‘Manliness requires the opportunity for risk, and those opportunities are decreasing in our highly controlled, pacified society. Men need chaos to restart the world.’

-Jack Donavan, from an interview

From age six to thirteen I grew into a person that was deeply distrustful of adults, the crazy senseless adult world, and the schools that were used by this sick adult world to inflict their sick ideas on me. Most of the kids I knew believed all of this shit, hence I hated them. Since I had been alienated and bullied for every memorable moment of my life I had a visceral aversion to all things adult and school.

I was not, however, a smart boy; not particularly bright. I just knew that the world was wrong. I had no idea what was right, only that adult values were wrong—abusively wrong. Then, one day, Ted, my father, who had been trying to reach my retreating and increasingly psychopathic mind through books, brought home Conan the Wanderer, the 4th volume in the Ace series of Conan paperbacks. I read it until the wee hours of the morning, and when I woke, I woke reborn, with a value system, with a belief in what was right.

Conan the Barbarian—a character created by Robert E. Howard, a man who resented America for selling out to Wall Street, and killed himself in his prime rather than live on in a denatured world—was right.

School was wrong.

Church was wrong.

Mom, despite her desire to do right, was definitely wrong.

Dad seemed to have an idea as to what was right but veered away from it.

Grandpa Kern, my mother’s dad, he knew what was right, and said it. Grandpa was a man of Robert E. Howard’s time, and he knew for certain, by 1973, that the world of adults had stepped off a cliff. His advice to me and my brother was to avoid anything to do with the government and the military. Ever since that day when Grandpa sat us down and had us watch the Vietnam War movie ‘The Boy’s of Company C’ I have remained steadfastly a crackpot who believes the world is a festering pool of corruption. By age 18 I had my own set of hardened values, based on reading a blood-drenched reactionary sword and sorcery fantasy penned in the 1930s and watching that anti-war movie with our family patriarch.

Now, as I coast downhill to defiant death through an America where a socially acceptable family may not have a patriarch, I have viewed a speech by a young writer who articulates everything that I have believed since I was a 13-year-old boy, and believed it for no better reasons than those cited above.

Jack correctly defines ‘barbarian’ as an ancient Greek term for an outsider who lived according to a lifeway that was outside the bounds of The State. He goes on to make many quotable points which you are better served viewing for yourself than reading my interpretation. If you have any liberal sensibilities Jack might strike you as being on a slippery racial slope at the outset. Stick with him until the end, when he discusses why non-white immigrant communities have more than a few things to teach the reviled ‘Whiteman’ of post-apocalyptic America about living free.

Great job Jack.

If you like Jack's video, or are interested in my alienated view of the world, check out Why I Am Not A Martial Artist and Through A Glass Darkly.