“If you’re gonna hunt, you have to get off the trail.”

-Hunting Guide, Smith-Morehouse Canyon, 9/4/18

Every survival writer tells us that no man is capable by himself to surmount danger, to survive a second.

Masculinity writers speak of man as nothing without being a cog in a machine, a step in a hierarchy.

At every turn, government schools and TV teach and preach the herd instinct applied to people.

Is it so, is every man helpless, a mere baby facing a group of men, are we nothing but the potential bullets for a collective gun?

We might as well ask, “Am I nothing, or am I something?”

Myth, primeval, ancient, medieval, modern and postmodern all have one obsession in common, the lone hero, the individual fighting man [now being replaced by the woman in a final bid to extinguish our soul where it flickers.] The continued production of super soldier movies, outside of the hero-negating superhero faɡɡotry, is evidence, even in the process of its systemic negation by the non-heroic editors and producers of fiction and film, that a desire for heroic images is inseparable from the human imagination. In fact, those people who I can recall preaching to me that heroism is not possible, have been people with a strident lack of imagination. I once had a reader complain to me that a hero I wrote could not do a certain number of repetitions of an exercise, when I had done that exact number myself and was aware of men ten times stronger than I.

As usual, an argument is posed which is ridiculous. We must believe either that only lone bad-asses prevail or that only senseless mobs prevail, when in fact, those that prevail are usually small cohesive groups of individual combatants.

This goes far beyond combat and applies to even the most mundane work. When I was running a night crew for a grocer who lost his entire crew through drugs and alcohol every week, he hired me 15 men to do the work of 5. So, into the 5 aisles I put 3 men each. Not a team made any real progress. Finally Paul came to me and said, “Could you please get these faɡɡots out of the aisle so I can work.”

I placed these two men in the next aisle, where the 3 there had not done a thing.

Paul finished in 2 hours.

Not another aisle was even a fraction done.

I cleared three men from one aisle and put them in the middle aisle—now 8 men strong!

By the time Paul finished their aisle, no one else was even half done.

Eventually Paul and I, having herded away the three man teams and finishing the aisles, looked upon the center aisle, 14 men strong, still not half of the work done. I dismissed them all and we finished it in an hour. Pau and I could easily freight that store on our own.

Okay, that is just stocking groceries. But what about shooting?

I was shooting tennis ball size rocks with Ishmael, who missed 1 in 9, while I hit 1 in 9. A mathematician should be able to figure out how many of me would be required to beat him in a gun fight. If my experience with clerks and athletes is any guide, the more men who do not have proficiency in a thing, who you throw into an increasingly chaotic situation, the worse they will perform.

People that think elite warriors cannot exist, must, by the same logic, also believe that an NFL team could defeat a chess champion in chess as they collectively debated their every move.

I think humans know, deep down, that the most effective combatants, or actionists in mundane endeavors, are those who are effective on their own, and then amplify their effectiveness by not just combining with others, but multiplying their effectiveness through team work, which is merely an interactive skill set.

When a survivalist says one man cannot be effective, he is overstating the case to instill caution and guard against foolhardiness.

When a masculinist says that a man is nothing without other men, well, than he is letting us know that he feels like nothing without other men to support and protect him. He’s a collectivist.

When the government reminds us that we are nothing alone, it is predisposing us to join the SYSTEM or oppose it by concentrating our numbers so we can be crushed with one stamp of the iron heel.

There were practical reason why the ancients told stories of lone heroes, because a band might be split up somehow and one might need be a lone hero until he rejoined his brothers.

There is also another possibility, that the idea of the hero is cyclically ancient, that the ancient ancestral memories of lone heroes like Odysseus and Roland might be a residue of a fallen civilization—the fallen MONSTER CIVILIZATION—and that our legends of barbarian heroes might be of the dissenting mind unconquered.

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