too broad a meaning.
A better way to understand a man’s purpose is to remove the complications of civilization completely, what did man do in nature? Man was a hunter, the ultimate predator. You must use this to shift to a more masculine mindset. Masculine gurus often talk on maxing certain virtues like strength, courage, and honor.
These virtues are important, but they don’t make the man. What makes the man is his ability to enter the threshold, to go into the darkness, hunt, and win. What this means is you change how you look at circumstances. You must develop a killer instinct.
The warrior hunter must take life whether it’s a real threat or food. He must look at his enemies as wills that need to be broken. It’s his will vs another’s. My favorite embodiment of this mindset is James Lafond. He spoke on what it’s like to be preyed upon by multiple assailants. He knows he’s going to lose, but he’s resolved to take at least one of them with him to hell.
That killer instinct has saved Lafond during his time in “Harm City” as he calls it. That feeling you get when all you see is red. How can you kill the guy on front of you? The strong silence that takes place, like the Neolithic hunter stalking the lion. Men facing predators with this mentality understand in the blood what they’re about to step into. The coward will break, the man will fight.
Imposing Your Will
Having the killer instinct is the act of imposing your will on your enemies with the intent of breaking their will to fight. You want to break your enemy’s spirit. This takes place both mentally and physically.
To be a man is to be able to hunt and fight. To play this game of breaking wills. To keep your own will unbroken. And where it does crack, to build it back stronger. To build this manly instinct to break wills, you have to face adversity. You have to find your limits and push beyond them.
The Greek world Agon from where we get the word “agony” is what they called conflict, the testing of wills. It’s the struggle. For men, stress is good. Stress is vitalism. You have to learn to live in it. To desire the fight and thrive on the struggle.
Developing the Manly Instinct
The killer instinct must be forged. The Ancient Romans had a powerful understanding of it. They believed each man had an animus, a type of animalistic spirit that a man had to direct towards labor. Ancient Romans wanted to prove the strength of their wills.
Their physical power, vigor, and vitality were all directed to toward labor in the Herculean sense. These men dwelled on how to direct their animus in a way that would bring them glory. To leave their mark on the world. How do you go about developing the killer instinct? The desire to at the very least go out fighting. To break the wills of your enemies as you fight?
While psychology is the game being played, you must train your physicality to bring it out. The most potent way to do this is to fight. Pick up a martial art like boxing, wrestling, Muay Thai. If financially you’re unable to do this, train with your friends. Test your will against other men.
The tamest way to start building this instinct is to powerlift. It’s you vs the iron, which gets progressively heavier over time. As you reach your limits, you must go to war with the weight. It becomes an enemy you have to manhandle in order to win.
However you choose to strengthen your will and build the killer instinct, you must remember to condition and condition hard. The legs feed the wolves. When your conditioning fails, the will follows. Do the hard things. Do the things that test your will. Embrace the struggle.