Over the past few years, I’ve talked to a lot of guys privately about race. I think it’s a 20th Century discussion, especially in America, that’s being continued by people who benefit from it.
I’ve been around for awhile and traveled in a lot of different circles. I’ve been around all sides and I’ve heard what everyone has to say.
I voted for John Kerry in San Francisco with a Mexican guy who is the most important person in my life. And I’ve spoken to the far right about violence in a beer hall in Germany.
Over the past few months, legislators and governors ran out of toilet paper, panicked, and wiped their asses with the constitution and all of our so-called “rights.” They want you to forget about that. As soon as possible.
Based on the numbers and the rationale they used to close down businesses, put people out of work, and confine them to their homes — given the amount of people who just gathered together in major hotspots — in a few weeks, hundreds of thousands of people should die. But they won’t. Because…mistakes were made. Or maybe they weren’t.
I think the police brutality that occurred was disgusting and I’m glad that the man responsible is in jail. I hope he is severely punished for it and they make an example of him. That’s justice. If you give men power, a percentage of them will always abuse it. You can’t change that with hashtags and blank screens. That will go on until the end of time.
I’ve hung out with actual racists. All of the stars of that world. And I have a lot of guys who are starting to go down that road reach out to me. I block the ones that are already far gone, but I’ve tried to tell a bunch of them personally that where they are going is a dead end and a distraction from bigger threats to liberty. I’ve already heard everything they desperately want to tell me a thousand times, and I try to get them to look at the bigger picture.
People virtue signaling to all of their liberal friends are making meaningless gestures. There’s no danger in it. Just, “Look at me, I’m a good person too,” for all of their friends who believe the same things to see. The actual impact is zero. And most of it is motivated by fear. They don’t want to become targets of what is happening right now.
I’ve been pulling guys aside for two years, saying, “man, look beyond race.” Guys who would have gone hard in that direction. These riots are making that a hard sell. Because they aren’t about justice. They’re about chaos and destruction for the sake of chaos and destruction. While many Americans kneeled and posted socially safe, easily applauded gestures, many are also sitting around saying, “I told you so.”
I don’t want to have a civil war with blacks. I don’t hate blacks. I hate tyranny. The media and the people playing games want us to hate each other. That’s the story they want to sell. And it’s the story the government wants. Because before this all happened, America was getting real close to Civil War. Not against blacks, but against the totalitarian and corrupt state that pushed a lie and destroyed the lives and livelihoods of hundreds of thousands of people. Black, white, brown — everyone.
It would be cooler if we all stood together against THAT.
Does anyone remember the Occupy movement?
Months of violent, destructive protests against the “1%” that in the end, accomplished absolutely nothing. While America has been locked down and middle class businesses are being burned and looted, the 1% has been buying up the economy, becoming more powerful, and creating more distance between people who have unimaginable wealth and people who have very little.
If you want to rise up out of poverty, there has to be a middle class left for you to rise up into. These riots aren’t helping blacks or whites, many of whom are poorer now than they were 6 months ago.
These riots are helping the 1%, who sit in gated mansions behind armed security guards. They’re not worried. They’re not scared. They’re popping organic popcorn and enjoying the show.
When I first heard the phrase “social distancing,” I laughed.
Man, that was a meeting!
A bunch of people sat in a room and brainstormed that. Maybe they sent it to an ad agency or focus-grouped it. Nothing would surprise me, and frankly, that seems like it would be the most logical thing to do.
“How are we going to sell people on the idea that they should stay away from everyone…
Stop shaking hands…Stop hanging out with their friends and loved ones? Stop trying to get laid…? And at the same time, convince them that they are SAVING THE WORLD?”
I’m not sure who came up with it, but it was a brilliant manipulation. Hat-tip to the Machiavellian creeps who cooked it up.
“Social distancing” is a euphemistic confection that evokes both “social justice” and “social responsibility.” Perhaps it is going too far to call “social distancing” a Trojan horse for socialism…or maybe that’s exactly what it is. To explain the machinations of bloated bureaucracies, I generally tend to prefer desperation, delusion, self-interest and incompetence over conspiracy — but I could be wrong.
When the states issued orders mandating a soft house arrest and the closure of countless businesses, it was called “Shelter In Place” and “Safer at Home” and, weirdly, a “Pause.” I guess you could also call a prison sentence a “pause,” though it wasn’t quite that, so I’ll avoid the gratuitous hyperbole and say it was a little more like parole. On parole, you’re allowed to go to the grocery store and go to work, but there are limits and rules and the promise of freedom is dangled if you follow them. This is, certainly, what the various “phases” of reopening have been and will be like. Businesses and citizens on parole.
The states closed all operations not deemed “essential.” This sent homebound people flocking in comical makeshift headdresses to grocery stores and liquor stores and weed shops and Home Depots and Wal-Marts, which were deemed “essential.” Some people kept working at manufacturing plants and people bought tons of exercise equipment — good for them! — from busy mail order businesses, while many others lost their jobs or were forced to work from home, hunched over laptops in their pajamas.
This became something of a joke. There’s a guy driving a truck around my neighborhood with a decal that says “#ESSENTIALAF.” (That’s Essential As Fuck, if you’re not keeping up with the new lingo.)
On the sensible heels of “social distancing,” hordes of giggly media prostitutes tongued out a new litany of Orwellian control phrases that were enthusiastically repeated by virtue signaling rubes and all of the business owners desperate for a share of their stimulus dollars and unemployment checks.
Car commercials promised new deals “…in these uncertain and unprecedented times…”
All sorts of nauseating feel-good phrases were popularized to comfort citizens as they were being relieved of their freedoms — like “we’re all in this together,” with the implied paranthetical (whether you like it or not). Perky people — who obviously didn’t have anything at all — insisted that “we got this!”
Many of these novel phrases are coping mechanisms, but by far the most insidious is “The New Normal.” So vague and flexible. It soon seemed as though at least a third of the population would accept any new intrusion, regulation or confinement as long as their influencers contentedly repeated that it was “the new normal.”
The lockdown has convinced me that if Bill Gates and Anthony Fauci went on Dr. Oz and told people to eat their own feces — and called this a new SCIENTIFIC, peer-reviewed BREAKTHROUGH in “nutrient recycling” — millions of Americans would post videos of themselves trying it for the first time, and Rachel Ray would be showing us how to make “up-cycled” artisan shit sandwiches.
The words we use tell a story about the way we perceive our world. New phrases are designed to shift thinking and realign reality. Words are power. The Bible said “In the beginning there was the word,” and Nietzsche said that masters were the givers of names. When you repeat their magic words over and over, you help them create their “new normal.”
I’ve been writing about masculinity for many years, and I watched feminists popularize radical anti-masculinity sentiments by engineering catch phrases like this. “Reimagining masculinity” sounds positive and inventive, but the reimagining always means “convince men to behave more like women.” The phrase “masculinity is a mask” really means that all masculine men are inauthentic, hiding behind a mask because they are “afraid” and “fragile.” “Toxic masculinity” was popularized to create a “new normal” that rendered all masculinity — and men who didn’t hate being men — “toxic.” In the 1970s or 80s, they called it “testosterone poisoning.” Same concept, “up-cycled.” Like a shit sandwich.
If you want to maintain control of your own mind, be wary of whose words you repeat. These little catch phrases are scripts. If you don’t want to be an actor in someone else’s play, don’t read their script. Refuse to say, “social distancing,” and “we got this,” and “we’re in this together.” Refuse to participate in the process of manufacturing consent — in creating “the new normal.”
Let their eager slaves be known by their language.
However, if you don’t use their language, understand that it will make them uncomfortable. It will make you an outsider in their Empire of Nothing. Barbarians are people who use a vulgar alien tongue that offends the sensibilities of those who have acclimated to the “new normal.”
And if you refuse to accept the new normal, it will make you one of the new barbarians.
A reading of this essay is available as a bonus episode of Start The World.
Introduction:
Last year, I started promoting a slogan that seems to be catching on, and in response to a lot of questions about what it means to “stay solar,” I’ve decided to sketch out what I mean by it. I presented some of this material in a speech titled “Manly Idealism,” given at the 21 Convention in October 2019, and I expect that speech to be available online in a few months, first through 21 University, and then “free to the world.”
Throughout human history, and certainly in Indo-European cultures, men have revered some force in the sky, associated with day and the light. The sky fathers and all-fathers reigned from above, and men looked upward to these primal patriarchs for guidance on how to live more righteously — how to take the higher path. As it is explained in Plato’s Republic, this highest force and greatest good isn’t quite the sun, but the sun is perhaps the best way to understand it — the sun is “the child of the good.”
“Now, that which imparts truth to the known and the power of knowing to the knower is what I would have you term the idea of good, and this you will deem to be the cause of science, and of truth in so far as the latter becomes the subject of knowledge; beautiful too, as are both truth and knowledge, you will be right in esteeming this other nature as more beautiful than either; and, as in the previous instance, light and sight may be truly said to be like the sun, and yet not to be the sun, so in this other sphere, science and truth may be deemed to be like the good, but not the good; the good has a place of honor yet higher.”
— Plato. The Republic
In true, complete darkness, there is no truth or beauty whatsoever. True darkness is the void, and all things — all forms — are unintelligible. As Socrates makes clear, unlike the other sense organs, the eye requires light to see anything at all.
My formulation of what it means to stay or to be solar is a synthesis of mythic and scientific understandings of the sun and the nature of the cosmos. To our ancient ancestors, the sun made its way across the sky and disappeared at night, giving a sense to some that it was forced to “endure” the darkness and the night, only to emerge triumphant each morning. Today we know that the earth actually revolves around the sun, though the sun has its own very long orbit around the galaxy. Science tells us more than the ancients knew about gravity and space and the fiery nature of the sun, but to my mind, this information only enhances and adds depth to the analogies and metaphors about the sun and its influence over us.
While the solar mindset is present and even articulated in many religions, I don’t believe it favors any particular one or conflicts with most of them. In fact, while the specific doctrines and elements of many religions may contain anti-solar elements that are servile and submissive or based in the dark jealousy of ressentiment, I believe that the qualities I am associating with the sun and solarity are consistent with the way most men envision a benevolent god or sovereign.
“…the thing a man does practically believe (and this is often enough without asserting it even to himself, much less to others); the thing a man does practically lay to heart, and know for certain, concerning his vital relations to this mysterious Universe, and his duty and destiny there, that is in all cases the primary thing for him, and creatively determines all the rest. That is his religion…”
— Thomas Carlyle. On Heroes and Hero Worship and the Heroic in History.
Many have asked me if “Stay Solar” is some kind of Stoic mantra.
What “staying solar” has in common with Stoicism is emotional control, and as “life is conflict,” maintaining emotional control is a challenge that ends only after death.
A lot of men talk about Stoicism without having read the Stoics. In the popular mind, Stoicism sometimes appears to mean “THIS IS SPARTA!!” or “suck it up” or “can’t hurt me” and lends itself to a lot of tryhard tough-guy posturing. This would probably confuse a sensitive, thoughtful fellow like Marcus Aurelius, who, as far as I can gather, was not very much like Leonidas at all.
My beef with Stoicism is that it seems a bit too focused on acceptance, a bit too detached from outcomes…a bit too, “this is fine…”
The sun is hot and violent, made of fire and storm — but it retains its shape, its path, its gravity and the system of order that spins around it.
Gravity
Know your purpose. Stay centered and on task. Aim, whenever possible, to be an unmoved mover — to be a cause rather than an effect or the affected. Do not allow yourself to be pulled into petty disputes or frivolous pursuits. Remember who you are and what you are doing, and what your responsibilities are — and for all of it, why. Know your reasons and motivations — cultivate self-awareness.
One could call this “discipline,” but something about the word discipline sounds like a cracking whip to my ear — though it comes from the same root as “disciple” and implies the acceptance of teaching or an external order.
Perhaps it is more productive and life-affirming to think about maintaining a clarity of identity and purpose, and evaluating patterns of thought and action in terms of whether or not they facilitate or contribute to that purpose.
The sun is massive, stays on its own course and has a gravity of its own. The root of the word gravity means “weight” or “heavy.” The Romans considered gravitas a virtue, particularly in leaders. Speaking with gravity means conveying that weight by showing that you take yourself seriously, and that you are firm and will be “difficult to move” if you believe that your cause is righteous.
This does not mean that you will never compromise or change your mind over time— that would be foolish and unwise — but it does convey a certain integrity and trustworthiness. People who change their beliefs depending on who they are talking to eventually reveal themselves to be untrustworthy, because their marks eventually compare notes.
Order
As things shoot and move and float around them, objects with mass and weight and gravity are creators of orders and systems. Each sun is a creator of cosmos, of order, in the midst of the greatest chaos, the expansive disorienting void of outer space.
Man seeks order and in the absence of order, creates his own provisional order. He does this with his environment, with the people around him, and his own psyche. Consciousness itself is cosmo-generative.
The creation of order is the primary characteristic of solarity.
Do not confuse defiant creation with defiance for the sake of defiance. Defiant creation defies disorder to create order or rejects stagnant orthodoxy to improve an existing order. Defiance for its own sake merely perpetuates chaos.
Illumination
Be a calm source of illumination that reveals truth, whether it is ugly or beautiful. Seek out the truth of things and share it with those who are interested or ready to hear it — but don’t become another street corner prophet shouting at strangers.
Solarity is a paternal concept, so telling people the truth doesn’t always mean telling people what they want to hear. Sometimes it means telling them an uncomfortable truth that they need to hear — without malice or anger.
Do not confuse the revelation of truth with petty, trashy and malicious gossip. The prevailing Zeitgeist is salacious and gossip-driven. Anyone can be embarrassed and stripped of dignity. Few would want to be photographed on the toilet, though nothing is inherently wrong or shameful about going to the bathroom. What is the cumulative, overall truth of a person? What have they accomplished? How have they helped and inspired others? How do they treat the people around them?
Reveal the simple truth, like the sun at noon.
Human life is more beautiful and interesting with an interplay of light and shadow, and there is value in mystery, but do not rely on shadow to obscure and deceive. Beware of people who romanticize the dark and want to remain in the shadows. What truth are they hiding?
Be the light, and let the shadow reveal its absence.
Warmth
Without the sun, the Earth would be a frozen rock shooting through space.
Take a moment to think about how life-giving that makes the sun. Every forest and field and jungle and blade of grass on Earth reaches toward it and depends on it. No animals, much less men, would be able to survive on earth without it.
The sun can be blinding, and you can die from overexposure to its light. It is not benign, but it is for the most part benevolent — if we anthropomorphize a bit.
Are you a source of life-giving warmth in the lives of the people around you, or a collapsed sun— a black hole that draws them in and crushes them. Do the people in your orbit and the people you come in contact with every day feel improved by your presence? Do you make the people around you better or worse?
People love to complain, but it doesn’t help them. Be a source of inspiration, not commiseration.
The sun has warmth and energy to spare. What it gives doesn’t deplete it in any meaningful way.
Don’t operate in a “zero-sum” frame. Most of us are mobile, and we aren’t fighting over some closed, tiny market of friends, potential partners, or potential clients. Adopting an abundance mentality makes you appear more confident and less desperate — and ideally you will also become more confident and less desperate.
Let the low-energy vermin fight over every scrap in the alley, and turn your mind to greater concerns.
Conclusion
Any one of the virtues I’ve described above has been exalted by any number of religions, philosophies and motivational books. None of them are new. Each can be expanded upon and developed substantially.
Men have idealized and modeled themselves after sky fathers and solar entities for thousands of years. The sun is a powerful symbol — in fact I can’t think of a symbol more figuratively or physically powerful. The sun is unifying and universal. We can all look upward to see and contemplate the same sun. We can look inward and cultivate our own solarity. There’s nothing arcane about the sun and nothing could be less “occult” — less hidden or secret.
The slogan “stay solar” seems to have resonated with a lot of men, even men who years ago would have considered themselves drawn to darker or more oppositional ideologies. I believe that’s because it’s the right message, and it is the message men need right now. We live in an age of unhinged hysteria, where people feel compelled to react to or comment on a relentless barrage of trending outrages and curated “news” about strangers. All the old rules are in flux and no one seems to know what the new rules are yet.
So, when you are surrounded by all of this confusion and anger, be like the sun. Remember who you are and who you want to be. You’re the man, so be the man. Be the order. Be the light. In the midst of chaos and darkness, stay solar.
It’s a little like that line from Kipling’s “If.”
“If you can keep your head when all about you, are losing theirs and blaming it on you…”
Cultivating solarity is a response to darkness and confusion and anger and anxiety. It is a response to cynical nihilism, but it requires no retreat into childish naiveté or delusion. It’s optimistic, but not foolish. It’s a positive response to negativity. And it’s a personal response, because it starts with you.
I do not claim to be the perfect embodiment of any of the virtues or ideas I have espoused above. I’m going to put the best of myself forward, but I believe that the world loves nothing more than to see the inevitable deflation of men who puff out their chests too far, claiming to be something that they are not. The gods have always punished hubris, and I value humility in myself and the men whom I admire. As I have written in the past, “this is for me, too.” Writers who connect with men authentically write the things they themselves want to read or need to hear. These are virtues I’m working on myself, not just preaching to others.
Men can all do better, and we can all try a little harder to be and to stay solar.
The “Solar Vision” Symbol
You’ll find this symbol on my work and throughout this web site. It represents my own synthesis of the overseeing eye and a sun wheel.
This particular design is modeled after a Bronze Age sun wheel pendant originally found in Zürich, dated to the 2nd Millennium B.C. It was probably a Celtic symbol, as the Celts moved though the area around that time, so it likely would have been associated with the Celtic god Taranis, who was a god of thunder and lightning, not unlike Zeus or warrior gods like Thor or Indra. Lightning is often seen as a solar weapon, or as demonstrating the power of the god who rules the sky. Taranis was also depicted holding a wheel. The sun wheel, sun cross, or Sonnenkreuz symbolizes not only the sun, but motion and momentum, turning and action — referencing the spoked wheel and the terrible glory of the battle chariot. The sun itself is often represented by another deity, sometimes male (Helios), sometimes female (Sól/Sunna). However, the primary patriarch is sometimes believed to be “the eye in the sky.”
I created this hybrid symbol for my book, A More Complete Beast, to represent the concept of “solar vision,” which has evolved in my mind to represent and include the concepts discussed above.
The solar father as creative visionary who orders the world…
Usage and attribution
I created this exact symbol, as far as I am aware, though there are certainly many other eyes in wheels and suns and similar symbols.
My ideas are meant to be spread, so if you want to get this tattooed on your body or use it in a piece of your own artwork, I encourage this and grant my permission.
If you post it online, please include a link to this page or my site or one of my social media accounts, along with a note of attribution.
Please do not reproduce this symbol on merchandise to be sold for profit (or “non-profit”) without written permission from me, personally.
Starting a new season (calling it “Gen 2”) of my Start The World podcast today. (read more on that below) The first show I am dropping is with is Ian Strimbeck. Ian runs Runenation LLC, and his slogan is “Problem Solving and Confidence Building Through Education”
He teaches handgun, Carbine, Unarmed Combat, Edged Weapons and mindset. In this episode, we focused on mindset and talked about getting your head right, putting external evaluations and expectations in perspective, thoughts on stoicism, breathing, meditation and more.
This year I’m working on a new book that I’m really excited about and that’s my number one priority — I hope to have it out by Fall 2020.
Podcast
People have been asking me to restart my old podcast for years. I have access to a much bigger and more positive network of masculine thinkers now, and the technology is a lot better. I have a new (evolved) perspective myself, and I am looking forward to talking to other men who are committed to making men better and talking about masculine philosophy.
My 2020 Goal is to put out 20-40 podcasts.
I was going to say 20, but I’ve already recorded 3 more (Josh Tyler from Savage Gentlemen, Tanner Guzy from Masculine Style, and LMT Ken Curry from Solid Man) and I have 2 booked for the future with many more in the works.
Brutal Company
I’m closing down Brutal Company this month because shipping packages was becoming a distraction from more important work. I should be writing and producing content and training, not shipping shirts. I may release new shirts or rashguards on a limited basis in the future.
So if you want to continue to support my work in another way, I’ve created this option below.
Support My Work on SubscribeStar
Many readers have expressed an interest in supporting the new podcast (and my work in general). If you’d like to be among them, I’ve created a simple $4.99 subscription on SubscribeStar.
As I get a feel for what I can do there, I will share content there that I many not have shared or that I would have shared on Instagram, etc. I may share older essays you can’t find online or links to old podcasts that are no longer available. If there is interest, I may create a second tier that offers more — possibly even live video interactions and groups.
Let me know what interests you.
I considered using Patreon, but while it has more options and features, it is well known to be a pro-censorship, pro-hysteria/outrage culture platform. (Some big names dropped them because of this). My content is predominantly positive and aimed at helping men think about life and improve their own lives — but we live in a culture that responds to Twitter tantrums, and Patreon doesn’t seem like a platform I want to use or invest in.
Sign Up For My Mailing List
Many people subscribe to this site via WordPress, but I also keep a mailing list that I use to keep people up to date. I don’t send out emails often – usually only when I have a new product or service to offer, or some big news I don’t want my readers to miss.
This list is also on MailChimp and it is backed up, but MailChimp is also a pro-censorship company, so I may migrate it to another option eventually.
