One of the topics that filters through this magnificent site in discussion is that of the Taboo man: to be or not to be. The Taboo man, as detailed in James LaFond’s masterwork, Taboo You (2014) is a “Man with No Name” loner, making his way through the crumbling ruins of the West. He is a barbarian, being the ultimate outsider and rejecter of the values of the establishment, but is not a communitarian, maintaining his own company by preference.
This contrasts with the masculine tribalism of Jack Donovan in The Way of Men (2012) and mere recently, Becoming a Barbarian (2016). The thesis of The Way of Men is that manliness is intrinsically intertwined with “the way of the gang” and that the history of the human race has been that of men in survival gangs or tribes dealing with threats from other tribes and nature.
Tribal groups have thus been the building blocks of societies and civilizations, and still are. The tribe, a band of brothers, is thus a more fundamental unit than the family, and historically families probably came into existence as a way of social reproducing the tribe, a gang of hunters and protectors.
Today, feminized contemporary society which characterizes the West, crushes masculine virtues of strength, courage, mastery and honor. Donovan sees no hope for manhood under these conditions and looks forward to a collapse of the state, so that in a post-collapse Wild West world, men will be able to be men again, rather than domesticated farm animals as they are now. By contrast, James LaFond in his fiction already sees that collapse as well underway, as reported from the violence of the street. The Wild West frontier, is now everywhere.
Should one be a Taboo Man or a masculine tribalist? The choice is a false one because it is really not something one choses: one either is a Taboo man or is not, and one naturally gravitates towards a gang or one does not. Some people cannot function without being in a sea of people, so tribalism will come naturally when it is time to re-tribalize and circle the wagons. But the Taboo man knows that as J-P Sartre once put it in his existential phase in his play, No Exit (1944), before embracing trendy 1960s Parisian neo-Marxism, “Hell is other people.” Community can be an illusion.
A lot of bad shit has happened since the dawn of modernity and it may not be possible for some groups who have been totally bum-fucked by individualism and universalism to embrace communitarianism and ethno-racial particularism. White Europeans especially have a deluded sense of their own grand importance and universality, and have swallowed whole bottles of toxins such as liberalism. At present, they are dying from the Satanic toxins of postmodernity.
But the ruling truth of the universe is that we are all expendable, and will be inevitably expended, perhaps sooner than we think. Individuals, peoples, the human race. The great rule of the cosmos is the second law of thermodynamics: you’re fucked, and sooner than you think.
In the coming collapse that Donovan anticipates, perhaps most of us will be without any tribe or backup, fighting to save our own decaying hides as the world burns. We will be Taboo Men, whether we like it or not.
"At present, they are dying from the Satanic toxins of postmodernity." Great line, there.
Reading HG Wells 'Outline of History,' the long Roman twilight and post-collapse period, 500-1100 AD, a time dominated by fiefdoms, kings, sultans, emperors, warlords, armies, one is impressed at once by the futility of it all and an appreciation of what rollicking good fun it must, at times, have been. Sadly, history does not record the solitary drifter, the ones who escape through the cracks, other than oddballs here and there like Peter the Hermit. But Krum, King of (if I remember) the bad-ass Bulgarians (actively terrorizing the hood circa 800 AD), he who drank from the skull of the slain Fresh Prince of Constantinople...aye, there's a Taboo Man who made good!