In his book On Pain, Ernst Junger states that the necessary precondition for a society to both survive and deserve to survive is its willingness to shoulder suffering and struggle. This is evident in the wilds of the created order. Not only does the sick antelope quickly become dinner for the ravening lion, but even the slow and the weak rarely surmount infancy to assume the rank of adulthood. Now, mankind is distinctly higher in both nature and ontological value, therefore the stinging and culling edge of nature does not so readily apply to us. We have technology to insulate us from the immediate consequences of sickness. We have comforts and services to detach us from the dire straits that laziness would put any other lesser creature into. We have tribalism and loyalty to ensconce our elderly and our vulnerable from harm, even from other humans.

So, it is not so much the immediate ramifications of weakness that concern the cultures of the 21st Century, although such effects are being felt by every awakened Westerner distinctly these days. Largely thanks to the then-inconsequential laziness and apathy of prior generations.

It is no secret, especially in these corners of Substack and the broader online discourse in which the various parties of the dissident Right are involved, that the West, and its myriad glorious peoples, are in a bad spot. Infinity immigration accosting our shores and our women, endless tidal waves of betrayal and abandonment by our elected leadership, frivolous and circular culture warring, the division and destruction of churches, the instillation of Islam, the resurrection of Communism, and many more such ulcers. We are sick, our people are sick, and the future is uncertain.

Storm clouds hang on the horizon, and titanic shapes move within them, deeper than the darkest dark, wrapped in the water-heavy thunderheads. They harken. They approach.

The question on everyone’s mind is: will the West survive?

Truthfully, I don’t know. I have my theories and I’m no black piller. There is always hope and there is always a future to fight for, provided we have the stomach to do what must be done. But the question that has been occupying my mind, like a toothache or the first inkling of a head cold, is this:

Does the West deserve to survive?

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Let me use an illustration in order to dig up my conclusion. I’ve noticed a trend bubbling up lately here within my silo of Substack. A sort of trickling insurgence of a sort of profile that, at first blush, appears to belong within my sort of circles. Mythic, masculine, pro-western, and aggressive. Nice. I dig it.

But then they start to publish notes and articles that openly blaspheme Christ, piss on the ancestors of the West and of Christendom, and brew up a pseudo-intelligent smoothie of vitalism, nihilism, and retardation. It’s really a sight to see.

This creature I’m referring to is the Neo-Pagan Bro. A creature that emerges from the shell of Christendom, grown fat on the privileges afforded to him by Christian men before him, only to rise to his feet, brush off the debris of static living, and declare that he is returning to the roots of the true huwite man, which is paganism.

Never mind that if you ask him how he know anything at all about the defunct Norse religions he will invariably have to rely on the good graces and diligent work done by medieval monastics. But that’s neither here nor there.

I want to use this archetypal figure, the larping neo-pagan, to answer the question posed up top. Does the West deserve to survive? I saw a post the other day by an account called HamburgerToday in which he justifies the sexual abuse of non-white children based solely upon the predicate that they aren’t human. He will then go on to say that the preservation of the White people is of paramount importance, superseding all other values. Others have said that Christians, and all other White religious folk, ought to place their religiosity second to their loyalty to their race or their ethnos. That survival at all costs is the play going forward.

My response to such statements is simple.

The West does not deserve to survive if it loses its soul.

Put another way. In one’s own life, what is most difficult of all to achieve? Is it physical mastery? Perhaps the mastery of a sport or a skill? Or could it be that the most difficult aspect of one’s life to master and control is their inner life. The spiritual muscle of the human person is the most difficult to train, control, and grow. I’ve worked out nearly every day of my life since I was 15 and joined my school’s football team. From there I joined the military, took up long-distance endurance running, and over the last 4 years have been heavily active in the gym spending my time on powerlifting, CrossFit, and endurance. I know what physical pain is and I know how challenging it can be to make progress and overcome.

Yet, nothing is as difficult, as soul-flayingly arduous, as the spiritual life. Nothing showcases my weakness and ineptitude more than striving to live and grow within the life and mind of Christ. It is the greatest challenge of my life, and I assume I’m not alone. The inner life, devoting oneself to the spiritual disciplines, to the mystic life, to the life of self-denial and co-crucifixion with our Lord is the true and final battle. Shoot, you don’t even have to be a Christian to admit the truth in this statement. Ask a Muslim, a Buddhist, or even a Mormon if the spiritual life is an easy one, or if the ascension to their religious ideals is not the most difficult and daunting part of their life.

It is precisely men who wrestled with such things who built the Western world (and the whole world, frankly). The blood running from the hands that built the walls of Christendom is the blood of White Christian men. We are the West. We are the European people. The inner struggle of Theosis and moral perfection is the struggle that defined, and defines the ruins still, of the Western world.

Yet now we have a legion of edgy Neo-Pagan bros who insist, in the loudest and most incomprehensible terms, that the West is actually defined by hedonism, nihilism, and the brutal domination of all nons. As if the Western megalith was constructed on the LaVeyan Satanic principle of “do as thou wilt.” They squawk that the sooner we can RETVRN to our ancestoral modes of living, such as midwit nihilism and uninhibited urge expression, that sooner we can restore and reclaim our heritage as huWhite men! That if only we could re-adopt the syncretistic soup of Indian mysticism with European martial mastery, we could get out of this quagmire! “HAVE YOU EVEN READ EVOLA!?”, they will screech.

Nonsense. The history of the Western world IS the Church. It IS Christianity. It IS moral absolutes and transcendent realities punctuating our everyday existence. But the Neo-Pagan bro offers you something else. He offers you the brutality, the unbarred horror, of life before the expansion of Christendom. That somehow his pre-Christian ancestors lived the most fulfilling lives devoid of any moral transcendence, which is just patently false on its face.

The notion that there is no God (or even gods) that demand or decree their desired behavior, their rules, their laws and that no one ever believed such a thing before the weird desert people and their crucified God came up out of the Levant to preach their gospel (a gospel that these Pagan bros ancestors largely readily accepted, by the way [not so based now, right guy?]), is retardation bordering on drooling and self-defecation. Atheism is a distinctly modern notion and whether or not these smelly larpers realize it or not, they’re just roleplaying as atheists wearing amor and fur cloaks.

But no, the Neo-Pagan bro insists, the West, the White man, will be saved by releasing all moral hinderances, indulging every fancy in the name of virality and thumotic zeal, and functioning as a godless gooner! Isn’t it obvious that that’s the based Nietzschean thing to do?

Junger would be rattled and froth with wrath. These gooners and daytime park larpers are co-opting the religiosity and aesthetics of cultures and peoples who wouldn’t recognize them or have any affinity for them whatsoever.

But what really gets me, what really chaps me, is that Neo-Pagan Redditism is the easy way out. Look at it from 30,000ft as a working worldview or heuristic for the hurdles of the individual life. It offers you nothing. No structure, no dependability, no moral grounding, no interpretive lense through which the make sense of the world, no deep well from which to draw epistemic meaning from. It is, in the most frank of senses, a larp. A grift. A shill religion. It answers nothing and offers you only that which you would naturally default to without their input - hedonism.

It is the gayest of the possible worldviews because all it does is angle itself inward towards the guts and genitals and aim to please those evil twins above all else. It is spiritual masturbation wrapped in vibes and aesthetic mood edits.

So no, if that is the version of the West that these wifeless, childless, godless neos have to offer, then it does not deserve to survive.

It would be better for the Western world to die whilst frailly clutching the sword of Christendom than for it to cast aside the very tool it used to carve out its own existence. It is better to die with honor than to live a coward.

May God restore and preserve the Western peoples, or may he extinguish us before we further slander our great legacy.

Onward and Build the World.

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The phone rang twice before she picked up. Her voice was hollow and grating, like pebbles in a soda can. She was the 50th person I’d spoken to that day and my ear cartilage ached from being compressed beneath the corded receiver.

“Good morning, ma’am! I’m calling on behalf of ____ (insert some political figure I can’t remember) and his bid for state rep.

“Would you be willing to pledge your support?” I ask in as sweet and pandering voice as I could muster, banking that this woman would hear me for the child I was and take pity, treating me gently. She did not.

“WHAT! That dirty rat!” She shouted. She stretched out the “r” a bit longer than was natural. It sounded like she was casting a spell by saying it that way.

“Yes ma’am. Would you be willing to pledge your support?” I wasn’t the sharpest teenager.

I can’t remember the specific words that detailed her refusal, but it featured many uses of the f-word and more than one sexual slur. She hung up on me.

I breathed a sigh of relief at the ordeal being over and set the skin-color phone back in its holder with a plastic rattle. My two roommates sat on the two separate queen size beds elbow deep in their own phone calls. We were children, no less than 15 years old. My mother, having seen my keen eye for political shitposting (before that was a thing) and passion for the public square, enrolled me in a summer political activism program for Christian GOP kids called GenJ, short for Generation Joshua. Not sure what the Biblical tie in was supposed to be, but that’s what it was.

I was passionate, on fire, idealistic. Like many young men, I was on the golden path of “doing it right.” I was privately educated, keeping my grades up, playing sports, keeping fit, going to church, and doing extracurriculars like GenJ. We were cold calling and campaigning on behalf of some congressional runners and state representatives and I felt like I was on the bleeding edge of the battle for my country. For my people. For muh cause.

But I’ve come to realize that every battle since then, and probably before then, has been an “existential” one. A battle for our very survival. Every four years since I can remember the American people have had the final and ultimate dilemma dangled in front of them.

“This guy will kill you all!” They shout. “But this guy will save us!”

And I swallowed it all, hook, line, and sinker. I believed, cycle after cycle, that the system was functioning and that if I could only convince enough people to vote for my team, we’d survive. We could win if we just played by the rules and voted harder. Campaigned harder. Tried harder.

Sometimes we won, sometimes we didn’t, but the point is is that I was a firm believer in the system and that it functioned as it was promised to.

I was naive. So naive.

I haven’t believed that for a while now. And with every passing month I pass further from disbelief into abject disdain for what I once held to be true. The American political system is dead and they keep beating us with a dead horse.

I’m writing this from my couch in my living room in my city in the Midwest of America. Thomas Massie just lost the primary for Kentucky, the Epstein files are being redacted as I type, gas prices have risen $2 in a month, and the Middle East is, unsurprisingly, still on fire and syphoning my meager pennies away. I am a modern serf, but worse.

I am a wage slave, a debt prisoner, a cog in the machine, and angry about it.

I did it all right, you know. I was classically educated, went to a good college, achieved my Master’s degree from a good school, married a good Christian woman, and all that jazz. I kept my grades up, I voted, I toed the line. I joined the military and served my country. I did everything an American boy is supposed to do.

And my repayment is debt slavery, my money funding the lifestyle and military endeavors of other nations, endless immigration, the erosion of my people and culture, and the complete, bald-faced brazen robbery of my political voice.

I watched Thomas Massie, the last seemingly good man in Congress, get crushed by some bowlegged toad filled up to his eyelids with AIPAC money, despite being the people’s favorite. This one felt different, though. Despite seeing Trump cave to foreign pressure, or maybe he was just a hollow shell the whole time, and fulfill jack shit in regard to his campaign promises (mass deportations when?), seeing Thomas Massie get ratioed by the establishment’s long bloody hands felt different.

It felt like how I imagine it would feel if Minas Tirith didn’t survive the siege. If Rivendell fell. This feels like the last and final knell on the death bell that signals the true and final end to our political system.

They lied to us about Trump. He’s the same as the rest of them. They shot Charlie Kirk in front of his kids. They laughed at Iryana Zarutska’s murder. They bombed Christians to bloody ash in the Middle East.

They eat and rape our children.

They shuttle in men from other countries who do the same with glee and punish us for being upset at it. Our elites are satanists and pedophiles and now, to break the camel’s back, they sack Thomas Massie. Yes, I know, he was just one man. But he seemed to be the last glimmer of legitimacy, of hope for restoration, in the sprawling necrotic corpse that is our ruling establishment.

And it’s not just me that’s feeling the utter and complete disillusionment. Like a door opening into space and sucking the oxygen from the shuttle, the year since Trump’s second election have been extremely enlightening. So enlightening, in fact, that I’m witnessing formerly staunch plan-trusters and GOP party men begin to glance behind and say, “Oh no.”

I smile and unpin the “Fell For It Again Award” from my breast and hand it to them, grinning through teeth worn down from eating humble pie. My eyes are red from weeping tears over the rape of my people and my nation.

Our mythos is a lie, our foundation is built on corpses and bloody money, our leaders despise us and sell us like cattle, our systems are hollow plastic imitations made to satisfy us, our money is robbed from us, our children are scraped from the womb or fed into the grinding mill of pedophilic satanists or pagan invaders, our young men are fed into the endless gory hamster wheel of forever wars and cycles of addiction.

Our women prostitute themselves online for $5 a picture, our (white) children are taught to hate themselves into social suicide, our pastors hide behind their pulpits in fear of backlash, our children are hooked on pornography and goyslop media, our government builds titanic data centers in our backyards to guzzle our water and surveil our very words.

Sodomy and homosexuality run like infected wine down the streets, pedophilia and satanic rituals punctuate our ruling elites, our academies are corrupt and necrotic, our churches are flaccid and impotent, and our very identity as Americans is up for sale to whoever can claw their way in.

America is dead. I’m not sure how long she’s been dead, but I know that I have only discovered this over the past handfull of years.

And I’m very, very angry. And I’m in very, very good and multitudinous company.

So I suppose I’ll go workout for the second time today and dream of a better world to come on the other side of all the fire and smoke that must rise first.

There are no political solutions, as much as I desperately want there to be.

By God we’ll have our home again.

Arise, son, and Build the World.

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If you’ve been even somewhat sentient these past many months, you’ll have undoubtedly heard rumblings on the American Right of a “Right wing civil war”. You’ll have heard that a conversation took place in a man’s home studio and that this singular conversation triggered the panoply of crack shots and hurdled verbal arrows now being exchanged between what I will call the “old right” and the “ascendant right”. What was once a seemingly unified party of old men and boomer mouthpieces, hesitantly supported by an up-and-coming generation of young men, is now in shambles. Maga is dead and free speech killed it in the podcast studio with the mic stand.

A rift has formed. And the rifts run deep. Very deep. Deeper than was once thought.

But the problem really isn’t Tucker interviewing Fuentes, is it? The issue isn’t the collapsing economy and erupting house prices. The problem isn’t even Gen Z men being handed a steaming pile of Boomer refuse and being told to smile about it. It’s not the growingly hostile divide between young men and young women. It’s not the endless water hose of foreign aid being sprayed to every country but our own. It’s not the war in Ukraine or Gaza. It’s not even the political divide in the country. All of these things are symptoms of the cause. The itch surrounding a staff infection. And I don’t intend to address them specifically for many better men than me already have.

The problem is simple: we have left behind our young men.

In decades past we had convenient meat grinder-wars to toss our rabble-rousing young men into. Hell, we may have some again here soon. Before that, we had expanding industries for young men to test themselves and prover their worth within. Industries like the railroad, logging, farming, seafaring, trading, even car manufacturing. Before the Industrial Revolution we had westward expansion and a howling frontier to call and confront the virility of youthful masculinity.

What a call for young men that was! Imagine you’re a young, listless man in New Jersey or Alabama and the western half of the country is entirely empty, full of gold and riches (or at least the myth of such things, but that’s good enough), and Indians jonesing for a fight.

My heart rate rose typing that sentence! What a call. What a mission.

What a purpose!

But at some point along the way - just after the garden of Eden probably - it was decided that men are disposable and irrelevant to the goals and aspirations of women and society. Now, it’s true that men are the expendable of the two genders due to our skill and requisite duty to defend and protect our tribes. The women can’t go fight, because they suck at it, so that responsibility lies with men. Men lay down their bodies in war and women lay down their bodies for procreation. Fair’s fair. The entirity of the village is constructed to defend and prosper the mother and child. This is the way.

“The burden of dying is as natural to the male as the burden of bearing is to the female. The destiny of males is to stake their lives in the service of the species. Every male carries within him the calling to die.” - Rene Quinton, Maxims of War

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But from the feminist movement, starting in Seneca Falls, New York, in 1848, to now, men have been rendered obsolete to even these ends.

We are not needed for procreation - there is IVF.

We are not needed for fatherhood - there are incentives to single motherhood and a punitive family court system to pantomime as the father figure.

We are not needed for protection - there are strong independent women for that. And cops. And educational initiatives to “educate men to not be violent!” As if our masculinity were a bug, not a feature.

We are not needed in the workplace - there are DEI incentives and a cultural aversion to the masculine presence in the working environment.

We are not needed in media - unless you consider the need for a village idiot in every major film and media project for the last 30 years.

We are not needed for war - women can fight just as good as a man! We also have drones now, and missiles, and bombs, and planes. The strength of a man’s arm no longer holds the monopoly on force.

In short, men have no meaningful and distinct identity to fulfill in society anymore. Worse, we know what our role should be, but we are actively barred from striving after it and penalized when we do. In the Churches, in the schools, in the workplace, etc.

So, tell me, what good is pulling yourself up by your bootstraps when you can’t even afford the damn boots? And when wearing boots is considered “toxic masculinity”? And when boots are symbols of oppression? And when those boots were made by little brown kids in Thirdworldistan?

Men cannot win.

And the establishment Right can’t fathom why men like Nick Fuentes and Andrew Wilson and Milo Yiannopoulos and Sargon of Akkad are famous (and growing more so by the day). The croons at the Daily Wire sweat and grab their whitest, most unc-looking guys, prop their bloated corpses in front of the camera and post incessant intervention videos for the young men who are flooding out the exits.

“Hey son.” They’ll say in strained sincerity, “we need to have a talk. Man to man. Nick Fuentes is not your friend.” The pandering, the faux concern, the soft handed pearl clutching.

It’s all so tiresome.

The establishment right wing media apparatus was supposed to be on our side. They were supposed to be our guys. I grew up watching Shapiro “DESTROY THE LIBS!!!!!” and seal clapped to every own, burn, and demolition. These were my guys! But the more I grow, and the more the young men around me grow, the more we begin to feel that behind the corporatized shiny mask of the Daily Wire, The Blaze, Fox News, PragerU, Jordan Peterson Inc, and the others lie the same wickedly grinning cheshire cat of the establishment. The System. The Machine. The Man.

An establishment that told us that if we simply got good grades, stayed in school, and did all the extra-curriculars, we would be handed the world. That the sky would be the limit unto which we could strive. The world would be ours!

But instead, we were punted a flaming football of an economy, a nation hemorrhaging at the borders, foreigners and Muslims ruling our cities and towns, and barefooted second-generation Indian anchor baby telling us that anyone, including him, can be an American so long as he subscribes to the ideals and propositions of America.

Look at this guy! Surely he knows what a true American is, because he so obviously is one!

Our nation’s wealth being shipped to everyone but us. Our homes being bought out and turned into rental properties by global real estate firms. Our history erased and villainized. Our heroes murdered and their tombs opened and defiled. Our schools teaching us to hate our skin, our gender, and our name. Our workplaces turning us away because we’re too white and too male. Our culture being eroded and chewn away by third world grifters and their managerial handlers. Our identity being universalized and, therefore, neutralized.

Tyler Durden said it best, “we are the middle children of history.” But I’d say we’re worse than that - we’re the adopted youngest sibling brought on board when our parents were far too old to give us the time of day.

So, dear Evangelical Church, ConInc., and the Old Guard,

You lost us a long time ago. The voices in the wood line are us. Rome will be sacked, it’s just a question of who’s young men will do it…the Roman youth, or the barbarian immigrant youth.

You have left your gates open and are surprised to find traitors in your midst. You will awake one day when the foreigner rules over you and will cry out, “Where have our young warriors gone? Where has the strength of their fingers and the power of their bones gone? What shall become of us?”

Only God can say now.

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Onward, and Build the World.

This is the part of the Hero’s Journey known as the Abyss.

It is here where many stories end. For the hero is given a question that he’s heard before: Will ye go on? Will ye persevere? Will ye answer the call? He receives the Call to Adventure once more, much as he did in the beginning of the story. At the start of the story, the hero is stationary and is typically content in stasis. He is home, comfortable, and content. Or, he is miserable and stuck. Either way, he has no motion. No movement. No momentum.

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The same is true in the Abyss. The hero meet their low point. This is Frodo in Shelob’s pit in the heart of Morder; this is William Wallace in the dungeon on the night before his execution; this is Christ in the garden of Gethsemane. The Hero is brought low and made mournfully aware of his state, of what awaits him. Yet a question is posed to him by the Norns, by the fates, by the tale.

Will ye continue?

The Heroes that decline, and choose to lie down in the volcanic soil of the abyss, die there. These stories are the Shakespearean tragedies, the Norse myths, the heartbreaking films and stories that, while bleak and perhaps end on the down tempo, nevertheless have their place in our mythic headspace and deservedly so. Not every story needs a happy ending. In fact, most true stories are a mixture of both joyful and wounded, mirthful and weeping.

Yet, the Heroes that answer in the affirmative and brace themselves up, rising to their shaky legs, and pushing onward, will invariably escape the Abyss and the story will continue. He will have died and been reborn.

Now, before he can leave the Abyss, the Hero undergoes a transformation and offers atonement. This is Jacob walking with a limp after wrestling God, Frodo losing a finger to Gollum in order to be rid of the One Ring and living the rest of his life with a missing finger and a Morgul wound in his belly. The Hero triumphs, but he is fundamentally changed and he limps from the experience.

This is as far as I want to stretch Joseph Campbell’s Heroes Journey tool, for I have both met my needs by laying it out thusly and I realize my own ignorance as to the utter depths of this magical pool of analysis. Plus, anytime one attempts to utilize symbolism and extrapolation, there’s usually someone to whine and moan that they’re doing it wrong. So I’ll leave it there.

Enter: Confession

In the Christian tradition, there exists the sacrament of confession. This is the crucible of the Christian life - the moment of Katabasis, of the abyss, in which a Christian gazes into Galadriel’s pool and sees themselves and their path rightly. Once rightly apprehended, the Christian is able to confront the great heroic question:

Will ye continue?

If a Christian is to continue and avoid the entrapment of the sort of navel-gazing shame that the Apostle Paul writes of in 2 Corinthians, ultimately denying the call and dying in the Abyss, he must arise and confess. Repent.

As the awareness of our sin dawns upon us, so must our desire to be rid of it so also arise. To keep with the LOTR genuflections, call to mind the powerful image of Samwise Gamgee crouching over the prone form of Frodo Baggins. Frodo lies bloody and dry, broken apart on the rocks of Mount Doom. His eyes pierce the heavenly veil, and he sees time as a scroll open before him, peering back over his life in the Shire. He sees the fields, the golden sun bathing the lilies, the wind caressing the trees. Yet quickly, his mind’s eye transforms the golden day of the afternoon sun into the flaming hate of the eye of Sauron. The sun morphs and dissolves into the wicked and evil eye that condemns and sees.

So is our life under the gaze of our sin. The Christian, properly oriented, is as Frodo, gazing at his own life and at once seeing its beauty, then how quickly the beauty is soiled and burned away by the flame of his own wickedness. Then he must answer like Sam Gamgee upon hearing Frodo’s words uttered from under the blanket of his apocalyptic vision.

“Let us be rid of it! Once and for all.”

So the Christian enters into the confessional, he prostrates himself before the mercy seat of Christ, and he vomits his filth out. It cuts him, it wounds him, it hurts him. He will walk with a limp, but this is the cost of transformation. Of escaping the tragedy of life. Confession is the knife that cuts the cancer from the tissue. Forgiveness is the Lords, but grace is ours to be had in plentiful measure.

So stand up, brace yourself like a man, and confess. Escape the Abyss and heed the call. Rene Quinton says that the Hero is the one who transcends himself in the love of others. Heed the call and gird your loins.

BUILD THE WORLD

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“Oh, that I were as in the months of old, as in the days when God watched over me…”

Thus begins Job’s petition to God for his sufferings. Job was, in the Jungian sense, in the bottom of the lower rung of the Abyss, the bow shaped belly of the Heroes Journey wheel. He had lost everything - his children, his home, his lands, his labors. He was broken and stricken with disease, hounded by Lucifer, the accuser, himself. His friends and wife circled above his head like vultures, enticing him to apostasy and the sweet embrace of death.

Yet he resists. Yet he raises his eyes to heaven and beseeches God for answers. And the terrifying and awesome conclusion is the God does.

Now, I’m not a theologian and I don’t wish to attempt to turn this into an exegetical discourse on Job. Nor is this a Bible study. Rather, I want to open the eye and lazer down on one phrase uttered by the Most High as the preamble to His response to Job.

“Then the Lord answered Job out of the whirlwind, and said, Who is this that darkeneth counsel by words without knowledge? Gird up now thy loins like a man; for I will demand of thee, and answer thou me.” - Job 38:1-3

What does it mean to “gird up thy loins”? Let us inquire together.

In the ancient days, in the far East and in more arid climates, men wore tunics and robes to combat the heat and allow for ventilation to the netherbits. This was the common clothing norm for many peoples across many centuries. It still is today, in fact. Anyway, when a scruff was coming up or the enemy tribe was getting rowdy and coming your way, you, as the man, needed to prepare to fight.

But how could a man effectively do single-combat in what essentially amounts to a dress? His movements would be hampered, his flowing clothing would allow strategic opportunities for his enemy to grab or trip him up, and his swiftness would be diminished. So, being the man with the sword amongst other men with swords, he would gird up his loins.

Quickly, a word about loins. Loins refers the space between your lower ribs and your pelvic floor. Essentially your guts and your genitalia. The center of both your physical life and the arena from which new life is formed, or the contribution to new life is housed. The temple croft of your life and the life of your children. This area of your body is vital, perhaps more vital than anywhere else.

I am rather confident that you, dear reader, have probably never been in a life-or-death knife fight, but you nonetheless understand in your primal lizard brain the utter necessity of not getting stabbed in the belly or having your genitalia lopped off with a poleaxe. So, you grasp the importance and significance of your loins.

Pretty basic stuff here.

So, when an ancient man heard the horrid and beautiful drumbeat of war, he looked down at his tunic, and he resolved to gird it up:

The warrior would bunch his tunic up in front of him, hiking it up well above his thighs, pull it between his legs where he would then separate it into two sections, wrapping those sections out and around each side of his hips, and tie it off at his belly. Essentially he created a tightly-bound diaper, to put it crudely. This allowed him the freedom and mobility of a pair of shorts with the built-in brief liner.

(Check out the timeless work by Brett McKay on this subject and many more over at Art of Manliness.)

Now our warrior is ready for the hot blood and sunny steel of combat. This is the cultural connotation of girding up one’s loins. It is a preparation for struggle, for agony, for manly struggle. The sort of struggle that a man faces under the press of hundreds of pounds of barbell. The struggle of taking a risky business venture that may, or may not, pay off for your family. The struggle of crawling out of bed every morning before the sunrise to break your body all the more for your loved ones in the pursuit of provision. The struggle of confession. The struggle of loss. The struggle necessary for victory. The struggle of the mountain.

When the great and fearsome God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob descends in the whirlwind and the storm to address the audacity of His child Job, He offers Job a helpful warning. The warning to prepare the chest, harden the spine, and “gird the loins.”

For is this not what is required of a man to encounter the Divine? For what demands more of the intestinal fortitude of a man than introspection, self-analysis, and truthfulness with oneself in relation to the outer world? The reckoning of the bathroom mirror is merciless and demands a certain quality of manliness. Much more so for the confessional. For truthfulness with oneself and with the fate of mortal life.

Yet, atheists and redditards are quick to quip that religion and faith are the crutches of inferior men. That belief in God is for feeble people in need of aid in confronting the supposedly empty vacuum of the cosmos which cares nothing for you and offers nothing. Yet, I contend that atheism is, by it’s very nature, impossible to believe with any amount of honesty and calls to the very depths of every man’s cowardice.

Nothing exists after this, God is a myth, therefore I am free to live as I please. Atheism, if rightly lived out, is speedrunning suicide and embodies the height of the entitled and privileged child. But no one actually believes that the cosmos is an empty, purposeless, meaningless void. If they did, they wouldn’t climb out of bed ever again.

Nietzche says that any man in possession of a “why” can surmount any “how.”

I say that anyone without a “why” is not a man, nor can he even fathom a meaningful “how.” He is a half-human. The nature of a thing is what it does, and man is designed to worship God. Therefore, if a man is to fail to worship God, he is something other than fully human. A beast.

To encounter the divine requires a piece of you. The Hero does not climb out of the abyss of the Hero’s Journey wheel without immediately crossing the threshold of Atonement. He must give something, sacrifice something. This is Frodo’s aching wound and missing finger; WWII Veterans PTSD; Odysseus’ lost shipmates and his very own dignity; Hamlet’s wits and sanity. The toll to get out of the pit is a steep one, but if you can bear to pay it, if you can gird up your loins, you will be granted an audience with the Creator.

And that’s really something to strive for.

This is what so much of the Evangelical establishment is missing in regards to true faith and right expression - they demand nothing of you. You enter the BigEva church and are immediately coach-whipped with sensory input. Waves of cologne and perfume, the haze of fog machines, the concrete brutalism of modern architecture, pounding music, and a veritable desert of Christian imagery.

My wife put it profoundly once when we were forced to attend just such a church, she said, “There is nothing in here to tell you that this is a church.”

Just so. Yet, look at the Catholic or Orthodox traditions. High imagery, evocative symbolism, long-winded services, extended periods of standing, children pack into the pews, solemnity and reverence abound.

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I attended a Pascha service at my local Orthodox Church last year and, to my utter sadistic delight, we stood for four and a half hours. My feet wriggled and shifted with ache and sore, my back stiffened under the static load, and I felt closer to God than I ever have before. I drank gold and inhaled the dust of heaven.

This is the way. Aching feed, stiffened back, and glowing eyes.

Everything you wish for, the life you wish to live, the version of yourself that exists in both your mind and God’s, lies only on the other side of a life that requires you to stoop, lift up your robes, gird your loins, and pick up your sword.

Pain is a friend. Suffering can be trusted. Holiness is the reward.

Onward, and Build the World

I remember how it felt to watch them remove the statue. The dirty yellow straps reaching down from the crane head looked garish and insulting against the burnished bronze skin of the statue. Or maybe it was stone, I’m not sure. It doesn’t really matter. What matters is the contrast and the symbolic gut punch behind what was taking place. The straps, dirty yellow and pulled tight across the statue, drew a striking and disturbing line between what was decidedly old, noble, and far reaching, and what was new, vogue, and naval gazing.

It was July 1st, 2020, and due to mounting pressure from the race-conscious mobs, the statue was being removed to safeguard the fragile and increasingly explosive psyche of the masses. The statue depicted General Stonewall Jackson astride his mighty warhorse. His chest broad and high, his brow fixed to the horizon, his sword hand resting lightly by his side. He was poised in the posture that earned him his name: “Stonewall”.

It was July 21st, 1861, and Confederate General Bernard Bee was leading his men into battle at the Battle of Bull Run (or Menassas, depending on your orientation), when he spotted General Jackson atop his horse, peering down a hillside. He was facing into oncoming fire and flying shrapnel, as calm and collected as if he was in church. General Bee raised his saber and cried,

“Look, men! There is Jackson standing like a stone wall! Let us determine to die here, and we will conquer!”

General Bee himself would later, that same day, receive a mortal wound when an artillery shell exploded near him, sending shrapnel spinning and careering into his belly. He would die the very next day. However, his quote lives on in the nickname given to General Jackson: Stonewall.

Stonewall Jackson was a renowned and universally respected General in the Confederacy during the bitterest seasons of the American Civil War. His piety and virtuous living earned him the admiration of his men, his resoluteness and coolness in battle earned their respect, and his discipline and personal strivings earned their love. He was the epitome of the masculine spirit of the American South. Resolute, strong, pious, and devoted.

Now, propel yourself 159 years later and you shall find hoards of race-baiters and political agitators demanding the statue depicting Stonewall Jackson removed. Truthfully, I must admit, that the gentle removal of the statue was a preferable fate to the ignominious downfall that other symbolic totems suffered during the “mostly peaceful” Summer of Love riots. The riots, in case you missed it, were regarding the killing of George Floyd, a career criminal, drug user, baby killer, and abuser that died of an overdose during his arrest.

Subsequently, the city ghettos and the academic lecture halls (truly, two sides of the same spiritual coin) emptied out and cities began to burn as mobs of angry liberal cat moms and frothingly mad black folk looted, burned, destroyed, menaced, and murdered.

And removed statues.

Now, on its face this may seem like an innocuous side-note, a footnote, even, in the sprawling madness that was the Summer of Love. But for me, I feel the removals, defacements, and vandalisms of heroic statues and historical landmarks identifying men of the past points to a deeper and more pervasive tactic in the post-enlightenment campaign of demoralization, namely something I will call hero murder.

Let me explain.

Hero Murder occurs like this. A power apparatus embarks on a long-term propaganda and re-education campaign and begins by taking the following steps:

• Demystify, disenchant, and villainize specific historical figures and their exploits, in order to…

• Demoralize the youth and cause them to despise both themselves and their history, thereby…

• Rendering them flattened and depressed, unmoored from time, place, and people in order too…

• Control, manipulate, and enslave them.

Now, the propaganda campaign against the heart and minds of the Western man is complex, multi-fronted, and intentionally confusing. Disorientation and demoralization are the point (see my other written works on this subject), but the processes are myriad and I could write for months on the various fronts of the offensive campaign against your soul. I probably will...

Yet, Hero Murder remains one of the most potent and often overlooked aspects of this spiritual campaign.

For if you can successfully remove a key aspect of one’s self-orientation to the natural world around them, you bring them one fundamental step closer to detachment, confusion, and eventually something akin to neuroticism. If a young man cannot trust his ancestors, his forebearers, or the men who brought him to where he is, he loses an anchor, a touchstone, a marker on the map that orients the rest of his perception of himself and the world.

If you were an evil and tyrannical force, a cabal, intent on targeting and clamping your jaws down on your populace, could you think of a better tactic than to convince them to dismiss and/or despise themselves and their ontology?

For if I, a white Christian male, am so convinced to despise my skin, my ethnos, my place, and my people, then what conclusions can I possibly draw about my ontology, my place, my purpose? Surely nothing but negative ones. Conclusions that would see optimal outcome to be one where I withdraw, shrink, cease to strive, and perhaps even die. The slow (yet increasingly hasty) suicide of the Western world via mass immigration and felt-tipped needle of suicidal empathy is evidence enough of this.

And thus, the heart of the Western young man is hounded and scourged into hiding. He is driven into the deep places of the soul, the wet and smoky caves of wounding and hiding. Many a good man has died in these caves and many more will continue.

Unless…

Unless Western men awake from the sensory-deprivation tank of the Western post-Enlightenment hive mind with its steady diet of schadenfreude and self-hatred, and seize upon the birthright that is his, and revive the heroes of the West in his heart, he will never survive. He will die a quiet and drowned death. He will live a long time in the misery of the cave that the Longhouse and its White Knights drove him into, and there he will die without a word of protest.

You, O Western man, are descended from kings and conquerors. Your bloodlines built the world. The men who came before you were no more or less human than you, yet they possessed a courage and flame that you do not have.

But you could.

You still can.

The heroes of the Old World, the ghosts of Alfred the Great, Charlemagne, Napoleon, Godfrey of Boullion, Harald Hardrada, and thousands more await you in the woods of your blood memory. The heritage of the western man is the world - the gnarled and bloodied hands of ancestors and heroes reach to you from the gales of time with gifts, memories, and tokens. Reject and spurn those who would murder the memory of those mighty and good men. Rage, rage against the dying (murder) of their memory. Learn your history, tell their tales, and gird your loins for battle.

Remember who you are. Remember your place. Remember your people.

Take the gifts, seize them, and Build the World.

The hauntingly liminal and macabre photos of Epstein’s properties; the nonsensical, but not totally unsurprising, decorations and artwork depicting mutated human beings, nude women, and strangely posed children; the macabre inclusions of outdoor furniture inside of rooms painted to look like the waiting room of a family walk-in clinic from the early 90’s.

It all culminated in a detached sense of horror and despondency. Like the moments after a loud noise sends itself ping-ponging around the walls and nooks of a space, so did the unspeakable wickedness and evil of this man and his enterprises ring inside the arena of my psyche. The immediately distant, but all too close, memory of something evil and dark beyond measure filled my heart and my living room where I sat clicking on. I felt dirty and overwhelmed, exhausted in my marrow.

So, I closed my laptop, uncoiled my legs from each other and stretched out on the couch, exhaling the black fumes of horror I’d inhaled over the past few hours. The cold caress of the leather was a comfort as I realized I’d been sweating, holding tension in my back and neck, my heart rising and falling with the photos and emails and journals I’d poured over. I heard, down the hall, the slight musical tunes of my little girl’s children’s gospel music track she listens to at night and I felt, immediately, a new sensation.

Rage.

Deep and abiding rage. The sort of heat in your belly that causes your molars to meet like mountain goats in a duel in the back of your mouth, grinding themselves together for dominance, or release. The black, yawning abyss of horror in my stomach filled quickly with the acid of hate and bloodlust.

Those victims were little girls and boys, just like my child. No one came to save them. No one heard their screams and their cries in the dark halls of power, save for the dark forms of the demonic and brutish beasts that satiated their lusts upon them. No one held them. No one rescued them. Only the Earth and the good Lord and His hosts have them now. God have mercy on their sweet souls.

Even as I write this, a lump of blue despair rises in my throat as I am tempted to weep openly for these children. These blessed image bearers of God crushed and ground out of existence by wicked men and women. The worshipers of Baal and Molech, my enemies. The enemies of my God. God damn them.

But here lies the point I wish to make.

This is exactly what they want me to feel.

They want men like me, and readers like you, to read these files, view these pictures, and imagine these children and they want us to writhe in anger and despair and do nothing.

Demoralization and nihilism is the angle at play here. If they can overwhelm us and drown us in the deep, cold waters of their depravity and thereby numb us to it all via exhaustion and depression, they win. This is the angle of the propaganda war that began during the Enlightenment. With the death of God in the mind of the Western world, the throne had to be filled with something. So, the State arose. The State arose and sat itself as the new deity of the masses.

For what higher entity can a godless people appeal to but the hegemonic conglomerate of congealed force and power that is the gaggle of human beings at the top? Truly, nothing higher.

And how does such an entity, who’s grip on power is truly far more fragile and tenuous than any of us realize, control a population? They could try fear. They do that a lot and it works, for the most part.

They can dangle the carrot of compliance and compulsive partisanship support, while wielding the stick of global war, nuclear annihilation, famine, inflation, aliens, also aliens, and whatnot. “SUPPORT THIS THING OR THE BAD THING WILL HAPPEN, WE PINKY PROMISE!”

A tale as old as time.

But what works better than fear? Better, even, than hate of “others” or envy of the rich and powerful? What emotion or posture could a populace be forced to take that would proffer more boon to the rulership than imagined class struggle or partisan show-battles? I’ll tell you:

Demoralization.

I’ve never read Machiavelli, but if he doesn’t have a chapter on how to morally overwhelm, mentally clog, and emotionally deaden a populace, he missed out. For truly, nothing describes the spiritual state of our people in the West quite like the image of an overworked, traumatized, and spiritually empty man in a roadside diner. Beneath the keening neon signs and sticky American, our collective soul sips cold coffee and peels open its fourth pack cigarettes today.

This condition can be firmly placed at the foot of the secular humanists who kickstarted the Enlightenment project - a venture into an empty vacuum devoid of God, goodness, truth, or beauty. What vanity. We toppled the Father (in our hearts), thinking we could rule. We follow in the footsteps of the Morning Star, the Lucifer, who leads us by the hand into hell.

Hell is located at 9 East 71st Street on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.

And our rulers, our little kings and queens in the East, opened the binder and dropped the horrors of it all into our laps. All 3 million pieces of it. Why? What does this gain them? Surely, such an admission that our leadership are, and have been, cannibalistic child murderers and satanic sadists all along would cause the populace to revolt! Surely, such an admission would spur us to dust off our pitchforks, light the torches, and erect the gallows, right?

Of course not. The gallows have been built, but they were built for our souls long ago. The steps are humanism and self-dependance. The platform is ease and luxury. The trap door beneath our feet is the satiety of our every fleshly urge and vice. The rope is our pride. And the hand on the lever, gloved in a black gimp glove and ringed about with sin, is the Black Pill.

You see, once a people have been so totally and completely emptied of any hope, morale, thumos, vitality, or meaning, they are maximally easy to control. For what would they fight? Nothing. For what would they strive for if it’s all, truly, “fake and gay”?

God was killed a long time ago, right? The state, the hallowed halls of our democracy, of our man-made institutions, were supposed to save us, right? RIGHT? We were told we didn’t need God, that the superstitions of the antiquated Medievals and ancients was in the past, that we’d evolved past any need for “transcendent” meaning or heavenly heights of duty and purpose! We were told that the individual was the end-all-be-all, that he and he alone could plot his own path. That morality was subjective to each of us and that humanity was basically good, we just needed to get the political and cultural formula right before we could attain utopia.

Turns out, utopia is an international trafficking ring where our children are taken in, bound, consumed, and offered to the self-same pagan gods we were told had died with the ringing bells of the “enlightenment”. That utopia is a global order built upon the skin and bones of our most innocent, of our daughters and sons. That utopia is the spiritual and cultural rape of our identity as a people. That utopia is hell in a quarter zip USA polo.

Perhaps we were wrong, in the end. Perhaps the old gods of the desert and the flames aren’t gone. Perhaps the battle that raged in the air and the soil in those olden days hasn’t ceased, it’s only taken on new dimensions to suit the mediums of the age. And if the demons of the old world are still among us, than perhaps, just perhaps, the angels and the God of the angels is too.

Perhaps the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob is still working to punish the wicked and redeem His people.

Perhaps the utopianists aren’t utopianists at all.

Perhaps there is hope.

Perhaps the hope is in the defiance of the Black Pill and the mad adherence to Christ and the vitality of life of embodied beings. Perhaps the hope is in the grim satisfaction of knowing that every man and woman that harmed those children will be broken and ground into paste by the heel of the Headcrusher, the slain seven eyed Lamb.

There is hope. Defy the Black Pill for what it is: spiritual faggotry and moral cowardice. A snake oil peddled by men who hate you and by boys who have not control, and thus no ability to forge their own future. The Black Pill is the worldview of the lost and the broken, the hopeless and the weak.

A man possessed of power and thumos is, in his being, oil to the stagnant water of the Black Pill. Your vitality cries out in rebellion to the fatalism and the propaganda of the elites to demoralize and spiritually exhaust you. The Christian man, possessing the certainty of heaven and the chest of the self-controlled masculine spirit, is the lone bulwark.

The Kali Yuga must be ridden, but the ride doesn’t end in hell, or destruction, or seppuku. It ends in defiant victory. Victory in death, victory in the daily death of discipline, victory in the daily death of faith and self-denial.

Victory in the death of the man on the cross, brutalized for our sake and for the sake of the children lost to the beasts and the serpents.

He will have his vengeance, in this life and the next.

ONWARD, AND BUILD THE WORLD

I work a job in which I enter a different home every day. As a residential service technician in the blue-collar industry (meaning, I fix things in your house), I meet all sorts of people from all sorts pathways of life and, most vitally, I get to see their bookshelves.

You get to know a lot about a person after a cursory look at their bookshelf, let me tell ya.

Pretty quickly I can diagnose if I’m dealing with a normie Christian, an overly educated “erm-actually” atheist, a Starbucks spiritualistic E-witch, or a vaguely Hindu-coded Boomer Democrat. Truly, the diversity (or lack thereof) of one’s bookshelf tells the armchair sleuth a good deal about the interests, worldview, and values of the shelf-stocker. Call it literary physiognomy.

Nothing really shocks me anymore, as a result. I’ve been in the homes of American Indian pagan priests (literally), with the requisite animal skulls, sage, crystals, and eagle feathers all over the place; the homes of Left-Coast expat poets and elder hipsters with Bukowski on the shelf and indie-synth on the vinyl; or the homes of crusty politicians and haggard academics worn down to a thread by the world. And truly-truly I say to you that their bookshelves don’t surprise me. At all. It’s all rather uniform and expected. Boomer men have Clive Cussler, New Atheists have Sam Harris, fitness bros have Jocko…you know how it goes.

But one demographic of individual and their book choices never cease to startle me.

Christian women and their smut.

A comically large loophole in both secular and Christian circles is the glaring contradiction of women’s lust. Men are ritualistically and relentlessly slammed, shamed, and slandered for being sexual monsters from birth. The feminism that sprang from the Second Great Awakening in the late 18th Century held aloft the polemic that men were bestial by nature and required the civilizing effect of the divine feminine in order to domesticate them. Women of this era saw men as wild, unruly, and childish by nature and therefore requiring forcible maturation - their hard edges sanded down over years and years of tone policing, sexual manipulation and withholding, and a campaign of “mothering” their husband to an early (and quite happily met) grave.

This is the “Longhouse” - the matriarchal hegemony that women hold over society, the Church, and the family. “Behind every good man is a great woman!” The cuckold says. And he’s partly right, at least these days. This is the manner in which the system has been constructed. And it is within this Longhouse that young men and boys, in order to suppress their innate rapaciousness and villainy, are treated as rapists-in-the-making. Our sexuality and our God-given sexual drive is handled like dynamite - chucked down a dark hole in the ground to explode privately and anonymously. The purity culture of the 00’s admittedly wielded a hammer and both young men and women had became the proverbial nails, but the messaging sent to the two parties was markedly different.

Young men: “Your desire for sex and romantic connection with a woman is lustful and sinful and must be utterly and completely contained until your wedding night. On that night, good luck! We don’t talk about sex from the Christian male’s perspective, however, so good luck navigating your struggles in that arena. If your wife struggles with anything, send her our way, though!”

Young women: “Your sexuality is a pure, sugared light - a blessing for you to bestow on any man YOU CHOOSE, when the time is right. Protect your divine sexual flower at all costs, cuz you know how these boys are! **wink wink**”

I spoke to a good (female) friend of mine the other day about this topic and she said that she grew up with a sort of downloaded assumption that all men were degenerate perverts just waiting for one bad day to snap the chains of their self-restraint and bend, twist, and morph into a werewolf-like creature full rapacious urges ready to indulged. She grew up in a traditional home with a good and loving mother and father who raised her in the church and in the faith. Yet, this assumption was still hard baked into her.

Men were the problem. She was not. Men were the hunters. She was the prey.

The only reason men don’t snatch up every woman they see and violate her is because they are actively deciding not to. But they all want to, women everywhere are told.

The point is that men are informed in utero that we have a problem. That we are a problem. A snag. A defect. And for those of us who grew up in the hot, awful, Longhouse of Evangelical serfdom, this was shrouded in the moralizing and demoralizing verbiage of immutable sin nature (you’re just born that way) and moral defectiveness. Sex was evil until marriage and even then it was only passingly acceptable. You had sex with your nose plugged, looking away, as if you were cleaning out a dirty dish left in the car too long. It could never be talked about in the church or celebrated, it could only be used as a moral bludgeon for young boys and a cautionary tale for young women. All day, sun up to sun down, it was “guard your eyes, young man!”, “keep pure!”, and “take every thought captive!”.

Sound moral teaching, to be sure, but I began to notice something as I endured the relentless onslaught of managerial misandry and Longhoused tender-sexual purity culture:

I never heard about women’s sin.

Do women sin? I know they do, but to say so is akin to being the boy who says, “The Emperor has no clothes.” Except in this version, the boy’s mother and all the village women beat the hell from the boy and fill him with such shame and self-loathing that he never speaks again, only drawing deeper inside of himself and sharpening the shards of his broken heart to use against the world.

Yes, women sin. They sin a lot. They sin all over the place. Chief amongst their sins are vanity, pride, and selfishness. They can be cold, malicious, and wield the daggers of interpersonal manipulation and social assassination much, much better than men. Women ruin men’s lives every day. Modern America is littered with single dads who see their kids once a month, shattered businesses and dreams, homes ripped like a napkin down the middle, never to be reunited. Much of this is due to the culturally and legally empowered actions of women.

Now, before anyone tosses me in with the Red Pill crowd (see my published critiques of Red Pill culture in my other written works) or any of these sundry other women-haters, allow me to say that I, myself, am the chief amongst sinners. There is no stone or dart I lob at my fellow Christian sisters that I am not willing to have lobbed at me.

I am selfish, impetuous, vain, and haughty. I can wield spite and rhetorical venom with the best of them. I can be a destroyer of worlds if I choose. I am chief amongst sinners and the log in my eye is prominent, believe me. But this ought not disqualify me from pointing out the many specks in my sister’s eyes.

For Christ does not prohibit us from judgment, rather he admonishes us to judge fairly. See Matthew 7 where Christ warns us to judge not, lest we be judged by the standard we judge others. In verse 5 he says that we ought to deal with the log in our own eye so that we can more rightly and justly remove the speck from our brothers (or sisters) eyes.

Women’s Sin: The Arrival of the Smut

One of the beasts that the witch hunt of the purity culture movement spied out and ruthlessly attacked was pornography, and rightly so. Of course, it was ensconced as a male-only issue, with the begrudging admittance that some women may struggle with it, but it’s not a big deal for them because men are the sexual creatures afterall. Putting all my cards on the table, I myself am not unstained or unscarred by the demon of pornography and I will be the first in the shield wall when it comes to assaulting the totem of sexual degeneracy and pornography. I hate it and it has burned my soul like acid.

And it is precisely because I hate it and hate how it has wounded me and my family so deeply that I scoff in horror and disgust at the utter and complete passivity and permissiveness that the Church, and broader Christian culture, give to women who participate in their own pornography: Smut.

Now, some feminist coded troglodyte will retort: “SMUT HAS NO VICTIM! THE PORN INDUSTRY IS A FRONT FOR HUMAN TRAFFICKING!”

To which I say, “Yes, it is a trafficking front and participating in it is aiding in the trafficking itself.” But the notion, especially within Christian moral framing, that sin is permissible because it has no identifiable victim is theological retardation on an apocalyptic scale.

You, my sister, are the victim. If you think for a moment that reading a book about a young, struggling college girl going to work at a fantastical minotaur farm where she submits to daily systematic gang-r*pings by a herd of minotaur (but she secretly likes it, so it’s okay) is having zero effect on your soul, mental health, or ability to relate in a sexually healthy and Godly way with your husband or with men in general, you are hogging so many chromosomes you ought to be investigated for hoarding.

(Yes, the book I mentioned above is real and is massively popular with the porn-brained moms on TikTok).

It doesn’t even have to be that overt, however. So much of women’s fantasy and literature is porn-by-any-other-name. I dare you to go to the fantasy section, or watch the nearest Millennial/Gen Z woman at your local Barnes & Noble and see where she gravitates, pick up a novel from that section (names with an ampersand are usually a safe pick) and I would bet 5 healthy bucks that it will have multiple, explicit sex scenes in it that read just like the script to anything found on any porn site. I dare you. I will win.

And so we have a whole generation of Christian women sitting in the pews on Sunday, singing whole-heartedly to the Lord, who look forward to going home and breathing heavily over their smut novel while the kid’s play with ipads and their husband trims the hedges, and you know what? They see no problem with it at all. It is a total and complete blind spot.

If a male friend of mine told me that he was looking forward to Church concluding so he could go home and jerk it to the hub, I would have more than a severe word with him. I would chastise him and rebuke him, and so would all the women within earshot. It would be a beatdown, as it should be! But if a woman in the same Church leaned to her friends and said, “I can’t wait to get home and read Vapor & Roses (or whatever mad-lib names these garbage books have), its so SPICY!” She would be met with a chorus of giggles and winks. Even if one of her friends had moral umbrage with her reading such a book, she likely wouldn’t say anything for fear of social fallout.

So if women will not hold one another accountable, who must? Well, pastors obviously.

But it will be a cold day in hell before that happens. Don’t believe me? Pay attention the next time Mothers Day rolls around and compare the vibes of that holiday to the vibes of Fathers Day. The mothers will be given roses, chocolates, and their praises will be sung from the back row to the lofts, from the pew to the pulpit. She will be heralded and held aloft like Spiderman after he saved that train.

But on Fathers Day, we are given some hand-made crafts that the kids hodgepodged together in 5 minutes and will be forced to sit through a sermon on how we need to “step up”, and “do better.”

So all this is left is for anonymous clowns like me to cry out in the wilderness. I feel like Will Ferrel’s character Mugatu in Zoolander when Derek Zoolander whips out his new “face” and it is identical to all of his other “faces”, and he cries out, “DOESN’T ANYBODY NOTICE THIS? I FEEL LIKE I’M TAKING CRAZY PILLS!”

Our Christian mothers, wives, girlfriends, sisters, and friends are porn addicts, and many are openly flaunting it in the public square to much acclaim. And the men? The husbands and fathers and brothers and pastors? Silence. Perhaps a shrug.

Nothing will change unless Christian men begin holding their women accountable and following the Matthew 18 ethic. Nothing will change unless the Overton Window shifts and men (and women) become comfortable shaming and publicly rebuking such open and rampant sexual degeneracy among their Churches and communities. Yes, shame is good and it is a very effective social regulator.

Shame what is shameful. It worked on young men. It worked on me.

Until we are willing to be Iconoclastic towards the totems and idols in our culture, Churches, and homes, we will never see a return to Christ.

Onward, and Build The World

I lay on my back, face up, watching the afternoon storm clouds creep slowly across my vision.

My heart pounded in my ears, a sweat bead ran into my ear, and my feet pulsed inside my shoes. It was late afternoon in December and I lay in the parking lot of the North Rim visitor center of the Grand Canyon. My dad and I had just traversed the Canyon from the South Rim that morning on our single-day Rim-To-Rim-To-Rim attempt. Beginning at 3Am, we pushed through the dark and the cold and descended into the belly of the Earth, that great gouge in the very heart of all things that breaks and makes all who enter her.

It’s next to impossible to capture the Grand Canyon from the bottom with photos, much less with words on a white screen. How could one describe the razor’s edge of making - where the Colorado bellows and churns its way towards the center of the Earth? One would be equally challenged to fully describe a fever dream they had the night before. The moment you exit it, it stands as a foggy monolith in your hindsight - present, but untouchable.

Everything in the bottom of the Canyon is new, but it’s been there the whole time. You’re just the new thing; the raw, newborn baby teething on the suffering that is the descent and ascent. The clawprints of man’s struggle, of God’s might, and the ghosts of myth live in her passages and narrows. It’s pointless to try and capture the Grand Canyon with words.

We had descended to Phantom Ranch, arriving around breakfast time. After a meal of beef jerky, tuna, and pop tarts, we entered The Box - a winding, narrow passage of vertical black granite and grey bluff face. It leans in on both sides of you like it has a secret to share, an omen or a blessing. Felt medieval, like I’d wandered into Mordor. We made our way through her passages, earning our right of way with sweat and hummed folk ballads. The river tributary babbling its accompaniment on our left. In no time at all we began to climb out of the very bowels of the Earth and ascend into the most serene and Edenic meadow I’ve ever seen. The sun sat on the Canyon’s rim to my right, resting her December feet on the edge, perching to warm our bodies after the chill shadow of the Box. I stopped and inhaled the warm air of sagebrush breathing and evening coming. Like eating gold, the meadow above the Box is a thin place where God and the Angels and the myths draw near. All that could be real suddenly was.

In a place like that, a place of untainted and unmarred beauty, it’s suddenly very easy to believe in fairies, dragons, nymphs, river spirits, goblins, ghouls, and beasts. Maybe we do live in a grand adventure; maybe the world isn’t just stuff.

We climbed from there towards the North Rim, arriving at our final water stop before the 7-mile ascent to the Rim. It was colder, far colder than down below. The eternal hymn of a waterfall echoed down the draw as the path upwards drew the walls of the canyon in on itself, like Samson pulling in the pillars rather than pushing them.

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Refueled and rehydrated, we began the grueling climb. 7 miles of 45-degree trail and thousands of feet of gain, with snowpack blossoming under us with each step. The temperature dropped, the snow and ice encumbered our stride, and I began to feel my body give out. For the first time in my life, I dropped to my knees in exhaustion. I’ve always been the sort of man who thrives in misery and adversity, in fact I nearly crave it. Nothing fills me with more honeyed sweetness than struggle and achievement. And typically, I can keep my heart and mind forward, locked on the horizon, step followed by dogged step until I arrive. But the Grand Canyon, that great womb of the world, buckled my knees and held me in her golden dirt.

My dad gave me some fuel and we sat contemplating those thoughts that can only be entertained in the lounge of hurt. Deep thoughts, thoughts only men can hold on wearied legs and shaking arms.

Eventually, we arrived at the North Rim hollow and exhausted - and we were only halfway through our endeavor. My legs felt hollow and boneless, folding underneath me as I sat back on the sun-warmed asphalt of the closed visitor center. I didn’t know if I could continue. We were out of water and it was 7 miles back down the trail to the nearest water pump. The North Rim had closed its water sources due to the freezing night-time temperatures, as it does every year. We knew this going in, that there were only three water stops in the entire 48 mile round-trip traverse, but much like getting punched in the mouth, our plan barely survived contact with the enemy.

We triaged the situation, taking stock of my deteriorating condition which, as it turned out, was dehydration and under fueling. A classic blunder in the Canyon, even in December. I kicked myself inside for my stupidity. I was an experienced ultra runner and blistered outdoorsman. Cursing myself and my damn legs, I leaned over to the grass and began shoveling snow into my water bottles while my dad unpacked some food for us. I sat up, shoving a fistful of snow in my mouth, and muttered, “Any options?”

“Nope.” My dad said. “The park road leads out to the highway, but that’s a 40 mile walk and you see those?” He gestured behind him with a thumb, “We’ve got storms coming in and they’ve probably got snow for us.” We were in shorts and only had light windbreakers in our packs.

In that moment I felt like Cortez in the new world with his ships smoldering in the blackened surf. Was he afraid? Did he curse his weary legs? I doubt it. No way through but through. In the silence the song of the wind across the desert sung to my mind the images of my ancestors who tamed this land. Cowboys, rogues, settlers, and warriors.

My last name means “horse shepherd” and my forefathers rode these lands, coming out from the East, and pressing into the howling wilds of the unknown to subdue and build the world. And here I was laying in the spoils of their suffering and labor feeling sorry for myself.

I felt my ancestors’ eyes on me and I was embarrassed.

So, I lay on my back, face up, watching the afternoon storm clouds creep slowly across my vision and knew that for the first time in my life, I finally had an opportunity to do something significant. I swallowed my tuna and my self-pity and sat up, looked my dad in the eyes and conveyed those silent words that only a father and son know, and stood on shaky legs to re-enter the warm embrace of the golden and stony lover I’d come to loath and adore - that great gouge, the big ditch, the center of the universe.

“The only way through it is through it.” I say, recalling the phrase my dad uttered to me before I shipped off to Basic Training years and years before. He smiled, stood, and nodded.

And we descended once more into the heart of all things.

- Build The World

P.S: We made it. And I will forever love the Canyon for Her hospitality and brutality. She is the brutal American mother.

I was laying on my back with my 5-year-old little girl curled up on my chest like a cat (or a dragon [foreshadowing]) as we enjoyed the classic 2001 film Shrek. She had been consuming a steady diet of classic Disney princess films and old-timey TV shows, but I felt it high-time she was exposed to some of the timeless potty humor, loveable characters from my childhood, and most of all, Smashmouth.

(One of the first CD’s I ever purchased with cash-money was Smashmouth’s 1999 Astrolounge album and it was, in a word, exquisite).

Anyway, we popped that old chestnut into the DVD player and were enjoying the movie together quite nicely with the Sunday afternoon light molding us to the couch with warmth and love. We giggled at the jokes, I answered her questions mumbled out from under her blanket, and held her close when the dragon reared its head. She was scared of the Dragon, as all children being unstained by the cynicism of the world are.

Yet, as we frolicked through the runtime and the old familiar characters came forth to sit with my memory and greet me next to the stream of nostalgia, I began to notice a pattern I’d seen emerging in film and media from both our childhood, assuming you were a 90’s kid, and today’s media. Let me explain, and then I’ll come back to Shrek.

The simplest synopsis of this patter, of this story telling arch prevalent in most, if not all, of our animated (and otherwise) films goes like this:

Reject authority.

Embrace abnormality.

Find freedom.

Here’s some case examples.

In Little Mermaid, Ariel balks at her father’s wisdom and makes a covenant with a literal sea witch and encounters horrors beyond knowing in order to embrace abnormality (she’s a Mermaid, not a human, and her sacrifice to become a human costs her the most vital external component of her being - her tail and her voice) and find freedom (her freedom is only partial, as she must live life next to the man she loves as a mute).

In Aladdin, Princess Jasmin rejects her father’s wisdom and decides to leave the palace and her station (abnormality). She frolics off to slum it up and be a “normie” for a day (freedom), only to fall into the trap of Jafaar (the evil Wizard character), get her father psychically and mentally enslaved and abused, and cause the deaths or entrapment of two, admittedly bad, people. Just so Jasmine could feel alive, or something. Her motivations can be chalked up pretty accurately as plain old rebellion.

In Moana, we meet Moana, a totally awesome and supernaturally intuitive Island girlie who can literally speak to and control the ocean. And because Disney is the entertainment propaganda mouthpiece for our feminist hellscape, Moana is also set to be the next Chief of her tribe AND the savior of the entire ocean. I think I have girlboss fatigue. But first, she has to reject her father’s wisdom (reject authority) thanks to some advice from her sea-witch/shaman grandma to “follow her heart” (abnormality) and return the heart of the Mother Sea-goddess-thing so that the Deus can Ex the Machina (or find her feminine energy through forehead touching Moana) and Moana shall be free to…I don’t really know (freedom?). Be the boss-babe she always knew she could be, I suppose, and return to ensure her father and her people recognize how awesome she is and how deeply ingrained their internalized misogyny really runs. Something like that.

Remember, the lone sin for any young woman is to not believe in herself enough.

This plot cycle continues virtually everywhere in film and movies: reject authority, tradition, and hierarchy in order to “find yourself” and become the best version of yourself you can be. Because anarchy is the god of our age.

The only possible flaws for modern film characters are a) not knowing how powerful and awesome you really are, if you’re a girl, or b) not knowing how weak and terrible you really are, if you’re a dude.

But how does our main character, nearly always a woman, go about this self discovery and rejection of hierarchy? By embracing abnormality and the anarchy of self-determination.

As is the modus operandi of Leftist media, the more macabre, obscene, and wyrd the act of rebellion is, the more desirable it is to undertake. Deformation and perversion is the weapon in the hand of the Serpent. This is how the Left has pushes the Overton Window - by creating burn-out in the general populace via an unending deluge of “radical” and “boundary pushing” themes, images, and stories. Bit by bit, inch by inch, they inoculate the broader culture into accepting increasingly more deranged and perverse behavior.

It’s belligerent, amoral libertarianism having a demon child with globalist-feminism, and the baby’s name is Hollywood. But here’s the kicker, just like with Adam and Eve’s freedom-via-abnormality and self-discovery, it always leads to death and enslavement. For we know that evil does not exist as such. It has no source, nor origin, no being or location. Like darkness, evil is simply the negation of good, or light. Evil cannot create, it can only warp and twist what previously existed.

Allow me to quote Frodo Baggins on the matter:

“The Shadow that bred them can only mock, it cannot make: not real new things of its own. I don’t think it gave life to the Orcs, it only ruined them and twisted them...” - Frodo Baggins

The Return of the King, "The Tower of Cirith Ungol".

Evil, by its nature, mocks the Lord God and His creation. As created beings, the enemies of God cannot conjure new life or new being, they can only take what God has made and break it, twist it, and manipulate it.

This is what an evil culture does to its stories - it takes good, whole, and meaningful stories and myths and bastardizes them with ideological shoehorning and modernist “updates”. Take any number of popular IPs and mythologies that have been adapted to the big screen and report back to me how many hands and fingers it takes to count the number of post-enlightenment revisions and leftist messaging edits they’ve sledgehammered into the story. You’ll probably need more than you’ve got.

The only stories the modernist mind can tell are inverted ones.

Anyway, back to Shrek:

As I’m sure you remember, Shrek is our protagonist. A reluctantly friendly member of the hulking, barbaric, and reportedly murderous race of magical beings called “ogres”. He is the epitome of the none-hero. Not the guy you’d expect, the underdog, the nobody (who is, albeit, blessed with immense strength and the ability to strike fear into anyone he meets). He awakes one morning to find his swamp overwhelmed with bushels of magical migrants who have decided to make his home their own (one sympathizes). They say that they are refugees and have been forced from their homeland by the evil Lord Farquaad of Duloc. So Shrek, being an ogre of action, embarks on the short journey to Duloc with his sidekick, a chimeric hybrid donkey with the voice of a human. They are an amiable duo, to be sure, but in short order we meet the star of this article, Lord Farquaad.

We meet him in the midst of an interrogation session with the tiny Gingerbread Man. Lord Farquaad is attempting to extract the locations of the final holdouts of “fairytale” creatures. Farquaad’s motives are known at this point: deportation and expulsion (one sympathizes) of all magical creatures from his lands.

Now, allow me to lay out my thesis right here: Lord Farquaad is a moral hero in the story, from a Christian worldview, though he is inconvenient to the aims and goals of Shrek and co.

Point 1:

Farquaad is embodying the Dominion Mandate to subdue, dominate, and rule over the Earth and all that is in it (Gen 1:26-28) by driving out demonic creatures (2nd Samuel 15:21-22) and witches (Exodus 22:18), and establishing a noble reign of men in the land of Duloc.

There’s much here to ruffle the postmodern feather. A strong, noble Prince-figure, establishing law and order through the use of force in order to protect his people and curate a good and beautiful world. Beautiful because witchcraft and cryptids are wicked and disgusting. Very gross. God hates it, Lord Farquaad hates it, and so must we.

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Point 2: Lord Farquaad is a Medieval Christian Lord.

If Farquaad merely hated witchcraft, Nephilimic deities, and cryptid monsters for their sheer abnormality and wickedness, he would unknowingly be in alignment with the express will of God and therefore be acting justly and righteously. However, Duloc is shown to have a Cathedral, a Bishop, and a least one Friar. To my mind, that’s enough preponderance of evidence to heavily suggest, if not outright prove, my point that Duloc, and Farquaad by cultural extension, are Christian.

Point 3: Lord Farquaad seeks to follow God’s Dominion Mandate via marriage (Gen 1:28) by acknowledging that “it is not suitable for man to be alone” (Gen 2:18) and resolutely pursuing a wife and become the rightful king of his own lands. He bravely chooses the woman in most need, the one being held captive by the wicked Dragon, who is an open enemy of God (Revelation 12), likely a fallen Seraphim.

Two things are happening here and I will only belabor one of them.

First, Lord Farquaad, being the based Christian Lord he is, wishes to get married (one sympathizes). Not much exposition is needed there to reconcile that with a Christian worldview. Shoot, he’s even seeking to rescue her and lead her out of captivity and into a good and thriving life as a queen, which his marriage to her will allow him to do. He could have chosen two other women (Cinderella and Snow White) who would have posed far less trouble in retrieving (but less glory as well).

Secondly, Farquaad elects to have the Dragon slain and vanquished in his move to secure the hand of Fiona. This is based and Christ-pilled because it takes merely an ounce of typological skill to read scripture and understand the place of the Dragon in the cosmic tale of God’s creation. All across scripture, Dragons, whether in the sea or in the sky, are an enemy of God - with one exception. In Isaiah 6:2, we have this passage:

Above him were seraphim, each with six wings: With two wings they covered their faces, with two they covered their feet, and with two they were flying.

Now, in Hebrew the word for Seraphim is שָׂרָף, translated to śārāp̄. Pronounced like Saw-Rawf. The literal and direct translation of the word שָׂרָף means, “Fiery Serpent.”

The one who fell from heaven, the Morning Star Lucifer, the Devil, is depicted all across scripture as a Dragon. It is my deeply held belief that this description is not solely poetic or hyperbolic. I believe Dragons are real, they exist in this plane and the other, and they are very, very dangerous and almost always evil (except the ones in heaven around the throne).

Holy, Holy, Holy is the Lord God almighty.

Just as Christ is the Headcrusher of the Serpent, the one who will lay the vile worm low unto death, so we are called to emulate Christ in crushing the heads of serpents and Dragons. Our war is a spiritual one and our enemies are spiritual beings, including Dragons and other vile nasties and beasts. Read the Book of Enoch, read the hagiographies of St. Brendan, St. George, and others who encountered and slew Dragons.

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So, if Lord Farquaad was concerned with killing the Dragon, he is once again (willingly or unwittingly) doing the work of God in the world by having the head of the Dragon crushed. But Shrek and Donkey, being the hybrid monsters they are, befriend and Donkey even enters into an abominable relationship with the Dragon (who is female) and render themselves enemies of God.

Lord Farquaad, being the Dragon slaying, wife pursuing, people-protecting, Kingdom building Christian Chad he is, is undeniably the moral hero of the story of Shrek and his villainization and mockery in the story solidifies my point that Hollywood deals in the perverse and the inverted. It inverts what is naturally good and ordered and elevates what is unnatural and disordered.

Leave it to me and I’ll side with the Christian Lord exerting force to bring about order and drive out wickedness and evil over the highly diverse and morally anarchistic mob of demonic creatures in rebellion against God (also known as the average Londoners experience).

Call me crazy, but you can’t call me a liar.

Onward and Build the World

P.S. I still love Shrek. It’s a delightful movie and I will adore it until I die. This piece, while true and honest, is admittedly tongue-in-cheek. A playful jab at a loveable movie in order to reveal a deeper problem in Hollywood and secular art in general. I hope you enjoyed. Now go watch Shrek and enjoy it.

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FOR MORE ON THIS TOPIC, SEE JONATHAN PAGEAU’S WONDERFUL WORK ON SHREK HERE

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The weather is beginning to change, flirting with the cool eyes and pale legs of Lady Fall, and I felt that such an occasion called for an outing with the family. So, this last weekend we loaded up in the wagon and drove an hour south to a nature park which holds a pretty prominent place in my corner of America. The trees were starting to shift into auburn and the early fingertips of fall fire were revealing themselves in the raging green of the mountain forests. The smell of the delicious smoke of Autumn crept around the fringes of my perception. The drive was lovely, the natural world exploding with life and exuberance in preparation for the Long Sleep of winter.

In no time at all we pulled off the road into the entrance of the park and descended into her green embrace. However, the moment you leave the roadway and enter the park proper, a subtle and inconspicuous vibe shift occurs. You see, in the past decade or so, my pocket of the Midwest has begun to experience a renaissance in what I like to call the realm of “experientialist outdoorsmanship”. A business model that offers an experience of the outdoors, with none of the pursuant risks or struggle involved with actually being outdoors. Catered, hedged in, nicely appointed and brilliantly veneered to appear completely natural. It’s the belly of the uncanny valley and once you see it, you can never unsee it.

Let’s continue.

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My family and I pull into the park and are immediately shotblocked by roughly half the population of the Midwest trying to jockey for a parking spot. Rows upon rows of vehicles crammed into quaint little parking lots nestled against bluff faces, burrowed into the arms of a whispering river bend, or laying flat-out beneath the shade of towering oaks.

Very natural, much rugged.

We eventually find a parking spot at the rear-end of the lot set aside for the poors and the tardy - of which we are both. We climb out of our vehicle, load the toddler in the stroller, and my wife and I begin to make the overland endeavor to the tollhouse where we will purchase our tickets to experience “nature”. Remember, we parked in a parking lot next to the same river that flows through the park, under the same trees that populate the interior of the park, under the same sun that kisses the grass inside the park. But that river, those trees, and that sun are special, you uneducated and overfed troglodyte!

Magic river, by magic trees, under magic sun!

We arrive at the entrance to the park - a chokepoint in a canyon out of which the river flows underneath a walkway that connects a restaurant and a gift shop. Oh! And a water mill wheel. Because they’re grinding wheat in there, you drooling dolt! Anyway, I stride up to a portly woman next to an orange ticket kiosk and I put on my most genteel expression and politely ask, “Excuse me, ma’am, where can we buy tickets for the park?” Her eyes stare into me with all the perception and knowingness of an elderly basset hound on her last legs and barks a script that I’m sure she has to repeat a bazillion times a day (God bless her), “TICKETS TO MY LEFT, INSIDE THE GIFT SHOP. TWENTY DOLLARS PER PERSON.” And she turns her gaze back to the hole in the veil of reality she had been staring into previously. I feel you, sister.

I also feel my tongue in my mouth as I clench my jaw and reel internally at the price. Suddenly, the soil of the graveyard of my heart where I stow different historical personalities for any such convenient occasion begins to stir. John Muir’s bearded, hawkish face rises from the dirt with a scowl to freeze piss midair. Teddy Roosevelt begins to stir as well, the dirt rising a bit as he bellows wrath from beneath the embrace of the Earth. I’m indignant, my inner proletariat begins to rattle his cage, but I don’t show it.

“Awesome! Thank you!” I say, in typical Midwestern chip.

It was not awesome, and I was not thankful.

But, like I said, I’m a Midwestern guy and I’m positively enslaved to the noble cause of making service workers’ lives as trouble-free as possible, so I shuffle along, resigning myself to paying nearly 60 sweat-earned doubloons for a walk through “nature.”

“Magic nature, magic water, magic air,” I mumble to myself as I lumber, like a man to the gallows, up to the solid granite countertop that’s surely worth more than my life and regurgitate 60 smackers. In actuality, I have my wife take my card to pay so that I can pretend to be interested in some branded sunglasses on a spinny display tower on the other end of the lobby. Maybe, like taxes, if I ignore it, it’ll go away. Shortly, my springtime-in-winter wife bounces back to me and hands me my card, offering me a cheesy conciliatory smile, full of teeth and goodwill.

“It’s for the experience!” She says, as she goes on her tiptoes to accentuate the point, hoping to dab cold water on the burn on my ass cheek where my wallet sits. The branded sunglasses failed me.

We walk out through the doors that only “paying customers” get to use, adorned with little red wristbands that scream ADMISSION ONLY. This is because if you wish to do anything else but pass through the park, like a spirit encountering the Ferryman on the river Styx, you must pay the toll.

Food? Pay. Museum? Pay. Trolley? Pay. Mercy killing? Definitely pay.

(Now, forgive me for my crass observation here, but the transition is both too good pass up and truthfully what happened. Integrity in journalism, folks!)

As we trudge onto the paved walkway that spears deep into the park, I notice an upper-middle aged woman in front of me with a pair of the most criminally short and excruciatingly tight biker shorts I’ve ever seen. Now, being a man of God, my gaze was not lustful but horrified. For this woman had become mentally enslaved to the cult of body modification and possessed one of the most atrocious and disproportionate BBLs I’d ever seen. Truly, a sore for sighted eyes. She was shaped like a lowercase b, if the belly of the b had cerebral palsy or was a victim of severe hail damage.

I glanced at my wife to find that she too was transfixed by the Lovecraftian horror in our path. Our eyes locked and we shared that telepathic communique that only married couples and brothers-in-arms share. “Ope”, she whispered as she drew near to me in that conspiratorial huddle two children do when they’ve been caught in the candy bag again. We shuffled past her and let out our giggles, hasty to begin the day we just spent $60 to have.

The birds chirped, the press of tourists and mouth-breathing elderly shuffled all around, and the sun crept behind clouds like a panther behind foliage, peeking out occasionally to blink light and warmth down to us poor wage slaves experiencing “nature”. A towering waterfall leapt over the bluff crest to our left, splashing down to the man-made river below.

It was lovely…kind of.

Like someone who’s eyes are a bit too far apart, something felt off when you looked too long. It was too lovely, too Edenic, too closely manicured. It lacked all of the wildness, all of the hot amber rage of a free forest and river, all of the hate and love that nature, being the bipolar lover she is, possesses in reality. Everything was safe, everything was shackled and postured, everything was just so. It was nature, without her nature. Not to be hyperbolic, but it felt like the sensation you get when you see a really convincing trans person. At first blush, you’re convinced, but a moment of further inspection reveals a wyrdness, an uncanniness, around it.

And it cost $60 stinking dollars to see!

Some friends of ours who had accompanied us (and paid their children’s inheritance to experience “nature” alongside us) asked,

“Think it’s real?”, referencing the waterfall.

“About as real as that lady’s butt.” My wife mumbles beside me.

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Now, if you share my brand of autism, you’ll know what it’s like to have the sort of brain that can be sent off into metaphysical rabbit-holes and transcendental loop-da-loops at the smallest word, phrase, or reference that you find interesting. Like a key to a door to a garden to a mountain paradise, my brain can, in no time at all, launch itself from the slingshot of the here-and-now into the ether and begin to puzzle over reality itself in no time flat. Not even Musk in all his genius could design a vessel to travel as quickly as my mind goes from normalcy to “BiG bRaIn TiMe”.

I gaze upward at the waterfall, noting its perfectly chiseled ledges designed to corral the water into a most maximally pleasing and symmetrical cascade. Pair that with the impossibly green grass, the guided river in concrete cradle, the signage demanding no interaction with the “nature” and you could consider my mental slingshot locked and loaded for bear.

“No, not at all,” I say to my friend. “None of this is real.”

Muir rages, Roosevelt bellows, and my inner proletariat stomps his feet.

What’s so profoundly disappointing about modernity, or this side of the Enlightenment, is that while we haven’t done away with the true, good, and beautiful, we have relativized and commoditized them.

These three totems, known as the Three Transcendentals, are the grounding metaphysic for a Christian understanding of the world. We see these three aspects as being the three pillars of God’s presence in the world— holding up the cosmos in her order by these three guiding realities.

These three totems rely on one another for their existence and, when taken in their fullness, are a reliable metric for determining that which is most closely aligned with God’s heart. If something is beautiful, it will be both true and good. If it is beautiful, but tells a lie, then you know that it is neither good nor true. If it is true, it will be good and beautiful. And around it goes. A trinity, of sorts.

This is how you can tell art from kitsch, from non-art swill. If an artist refuses to tell the truth (or doesn’t themselves understand the truth), then he cannot identify or communicate goodness and beauty well.

This is why modernist/abstract/brutalist art is so grating and irritating to anyone lacking the social pressure to appreciate it for clout. For the rest of us who aren’t art majors or insufferable proselytizers of the message, modern art is deeply unsettling and vapid.

(What is this?)

Now that I think about it, however, I can’t say that in total honesty. If art is telling the truth, then perhaps modern art is telling the truth about the artists who made it and the culture the artist grew up encased within. If an artist lacks a grasp of the true (the “True” being the Logos, or God), they will grasp for whatever they can conceptualize as true through a prism of emotion and fearful rational. The modernist is terrified and their art tells their dirtiest secrets.

Look at the brutalist architecture of Eastern Europe and the USSR period. Compare the Soviet Block style housing with the enraged color and symmetry of the Cathedrals of Europe and tell me their worldviews exist in the same universe. They simply do not.

Art is downstream of the human heart.

And the modern Western human heart is saying,

I am terrified and I don’t know what to do with my hands.

So they make abysmal art to express their horror and disorientation.

The man or woman who painted this believes in nothing orderly or foundational, nothing true and pervasive, nothing beautiful and whole, nothing good and lovely. Only frenetic motion, like the primordial pool they espouse they sprung from.

Contrast that to this:

And tell me which one believes in abiding and life-giving truths. Which one grasps with their very fingernails at the doorjam of Heaven, desperate to please God with their labors, with their fruits, with their love? Tell me which one raises his eyes to the sky in wonder and rapture, and which one gazes at the ground, lost and entrapped in their own misery of being?

I think I know.

So, much in the same way, as I gazed upward at an artificial waterfall, I knew that because it was fake, it was neither beautiful nor good. That the heart who commissioned it and designed it had no loyalty or fealty to the sanctuary of the created order. That God was a lie, or distant, or dead to them and that this dry bluff face simply demanded a scar carved into her face, so that she could weep artificial tears in perpetuity. It was a lie, a smoking wraith in a room of mirrors. Chiseled by the hand of man, not Father Time; laid via blueprint, not via the loving tenderness of Mother Nature; settled by cement and plumbing, not with the pressure and weight of the Designer’s hand.

The waterfall was solely in the service of the one god man defers to when he has resolved to deny transcendence - accumulation.

And this, I suppose, is the crux of this writing. After all of the initial disappointment wore down into a low-thrumming discontent in my kidney area, I began to ponder the heart behind the park and I asked my friend who was walking beside me,

“Why do we have to monetize everything?”

And that’s really my whole thrust here. When did we begin to feel the pathetic urge to monetize every good and beautiful thing? I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve had conversations with good and well-meaning folks who, after revealing a creative idea or endeavor I have will ask me, “you think you can make that a side hustle?”

As if man’s sole purpose is to monetize living, monetize creating, monetize the joys of his heart. In this late-stage, Laissez-faire, humanist hellscape we’ve built for ourselves since the homicide of God, the accumulation of money is the signal token of worth-while-ness for any given endeavor.

And look, fair enough, I suppose.

With housing prices rocketing beyond the grasp of most people, with groceries rivaling the price of a blood oath, and with the threat of economic collapse looming over us like a piano in a 1930’s slapstick film, I understand the urge to monetize your skillsets for survival. In fact, I’ll say there is nothing wrong with that and it may even be the right and moral thing to do in order to provide and thrive.

The problems arise when man’s inclination towards his nature as a co-creator becomes a means of pursuing the vanity of his flesh, the envy of his fingers, and the grasping inner-Gollum of his baser nature. When the love for creation flees a man and the desire for accumulation and status replaces it.

Tell me, in all those hundreds and hundreds of hours that Michelangelo lay on his back on the upper ridges of scaffolding, late in the night, painting the Sistine Chaple by candlelight, with only the sound of his breathing and the bristles of wetted brush on stone for company - was he laboring solely for the paycheck? Was he so possessed by the demonic urge for accumulation and vanity that he endured the burning in his shoulders, the aches in his fingers and knuckles, and the tensions headaches of looking skyward for hours on end?

Somehow, I doubt it.

And somehow, I doubt the love in the heart of the architect who constructed that damned waterfall and erected “no wading" and “no fishing” signs near the edge of the river that accepted her tribute. Kids everywhere looked on in bewilderment. And somehow, I doubt that beauty alone was sufficient for the hungry urges of man for mammon and accumulation.

I know because I’ve done it. I’ve had the monetization thoughts before. The intrusive arrow in my frontal lobe that whispers “hast thou considered the coin?”

And I hate it. I hope you hate it to.

But hey, it’s not all bad. I paid $60 for a good article idea, so maybe it wasn’t a total wash.

Thank you for reading! Build The World is a publication written and managed by one young American dad in his spare time. If you appreciated this article, please do consider subscribing (for free) so that I can look at a party full of people and say, “I bet they don’t know I have a Substack.”

May the grace and peace of our Lord Jesus Christ, who was and is and is to come, be with you forever and always.

- Build the World

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All things are full of weariness; a man cannot utter it; the eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear filled with hearing.
What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done, and there is nothing new under the sun.
Is there a thing of which it is said,
“See, this is new”? It has been already in the ages before us.
There is no remembrance of former things, nor will there be any remembrance
of later things yet to be among those who come after.”

— Ecclesiastes 1:1, 1:8-11

“In obscurity and silence and absurdity and violence the quiet reminded me that the surest sign I don't understand is to be sure that I do. I knew more before I knew more.”

— Levi the Poet in The Dark Night of the Soul

I went out to the deserts of Nevada and Utah over the early winter to wander around with my father and brother. We climbed arid sage brush mountains and strayed in Mars-red desert canyons. It was haunted and holy, and I had come for a personal reason that smuggled itself beneath the veneer of tourism.

You see, for years now, my mind has been a haze. They say we all have ADD or something, and that’s definitely true for me, I guess. But recently it’s become worse. With the wars *over there*, the cultural maelstrom here in America, the looming threat(?) of global annihilation at the hands of politically convenient Titans, and the general uptick in speed and frenetic cultural pants-pissing, I’ve become hollowed out.

You see, ever since *TheVirusThatWon’tBeNamed*, I’ve noticed a change, a shift in the weather of my personal and inner life. Perhaps you’ve noticed it as well.

The seas of our collective hearts and minds have been choppier and more agitated than I remember. The tempo of our inner dialogues have quickened, the ratio of peace-to-rage has tipped decidedly towards the latter, and the future horizons of our lives have shifted from sunny ambiguity to the clouded doom of black-pilled certainty.

Everything is evil and no one can be trusted and it is all going to end in a fiery heap of anger and blood. And now this philosophy of incognito nihilism and anti humanism (here meaning anti-people and anti-humanness), seems to have not only crept over and infected me, but has began to infect everyone around me. Everyone seems to have woken up with a brand new conspiracy theory, a new “hot take” on some social issue, and a brand new “babe, wake up! the new doomsday scenario just dropped” seems to pop up every day. It feels like we’re holding our breath and soon something will give and we’ll all pass out and wake up in a scattered mess of broken glass and silverware. The tight burning in the bottom of our suffocated lungs has begun and that fire is funneled into an anger and hopelessness that even I am falling victim to.

The apocalyptic Duracell Bunny in my mind has been beating a cadence I can’t keep up with. All is losing its color, its edge, and the things that once brought me the spark of vitality and Thumos are beginning to wane.

What did Bilbo Baggins say about bread and jam?

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So anyway, I went to the desert and completely unplugged myself from the world just to see how it felt. No music, no podcasts, no audio books, no apps, no videos, no social media, nothing at all. Only the occasional text to my wife to check in. The worst that could happen was boredom - and wouldn’t that be nice for a change?

For me, the trip into the desert was a spiritual fast of silence and solitude. I’ve never tried shutting-the-hell-up and wandering out into the desert as Christ did (even in a microscopic way), so I thought I’d try it. I brought good books on Christian enchantment, scripture, a few holy icons, and a notebook and pen, and all my apathy - I hoped to find a deity I could give it all to.

I heard Christ might be the man for the job.

So, I entered the desert and felt her cold arms pull me in. Here’s what I noticed immediately:

1. The noise, the horrid static in my brain created by years and years of doom scrolling and rage-porn, ceased almost immediately.

2. My emotional tempo slowed as well. I wasn’t as reactive and volatile - I felt like I had bottled the stillness that allows specks of dust to hover golden and aloof in rays of sunlight inside the window. Remember, like when you were a child and had moments to notice such things. Peace, if only for a moment, settled on me like a blanket. I could breathe.

I did, out of job-related necessity, have to download Facebook to check on something and, unsurprisingly, but startlingly, I opened the app and immediately felt the panic and the noise rush in like a screaming legion of devils. I felt the noise rise, the cortisol tap turn on and begin to fill the sink, and my heart rate quicken. I did my business and deleted the app immediately.

The issue with the “machine” of modernity is not that is merely distracts us and manipulates us - it’s that at some core ontological level, it reduces us and erodes our humanity away, bit by bit. Whatever it is to be human, the Machine hates it and wants to eat it.

I’ll admit that by temperament I am a luddite - a spiritual curmudgeon that would delight to see humanity return to the Dark Ages when poems and storytelling were our main form of entertainment and the edge of life was as razor sharp as the likelihood of the next barbarian raid. I feel that we’ve lost something vital to our being, a core module in our spiritual motherboards that has left us hobbled and hollow.

It’s not that we mindlessly consume, it’s that we don’t desire anything better for ourselves.

It’s not that we’re depressed, it’s that we don’t know to look for the wild and wooly face of Christ.

It’s not that the rage of nations has us gridlocked in Black Pilled retardation, it’s that we have accepted that they hold our ultimate destiny’s in their hands.

It’s not the we tremble under a million impending causes of death, it’s that we believe Death is the end.

It’s not that we have the burden of laboring under the systems we do, it’s that we don’t believe Sisyphus to be happy.

My moment in the desert allowed me to peek behind the curtain and glimpse the shoulder of Christ skipping by and I came away glowing, like Moses off the mountain peak.

I am resolved to begin crawling out of the cave I’ve been living in and to pursue whatever it means to be human. I want to smell and taste the goodness of God in the summer breeze, in the song of the Loon that nests in my trees, in the colors of the rabbit that lives under my shed in the backyard.

I wouldn’t know those little creatures were out there if I continued to rage scroll and screech about the people *over there* and whatever the lizards at the top are doing.

In the most holy way I can muster: I don’t care for it anymore.

God be praised, may I love what ought to be loved and taste what ought to be tasted. May I hate with the heat of hell all of that which pulls me away from my God and myself.

Care to join me?

“‘Fair lady Goldberry!’ said Frodo at last, feeling his heart moved with a joy that he did not understand. He stood as he had at times stood enchanted by fair elven-voices; but the spell that was now laid upon him was different: less keen and lofty was the delight, but deeper and nearer to mortal heart; marvelous and yet not strange. ‘Fair lady Goldberry!’ he said again. ‘Now the joy that was hidden in the songs we heard is made plain to me.’”

Anyway, it was in this position, facing North and spelunking in the deep and smelly parts of my psyche, that I suddenly sensed a woman sit down in the seat next to me. I looked over and smiled, offering a small hello. She was peering through the viewfinder on a vintage Pentax and smiled a hello from beneath it. She was dressed like a woman who really enjoys nature and has strong opinions about artisan coffee and good reasons why you should consider New Age. Earth tones under a black knit sweater than hung to her knees. Her thin black hair was pulled behind her head in a messy bun held by a bronze clip. She had henna on her hands (obviously).

We began chatting about the views, where she was headed and why, and the conversation naturally, over the course of many hours, fell into more personal territory. What else was there to talk about, once the pleasantries and niceties were well-trod? She told me that she was going home to stay with a loved one who was dying and how she wanted to understand death and dying so as to be prepared for her own. To watch death overtake a loved one in real time so that she could both offer love and encouragement to them, and gain more of a perspective on the natural end of all things.

A lovely sentiment, to be sure, but being who I am (relentlessly symbolic) I naturally began to wonder exactly what she thought about death, what lay beyond, and ultimately about Christ, the ultimate not-so-dead man. I began to pray silently for guidance from the Holy Spirit as to how to speak to her about Christ and how to present the good news of the Gospel. I asked for an opening and for wisdom.

Well, my opportunity came many hours later, after darkness had fallen over the Southwestern Desert. She made mention of her love for “Jesus”, her past in the Church (which she has since walked away from [see: “church hurt”]), and her deep love for Beauty. She was an artist, you see, and had a natural eye for it. She had been snapping 36mm photos the entire time we talked, after all.

Aha! I thought to myself. That was my in.

Beauty.

Here’s the rough progression of reasoning with her…

Beauty is easily evident to all man, yes? Of course. The secular rationalist is still taken - against their will, no doubt - by the stunning beauty of the Earth. The Romantics called this the “Sublime” (If you’ve ever read Frankenstein, you’ll know of what I speak). Barring any abnormal cognitive malady, the snowy Rockies or the Highlands of Scotland appear beautiful to all mankind, regardless of the deity they serve. This is a more-than-reasonable starting place to establish the existence of Goodness and Truth via the pathways of Beauty.

For when we survey the span of the high plains of the Dakotas and I ask you if it is Beautiful, you say yes.

And then I ask you if it is True that it is beautiful. You will say yes, of course, feeling that you already answered that question. Which, in a sense, you did.

So if something exists regardless of whether or not you see it, understand it, or acknowledge it, it is true nonetheless. For a lie is simply the absence of Truth. It would be a lie to say that St. Peter’s Basilica is ugly. It categorically is not. Now, without getting into a discussion of the appeal of aesthetics and their transcendent nature, I believe it is more than reasonable to assert that if something is Beautiful, it’s also True that it is Beautiful. Truth exudes from the heart of Beauty, and vice versa. The two cannot be separated, for Beauty communicates with the soul, and it does not tell lies. This is why modern art is such a vulgar assault to the senses, regardless of what the women with the armpit hair tell you.

I appeal to no other metric of measurement to prove this than that we all know, in our heart of hearts, that lies are ugly. They may be viewed as a tool in the toolbox of the utilitarian, but I would be incredulous to believe that even the most hardened utilitarian would argue that lies and falsehoods are Beautiful in any way.

Beauty, like light, cannot exist in the presence of lies (darkness).

Rather, the husband leans into his wife’s ear and whispers Truths of his affection and devotion to her, and that is Beautiful.

So if it takes minimal intellectual legwork to prove the correlation and inexorable union of Truth and Beauty, than it takes even less legwork to prove that Goodness is present as well. Because if Beauty is True, and Truth is Beautiful, than they are necessarily Good. Now, I realize that this isn’t a totally airtight argument, but it is at least a worthwhile starting point for the unbeliever to begin to draw a divine thread between the Beauty they see in the world, their innate desire for Goodness, and the howling wilderness call of Truth.

Once that is established and agreed upon as a premise, one must ask the question of origin.

Where did these things come from? Why do they seem to be a transcendent value shared by all people everywhere? Why do they, as Solzhenitsyn wrote from the Gulag, “Cut through the heart” of every man? For if something exists, an entailment of its ontology as an existing thing is that it had a creator.

The necessary answer is that they must flow from somewhere. Nothing that exists can exist without a cause, otherwise you fall into the fallacious death-spiral of infinite regression. This was the sticking point with the girl on the train. She was perfectly happy to admit that the Three Transcendentals flowed from something specific, but that that specific “thing” was not a personal deity of ultimate power, but rather a…

“Christ consciousness.”

(Richard Rohr and his consequences have been a disaster for Evangelicals).

Christ consciousness has to be the most heaping, towering, nothing-burger I’ve ever encountered. It is the definition of having your cake and eating it to. The New Age occultists (that’s what they are) love the *idea* of Christ and love the notion of Jesus as a loving cosmic neighbor, or babysitter, or even homoerotic lover. But that’s beside the point of this article.

To conclude the story, I didn't convince her to drop it all and submit to Christ and His church on that train that night. And to be truthful, I’m not sure I even “planted a seed”, as some like to say.

You see, she represents a brand of agnostic whose worldview I feel is especially difficult to penetrate with the light of Truth sheerly because they are so steeped in that light already. The acknowledge the light, enjoy the light, benefit from the light, but completely misidentify where the light is emanating from. They are so deeply convinced of their own enlightenment that every bit of Truth offered to them is met with:

“That’s so beautiful and I love that for you.”

“If that’s what makes you happy, go for it.”

“God is in all of us!”

You can tell this sort of person about Christ and they’ll say, “Oh, yes, I know Jesus! A swell guy, if I do say so myself.” They may even be bold enough to say he was a prophet or even divine (in the sense that we are all divine, or something). But it is precisely this nearness, this familiarity, that I fear will leave them just outside the gates of heaven. They are camped quite happily on the pathways leading into the City of God and even consider themselves citizens to some degree, basking in the shade of the walls - but there will come a day when the gates slam shut and they will realize just how close they came, yet how far they fell.

Horseshoes and hand grenades, or something like that. Pity them and pray for their souls. Because if a southwestern desert sunset won’t nudge their hearts, I’m not sure what more I can do.

Sincerely,

BTW

I stood in the cold parking lot, shifting my weight from one foot to the other, inhaling the second-hand smoke from his cigarette. I’ve always liked cigarette smoke. My friend stood a few paces from me, his black hood pulled over his narrow and hawkish face, cutting off the light from the lamppost so that only his nose and white teeth were visible to the white light. His long black beard, lined with grey, was framed by his thin black hair that spilled out of the hooded portal like a dark river.

A cloaked Rasputin smoking a Marlboro.

A prophet or a hermit, with an affinity for death metal. It’s true - I’ve never seen my friend without some obscure death metal band shirt on. Always black. He was telling me about a vision he has in his mind regarding God and destiny. His vision goes something like this:

I imagine this field, right? This field of workers. All bent low and stooping to their scythes, or whatever, and they’re all busy toiling away. But off over there is a forest, we’ll say an enchanted forest. Because every forest is really enchanted.

He smiles and leans in, gesturing with his hands like he’s conjuring a spell.

And out of this forest drifts a song, or a melody of voices, out across the field. Some workers pay it no mind, others wave it off grumpily. But some…some raise their heads from their labor and begin to look around.

He raises his face to meet mine. His eyes are wide as if to imitate the wonder of the imagined workers.

“What is that?” They ask themselves. And slowly they drop their tools, stand upright, stretching their backs, and begin to wander towards the woods. The enchanted woods, right? They wander to it, as if in a dream, feeling compelled to follow the song. Others don’t. Others stick to their work. But the few who follow are the ones who heard…and listened.

Anyway, that was my vision the other night.

He pulled al long drag from his withering cigarette and send the plume heavenward in tribute.

Over the past year I’ve grown tired. Very tired. What is it Bilbo said? Too much jam and not enough bread, or something like that. The very notions of what the world “is” are becoming muttled and torn. The slick and rational scientific explanations for my experiences, other people, and the cosmos have aged like the contents of a fruit drawer in a dead fridge. Moldy, squishy, and entirely unappetizing.

That’s where my friend came into my life. He exists like this ethereal being, the quest giver, on the outside of my frame. In the periphery of my zeitgeist, he keeps pulling the camera frame to him to show me the stars. He’s a sort of Tyler Durden to my, well…Tyler Durden. If Tyler Durden was an Eastern Orthodox father of four who loved star gazing.

You see, I’ve been a Christian most of my life and I’ve always possessed the “answers” to the questions. I was raised under a brand of tutelage that taught me to wield the analytical scalpel, the apologetic pliers, and the rhetorical forceps masterfully. And I’ll be fair and say that I am immeasurably grateful for it and I love using those tools. Always will.

I believe in them.

They’re real tools.

But recently I’ve begun to feel like Truman on the Truman Show when he starts to notice the patterns and interpret the patterns and realize the patterns seem off or obtuse to his intuition. The patterns lead him to understand how small he is, how confined, and how big the “outside” reality is - outside the dome.

It’s not that my faith in God is dwindling. By no means. I am hungrier for Christ than ever before. And by no means am I deconstructing! Rather I am CONstructing beyond the strictures of what my upbringing can answer; what a rational, materialistic, empirical, “scientific” formula can answer.

Because no amount of math, science, reasoning, or rhetoric can make a sunset more beautiful, an Elk’s call more haunting, or my wife’s eyes more intoxicating. They just are - my intellect be damned.

So what is it that points at and mocks my intelligence, my knowledge, and my academic strivings? What is it that dares me to believe the stars are the spirits of ancient Kings and heroes, with a spindly finger (wrapped in flowers) beckoning “COME HITHER!”

What is that White Stag that calls me?

→ MYSTERY ←

I feel that the tradition of Christianity I’ve grown up in has been extremely effective at raising up thinkers, but not so great at raising up song-listeners, cave mystics, or poets. Great at theologians, not so great at desert prophets or fireside story tellers. So cerebral that the mystery has been squeezed out, drop by drop until a dried (but extremely well catalogued) husk remains.

(Again, don’t mistake me: Thinkers, apologists, and theologians are good and Godly and beautiful and necessary for the health and correction of the Body of Christ).

But my Christian Protestant ancestors were iconoclasts and statue breakers and now I’m left with Churches with no domes or statues and names like “First Baptist”, like someone held a race and they broke the tape. As if they were first to discover some artifact or map a new content. You wander inside and the nearest thing they have to paintings are the flannel graphs and paintings of wealthy (dead) donors and deacons and pastors. The nearest thing they have to statues are the lone, wooden crosses adorning everything (CUZ JESUS AIN’T ON THE CROSS NO MORE).

Now, without throwing too much shade at the Reformers or their progeny, I will narrow my grievances to one point and one alone.

They destroyed the mystery.

No, that’s not right.

Because I don’t believe you can actually destroy a mystery.

You can only stop talking about it; put it in the corner of the room and put a blanket over it, or bury it in the backyard next to the dog. But you can’t kill it. It’s still there and you know it.

And it’s that knowing that gnaws at you, like a rat at the baseboards or a leak in the attic.

You’ll notice eventually.

It’ll always move closer.

You won’t be able to bear it any longer, after you have no more baseboards and the ceiling is falling in and you’re soaking wet.

Half inch by half inch.

All you can do is search for the bottom of the mystery, like the bottom of a cave or a can of Pringles that your hand is too big to fit into. And that’s the most wonderful thing about the mysteries of God: they’re unplumbable. Meaning that they can never be made known and thereby rendered NOT mysterious. They are mysteries by their very nature of being extensions of God, who is mysterious. God is a mystery, a Holy and relational mystery, but a mystery nonetheless.

So what can you do?

You can listen to the mystery, pocket your tool, and follow it into the woods.

For after a time, if you’re paying attention, you’ll hear words coming out of the grave behind the shed or from under the sheet and they’ll be in a language you don’t understand. A language you once knew, but not anymore. Maybe if you asked the neighborhood child, with dirty knees and twigs in her hair. Maybe she’d know.

But what are those words?

Stories of Saints.

Fairy tales.

Tales of snakes, gardens, floods, giants, wars, kings, demons, angels, gods, fire, love, justice, and a naked God on a cross.

Cosmic scandal that weaves itself into a tapestry so huge and violently colorful that it makes the Naturalist vomit and the New Atheist punch the air in impotent anger.

For you see, our God, (the Christian God of the Holy Scriptures revealed in Christ Jesus who died on the cross and rose again after having defeated death and ripping a certain curtain) is so wild and so untamed that he cannot be fully known, or even partially known to any scientifically satisfactory extent.

Did you hear me?

God cannot be fully known.

For if he was, then he wouldn’t be God because we’d have no need of him. For to be known is to be named and to be named is to be owned. And we will never own God. That’s why God had Adam name the animals as part of his purpose, to have dominion over them. Naming is oral, it is eating, it is the total capture of a thing. That’s why slander and lying are so reprehensible and why God warns us that the tongue can burn forests down. Words are a bear trap. Name it and claim it, as the saying goes.

And you can’t name God. What name did God give Moses at the burning bush?

I AM THAT I AM

What a painful, awful, wonderful, terrible, perfect name for God. He is because He is. He is.

He just is.

How the hell can you know something like that? How the hell can you begin to understand a God whose only understandable name is something akin to “EXISTENCE”?

You can’t. And thank Him for that.

So anyway. I’m off on a journey into the misty forests and mountains, hunting for a “Mossy Christ”, as Martin Shaw calls Him. If you need me, I’ll be sitting beneath an icon of Christ, weeping for it all. Maybe smoking a cigarette.

Sincerely,

BTW

The Siege of Acre ended on May 18th, 1291. The siege had lasted 42 hellish days and countless thousands lay dead and dying in the surrounding fields, the ruined remains of the walls, and the hot and smoldering streets. Blood coagulated, flesh rotted, and carrion feasted. The night sky glowed with flames and the firmament resounded with the screams of the dying, the raped, and the enslaved. The victor, Mamluk Sultan al-Ashraf Khalil, having been raised in the shadow of his father’s conquests of the dwindling Crusader kingdoms decades before, had set his eyes on Acre, the final major Christian stronghold in the Levant. The final foothold of Christendom in the Holy Land and with its destruction, the smothering of any hope Europe had for a reconquest of Jerusalem and the Holy Land. The final hours of Christendom in the East had come and gone with fire, horror, and death.

This isn’t a historical retelling of Acre’s fall, although I plan to expound on things like that in the future. In the meantime I highly recommend books like God's Battalions: The Case for the Crusades by Rodney Stark, Defenders of the West: Christian Heroes Who Stood Against Islam by Raymond Ibrahim, and The Accursed Tower: The Fall of Acre and the End of the Crusades by Roger Crowley.

The point I wish to highlight is the spirit of purpose and struggle that exists in the story and stories like it. Whenever I ask men what their favorite scenario of war or battle is, I usually receive the answer: “A last stand!” Or, “The one where I send my family/village/people onwards to safety while I stay back to cover their escape, sacrificing my life!” As a fellow red-blooded man, I always nod enthusiastically, for I agree. What man doesn’t love the story of the Alamo, Thermopylae, or Acre? The thought of smoking a cigarette, rifle in hand, awaiting a certain, yet honorable, death sticks to a man’s psyche like glue. Something embedded deep within those tales calls to the hearts of men everywhere.

Duty, courage, sacrifice, honor, violence. The clash of arms, the spray of blood, the cry of rage, the battle-joy, the hopeless bravery. We love it all. We simply cannot get enough of it. Our atoms vibrate for it, our blood pumps for it, our breath hastens for it.

In the photo above, we see warriors, Christian knights and men-at-arms, fighting desperately to rebuff the scaling Turks. The intensity and heat of the battle, the closely intermingled bodies grappling, the brave knight standing tall on the rampart with club raised to crush the head of the rising Saracen. All of it evokes hopelessness, desperation, savagery, and undeniable bravery. And we love every second of it. Why? Because we *want* that. But what is that and what does it have to do with men’s mental health?

Well, I’ll tell you my hypotheses.

I heard some female influencer the other day yapping on about her diagnosis for why men are deleting themselves at such higher rates, why male depression is so high, and why men’s psychological health in general is in the decline (or freewill, depending on how cynical you are). Her reasoning went like this:

“Men are miserable because the oppressive patriarchy convinced them that crying was too ‘feminine’ and that they just had to bottle up their feelings and act all ‘manly.’”

A couple problems with this are apparent on the face. I will respond to them and then propose my own solution to the problem of male depression and meaninglessness.

1. A properly functioning patriarchy would lead to male happiness and fulfillment, not their misery.

A certain underlying assumption is baked into her statement regarding the “toxic” effects of patriarchy on men: that the patriarchy would somehow work against the best interests of men, who created the system. Logically, this is incoherent. Either men are too stupid to create a system in which their needs and wants are met, or there is no overriding patriarchy that benefits them. Because men are floundering and suffering under a malaise of obsolescence, either an ineffectual patriarchy exists, which would make it a matriarchy, or it doesn’t exist at all. Because true patriarchy is a net-positive for all under its wings.

If we lived in a properly function patriarchy, which we don’t, the distinction between men and women would remain resolute, the nobility of both masculinity and femininity would be proportioned and honored, and the mental health of both men and women would flourish. There would be walls around Truth and men to patrol them. Men bring order and the systems they create are orderly and lawful. When men become weak and irreligious, they begin to act more like the women around them and thus the system begins to collapse. This isn’t to say that women are weak and irreligious, but rather that when men act like something they are not, chaos ensues. Same for women. When the Natural Law is violated, disorder always follows. Much like music must adhere to certain immutable laws of harmony, so too does human action.

So it doesn't follow, at least to my rational, that a good and upright patriarchy would do anything but instill purpose and meaning into men’s lives.

2. The principles of stoicism and “manliness” are natural to men and are not at all at odds with our emotionality or artistic natures.

Men are designed, by God, to be warriors, hunters, workers, providers, conquerors, and world-makers. If we were highly susceptible to emotional outbursts, we wouldn’t be effective in these roles. That’s not to say that men don’t have emotion. Perish the thought! I would argue that the emotional well of men is actually deeper than women. Think of the difference between a pond and a well. Deep waters are harder to stir up, after all, but they are immensely more powerful when they are. Whereas women have a broader expanse of emotional wealth, the water of their hearts are more easily stirred. Men, for their part, are more narrowly, but profoundly, emotional. For instance, nearly all of the great poets, playwrights, painters, sculptors, and architects of the Medieval and Renascence period were men.

The Rose Window in the great Notre Dame Cathedral, by Jean de Chelles in 1250.

The David by Michelangelo in 1501.

These are just two examples among thousands of high-art and beauty created by men in the canon of Western history. You see, men are deeply emotional and driven by beauty and passion. The patriarchy didn’t stifle these things, for the world of the Medievals and the Renaissance was dramatically more patriarchal than ours and it was from those same environments that the deepest expressions of male emotion sprang forth.

But yet men are stoic by nature. These two aspect of ourselves, our emotional depth and our ability to control and utilize that emotion, are bedrock skills necessary for proper masculinity. It isn’t that men are unfeeling bastards and it isn’t that men are repressed emotional flowers. Manliness is order, remember. Manliness is control and disciplined utilization of emotion and stoicism. “Bottling up” our feelings is not suppressing them, but rather holding them down and keeping them under control.

Now, I’ll agree with the influencer that if left unaddressed, men’s emotions will become a liability to them, causing them great and necrotic harm in the long-term. Any emotion left unconfronted is bad medicine to the heart and soul of an individual. Like holding a hot grenade, you have to do something with it lest you explode.

So why are men so depressed and miserable? It’s not because of our suppressed emotions or some dogmatic exterior voice of the patriarchy telling us to act more like men (though I’d argue we desperately need that), but rather it has to do with the other side of the emotional question: The venting of that emotion.

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As I stated above, men are doers and world builders. Much like a precision engine or a prized race horse, if left unused and untouched, men will decay and rust over. Such is the state of the modern West.

Men have been made to feel and believe themselves to be toxic and, what’s more, unwanted and obsolete. A one-two punch.

Punch One: Beginning with the demonic dogmatism of the original Feminists (see: Occult Feminism: The Secret History of Women's Liberation by Rachel Wilson), masculinity as an ideal has been under complete and utter social assault. Men have been made out to be rapists, killers, abusers, and vagabonds of every degree by sheer dint of existing; it’s hard baked into our nature, apparently. Compounded with absurd cultural moments like the MeToo movement of the past couple decades and the systematic reduction and ridicule of masculinity in modern media (see: Female Thor alongside silly and effete Thor), masculinity has become a social pariah. If you are a man and you:

• Explain something you’re knowledgeable about = Mansplaining

• Open a door for a woman or walk her to her car = Sexist

• Compliment a woman on her appearance = Creepy and Misogynist

• Workout and be strong = Threatening and Toxic

• Establish boundaries in dating/marriage/life = Insecure

I could go on. The point is that masculinity and manliness is a culturally leprous notion and men feel it in their bones: they are toxic, dangerous, and hated. Our little boys are raised to control (drown) their masculine impulses and if they can’t, we medicate the fire right out of them.

A chemical inquisition of the feminist variety.

“WE HAVE FOUND YOU GUILTY OF THE HERESY OF MANLINESS. YOUR PUNISHMENT: CHEMICAL INTERVENTION!”

Punch Two: Since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, there has been a steady and intentional push to drive women out of the home and into the workspace where they, inevitably, must compete with men. This began the blurring the lines between what makes men masculine and women feminine. Now, we have men masquerading as women and there is a cultural gun at the back of our heads that demands we acknowledge them as such. Masculinity, and femininity, has become nothing more than a malleable construct, a costume to wear.

It puts the lotion on the skin or it gets the cancelation again.

What is it that the evil villain in the Incredibles film once said? “If everyone’s super…no one will be.”? Hm.

Women can, and are encouraged via incentives and media, to directly challenge and override male spaces because “anything you can do, I can do better” is the mantra of their movement. If there are no functional differences between men and women, then women can do whatever a men can (but probably better because “boss-bitch” exists, despite being in direct conflict with the proposed malleability of genders, but I digress). In a world of tapioca-bland equality, any whiff of a “male dominated space” brings out the heresy hunters.

Men’s presence in the workforce, in culture, and even in the home has been colonized and reduced by the feminist ideology. We see it in the conflict of women pastors which rages with infernal intensity in the belly of the Western Church; the plague of affirmative action initiatives that overtly seek to unseat men from their rightful places; and the push to drive fathers out of the home and eviscerate their authority and rip out their cultural voice box.

In our technocratic age, there are no more wilds to tame, dragons to slay, or empires to build. All that can be accomplished is done so in gender-neutral and universally accessible ways. With the exception of Blue Collar work, men and women have been artificially homogenized as workers and men feel no unique purpose as a result. Our masculinity is obsolete.

So men’s mental health does not stem from an inability to talk about it, although a lack of that resource is surely a contributing factor, but rather a lack of, and demonization of, our roles as men. We have no Acre to fight for, no walls to defend, and no dragons to slay anymore. Like the race car left in the garage for decades, we have rusted out and decayed inside of ourselves for want of usefulness. Left with nothing but empty self-pleasure and endless dopamine loops, men, who otherwise would have been kings and conquerors, are left at the edge of the village, in the darkness, whipping themselves for their masculinity. For merely existing. Begging for the crumbs of attention from women who are “icked” by them.

The village has no need of us. In fact, they despise us. So we go off into the dark and disappear. We go softly into that good night and paint the bathroom walls with our blood or open our veins to the cool breeze of evening.

I am reminded of a quote by C.S. Lewis.

“In a sort of ghastly simplicity we remove the organ and demand the function. We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.”

―C.S. Lewis,The Abolition of Man

Check on your brothers. Make yourself useful to those who still depend on you. Go to the gym and prepare yourself for the day the village needs you again (they will, and soon). Marry a good woman and build your own village. Go the Church and submit to the King who is Christ. Duty and purpose are all around you, albeit hidden and tucked away. You simply need to step into that responsibility and shoulder those life-giving burdens of submission to God, sacrifice for family, and labor for the community.

The modern world has decided that it has no need of your virility or your nature. But they will. With war, collapse, chaos, and darkness encroaching ever closer to us and to our families, the necessity to make yourself dangerous and purposeful again has never been stronger.

The “Turks” are amassing beyond the horizon and they want to take it all from you. The feminists hate you now, but wait until the gates are being pummeled by the Grond of cultural diversity and economic desperation and they will come crawling back to you for aid.

Be ready.

Men, your masculinity is necessary, valuable, and good. It is no sin to be strong, powerful, resolute, and courageous. Our creator God looks down on you with pride when you, like a stallion, build yourself up and embrace your design as a man. The blood of knights, kings, lords, and warriors runs in your veins, no matter who you are. Make them proud, honor God, and BUILD THE WORLD.

Sincerely,

Piety

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If any of you met me in person, it would be no great secret that I despise the “machine” (as so wonderfully describes it) and its requisite mind viruses that work so diligently and nefariously to undermine, poison, and erode any Westerner’s sense of self or environment. They work harder than Mexican roofers to dismantle and obfuscate transcendent truth and identity markers, throwing smoke grenades of ambiguity and relativism into the congregated midst of Western God-seekers. Here are some of my thoughts as to the tactics and methodologies of the “Machinists” and their assault on the West’s identity.

To Dissolve, And/Or Demonize, Any Connection With Outside Identity Markers:

It is a historical truism that mankind has identified itself with a number of exterior and immutable factors. A Frenchman in the Medieval period would have identified himself via his connection to his family, his village or town, his Church, his parish congregation, his local Lord, and his lineage or connection to local or national heroes, both real and folk. The “memory” of his people would have been hardwired into his psyche via stories, traditions, and folklore. The point is that at no time would the notion of “I feel like…” been used or relied on as a yardstick to delineate his identity.

He would have said, “I am Tim (a very French name), from the Martin Family. I’m from the village of *insert French village name* and my local Priest is Father Pierre. I'm a farmer, my father was a farmer, and my ancestors were farmers. My great grandfather went on Crusade with the good Saint King Louis and he performed many mighty deeds of valor. Would you like to hear some of them?”

Nothing in that account speaks to how he identifies himself, but rather how his external world identifies him; an outside-in analysis. He is French and damn proud of it. His grandfather bore the sword for Christendom and he is damn proud of it. He is a farmer and livelong Christ follower and damn proud of it. That’s it. What else is there to our noble peasant Tim? What more ought there be?

But in the West today, such notions would be deemed archaic and, at worst, dangerous and oppressive. Our poor Tim would be labeled a “far Right extremist” and would likely be investigated by clandestine alphabet agencies for thought crimes. There has been an overt move by the postmodern Machinists, and their Frankfurt School progenitors, to strip the Western mind of these outward identity markers. Today, no Anglo-Saxon is permitted an historic sense of self beyond the laundry list of sins committed by their ancestors.

“I’m a proud white man” is a phrase to make even the most dyed-in-the-wool American cringe. But don’t you know that your ancestors had slaves and that you are an inescapable member of the oppressor class?!

“I’m a proud Christian and I’m proud of the work of the Church across the millennia.” But haven’t you heard of the Inquisition? Or the Crusades? Or the Salem Witch Trials?!

“I’m a proud American man and I’m proud of my connection to America’s great founders, heroes, and explorers!” But, but, but! Aren’t you aware of the systematic oppression, colonization, and erasure of native peoples?!

The only exterior markers I can identify myself with (as a straight, white, Anglo-Saxon, Christian, father, husband, western male) are the “damages”, real or imagined, that men who look like me supposedly committed across time. Any exterior markers I find for identifying my place in the story are a) invalidated (i.e. “America is an idea”), or b) inverted to be negative markers used to make me, and people like me, hate ourselves.

To Establish The Primacy of Self-Identification In Raging Spite Of “Oppressive” Exterior Markers

Meanwhile, across town, the blue-haired baristas, cat-mom feminist professors, and metro-sexual slam poets can identify themselves from the inside-out, irregardless of any and all exterior identity markers (such as genitalia). Only the “oppressor” class is allowed, and indeed forced to use, the archaic methodology of exterior identification (the outside-in), but only insofar as those markers serve to demonize and belittle that identity.

All shall be free to express themselves ((((except for those trapped in the iron-cage of ancestral sin, not those bigots)))), is the battle cry of the uncanny slop monsters of late-stage American idealism and consumerism. Generations of children educated by Marxist teachers and Woodstock washouts, globalist prophets hellbent on destruction by vagary and homogeneity, and feminist sirens atop academic institutions have produced an entire panoply of dogma that has infected every corner of the West. This infection is as old as the Garden, when the accursed Serpent uttered those fateful words:

“Did God really say…?”

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The ethos, the spirit, the spinal column of the Machine is the utter slavery of total freedom. Each and every individual is a free-floating vessel, free to identify itself by itself. This is the first sin, the first blood drawn by man - the spit in the face of God and move into his office. He has been rendered obsolete in the face of our enlightenment.

We are sailors who have tossed our sextants overboard to spite the stars for their arrogance in asserting that there is, in fact, objective reality. We are sailors who spit in the face of anyone who suggest that North, South, East, and West are real and necessary for life. We call them bigots and archaic extremists. We are, as Nietzsche said, partying in the darkened streets with the blood of God on our hands, blissfully enraptured by our own visage in the mirror. But like Dorian Gray, we are sure to find only monsters in the hell of a world without walls, directions, or exterior markers of identity.

All we know now is that a certain group absolutely cannot partake of our orgy of self-realization, no. They must sit in the corner and think about what their ancestors have done, cutting away their very flesh and molding themselves in the collective’s image. That way, we can look at them over there and us over here and revel in the distance. The distance if proof of our superiority. We have outgrown those silly bigots.

Every bisexual cat mom has the enduring assurance that she/they is, at least, not as bad as those Anglo-Saxon extremists who love their history and culture. She/They wakes up every morning and declares that the West deserves no sovereignty and has no right to identify itself positively with its ancestors and lineage. The West is an “idea”, not a people or a culture, and they are wicked and irredeemable, worthy only of the negative judgment of history. They can only be saved by being forced to pull those stars out of the heavens, crush them, and allow the ensuing darkness to fill them until we are

All

One

Single

Homogenous

People.

From nowhere and no one. Known only to ourselves, by ourselves, for ourselves.

As always, may the Grace and Peace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you.

Signed,

Piety.

I received a book in the mail the other day and have spent every moment of time since buried up to my eyeballs in it. It’s a small book entitled Savage Gods, written by . Written during his inaugural years owning a small plot of land deep in the rural hillocks of Ireland, Kingsnorth drops us into his daily life and rumination as a novice farmer. Kingsnorth is an author and environmentalist with a pen that practically drips poetic honey and an imagination firmly locked in the grip of smoky highlands and deep places. His prose is deeply contemplative and grievous. He’s practically bleeding down his forearm and into his pen when he writes. He bought that plot of land in Ireland because he felt, in his words, as if something was “calling” him to it and that he owed a debt of some sort. He felt that words, language itself, was beckoning him into the wilderness to learn and see. He expresses often throughout the book, and indeed it is the thrust of the book itself, that language has abandoned him. Like a cheating lover slips quietly out at night, Kingsnorth found himself wholly bereft of his tools - words. They meant nothing and gave nothing in return.

So he went to the wilderness to find them.

Now, this article won’t be a review of Kingsnorth’s book, although I heartily recommend it. It is devastatingly good. No, rather, I want to expound on a small point he makes in the book regarding the collective human imagination and when, exactly, we began to lose our grip on it.

Halfway through the book, Kingsnorth muses as to the effect of the written and codified alphabet on our imagination and connection with the symbolic world. He states:

“The aleph-beth—which later became, via the Greeks, our own alphabet—was made up of written characters which no longer directly represented an actual thing in the real world…the links between culture and nature was finally lost. Written language was no longer visually tied to the world of physical, real, naturally occurring things. Letters were now only marks, signifying nothing but their own internal meaning…Human language now pointed to nothing but itself. It was a code which only other humans could interpret, and it formed an auditory loop, like a guitar held too close to an amp, forever issuing screeching feedback into our minds.”

As is often the case with human progress, we engage in sacrificial ceremonies on Babylonian alters, hacking and chopping up some intrinsic part of ourselves in order to gain the favor of the gods. This is the story of the antediluvian world - man and the lesser gods (fallen angels) engaged in carnal exchanges of sex and worship for technology and knowledge. Knowledge which wasn’t meant for us. Further back, this is the story of Eden. We ate the apple to gain knowledge and in the process we lost the Garden.

When man advances toward deification under the merit of his own feet and head, he burns up under the sun and plummets to the chaotic waters below. Icarus, anyone? Prometheus, perhaps?

Much the same with our imagination. As the Enlightenment taught us to unplug our minds from the rapturous mysteries of God’s creation, of the cosmos, and to begin to view reality as nothing but numbers and formulas, devoid of poetry, we left another Garden. As the Industrial Revolution inculcated a frantic psychosis of production and consumption into our weary minds, we left another Garden. As the Digital Age, the Machine Age, dawned and we became obsessed with the latest and greatest tech and our bodies were infected with leisure, we left another Garden.

Much in the same way, when the alphabet was invented and ensconced into our lives, we suffered a small crack in the hull of the ship of our imaginations; our symbolic and typological imaginations. No longer did images have a monopoly on tactile communications, but now we had a hard and cold representative of a fraction of reality.

A tree was no longer a symbol and totem of the seasons, of life, of majesty. No, now it is simply:

T

R

E

E

and

PHOTOSYNTHESIS

LUMBER

MATERIALS

Water ceased to be the gates to the underworld, the embodiment of chaos and the realm of the Serpent. Now it is only:

W

A

T

E

R

and

H2O

SALTY OR FRESH

Nothing more.

Am I saying that the alphabet is bad? Of course not. Am I saying that its invention was bad? Of course not, I’m a writer. Words are my tool, much like Kingsnorth’s.

No, what I’m saying is that the incarnation of the alphabet was a symbolic wounding of our ability and desire to interact with the world and with nature as a mysterious and living cosmos full of myth and wonder. More is true than we know, but we are blindfolded by facts and logic.

Kingsnorth finishes his monologue about the alphabet with this line:

“What if all words are as fake as a scratch on a clay tablet denoting a cow? It is not a cow. It is a scratch. It will never be anything other than a scratch. To see the real cow, you have to go outside.”

The expanses between language and reality is bridged by experience. The word

C

O

W

doesn’t mean anything to you if you haven’t gone out and stared at a cow, felt her rough hide, or smelled her manure. Until you experience and reconnect with the world, the cosmos, around you, you will never have anything more than words.

Totems of fractions of something.

“C” is 33.33% of the word “COW”. If you know C, O, and W, you still don’t know what the hell a Cow is. You just know the representatives of it, not the real thing.

How can you know a thing?

In the early 1190’s, King Richard the Lionheart of England was blazing a path of destruction and vengeance across the Middle East against the Turkish forces that opposed Christendom’s right to Jerusalem. Specifically, he opposed the great leader and warrior Salah ad-Din Yusuf ibn Ayyub, also known as “Saladin.” Both were great warriors and titanic figures in history. Yet, when Saladin sued for peace talks and parlay, he himself refused to meet with Richard, instead sending his representative.

Why did he do this?

To paraphrase Saladin, he feared to be seen by Richard. Not because he feared Richard, but he feared being known by Richard. Saladin wished to remain an unknowable enemy.

For in Saladin’s imagination, to be seen was to be known.

TO BE SEEN IS TO BE KNOWN.

Do you wish to know the Earth? To know the Cosmos?

To quote Johnny Cash:

"And I heard, as it were, the noise of thunder
One of the four beasts saying,
'Come and see.'

and I saw…”

May the grace and peace of our Lord Jesus Christ be upon you.

Sincerely and with love,

Piety

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The Fire In The Woods:

The deep drones of the song reached our ears, causing us to turn our heads simultaneously towards the distant woods. My comrades and I stood covered in mud and sweat, with raw and bloody forearms and elbows. Our rifles hung loosely in our grips and our gear lay piled at our feet. The formation was loose and untidy, but no one cared. The Drill Sergeants were whispering to one another a-ways away and we had a moment to relax. But then the song came to our ears and we all turned to see, deep in the woods, a bright light emanating. A warm, golden, dancing light.

A fire.

The song was Flying High/Sgt. MacKenzie from the film We Were Soldiers. When the helicopters lift off and take the 7th Cavalry to their doom in the Ia Drang. All men know the scene. I know we sure did. As we stared at the blazing glow dancing from between the black and towering trees, our Drill Sergeants turned to us and screamed for us to charge the fire with our greatest war cry.

And we did.

130 dirty, tired, worn out young soldiers on the final day of BCT (Basic Combat Training) charged a dark tree line, screaming like banshees. We were young and idealistic, hungry for a name. A name given to us by a forest father or a hairy man of war. Images of red war flashed in our minds and our youthful hearts practically erupted from our chest for battle joy. Like wild animals, like Vercingetorix charging into Caesar’s lines, like William Wallace at the fields of Bannockburn, like the Rohirrim at the Pelennor Fields, we ran. I leapt over log and root like a fawn in the dawn of a new day. I felt the image of a tomahawk in one hand and a knife in the other, or maybe a pistol and bowie knife, or an axe and a Danish shield. I was Davy Crockett, I was Harald Hardrada, I was Charles Martel.

I was someone.

As we neared the forest’s dark chest, we slowed to a jog and our Drill Sergeants corralled us along a dirt path into a clearing. In the center of the well-worn clearing lie a 12 foot tall pile of burning pallets. The light cast shadows and rays of golden firelight dozens of yards into the forest around us, awaking dancing nymphs and mythic creatures. It felt a world apart, like the seam was thin and ready to snap and suck us into Middle Earth or Narnia. Separate and wholly distinct from the world outside the trees. The droning voice of Sgt. MacKenzie echoed off through the trees, around our legs, into our spines, settling in our stomachs like a meal of raw meat.

We assembled in our platoons in three blocks surrounding the fire. Our painted and dirty faces looked ghoulish and wicked in the firelight, mighty and heroic. Our 1st Sergeant, a towering black warrior with more combat experience than all of our Drill sergeants combined, stood by the fire and bellowed out a speech about heroism and the passage from child to adult, boy to man, man to warrior. He looked like a pagan god here to usher us on to war, with his back to the fire, framed in the billowing firelight. Sparks carried the word heavenward.

He called us warriors. And so we were. With the utterance of his mouth, we were so.

Our Drill Sergeants came to us one by one, called us by our name, and shook our hands. These demons, these beasts of our molding and making, who had tormented us for months were now towering over us in the light with a hand outstretched. No more, no less.

But it was enough.

In the past 6 hours we had gone through a brutal ruck march and into our Night Infiltration Course (NIC), a 100 yard stretch of sand, pits, barbed wire, and live ammo and grenades going off all around us.

(No, the rounds weren’t anywhere near us. They were easily 15 feet overhead and the grenades, or whatever explosives they happened to be, were exploding in deep concrete pits beside us. Truly a simulated environment with no real risk. But it felt real enough).

The symbolism of the NIC is obvious. At the start line, we were still recruits, not yet initiated into the cult of soldiery. We were hungry for it, buzzing for it, jumping up and down in place for it. We passed through fire, through (simulated) combat, and came out the other side. Once there, we stripped our armor off, dropped our weapons, and stood in our t-shirts and pants, exposed. Shown for who we really were. Having passed our Rite, we were ready for initiation. So we ran screaming into the woods to attain it. The woods, the temple of boys and men since the beginning, the great keeper of men’s hearts. And for a moment, just for a moment, on that cold and muddy night, screaming and sprinting towards the imagined enemy, we were the heroes we’d dreamed of.

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Where Did The Men Go?

Over the past dozen years or so, the World War I and II Heavyweight Champs have been facing something of a recruitment crisis. Rocky has been slacking in the gym, you could say. According to the DOD, in the fiscal year of 2023, the military was under the recruitment standard by nearly 41,000 recruits.1 This isn’t new, though, the numbers have been dismal for years. As disillusionment with the military, the establishment powers that be, and with the spirit of our Nation and our People as a whole declining, it’s no wonder that the numbers are dropping. The reasons are myriad, but after nearly 20 years of sustained, slogging, tangled combat in the Middle East, against an entrenched, religiously motivated, and internally reproducing enemy force, our soldiers found themselves having spent their lives and years grinding desert sand into finer desert sand and we all know it now. The heat of the sun was the only victor out there (and maybe the pharmaceutical/military/oil industrial complex).

Now, I could postulate all day as to the cultural movements holding the smoking gun that killed the recruitment numbers. Movements such as the radical racism against white people, the sexism against young men, the demonization of masculinity, and the DEI incentives that abjectly victimize competent, white, young men who are, and have always been, the backbone of the US military. Or the value set that prioritizes inclusion over competence, diversity over talent, and ideology over combat readiness. All of these facets are true and worth mention, but greater minds than I have done so.

What I want to do is point the spotlight towards the back of the room to illuminate the lurking, illusive, and oft-missed culprit. To illuminate a cultural wound that has crippled generations of our young men and incapacitated them from engaging in their heroic programming. A wound of such deep and corrosive magnitude, that I would reckon this lies damn near the center of many of our cultural, spiritual, and mental woes.

Of course, I’m speaking of the lack of initiation. The lack of any sort of Rite of Passage for young men into adulthood. There are no more lions to send our sons off to kill. That is far too dangerous and causes mothers far too much anxiety. There is now no ring of elder men to bring a boy out, cut him, knock a tooth loose, sting him with ants, break a bone, or inflict benevolent pain upon him anymore. For neither is there elder men, nor is their a tolerance of pain, either at the personal or cultural level. All is sanitary, all is safe, all is orderly, all is domestic, all is matriarchal.

Gone is the wilderness to draw out, gone is the beast to slay, gone is the pain to inflict, gone are the elder men to send, gone are the boys willing to go, and gone are the stories that tell us we need them all. And thus, gone are the men.

The Men Without Stories

You see, what lie at the heart of the Rite of Passage for a young boy was the confirmation of identity. He was drawn out from his mother, usually forcefully, by the elder men of the tribe. Once out, they would put the boy through his abyss moment (see: Joseph Campbell’s work), some sort of test of strength, spirit, and will. This test could take the form of pain endurance, such as the Bullet Ant Glove ceremony still occasionally practiced by the Satere-Mawe tribe in the Amazon. This ceremony would have young men, initiates, don a woven glove interlaced with hundreds of angry bullet ants that would bite the hand for hours and hours. The pain is said to be among the most severe in the world, with boys often passing out, vomiting, and falling ill. Yet, throughout all of this, the boys must dance to tribal songs and show minimal pain. Once they’ve done this, they will be christened as a man by the tribe and all the men and women would recognize them as such. And just as vitally, the young women would recognize them.

Other Rites or tests would require the young men to slay a lion, endure the cold and dark, or complete a physical feat of immense strength. The list goes on and I could write about that at length. For more information on these and other blood rituals and rites, check out Jack Donavan’s book Blood Brotherhood. But allow me to get to my point.

At the root, the US and UK military institutions have lost their young men because they have has murdered their own heroism, their own heroic myth.

Gone are the days of the posters of strong, powerful men standing proud in uniform behind bold, emblazoned calls to action on behalf of kin and country. Replaced by posters of benevolent diversity persons handing out food to poor refugees.

Gone are the standards of achievement and physical mastery that used to be expected in the military. Replaced by lowering and flexible standards of competency and ability.

Gone are the mighty US soldiers who struck fear into Nazi Germany and the Empire of Japan. Replaced by transgender commanders and overweight weekend warriors who couldn’t outfight a High Schooler in a fair fight.

You see, I can monologue, but at the root, the US and UK militaries have disdained their core membership by ruining their stories, slandering their heritage, and stripping all the connective tissue of heroism and warriorhood from the bones of the lurching skeleton of the once-great Western armies. There is no more military because our military has lost its identity. And the ugly fact of that identity is this: armies are meant to destroy, soldiers are bred to kill. When the means of victory are disdained and the tools of the warrior are spurned, victory will flee from us.

So when you have a culture that doesn’t value and, perhaps, even vilifies those aspects of its own nature, you are left with a hollow, vain, shell of the former institution it once was. This shell will not attract young men. Much less young men who have been utterly robbed of initiation rituals in our postmodern matriarchy. Men who, up until some years ago, flocked to the Military as one of the last bastions that honored and rewarded masculine traits such as aggression, honor, and Thumos (for more on Thumos, see this article by The Art Of Manliness).

If the militaries of the modern West want to restore their stream of volunteers and recruits, they must offer a spiritual incentive to them. It cannot be solely money or career opportunities, although those are important. It must be a deeper incentive, an incentive that plucks the musical strings of the masculine soul. A masculine soul that desires to be a hero, a knight, and a king. All young men want to be a hero, until the world beats it out of them and convinces them that they are toxic. Now, all young men are withdrawing from the world or, devastatingly, lashing out at the world in violence. We have generations of young men wandering into a dark forest with no Elders to meet them and teach them and break them and make them. No fires, no songs, no Elders, no men. Only sad, bitter, hard-hearted young men.

So is it really any surprise that now that the military has joined ranks with the anti-masculine mob that men are allergic to it? It is really any surprise that when you murder the spirit of the man, his body and presence will follow suit?

It doesn’t surprise me.

Not one bit.

“THE CHILD WHO IS NOT EMBRACED BY THE VILLAGE WILL BURN IT DOWN TO FEEL ITS WARMTH.”

-- AFRICAN PROVERB

May the grace and peace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you.

Sincerely,

Piety

I remember when I first discovered the Red Pill movement. Okay, I don’t fully remember when. Alright, I have no idea when I first discovered it, but it feels like it’s been in my zeitgeist for a while. I remember as a young teen hopping on to my desktop and logging in to read the latest Art of Manliness article on how to walk into a room confidently, the life and sayings of Teddy Roosevelt, or how to tie a tie. Hell, I even bought the book set and had it signed by Brett McKay himself. Mr. McKay was my Iron John, the hairy man who took me into the woods of Masculinity and gave me permission to love being a man. He’s the Godfather of the manosphere space, at least to me. Yet, what pulled me into his way of approaching Masculinity was that he simultaneously gave the young Piety permission to be a man of both violence and class, power and grace, strength and virtue.

This melding of two disparate ideas that fit so perfectly together, like the Yin and Yang of Manhood, formed the foundation of Masculinity that I still operate from now. A true man is one who is both competent and virtuous. A man who can throw a mean haymaker, yet also rock a baby to sleep. A man who can change a car tire, yet also write poetry. A warrior-poet, as it were. A man so fully in touch with his Masculine self that he was free to employ his masculinity into areas typically deemed “soft” or “womanly”, such as raising an infant or wooing a woman with romantic gestures.

How did we stray so far from that? So far from the mustachioed man in the suit who could fight, love, write poems, and raise a family.

(Now, before anyone comes at me, let me be clear. No, I am not specifically talking about men from the 40’s, 50’s, or 60’s. They were plagued by their own issues, God bless them. Rather I am discussing models of masculinity and am simply using visual aids to drive home the symbolism.)

But now, in our modern day, we have the modern iteration of masculinity championed in the Manosphere space that encourages debauchery, degeneracy, and disdain for women as some sort of righteous retaliation at women for doing the same to them.

Now look, the Red Pill zeitgeist has done a lot of good in waking men and culture up to the horrors that feminism has wrought upon society. Such as broken families, a matriarchal family court system that unjustly punishes men, provocativeness, pornography, rampant sexual promiscuity, and much more all under the guise of “sexual liberation.” Without ranting too much about Feminism and its cancerous effects on society, let me finish that thought by saying: yes, the Red Pill is right about feminism and mostly right about gender dynamics and sexual psychology, generally speaking…

…But they are completely and utterly wrong about men. With a few exceptions, the prevailing, and growing, sentiment among the Red Pill Prophets is that a man must make himself “high value.” Now, first to lend credit to a good definition of this sort of man.

The late Kevin Samuels, a wildly popular men’s image and life coach, postulated six benchmarks for what he called a “High Value Man”. To be fair to Samuels, he disclaims that he did not create these metrics nor the title, but rather he is relaying commonly agreed upon metrics.

1. Money: Makes 10k a month.

2. Longevity: Makes that money for 3-5 years.

3. Group Acceptance: He is recognized by other High Value Men.

4. Network: He has other H.V.M. he can call upon.

5. Visibility: He has recognizable status.

6. Utility: He is useful to the group.

Now, there is absolutely nothing wrong with these metrics. They are a-moral and neither good nor bad, morally speaking. They are simply metrics for modern “success” of a man. While I’d love to argue that the blue collar dad who makes 50k a year and loves his family is of far more value than a 10k-month entrepreneur bro, that’s not the point of this article.

The point is that many of the Red Pill Prophets have taken this perfectly acceptable list of masculine “oughts”, and added a seventh category. According the village idiots like Andrew Tate, the Fresh & Fit podcast, Sneako, and sundry other surly gang, the seventh tenant of a High Value Man is sexual prowess, although perhaps sexual predation would be a better word. This idea is no different than the Feminist talking point of “finding yourself” before you settle down and get married. “Finding yourself” in the context of both the Feminist and Red Pill hellscapes is simply sleeping with as many people as you can. I’ve heard certain Red Pill Prophets proudly claim that a man ought to have sex with 50 women before he even considers marriage. Goodness, even the kingpin of the Red Pill himself, Andrew Tate, is a sex trafficker and pimp!

Now I ask you, what is the functional difference between the Feminist movement and the current Red Pill movement? Nothing. Not a thing. They’re both sexually liberated ideologies with an axe to grind against religion (Christianity), the family unit, fatherhood, motherhood, and virtue in general. It’s anti-human, anti-masculine, anti-woman, and anti-family.

But, you know what’s missing from Kevin Samuel’s list? I’ll tell you.

Virtue. Morality. Goodness.

Not a jot, not a note, of encouragement for men to be good men. No casting manhood as an aspirational standard that can only be achieved by discipline, strength, and virtue. Rather, only casting manhood as a cheap label you get, like a plaque, when you make enough money and have enough empty sex.

At it’s heart, I would summarize the current Red Pill cult to be nothing more than a reactionary and spiteful Uno reverse card against the women that hurt them.

“Oh, you’re going to sleep with five other guys? Well I’m gonna sleep with TEN other women!”

Not a jot.

Not a dash.

Not a word of goodness or virtue.

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This is the difference between my masculinity and the Red Pill masculinity. I believe true masculinity is embodied in the family unity. How? Through sacrifice, restraint, discipline, and love. None of which have I ever heard preached from the Red Pill sphere. They decry that sort of behavior. They call it simping, weakness, or beta. That’s fine. They’re wrong. Just like the OnlyFans models they pretend to hate, but continue to platform and stumble over, they will reach middle age and find themselves rich, ugly, and alone.

Meanwhile, I go to work every day and work long hours outside so that my family can eat, so that my children can go to a good Christian school, so that my wife can stay home and be the mother and wife she longs to be. My children love me, my wife respects me, and my Church community can count on me.

I don’t make 10k a month. I don’t drive a Bugatti. I’ve never even seen a Rolex in person. But I do come home and hear “Daddy!” and the stampede of tiny feet coming for a hug. I do get popsicle stick crafts as gifts. I do get to sleep in bed next to the only woman I’ve ever had sex with.

And if you’re reading this, as a man, and you can say these things as well, know that you are of higher value than any of those hollow men in expensive suits masquerading as heroes. We are the true men, the true masculinity.

We value virtue over fame.

Family over fortune.

Legacy over promiscuity.

Goodness over expediency.

Strength over power.

God over man.

Kingdom over everything.

Stay in the fight, brothers.

May the grace and peace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you.

Signed,

Piety

“The Barbarian hopes — and that is the mark of him, that he can have his cake and eat it too. He will consume what civilization has slowly produced after generations of selection and effort, but he will not be at pains to replace such goods, nor indeed has he a comprehension of the virtue that has brought them into being. Discipline seems to him irrational, on which account he is ever marvelling that civilization, should have offended him with priests and soldiers.... In a word, the Barbarian is discoverable everywhere in this, that he cannot make: that he can befog and destroy but that he cannot sustain; and of every Barbarian in the decline or peril of every civilization exactly that has been true.” - Hilaire Belloc

(Note: As with all of my writings, I write to men of the Church. If you are an atheist, agnostic, pagan, or some other identifier other than Christian, you won't be able to affirm my premises here, therefore you will not be able to arrive at my conclusion. I encourage you to read along, nevertheless, but be aware that my assumptions will be within the realm that affirms transcendent Truth values.

The assumption I make here is that there is, in fact, a correct way for men to behave. The measure of this correctness could be called Christian “Virtue” or Christlikeness. Again, if you digress from this premise, your conclusion will be different from mine.)

The Tates and the Outer Dark

In regards to the Tate brothers, I believe that they manifest a form of masculinity that harkens back to the distinction between the civilized world and the outer dark world of the Barbarian. They, as you may have guessed, reside in the outer-darkness. In the cold forests, far from city centers. In the world of the Barbarian, the effective virtues are determined by the outcome or what can be gained. The ends of the Barbarian are chiefly what benefits him the most. He is a beast, a sub-human, driven by the passions of the flesh and devoid of ethics and virtue. A Barbarian reading this would protest and claim that they do, indeed, have virtue and ethics, despite those virtues and ethics being utilitarian and hedonistic. Yet, I maintain that without a higher-order metric, or giver, of virtue and ethics, one is left to determine them for oneself. And if one determines their own virtues and ethics, then they are meaningless.

Subjective virtue is no virtue at all.

Subjectivity negates existence.

The Tate brothers and their slew of Red Pill prophets and copycats need only speak for a few moments before my point is proven. Their entire business model is framed around how one can game the system to gain affluence, money, power, and women. The lusts of the flesh. Even their philosophies of self-discipline are rooted in the ultimate goal of gaining for the self. Never for sacrifice, never for submission to a higher order good, never for giving of oneself for another, never for virtue. In this, even fitness and the nobility of discipline is perverted by hubris and greed. Need further proof? Andrew Tate is a pimp and a virtual slaveowner. A trafficker and manipulator of the highest order and yet he stands as the pinnacle, or maybe mascot, of the Red Pill sphere.

In short, the masculinity they champion is one practiced by the archetype of the Warlord or Barbarian. The man who uses his might and strength not for defense and provision, but for assault and thievery. He takes what he wishes because he can. He is driven solely by his desire for gain and praise. He abuses the women around him, manipulates and uses the men around him, and creates death and fear rather than life and peace. He is mighty, so he can take. He is rich, so he can acquire. He is powerful, so he can control. No giving, no sacrifice, no leadership.

Now, don’t confuse me. The noble man can, and must, use violence, strength, and riches to great effect when blessed with them. Neither is the noble man expected not to act to gain things he may want or need. But I need not delineate between reasonable gain and selfish greed. The distinction is too hazy to elucidate in writing, at least by my hand, but it is obvious enough to us when we see it. The benevolent king is readily identifiable when compared to the plundering barbarian. Both are rich, but one gives and one takes.

Now, to illustrate this divide between the Tate’s barbarism and this mytho-virtuous model of manhood that I espouse, allow me to draw your mind’s eye to one of the west’s most beloved tales: The Iliad.

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In Homer’s Iliad, we have two men who, for all intents and purposes, serve as the dichotomies, the opposing faces, of each other. They circle the fire, staring into one another’s eyes, locked in eternal competition.

One is Achilles, the nearly immortal hero, feared and honored by all and loved by none. An angry and impulsive teenager, driven by a relentless thirst for glory and praise, he is the young lion, tethered to nothing and loyal only to himself. He has arrived in Troy sheerly out of a desire to be recognized and praised by others. In fact, before he leaves home his mother, Thetis, offers him a prophetic dilemma. She says to him that before him lie two roads, down one lies a long life of safety, peace, and love…and anonymity. The other is a nasty and short road that ends in his bloody death but guarantees that he will be remembered.

Which one do you suppose he chose? The one that fanned the flames of his hubris, his pride.

The other is Hector, the crown prince of Troy, the father and husband, the middle-aged man. He is honored, revered, and loved by all his people.

Caught up in these two men I believe we can see the struggle for Masculinity taking place in the Red Pill/Manosphere space.

On one hand, we have the hoards of young, restless, and virile men eager to be worthy and honored. A noble aim and one shared by all men, to be sure. However, they are corrupted by the spirit of Achilles into believing that their path to manhood lies in conquest, war, hubris, destruction of their enemies, sexual degeneracy, and taking what they feel belongs to them. Self-pleasing, self-aggrandizing. It is nothing at all but flesh and pride. Dust and ash.

And to what end does this passion lead Achilles? To death. Yet, not just any death. A lonely death inside of a burning city. Loved by none, feared by many, and hated by all. But hey, he had his glory. That is precisely what lies in store for the Red Pill barbarians of our age - loneliness and death of both a spiritual and physical nature. They are the hedonists of our age, suckling on the bleeding father wounds of men. Leeches and vipers, all.

Now to Hector, the prince of Troy, the eldest son of King Priam, and the picture of virtuous manhood. He has a beautiful wife who he’s stolen the heart of, a baby boy he adores, and the respect and love of his people. Yet he is still a mighty warrior, second only to Achilles. He fights with brutality and fierceness, like a wild animal. However, something separates him from Achilles.

He is virtuous.

Everything about him is channeled through the lens of virtue. He desires honor, same as Achilles, but he desires to be recognized by his people for his service to them. He fights for his people, not himself. He sacrifices his life in front of the city walls, his corpse brutalized by the petulant Achilles, in sight of his loving family and people.

The difference between these two men ought to be obvious. Achilles fights for ego and self. Hector fights for honor and to save the lives of others. I’m moved by a scene in the Iliad where Hector returns home from a day of horrid battle. His radiance is clouded by gore and blood, his armor is caked in it, the horsehair plume of his helmet is matted with it. He looks like a demon or a beast of lore. When he enters his house, his little boy cries out in terror and runs from him. Hector quickly drops his helmet, hir armor, and cleans himself off before kneeling in front of his child, arms out, pulling him into an embrace.

This picture, of the warrior prince, holding his little boy and hugging his wife epitomizes virtuous masculinity. A masculinity that not only the Tates and Red Pill prophets cannot accept, but a masculinity they scorn and disdain. They despise the family, despise the home, and despise fathers (which is an entirely different conversation, but one worth having).

And this is really the thrust of my argument:

Only when a man’s natural proclivities towards manliness are wedded with virtue can it be deemed truly masculine.

When a man acts out of impulse, selfishness, greed, and malice, he is an anti-masculine force. He is the Barbarian. Uncivilized, undignified, and totally out of step with truth, goodness, and beauty.

(This is the achilles heel [pun intended] of the Red Pill world, by the way. A cadre of men properly identifying the problems facing men, but prescribing barbaric solutions)

However, when a man submit to virtue and the three transcendental values (truth, goodness, and beauty) he becomes an effective force for life, flourishing, peace, and defense. Around him flock the needy and the defenseless, around him bloom the trees of lineage and generations, around him gathers peace and purpose.

Virtue is behavior that is consistent with transcendent goodness, truth, and beauty. In a word, Christlike. To be virtuous is to behave “rightly”, and that “rightly” hinges upon the person of Christ and the New Kingdom.

Postscript: Allow me to offer one last tale and leave it up for you to interpret. In Book 11 of The Odyssey, Odysseus visits the Underworld in order to gain wisdom and direction for his homeward journey. While there, he meets a slew of fallen heroes, family members, friends, as well as enemies. One such individual he meets is Achilles. Achilles got his reward, it turns out. He was heroic and, by many metrics, one of the greatest warriors of the Greek world. His reward? He is made a prince of the Underworld. He is elevated to a position of the honor he hungered so deeply for in life. Yet, when Odysseus approaches his specter, he is forlorn and crestfallen. Achilles then offers him this infamous and heartbreaking line:

“Don’t give me consolation about death, glorious Odysseus.
I’d rather be above earth and labour for someone else,
a man with no land of his own and little livelihood,
than be king over all the lifeless dead.”
-- Homer, Odyssey 11.488-491

All that glory. For what?

May the grace and peace of our Lord Jesus Christ be upon you.

Signed,

Piety & Violence

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