In his book The Way of Men Jack Donovan defines four universal masculine qualities:

Strength

Courage

Mastery

Honor

I will use this hierarchy of masculine qualities as a model for this discussion. It is significant that the man that finally codified these qualities in a universal manner—much like Joseph Campbell once developed methods for understanding a multitude of spiritual traditions as an expression of a psychological need common to all pre-modern societies—ordered these qualities according to a scheme of spiritual ascent.

I will return to Jack’s Four Tactical Virtues in following chapters. For now, before my discussion of the incompatibility of the primal masculine concept of honor with the feminine construct of modern life, I would like to demonstrate the concept of spiritual ascent via a profile of a man I love, an older fighter who was once sent to a foreign land to kill rice farmers for a nation who hated him.

Victor grew up in a poor ethnic enclave in East Baltimore. Like many small children in such situations he was afraid to defy the cruel adults that ruled his life with fist and belt. Victor did not have a caring mentor. He took out his frustration by fighting other boys on the street, and competing in illegal prizefights in back alleys which would be arranged and bet upon by older boys and men. Without the requisite Strength Victor could not apply the courage he had developed fighting other boys to the purpose of defying the men who were the lid on his circumscribed life.

Eventually, through training and the magic of puberty [envisioned by primitive men as a divine bestowal] Victor eventually acquired the physical strength necessary to increase and apply his psychological strength, or Courage. No longer ruled by his fears, Victor spent the next 50 years of his life as a fighter and trainer of fighters.

By his 50s Victor was regarded as a ‘master’. This is not some magical step. To master a combat art requires courage that is lacking in most people in a civilized society. There are numerous fears that must be overcome through the use of courage: the fear of pain, exhaustion, injury, death, failure, alienation and domination all await the prospective fighter. The vast majority of people who come to me for instruction in stick, blade or fist fighting, fail to attain any significant level of mastery, and usually quit. All such failures are due to a lack of courage in regards to one or more of the fears that haunt a prospective fighter. Victor used his Courage to defeat his fears and attain mastery.

Having attained mastery in the physical arts Victor has devoted himself to the honorable life, a life based on the respect of virtues in others, and facilitated by male alliances sealed with his word as his bond.

Strength enables Courage

Courage enables Mastery

Mastery enables Honor

Honor enables a type of Courage that is not dependent on Strength. Courage without Strength is now the very definition of Victor, who—due to old age and illness resulting from military service—lives in a body weaker by far than the child’s body that was once his prison.

From this vantage of having attained a sense of Honor through the mental discipline necessary to achieve in combat Victor remains in a position to defy anyone—which he does with a quietly cantankerous edge—and also inspire the young fighters he trains. He once dragged himself out of a hospital bed and walked 10 miles in August heat to the gym. I was training some meathead in the back of the facility when I saw the old man walk in. He refused help putting on his uniform and managed to get out on the floor in about a half hour. Victor waved off the applause and walked up to me and said, “I want you to train me James. I cooked my brain out there—can’t remember my forms.”

I turned to the young buck I had been working with, who had been giving up on ever learning how to post the jab, and told him as I nodded to Victor reduced to a simple war with gravity, “The skills are just a way to get where he’s at—and, if you have enough fights, you’ll be where he’s at often.”

Consider this last scene, the old man nearly dead on his feet, having broken out of the hospital that he saw as a slave pen, just so he could get out on the floor and do what to most people is senseless suffering. There are surely lawyers, and social workers, and mommies, and any number of the soulless emasculating agents of society out there who would say those of us at the gym were criminals for applauding Victor when he came out on the floor, and that I should be ashamed that I encouraged him in his mad pursuit when he should have been in a hospital bed.

I wanted to write of Victor and his little revolt against the tranny bitch that owns us to point out that our society is ordered around the concept of denying the man his transcendental moment. In our sick mind the only person deserving of such moments are those State licensed athletes who rent such moments from society with entertainment.

Last week, after the trip to work during which I saw a squad of heavily armed cops and their half dozen vehicles devoting themselves to the herculean task of keeping one white boy from getting high, and then walked past what seemed to be an attempt by another white boy to settle his drug debt by lending his woman to a van full of black guys, I returned via the same route in the dim light of an overcast morning.

As I neared the bus stop I noted two different busloads of people offloading from other lines to wait for the cross town bus I would be boarding. This is a good time to observe people as they tend to be in a lethargic state and are not very observant. Two fit young men off-loaded and stepped out in front of traffic. Confident that no cowardly white person would dare strike them with their car or even so much as beep the horn, these youths walked very slowly, holding up traffic, spitting repeatedly on the ground [a habit of nearly all Baltimore blacks] and delighting in their ability to intimidate.

A young woman followed them, dropping her trash in the street five feet before reaching the trash bin. As I came to stand off behind them an elderly white man was hobbling across the street on his cane. Not able to take both lanes without making motorists wait he stood on the center line to permit traffic to flow, and then continued across to the stop. Young people where eating and drinking and throwing their trash on the ground around the trash bin and spitting continuously.

The old man nodded respectfully to me and then hobbled over to the trash bin to put his gum wrapper in the can. This may seem petty to the reader, so let me go back 14 years to a bus stop scene.

About ten white people were at a county bus stop. I and a Latino punk showed up at the same time. The stop was trash free, the assembled patrons placing their coffee cups in the trash bin. This punk ate two chocolate iced Tasty Cakes as he leaned on the trash bin and then held the wrapper out and dropped it on the sidewalk. He looked to every face there except for mine and made eye contact, daring the gathered vaginas and manginas to object.

This is intimidation, plain and simple. This punk is telling the gathered women and cowards that he hates them and will defile their habitat and is further their master, for they fear him. This dynamic here at this 2001 bus stop is the social dynamic that dominates American culture. People who trash their environment visibly like this, particularly by spitting constantly, are saying, “I spit on you and your world—say something weakling.”

Nobody says anything because honor is dead.

Nobody does anything because courage is a worthless trait that belongs to the past ages of men. We now live in the age of women.

I usually ignore this.

The punk used action and posture rather than words to insult and threaten a small herd of civilized cattle.

The cattle, conditioned to believe in a non-nuanced, and purely material world, reverted to their conditioning and acted as if they had not been insulted or threatened. Indeed, although men have long ago worked out the body language of aggression, defiance and submission, our womanly legal codes have not. This punk’s action could never be categorized as aggression by a society built on the premise that submission is achieved without aggression, but out of a naturally compliant mother order.

This entire denatured little amorality play irked me, so I took a dollar out of my pocket, walked up to the punk leaning on the trash can, glared into his face as I crumpled up the dollar, and then pushed him into the gutter with my shoulder. He stepped down with one foot and looked up at me like a child—and I suppose he was—as I placed the dollar in the trash can and snarled at him—just silently barring my teeth.

He walked around and hid behind the shelter as the gathered women looked at me like I was some evil fiend for bullying this punk. This one cow actually looked angry with me. Moments before they had been swallowing hard, blinking their eyes, and looking down and away from their little brown conqueror—men and women both. Now, at this juncture, the women eyed me angrily and the men looked at their shoes. I have often wondered what this scene meant socially, other than as an example of white inferiority.

I think now, after seeing the old man at the bus stop last week, that this is an example of a collective white female yearning to denature men. The old man’s next act was to stand back as the bus pulled up—and standing was hard work for him—so that the other patrons could get on first. It was a cold moist nasty day. The muscular young black men leaped on first in front of the old lady, the young pregnant woman with the toddler, and the girl who had thrown trash in the street. As is generally the case with black women, no matter how ghetto, slutty or well-mannered, they appreciate it visibly when a man steps aside and lets them board first.

Interestingly enough most white women under 60 object to a man doing this. In my mind this is about respect for a man’s claim to one of our lingering artifices of honor should he choose to make it [unlike the well proportioned manginas leaping in out of the cold ahead of the elderly and pregnant] and the white woman’s commitment to total emasculation of our gender, even going so far as to deny one of the minor, residual artifices of an outmoded code of honor.

The last two in line, the old man motioned for me to go first, nodding to his leg, and indicating that he did not want to hold up boarding. I showed him that I was paying cash so would be holding up the loading process compared to him showing his disability pass, and he boarded ahead of me. The middle aged female driver [they are all black] nodded to the young men primping in their hand held mirrors, rapping with their headsets on, and playing video games as I fed money into the meter. She then gave me the single slowly batted eyelash of approval, then as I looked to the rear to pick out a seat she captioned the quality of the young men on the bus, “Baby, we ain’t neva’ winnin’ anotha’ war with a nation full of that.”

This brief experience compared with my memory of the long ago trash bin standoff about 10 miles off, symbolizes in my mind the weakness of the American man down to the most trivial level. As a boxing coach I know that the small details are not merely trivial but a crack in a fighter’s psyche, which when things get tough is all he has. What I see in these incidents is the refusal of men to separate themselves behaviorally from women and to adopt complimentary roles, and the refusal of most women to see a man’s adoption of a complimentary role as anything other than a threat.

I will expand this concept into more lethal ground in The Women We Have Left Behind.

The purpose of this book is largely to track what I see as something dichotomous, that hierarchies, which are such an integral part of masculine culture—even to the type of Omega male I refer to as a Taboo Man—have became the very means of social emasculation.

As I was mulling this question over in my mind the other day I was delivering a stack of books—all written by the same asshole—to Doc Landon. I had to deliver these books, and had two people try to talk me out of it because it was raining. After all, what could be so important about dropping some books off to a friend? I explained that Doc gives me free medical care in return for me coaching his MMA team in boxing, but that due to scheduling hassles with those who manage the facility this had not been possible since before three visits ago. I was told that my ‘weird man-thing’ reciprocal relationship was not necessary, that I should just get free healthcare, and that Doc, being a wealthy doctor after all, should be buying the books.

This type of reasoning is where materialism goes, right down the asshole of the mind. Once a price has been assigned to us we are no longer supposed to be men but citizens, all calculating the cost/benefit ratio of our every human interaction like some limp-dicked libertarian determining that chattel slavery was beneficial to the enslaved as it offered more security than the hazards of escape.

When I reached Doc’s office so that the nut would have something more fun to read than medical journals on his stationary bike his receptionist could not believe that I would not sit and wait for him to come out and thank me in person. In fact all of the females in the office seemed bemused that I did not express a need to hug him or shake his hand or bask in his gratitude, and that he did not seem insulted that I would not wait around for a greeting. Doc takes care of many local fighters gratis. Knuckleheads coming in to say hello, they understand. But two men having some kind of minimal contact reciprocal relationship—an alliance—just does not factor in the female mind.

I first got to know Doc when he tapped me as a sparring partner for his stick-fighters—about 15 high school athletes ranging from 80-350 pounds. He would eventually use me as a specialized boxing coach. But for the first few years my job was to brutalize and confound his students. He introduced me in the gym with a pointed finger, “This is the Maniac LaFond. He fights with machetes and beat the shit out of men with sticks. You will attempt to do the same to him.”

Two hours a night twice a week I sparred in the weight room with young men as more of a manhood ritual for them than anything. Doc refused to let this experience descend to a technical level with his fighters. He told me, “I have the curriculum they need. But with this generation—even the tough kids—they are all so pampered. I want you to separate them from that.”

Once when he stopped into the weight room to watch, as one of the students had told him I was hurt [my thumb had been broken by an oak katana], the kid I was sparring with stepped back between rounds and inquired as to a technical point. Doc shook his head, and sneered, “Are you kidding me? He’s tired, old and hurt. Just beat his ass!”

With those words Doc walked out and the kid looked at me with big eyes, having got the message that this was about forging an identity, not learning the latest trick. That identity, that sense of masculine self, that is what honor is built on, the foundation that the men you interact with base their expectations on. There have been many codes of honor, down to the trivial remnants in western culture like holding a door for a woman.

Something as minor as that is still a statement of personal quality; a symbolic act that a man holds himself to a higher standard than women and children and that he looks out for those under his care before himself—down to the most minor detail. Such quaint and outmoded acts are really just behavioral artifices that remind the actor of a commitment to an internal discipline, which is a kind of separation. Before closing this chapter another anecdote will hopefully clear up this point.

I was standing at a bar having a draft with a lady when the barmaid asked me to pick her up a certain pastry that was only made at the food market where I worked. I agreed to acquire the delicacy. The woman next to me pointed at a shapely young lady dancing in front of the juke box and said, “You’d be on that in a heartbeat—and I’d understand.”

She then pointed at the biker babe barmaid as she spilled out of her top digging beers out of the cooler and emphasized, “But if you ever fuck that whore—we’re done!”

She’s not a man, so we didn’t shake hands. But this astute lady correctly guessed that the barmaid had previously expressed an interest in me and decided to use my sense of obligation to my own word—which is the corner stone of most honor codes, without which such codes fail to function—to shore up her limited claim on my time and affection. This particular woman I am speaking of has had to live largely as a man in the ruins of our fractured society—raising children alone, fighting off rapists and muggers with her fists. But, she has learned that the only way she can really protect herself or the younger women who work under her in a high crime area, is by cultivating friendships and alliances with dangerous men who live by a code of honor. If it comes down to the oft-evoked 'zombie apocalypse' she's prepared, and has a better idea of how archaic men function than do most postmodern men. Meanwhile, for every retro-woman like her there are a hundred calling for your castration.

The ancient Spartans had an apothegm attributed to their legendary founder Lykurgus that gets to the core value that is common to most honor systems, “Give a pledge, and suffer for it.”

This is counter to the modern ethos, and the very concept is understood by few and agreed upon by fewer. The concept has largely fallen into disrepute outside of criminal fraternities, where, in the absence of enforceable law, honor and honor-based obligations retain much of their utility, until everyone gets busted and begins flipping on each other as soon as the legal apparatus of the State turns a sense of honor into a fool’s liability.