The Sensitive Young Man Must Dream of Annihilating Everything That Exists

Lord Help Me, I've Seen a Meme.

3,692 words.

I’ve come to believe that the most pronounced characteristic of the masculine condition is imagining what peak masculinity ought to be and then contrasting oneself against that. Despite claims that the requirements of masculinity have ebbed and flowed erratically across time, I believe they’ve been rather consistent while undergoing changes primarily in fashion while the nucleus of the masculine ideal is made of sturdier stuff.

One controversial trait that is frequently handwaved away as feminine is what some call “drama,” others might call “gossip,” but is summarized best as speaking about people behind their backs. You’d be hard pressed to find anyone that defends trafficking in rumors, despite the fact that everyone seems to do it. Most importantly, men are purportedly above it, choosing instead to engage the object of their scorn directly rather than clandestine politicking. Conversely, this is understood to be the root of female power and their capacity to conjure whisper campaigns against their targets is widely accepted.

I do not see the interest in rumors as an inherently feminizing trait, and while male hierarchies are purportedly designed to solve this issue, it seems obvious to me that discussion of an individual’s behavior, personality, or faults exists in every grouping from military units to boardrooms. Regardless of whatever tier of operator you are in your given field, rumors will emerge of someone’s substance abuse problems, their sexual peculiarities, or their hidden traumas that could compromise the group. It is easy to accuse strangers in the arena of discursive combat, but compatriots and comrades require a comprehensive case to be gathered beforehand. Wherever a man has chosen to keep a secret there will be gossip, even in the interest of formulating a plan of action.

The drive that would make a woman want to know if her friend fellated ten men that previous weekend is shared by men concerning their comrades. Brainstorming must occur and the truth must be uncovered, especially in a high-trust organization.

While men and women utilize similar tactics, they have different methodologies and ultimately different moral frameworks. A common argument is that women simply lie more, they are liars and lie because it is their nature, whereas men strive to live in the truth because life isn’t a game.

In reality women likely do lie more often especially to each other, but women are aware they lie just as much as men are, and that awareness is key to understanding their social interactions. The feminine experience is to create a hybrid ecosystem between truth and fiction to generate a social game, one that frequently frustrates men standing outside of it. However, it is incorrect to say men don’t have affiliation networks and whisper campaigns involving each other, even if the end goal is terminal conflict or exile.

This is why “cancel culture” is not historically remarkable, rather an essential aspect of a high trust society. We always have the mechanisms to segregate, ostracize, and expunge problem individuals even if their behavior is not explicitly criminal. In healthy societies where every social norm need not be hardcoded in tomes of legislation, these gradients of ostracization moved like silent fluid.

Cancel Culture as we experience it currently is this hybrid existence of women applied to something approximating politics, but it has the spiritually masculine impulse of bullying someone to suicide as a public ritual. We generally dislike cancel culture because it is applied to cool things like saying slurs and sleeping with mentally imbalanced women, however people used to be “cancelled” for being homosexuals or communists. It is not illegal for Fat Mike from NOFX to be in proximity to children, but as a father you might want your community to know a substance-abusing BDSM Jewish hobo in a skirt is strolling around your neighborhood park.

These campaigns are orchestrated by the Karens of the world, the matrons posted up on their porches and keeping an eye on their domain, making sure fat children don’t get too comfortable eating candy in public. Most of the time you don’t need every social pariah beaten in the street, sometimes you need to impose exile through the confounding machinations of busybodies who have downloaded the most extreme viewpoints of their husbands to express those politics by other means.

Drama is utilitarian, whereas solemn contemplation leads to inert inwardness. This is where we encounter the Sensitive Young Man.

I had encountered the term “sensitive young man” employed in much the same way as the “vengeful son,” depicting a lone masculine figure at odds with his society while tasked by ethereal forces with changing it. I found it difficult to track down the origin of the phrase or any resource that could provide further insight, making it a meme that assumed the temporary characteristics of whomever was citing it. I managed to locate what I believe to be ground zero of the term’s usage, on a Substack that has since been set to private.

^{The Power of Sensitivity.}

The term seemed to appeal to many men and I expanded the definition to refer to the Meta Man: he who contemplates not only the world around him but delves deeply within himself, standing outside of himself in a McLuhanesque exercise in extension enabled by technological mastery. I think it’s important to nail down a succinct definition, rather than describing any man who is aligned against the status quo, whether they be Holocaust Deniers or Gun Theorycels. A distinctly Western entity, the Sensitive Young Man is ambitious but not necessarily a leader; he is at war with society but not necessarily a revolutionary.

His sensitivity is awareness, generating justifiable distrust towards most forms of authority, institutions which populate a dynamic history which draws his focus and, being initiated in the acute technics of propaganda, demands revision. Not necessarily the right-tail of the IQ bell curve, he nonetheless possesses the capability to scheme out possible futures and is frequently paralyzed by these meditations.

The Sensitive Young Man – a decidedly unmasculine title denoting his identification beneath a matriarchal eye – will speak of the multitudinous oppressions he is facing, one of which being the concept of the “longhouse.” This is a term which connects us to our ancient past, popularized by Costin Alamariu – alternatively known as Bronze Age Pervert – who explored this concept loosely in his book “Bronze Age Mindset” and more acutely in its academic sequel “Selective Breeding and the Birth of Philosophy.”

Like Sensitive Young Man, you will witness the Longhouse describe whatever societal oppression is required at the time, tokenized by men to denounce Feminism, Leftists to denounce Neoliberalism, or Work Groups to denounce Basic Assumption Groups. Taken literally, the longhouse refers to communal living pioneered by nomadic people across Indo-Europe and Asia. You probably recall it in the context of Vikings. But that’s not what anyone ever really means; most assume it means women and gays being in control of everything.

^{They do, however, have a point.}

If we investigate the genesis of the word’s modern usage, the concept of the longhouse states that civilization itself is feminine, nefariously conjured to constrain the savage anarchy of man, to the degree that patriarchy is the subversive arm of the matriarchy. Man in his truest form does not desire to stay stationary, raise his children, or construct anything in rebellion against time and space. This is the essence of territorial conquest and reproduction through rape that constitutes a vitalist aristocracy, summarized as a new caste system that can shatter the desire for moral frameworks. Many I have explained this to are surprised to learn this is the true meaning, having never take the time to dissect the source material. The criminal rather than the colonist is the iconoclast of the Bronze Age Mindset, the more deranged hedonism is embraced the better.

Wayward and atomized men gravitate towards this outlook, and while many sensible people can engage with these ideas dispassionately and find utility in them, others begin to think that anything women do, men must reflexively do the inverse of. Everything beyond outrageous violence thus becomes “longhoused,” even paradoxically the desire to not have a civilization of young men raised by single mothers. Rather than generate positivistic systems from within, they become wholly reactionary and seek to simply inhabit the space outside of the perceived matriarchal status quo. The anarchistic fringe is glamorized, and all antisocial behavior is weighted equally inasmuch as it stands opposed to suffocating moral codes.

^{This is an important meme.}

The bedfellows of this new warrior class, of course, being the slimiest recesses of the gay community, unemployable Marxists, impotent rapists, and gladhanding egoists all gathering around the altar of drunk teenager worship.

The sensitive young man finds refuge in expanding labyrinths of theory drilling into the world, and finds a pleasant home in the widening cracks between reality where endless ideologies lurk. It is very easy for a man of even moderate intellect and the ability to comprehend systems to lose themselves in the jungles of inquiry given intense form by digital ecosystems. Every data point becomes a cathedral of intersecting rabbit holes, every idea is overthought, and every opinion commoditized as a mass market ready consumer packaged good.

For example: the differences between men and women become the yin and yang of hostile pathologies which ultimately render us extraterrestrials to ourselves. The Sensitive Young Man, insofar as he exists in the real world and not a projection residing in these very ecosystems, thrives in the fandoms defined by commoditized esoteric takes. He is typically opposed to gossip and drama, identifying them as feminine pursuits. He can believe this because in all likelihood he has never existed in a dynamic group that required absolute trust and placed a high value on information. In cases where men are demanded to take extreme ownership, they do not have the privilege of sort-ranking information for the scent of gender.

A man attempting to reclaim his masculinity in a world seemingly determined to wring it from his being can easily fall into worship of manhood in its commoditized form. Sets of essenceless rituals and propagandized images are readily available to consume in endless loops, with cults of personality eager to wring them dry in a completely different manner. Rather than embody the virtues of masculinity, they are imprisoned in the fandom of manliness.

What is a fandom? Most reading this can intuit what a fandom means due to their incessant noospherical bombardment by pop culture. I have seen it describe both consumers of Marvel movies and revolutionary literature, so it’s not just referring to a corporate product. How does a fandom differ from a group that just holds a unifying, albeit antisocial, belief?

A fandom is an extension of commoditization which is accelerated in online communities, with the Woman Question it is possible to expand the gulf between the sexes with theory and then mythologize that theory, permitting people to spend all their time lurking in its depths. This is different from a Content Plantation which describes a community gathered around an individual or show that seeks to maintain their audience as an ongoing revenue stream, often through emotionally manipulative content.

In each instance, ideas, opinions, and “takes” are commoditized as a product for the purpose of consumption. The community of individuals, occasionally antagonistic to the producer but otherwise requiring their output as part of their identity, gathered together represents the fandom.

We can think of an online – or textual – community as a group that arises somewhere in the interstices between the imposition of the written word and the articulation of a certain type of social organization. It is an interpretive community, but it is also a social entity that takes on the attributes of a distinct organism like any other group. Patrick W. Galbraith summarized this phenomenon in “Fujoshi: Fantasy Play and Transgressive Intimacy among ‘Rotten Girls’ in Contemporary Japan,” writing:

“When surfing the Internet reading yaoi stories and viewing yaoi art, informants looked at the computer screen as they spoke, even when they were physically sitting together in front of the same machine reading the same post at the same time. The words they spoke were in most cases not opinions or verbose comments but rather verbalizations of written text, descriptions of images, or rapid-fire, decontextualized comments to draw the other’s attention to a certain point and invite shared experience. The extreme concentration devoted to the material bordered on trance, broken only by their rhetoric.” – Patrick W. GalbraitH, Fujoshi

I would contend instead that the online communities who prove successful for the long run will not be possessed or agitated by memeplexes or the Economy of Takes, but will instead exercise agency over their foundational ideas, essential mores, and important bits of information, in effect pulling them out of the realm of digital abstraction and bringing them into the realm of physical actions.

Our memories stay with us most vividly when they are tied to the spatial world we inhabit, and so cultural practices that remind its participants of their place in the world will be better for collective memory than those that don’t.

This principle is probably why oral (or pre-literate) cultures tend to establish specific landmarks as the center of their world. For digital tribes, the lack of common physical space, their “deterritorialization” proves to be a bug rather than an empowering feature. For some digital tribes, permanent body modification has become an initiatory rite. Transhumanist ideology and transgender ideology both offer their adherents the ability to commit themselves to their entire manner of thinking by effecting it first upon themselves.

The Right, too, has its own version of this practice in the form of tattoos, bodybuilding, and on the more radical end, aristocratic breeding. Kerwin Fjøl addresses this in his Medium article “Collective Mnemotechnics: The Neglected Engine of Digital Tribalism.”

“It is for this reason that that the Israelites developed the mnemotechnic innovation of canonization. By cutting off the possibilities for new laws and foundational myths, and then later on further refining the limits of their own history by canonizing the greater Tanakh, the Israelites were creating the potential for a culture of exegesis, a scribal culture in which rabbis could debate with one other about how to interpret the letter of the law as well as various aspects of their own history […] If digital tribes are to remain intact, they will have to innovate some sort of social technology to either form a canon of essential information in situations where there are none, or keep theirs from being perverted, which would inevitably lead to tribal dissolution.” – Kerwin Fjøl, Collective Mnemotechnics: The Neglected Engine of Digital Tribalism.

People are beginning to perceive a return to the agonism once found in the language and rituals of the pre-literate world, a once-forgotten mode of consciousness explored so thoroughly by the likes of Mircea Eliade and Julian Jaynes. This is the retribalization expounded by McLuhan, so frequently misunderstood as a peaceful “global village” when it’s closer to psychologically and spiritually interconnected planetary nodes, in all likelihood experiencing a constant state of war. We balance both the interwoven thought processes of oral cultures and the ideological intensity of the literate ones, a symbiosis of fractal esoteric intensity and unprecedented exoteric strategies for hostility. Despite the vast expanse of time that separates our current technological conditions from those of ancient epochs, the principles that govern a tribe’s ability to survive, and even thrive, still hold true.

Our canons will find no impediments to evolving into voracious organisms, but they will devour its adherents if they fail to accomplish their charge of mapping themselves onto the physical reality through unpredictable landmarks, including their own biology. Failing to accomplish this will result in a global tribe of grey goo seeping through throbbing corpse gristle.

The Sensitive Young Man’s enemy reveals itself not as the matriarchy of civilization but the commoditized revolt itself. These are the canyons inside which he will be mummified in search of the secret of hidden vitality. Even the intellectual aggression of the salon is best seen as a cocoon he must emerge from possessed by the momentum of hostility, determined to forge violent landmarks guided by his wisdom rather than anesthetized by information. 

Two salient examples of theoretical imprisonment can be pulled from the history of French Radicalism: the Nouvelle Droit and the French Revolution.

Guillaume Faye, former member of the Far-Right “Nouvelle Droit” which still exists under the leadership of Alain de Benoist and the activities of GRECE and Éléments, criticized his former association for its move away from radical action and into the secure reservation of critique. He believed that in order to shape history it is necessary to unleash ideological storms by attacking the values that form the skeleton of the system. The goal was always utter obliteration of those bones.

Intellectual movements that gain public attention pose a concrete political threat in the form of thought in action. The media, fascinated by the shocking political incorrectness of the Front National and of its President, soon forgot all about the Nouvelle Droite as they produced texts and events that were less attractive and threatening to the system. As they became more serious they became less of a sensation.

“In brief, the Nouvelle Droite has been confined to the periphery of the debate. Regrettably, it has turned into an ideological ghetto. It no longer sees itself as a powerhouse for the diffusion of energies with the ultimate aim of acquiring power, but rather as a publishing enterprise that also organizes conference but has limited ambitions.” – Guillaume Faye, Archeofuturism.

Like many organizations that seek legitimacy for the interest of policy exchange with the center of power, they adopted an ‘apparatus logic’ of the type to be found in bureaucratic institutions. Many radicals believe that they arrive at a juncture which demands them to become serious, and seriousness requires taking the form of what which they hope to replace. It proved easier to dig into the mantle of the Earth then construct a functional siege tower.

From the opposing side we look to Georges Sorel, who in his translation of “Reflections on Violence” opined that the chief reason for the downfall of the syndicalist movement in the early 20th century was the tendency of its revolutionaries to engage in negotiations with the center of power rather than ruthlessly attacking it. He described how the compromises which lead to the victory of collective contracts were the best means of avoiding the true Marxist revolution, which in its truest form was the complete replacement of the existing system.

By acquiescing to a legitimizing victory defined by their enemies, they fell into the orbit of Democratic Socialism endorsed by the status quo, thereby nullifying the revolutionary momentum.

“Everything in war is carried out without hatred and without the spirit of revenge; in war the vanquished are not killed; noncombatants are not made to bear the consequences of the disappointments which the armies may have experienced on the field of battle; force is then displayed according to its own nature, without ever professing to borrow anything from the judicial proceedings which society sets up against criminals.” – Georges Sorel, Reflections on Violence

The formerly radical leadership ultimately ceased to believe in insurrection once inducted into Parliamentary Socialism, especially on the topic of violence. They proclaimed that the ballot-box has replaced the gun. These leaders eventually bartered themselves into ideal positions within the government and whatever revolution remained was employed as a permissible fringe of the superstructure. Without the action to animate it or the leaders to galvanize focused action, these movement become grifts at the low end and pastures of sacrificial celebrities at the high end.

In either example, where they interfaced with power they were absorbed by it because they were not prepared for total war. They were not prepared to inhabit destruction, so they chose survival by a thousand cuts. And where they survived, they made a fandom of critique and collective struggle.

In both of these cases, the organizations followed the condemnations of the vitalists where the bureaucratic demands of large group dynamics suffocated the masculine energy that, in its most essential form, seeks to annihilate everything that exists: to crush their enemies, see them driven before them, and to hear the lamentation of their women. This in itself cannot exist upon the cartography of mythology realized through politics. Where it emerges as a movement it reveals itself to be a fandom of trite degenerates and insufferable antisocials.

Sequestered into plantations of content and corralled down every avenue except the one that has proven solely effective throughout history, the Sensitive Young Men slam their heads against the wall and puzzle over why the revolt has not miraculously arrived. Instead of ascending they fall further and further inward. The sensitive young man chooses to inhabit a place of fractal introspection, and he can get lost in a Minotaur’s maze constructed from his own memories.

Instead of the longhouse he creates a tallhouse, falling eternally inward.

Masculinity is not achieved by the highly theoretical projection of the commoditized ideal upon the self, neither is it realized in fantasies of being subsumed into a violent mass as a slave to nature. It is achieved by the individual strength of hostile will realized in the group dynamic, at varying times the warrior tribe and the self-sufficient family unit. This is how the awakened man circumnavigates the world of nihilism, fandoms, and imprisoning inwardness.

Masculinity does not live as a deity to be worshipped, rather it finds its essence in the violent action demanded by living up to one’s first principles actualized in the group dynamic. It does not need to be commoditized as a pop-philosophy, it does not even need to be discussed. Guided by immediate goals rather than isolated enlightenment, it seeks to map itself onto the real world rather than inhabiting the seductive memeplexes of radical theory.

This is why you should not feel bad about talking shit about people behind their back, as long as it is for filtering dopes in the interest of righteous violence.

Also, everyone gets to have one lolcow.