Chapter 2: We are Tools

Previous chapter Next chapter

Chapter 2: We are Tools

‘‘During the Second World War, in June of 1944, over a million conscripted young men were ordered to prepare for the Normandy landings. On D-Day, those fresh recruits were ordered to charge against entrenched machine-gun on open ground. During the Battle of Normandy, nearly half a million casualties were counted amongst both camps. These soldiers that made the ultimate sacrifice were good men, but not good in the sense that they were noble or courageous, but good for that they died for the benefit of their society. Their ‘‘goodness’’ did not come from their values or their sacrifice, but from their willingness to be used by other, from their readiness to be a tool.

It is men and boys, often with their bloody corpses, which oil the machinery of civilization. After all, who would care about thousands of chicken, pigs, and cows being massacred, or about several industrial complexes being burnt down? Yes, it would be a financial hindrance, but it would not be enough to generate outrage. Apparently, that is what men are. That is your purpose as a man. If you are a man, you are not a human; you are a draft animal. You are a protector and a provider. You are a task machine. You are a cash dispenser.

Then, if men’s deaths are inconsequential, it must be that men are not human. Then, what are men? Are they slaves? No, slaves are people, it can’t be it… Are men animals? No, it can’t be it either. Then, it must be that men are devices, appliances, pieces of equipment, mechanisms, parts, and gears that fit on a more massive machine.’’

– johntheother –

We could put this in more elegant terms, and say that men are ‘‘heroes’’. A hero is a person who, in the face of danger, combats adversity through feats of ingenuity, bravery, and strength, often sacrificing their own personal well being for the greater good. Heroes always seem to be the persistent type. They never give up, and if they do, they eventually realize that they must continue onward anyways. Not for themselves, but for others. Others need them, and so they continue to do what they believe needs to be done despite the hardships and pain. A hero always appears to give no regard to his life if it is required. Whether or not he is truly afraid of dying is of no consequence; a hero will always risk or give up his life in an attempt to do what he believes is right. In fiction, heroes almost always survive, but in real life they die. They are forgotten, forever buried under the dirt, carnage, and hopelessness that they felt before their untimely end. A ‘‘heroes’’ is the perfect disposable man with buttery cream and cute little flowers on top of his hat. He’s fine merchandise used to attract more young men into the blood-soaked trenches of war. Even if such a person were to survive, this ‘‘hero’’ would get discarded by society as soon as his purpose was accomplished.

After all, a soldier returning to civilization is like a katana in a kitchen.

Military men sacrifice their "gentle" values to a certain degree in exchange for the more primal, savage attitude needed to survive when in service to one's country. Once awakened, these instincts never truly go away, and society can sense this. The populace demands that a certain group of people make the sacrifice of war for the "greater good", but when the soldiers return home they are unwelcomed and ostracized; most people would rather they go and disappear since they make them uncomfortable.

On the other end, a soldier missing a limb or afflicted with a post-traumatic stress disorder resulting from warfare will be discarded like a broken tool. A knife with a dull edge is useless, and veterans will receive little empathy for the horrific endeavor they had to go through.

But the problem goes much deeper than that. A lot of veterans who come back from war suffer from PTSD and can’t sleep at night. A number will turn to alcohol and drug abuse; some may become homeless, while others will even commit suicide. While I can’t say that I understand every circumstance that those men face, I can tell that their ongoing pain does not come solely from what they experienced during their service. It came from their loss of identity.

If you are a soldier who received a medical discharge with a disability check, the chances are that just after being sent out from your unit your ties to the military were cut clean. As a military man, you have forged your identity as a soldier for years through sweat, lead and blood, and you are a proud member of the army. That is what you aspired to be, that is what you worked hard to become, that is what you are, and now that has been taken away from you. Now that you have been thrown back into the ‘‘real world’’, you don’t know who you are anymore. You don’t know what you should do, and unlike in the military, nobody is here to tell you what to do. No one is there to bark orders at you, no one will grant you the answers you seek.

If you’re not doing anything, you’re not worth anything. You’re not a human being, but a human doing. Whether for the army or society, the chances are that your entire reason for being was to be a tool, a resource. But the sad reality is that numerous younger men are there, readily taking your place, and you can never return to the past.

If you feel like a dulled edged, the obvious thing to do would be to ‘‘re-sharpen the knife’’ and go back to work. And just like a cog in the gear, that is precisely what you should be thinking; that is what society has conditioned you to believe. If you oblige to this idea, then yes, you are a soldier, you are a thing, a tool, and you do not have any worth more than what you can do. You may feel hopeless, alone, and used. This could lead you to a dark path that’s hard to come back from.

Military men aren’t the only one suffering from this inner identity war, as divorced men face the exact same issue. When their role of father, husband, and provider is taken from them by their spouse or an unjust family court system, their sense of identity gets obliterated and this is precisely why they are a group with one of the highest risks for suicide. Just like service men, divorced men were gears, tools meant to do a job. When they got thrown away, they lost everything, including themselves. They don’t know who they are anymore, and they are lost in a thick fog of quiet desperation. It’s not just the money, or the child support that they ought to pay that traps them in despair. Divorced men feel alone, depressed, and they have nothing to fill the void, nothing to live for.

Nations need men to be utilities, as it requires men to sacrifice themselves, and the leaders who run these nations have no incentive toward changing this dynamic. Society will make you feel as if you have no worth outside of what you do because that will keep you content with what little you receive. Otherwise, no man would have gone to the Normandy landings. No man, even one who has only the tiniest speck of self-respect, would willingly sacrifice himself with little to no benefits.

A self-actualized man will not take a deal that is not mutually beneficial, and that is a threat to the greater machine that runs on the corpses of men. It is a threat to the normal functions of society.

There is a bitter fatality in all of this. Fixing the problem and healing men would fundamentally break the system, and that is why society will never work to address the deeper issues plaguing men’s lives.

Male disposability is at the root of every successful civilization. It comes from our baser instincts, mainly from the sex drive that pushes males to take risks in order to gain access to mating opportunities, and it is reinforced manifolds by culture. But more than that, male disposability stands from the law of the jungle. If all the men in a specific country woke up and decided unanimously to stop being disposable, they would become vulnerable to foreign threats. With no group of men willing to sacrifice themselves, they would eventually be conquered by the stronger neighbor that does uphold the ideals of male disposability.

A society composed of self-actualized men won’t last long. Its internal machinery (which should routinely be oiled by men’s blood) will slowly rust and crumble in on itself. After 12,000 years of human civilization, why is it that we do not have a single society of men who seek internal validation instead of external validation as a whole? It is that it cannot exist, and it never will. No matter what we try, a chair with only one leg will always fall down…

To put it plainly, a society that does not intensely pursue their most primal mandates or a group of people that do not place their biological imperatives as their first and most crucial priority is guaranteed to be erased from the surface of the earth. They will be replaced and conquered by other groups that are more focused on survival and reproduction (and thusly more successful). This is why men will never be ‘‘awoken’’ en mass. As a species, we will never evolve past our primal urges, fated to be forever led by the whims of our most profound primitive programming.

According to the laws of physics, everything in our universe tries to move toward its ground state, where it is completely stable. What is true for energy systems is applicable to society as well.

Our societies also tend to reach a sort of ‘‘ground state’’. As a species, we naturally gravitate via process of elimination and natural selection toward the most stable evolutionary strategy. A stable evolutionary strategy stands for a strategy that cannot be bettered by alternatives nor can it be threatened by deviant individuals within the population. To explore this idea, I will have to do some simple theorizing. (To learn more about evolutionary stable strategies I suggest learning about ‘‘The hawk vs. dove game theory model’’.)

If every person in a particular society was inherently good, hard-working, and honest, these people could have a more productive and prosperous community compared to their neighboring nations. But a group of innately kind people is not a stable strategy. Humans are selfish at heart, and this group of good people would be a huge chuck of juicy meat for the scammers, the liars, and the deceitful people, who would all quickly flock to such a place. Even if this particular society were isolated from the rest of the world, people from the inside would adapt and abuse the sincerity of others for the simple reason that there is too much to gain. Taking a larger piece of the pie, especially if there were no consequences in doing so, is an opportunity that is too appetizing to refuse. Once a few people began cheating, everybody would quickly realize that not everyone was obeying the rules, and the citizens of this nation would have to adapt their behaviors.

A society composed entirely of con artists, deceivers, and tricksters wouldn’t work either, as everyone would constantly be at a loss. With no one working hard and everybody trying to feed off of one another, it wouldn’t be long before everything would fall apart.

It is impossible to have a utopian society that solely consist of ‘‘good’’ people. Nor could you, however, have a homogenous community of deceivers, you’d have to have a mix of both. In fact, most people would find themselves between the two extremes. Let’s call this group the gray group. Acting deceitfully when there are great rewards to be reaped (and when the risks of getting caught are low) while working honestly most of the time is a better strategy for most individual, and it enables a society to functions without too much itches. After a process of selection and optimization, a balance will arise with a stable ratio between the purely good people, the gray group and the deceivers. Once this process comes to fruition and solidifies, the only thing capable of changing the delicate ratio between these groups would be a significant environmental change. For example, economic collapses are known to drastically alter people’s behaviours. Crimes like theft and armed robbery tend to go up when money and food are scarce. Venezuela’s recent economic crisis is a good example of this phenomenon.

Desperate people in Venezuela don’t rob stores or banks. There would be no point; hyperinflation transformed the bolívar into a worthless piece of paper and cash machines are mostly empty.

But desperate people in Venezuela do rob restaurants. Empty stomachs are driving people from all walks of life into crime and fueling an unprecedented wave of violence. In this type of environment, being a deceiver may be a better adaptation (for immediate survival) than being an honest person.

Although this example is simplistic, it serves as a helpful example for my next point. Having too many men that self-actualize isn’t a stable strategy, and as such, it cannot be sustained nor can it work.

As I write this book, we may have a lot more Men Going Their Own Way, Red-Pilled men, and confirmed bachelors than should be common, and we may be tempted to think that more and more men are embracing self-actualization. But don’t be fooled, as that phenomenon is 100% caused by socio-political factors such as feminism and a socialist economy. In the current system (primarily in western countries) men are disenfranchised and are ejected out of their traditional role. In more than a few ways, a growing number of modern men are compelled to find their own path, not because they seek it, but out of necessity. However, things will return to their ground state when this unsustainable system inevitably crumbles.

As a whole, human existence will always be more or less the same. Nature can only allow a certain number of self-actualized people to see the light of day, and we can’t, nor should we expect anything different.

But that doesn’t mean all is hopeless. Sadly, we can’t liberate all men; it isn’t even a remote possibility. However, what you do with your life is what truly matters. In the end, only your truth matters. For me, if I can make a positive change in the lives of only a few men, it will be a life well lived.

I cannot give you the perfect answer, but I can point you toward the path of self-actualization, and it begins by seeking validation from within yourself instead of seeking it from external sources; from others. If you decide to ascertain your own sense of worth, no one will be able to manipulate or hurt you. You will be free, and with time you will heal.

Ask yourself who you really are. It may hard and it may be complicated, but you can begin by looking at what you are not. Take a good look at all of those roles and things that you have always identified yourself with and strip them away. Are you a soldier? Are you a provider? Are you your job? Are you your money? Are you your status? Are you a tool? Are you a human doing? Are you what people expect of you? No, no, and more no. Take all the artificial stuff off of you. Get down to the most simple, uncomplicated, necessary things that define you. Start from there when trying to figure it out.

Unfortunately, group therapy and modern treatments centered on feelings, better geared toward women, won’t usually address these broader issues. Even with the help of the best psychologist, self-actualization can only emerge from within the patient. A counsellor can’t ‘‘give’’ self-actualization to his patient. Therapists can share some tools with their clients so that they may think more accurately about the world around them and perhaps differently than they already know how to think. A therapist can also create an environment where the patient can explore his thoughts, emotions, the causes behind his destructive patterns, and he can promote growth in his patient. However, self-actualisation is a personal matter and you are the only one who can search for it.

Humans are extremely vulnerable when they start their journey into the world, and for a small child whose whole existence and well-being depends on others, rejection actually equals death. In order to keep receiving the continual protection from his caretakers, the small child must learn early in life that it is important to please them. When someone disapproves of and invalidates his behaviors, the child will feel a diverse palette of painful emotions such as shame, guilt, anger, loneliness, anxiety, and confusion. Since he learned to seek external validation since the beginning of his cognitive development, the child that has now grown into a man, might spend his whole life (and many do) chasing after the acceptance of ohters, and feel terrified of rejection.

If you want to embark on the journey of self-actualization, you will have to find your own personal answers. Nobody can do that for you. What you may discover won’t always be pretty, and sometimes you may feel frustrated or depressed, but it’s worth it in the end. The freedom that comes from liberating yourself from external validation is the greatest gift that you can gift yourself. True worth comes from within, and that, nobody can steal it from you.

I personally found some of my own answers in optimistic nihilism. To put it simply, those who embrace nihilism reject the identities placed upon themselves by society and have the option of forging a new one to better suit their needs. But that’s the subject for another chapter.

“What the superior man seeks is in himself; what the small man seeks is in others.”

- Confucius –

“Freedom on the inside comes when validation from the outside doesn’t matter.”

- Richie Norton –

“Do not wait for someone else to validate your existence; it is your own responsibility.”

- Jasz Gill –

“Boys come into the world with less human capital than do girls; in other words, boys are less human than girls.”

- Kay S. Hymowitz –

This chapter was inspired by Turd Flinging Monkey's video titled ‘‘Broken Tool Support Group (MGTOW)’’as well as johntheother’s video titled ‘‘Patriarchy: Women Own You.’’

I highly suggest that you check out their YouTube channels if you haven't already.

Previous chapter Next chapter