James, in the blurb for your breakout masculinity book Taboo You, you, or it seems your publisher, wrote:

“Taboo You is his advice for living such a life if you so choose, and how to survive with dignity, as an individual, in our sick tribal world.”

Based on your recent pro-tribalism writing what should we think about this?

-Eugene

Eugene, you are supposed to think I’m a hypocrite and discount everything I’ve written. So thanks for giving me this chance. I published that book myself, so the blurb was all mine.

The premise of this book was that the then recent “manosphere” wisdom that a man is nothing without a gang or a tribe and that a tribe is a strict corporate or military style hierarchy, constituted a modern misunderstanding of the primal social unit which straddles family and politics and is the lynch-pin between the world as we know it and the world as mankind knew it for most of human existence.

These cartoonish to feral tribal constructs like biker gangs, street gangs and drum circles mirror not the family-oriented tribe but the masculine society, those specific and very important organizations that, in tribal times, straddled tribes and were often intertribal men’s associations of taboo nature and survived into national times, and would seem to be well-positioned to thrive in the coming post-national times, as “secret societies” or multinational fraternities.

I also wanted to set the record straight that the hundreds of tribes I have studied are rarely—unless in Africa—strict big man societies, but rather interdependent spheres of often non-coercive hierarchies within the tribe.

I further sought to explain my place as one of the rare men in my city who had maintained his physical autonomy without a gang or a click or a club to back me and had successfully stood up to no less than three criminal organizations and had also avoided the vile attentions of the Baltimore Police Department, the largest criminal organization in my home town. I did this by noting that tribal societies were not strictly alpha over beta hierarchies of brute force, merit or compliance, but places in the collective human mind where set-aside positions for wrong thinkers and thought criminals tended to benefit the community by offering an advisory perspective. In his book Typee, about his being marooned on a Pacific Island, Herman Melville met such a man, a travelling man with wives in each of the three rival tribes, all of which he served in an advisory, news reporting and diplomatic capacity. I read this book as I read Jack Donovan’s The Way of Men and it occurred to me then, on that bus, that our society is sick and that our various residual and resurgent tribal ideals [such as heroism and manhood and masculine affiliation] are most sick of all, to the point where a man of my oddly alien frame of mine faces a more dynamic and many-faceted wilderness of opportunities and pitfalls than the hermits, shaman, poets, sorcerers and various taboo “omega” men of past ages, while the social climber—the alpha-male or chieftain type ascends an ever more narrow course in his natural pursuit of power.

As for the third type of man, the beta-male, the follower, the joiner, the nodding heads in the chorus of ascent, they are not my concern, for they are the steers, eunuchs, grogs, NPCs and geldings of our kind, the pawns and obstacles of the alpha and the omega, the chieftain and the trickster who are the only true actors on the human stage. I totally reject the Huxley masculine lettering system and classify men as Alpha leader types, Beta follower types [essentially female of mind] and Omega outliers with a place in the tribal sphere but not on the narrow post tribal path to the corporate top.

Masculinity

Biography