Clown World Chronicles: What Is A ‘MGTOW’?

In Clown World, relations between the genders are not as they should be. As everything in Clown World is a twisted, tragicomic imitation of how things would be in a normal world, so too is dating and romance. One of the phenomena that this has created is that of the MGTOW. This essay explains who these people are and what motivates them.

‘MGTOW’ stands for Men Going Their Own Way. The idea is that MGTOW is a rebellion against the expectations levied upon the average man by society. These expectations, MGTOWs contend, are that a man shall slave away for the vast majority of his life for the sake of providing for a wife and family, without any assurance that any of his work will pay itself off. It’s a raw deal, and so they reject it.

The average MGTOW has an extremely cynical attitude towards women. Their idea of the feminine is deceitful, manipulative, dishonest – women attract men like spiders attract flies. The attitude that women are evil underpins much of the MGTOW movement. After all, if it were true that women were evil, then it would make sense to avoid them.

MGTOWs speak of a time when the average man was afforded a lot more respect. During this time, marriages were stable and women were loyal. Men were not subject to “divorce rape” – in which a formerly happy wife betrays a man and then enlists a lawyer to take everything that man has in divorce proceedings. Cases like Jeff Bezos’s wife, who became a multi-billionaire through a divorce settlement, are emblematic.

The problem with today’s society, MGTOWs contend, is that women are no longer as they once were.

Women are no longer loyal – a combination of decreased social pressure towards loyalty, a legal environment unfavourable to males, and their own inner malice. Therefore, the old social contract, under which a man would labour throughout his productive years in exchange for a pleasant wife who would provide him a family, is no longer valid. Absent this, men are not obliged to be part of society. They can go their own way.

It’s true that the average Western man today has a much shittier situation facing them than the average Western man in the 1950s or 60s. Unlike his grandfathers, he has almost no chance of owning a home and raising a family on his wage alone. The average young New Zealander today has less than 40% of the house-buying power that his parents’ generation enjoyed. Being the breadwinner of a family is many times harder than it used to be.

It’s also true that the balance of power has shifted towards women in recent generations. Our grandfathers were able to literally beat their women into submission, knowing that both their neighbours and the Police would look the other way. Marital rape was legal in New Zealand until 1984. In the 21st century, however, women make up two-thirds of Bachelor’s degree recipients in New Zealand. It’s a woman’s world now.

Moreover, men today have to deal with the reality of hypergamy (all MGTOWs are familiar with this term). Hypergamy is the tendency of the female in sexually reproducing species to try to marry up by attracting the sexual partner with the highest possible social status. MGTOWs contend that the advent of online dating has exacerbated this tendency to such an extreme degree that, today, most women have no interest in the bottom 80% of men.

To many men, this makes the prospect of a fulfilling long-term relationship seem unlikely. MGTOWs will say “women are only as loyal as their options,” and because Tinder gives them effectively infinite options, women no longer have any reason to be loyal. Even worse, they don’t even need a man to raise children because the State will pay for it with welfare (there is great overlap between MGTOWs and the libertarian right when it comes to resenting welfare).

Because there is little reason to work hard and to hold down a job if one does not (or can not) have a family, a number of men have just said “fuck it” and dropped out of society in response to all this. They fill their time mostly with video games, Netflix and television. Others fill their time with pornography (see the Coomer meme). None of this is productive, but there’s no reason for a man who has abandoned (or been abandoned by) society to be productive.

There is a great overlap between those who identify with being MGTOW and incels. Both of them share a deep frustration about their failed attempts to get what they want out of women. The difference, in theory, is that MGTOWs are no longer trying to find ways to co-exist with women, whereas incels are still trying but are getting rejected. The incel to MGTOW pathway is obvious.

Curiously, there isn’t much overlap between those who identify with being MGTOW and volcels. In theory, there ought to be, because a man who is going his own way is a fitting description for a man who is voluntarily celibate. But a man who is voluntarily celibate is probably doing so for spiritual or mental health reasons – a MGTOW, by contrast, goes his own way out of bitterness and resentment.

One of the main drawbacks of the MGTOW strategy is that most men can’t achieve anything by themselves. Like it or not, individual humans are interdependent with other humans and cannot exist in isolation. Even the greatest of men can’t achieve much without a network of people who make that man’s greatness known to the wider world.

Inevitably, such a network will include women. Therefore, a man who hates or who wants to avoid women is unlikely to also to be supported by a large social network.

If the MGTOWs themselves are correct, then the phenomenon ought to become more prevalent as the economic and social balance of power shifts further in favour of women. This could have social repercussions. If a large proportion of the men in a society are unwilling to act to preserve it then it may well collapse. The prospect of this is something that many MGTOWs look forwards to with joy.

Being a sick and insane circus, Clown World is inherently unstable, and the MGTOW phenomenon may be one that heralds its demise.

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This article is an excerpt from Clown World Chronicles, a book about the insanity of life in the post-Industrial West. This is being compiled by Vince McLeod for an expected release in the middle of 2020.

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VJMP Reads: Edward Bernays’s Propaganda IX

This reading carries on from here.

The ninth chapter of Edward Bernays’s Propaganda is called ‘Propaganda in Social Service’.

By “Social Service,” Bernays refers to what would today be known as the welfare system. He states that the welfare system requires constant propagandising, on account of that its continued existence is contingent on the will of the wealthy. Here he states the maxim that “Civilization is limited by inertia.”

One striking feature of today’s world, Bernays contends, is the democratisation of propaganda opportunities. Back in the day, change was effected by autocratic rulers who decreed it, but today any person is able at least to try changing public opinion about something.

In this chapter Bernays again underlines the significance of appealing to the leaders of the various groups within society. If a variety of leaders of different social groups can be brought on board, it’s not too hard to get the people they influence on board too. With this achieved, it’s possible to use the approval of these leaders to further propagandise.

Bernays states here that “Social service… is identical with propaganda in many cases.” By this he means that all efforts to effect social change are propaganda efforts. The efforts of the welfare state to raise the wellbeing of people necessitates a propaganda effort. This is especially true when new scientific advances suggest certain changes (as they did in Bernays’s time in the case of prison reform).

He concludes this chapter with the statement that “Social progress is simply the progressive education and enlightenment of the public mind in regard to its immediate and distant social problems.” In this regard, the propagandist has an extremely important role. It’s perhaps telling, though, that Bernays doesn’t write about how the propagandist knows whether they’re enlightening or misleading people with their work.

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If you enjoyed reading this essay, you can get a compilation of the Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2018 from Amazon for Kindle or Amazon for CreateSpace (for international readers), or TradeMe (for Kiwis). A compilation of the Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2017 is also available.

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Is It Time For An Asian Quota In The All Blacks?

Japanese player Daisuke Ohata is history’s top international rugby union try scorer, proving that being Asian is no hindrance to rugby excellence

By the time of the 2019 Rugby World Cup, over 1,000 men had represented the All Blacks throughout history. Although the All Blacks are famous for being a successful multicultural operation, not a single one of those thousand plus All Blacks has been Asian. This essay asks whether it’s time for an Asian quota in the All Blacks.

At the time of the 2018 Census, some 15.3% of the New Zealand population were Asians, around 750,000 people. About a quarter million of those are Chinese, another quarter million Indian, and the rest a mix of Japanese, Korean, Thai, Vietnamese, Filipino and a few others. It’s similar to the total number of Maoris and greater than the total number of Pacific Islanders.

Most of those Asians are relative newcomers to New Zealand, and therefore a historic lack of Asian representation is not hard to explain. However, 15% of the current population is a large number of people. On the face of it, it seems extremely improbable that none of these people would have gone on to be an All Black today. Indeed, there are very few Asians among professional rugby players full stop.

The conventional explanation for this disparity is a supposed inherent genetic disadvantage possessed by Asians.

Because rugby is an extremely physical game, the more effective rugby players tend to also be the more muscular ones. For the forwards, muscle power gives the wrestling strength to win possession of the ball; for the backs, muscle power gives the explosiveness to break tackles and to hit gaps. According to the common explanation, Asians lack this muscle power because they don’t have the right genes.

The idea that Polynesians and white people are genetically larger than Asians is part of a school of thought called scientific racism. This school of thought is the rhetoric of dressing up racism in scientific-sounding statements to give it legitimacy. People who adhere to this school of thought like to draw jargon from evolutionary psychology and genetics to create the appearance of support for their case.

Scientific racists will say that, when a people becomes civilised, the set of selection pressures in favour of big muscles are no longer as strong among that people. A capacity for violence gives way to a capacity to co-operate. Hence, the longer a people has been civilised, the smaller they will become. This is the reason why Indians have the least lean muscle mass in the world – they have been civilised the longest.

Scientific racists go on to say that, because Northern Europeans and Polynesians were the last to become civilised, that they have the most lean muscle mass, this being the inevitable consequence of selective pressures that rewarded the most violent and aggressive males with mates and social status. This lean muscle mass makes them better rugby players, and therefore the low level of Asian representation can be explained by Asian inferiority.

In reality, this is merely a “just so” story used to justify racist oppression of Asians.

The truth is that Asians have been discouraged from playing rugby because of the racism they have encountered from Polynesians and white people. Unfortunately, Asians have been stereotyped as small, weedy nerds who are only good at maths and computer science. This has led to an extreme amount of racist bullying from Polynesians and white people, which has discouraged Asians from pursuing higher honours in the game.

Further proof for this contention comes from the observation that all of the Japanese national rugby side’s players are much better at rugby than the average Polynesian or white man. It follows from this that excellence at rugby is primarily a question of dedication to training and not genetics. This proves that the over-representation of Polynesians and whites in the All Blacks cannot be because of inherent racial superiority.

If there is no inherent racial superiority, then anti-Asian racism is the only possible explanation for the lack of Asian representation in the All Blacks. This means that the existing New Zealand rugby structure is obliged to do something about their racism and the historical advantage it has given Polynesian and white players.

One way of rectifying this would be to use the South African solution of racial quotas.

There are 15 players in a starting rugby union team, and 23 players in a match-day team (which includes the bench). This means that fair and equal representation for Asians in the All Blacks (based on their proportion of the New Zealand population) would be something like two starting players and one on the bench.

This doesn’t mean that there should be a quota of three places for Asian players in the All Blacks straight away. A better way to do transformation, following the South African example, would be to have one quota place for Asians in the All Blacks but three quota places for Asians in all Super Rugby teams (at least to start with).

Until New Zealand Rugby can rectify their horrific failure to include Asians in the top levels of professional rugby culture, they will continue to be a racist organisation. They show no willingness to change their attitudes on their own, however. Therefore, a quota for Asian players in the All Blacks is necessary before the All Blacks can be considered, for the first time, a fully representative team.

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Note: this article is a pisstake. If you got trolled, the joke’s on you!

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If you enjoyed reading this essay, you can get a compilation of the Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2018 from Amazon for Kindle or Amazon for CreateSpace (for international readers), or TradeMe (for Kiwis). A compilation of the Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2017 is also available.

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The Three Dominance Hierarchies

The hierarchy of iron is characterised by big muscles; the hierarchy of silver is characterised by flash suits

A lot of discussion in social psychology revolves around the idea of the dominance hierarchy. This refers to the fact that humans, as a form of primate, have social dominance hierarchies like other primates (and other mammals). There are actually three separate forms of dominance hierarchy, depending on the nature of the situation, as this essay will examine.

The elementary dominance hierarchy corresponds to the realm of iron. This is the same as the dominance hierarchy that exists in a state of Nature.

In principle, there’s little more to the elementary dominance hierarchy than who can beat up who. The dominance hierarchy relating to iron is similar to the dominance hierarchy that exists in prison. Authority is determined by a capacity and a will to use violence. The top of this hierarchy is held by mighty warriors, warlords and kings.

All the posturing one sees about who could beat up who is establishing a dominance hierarchy in the realm of iron. There is a whole art to posturing in this manner, and males will start learning it while they are still boys. The point of it is to establish who is better at fighting, but without actually fighting. The man who is believed to be the best fighter is at the top of this hierarchy and, if you disagree, he will bash you.

The dominance hierarchy that corresponds to the realm of silver is the same as the social hierarchy.

This hierarchy doesn’t reflect fighting ability but rather social status. In a civilised setting, where peace reigns, the person who generally makes the most intelligent long-term decisions will be at the top of the dominance hierarchy. Fighting in terms of social status means that the loser gets ostracised (or incarcerated) instead of killed.

The dominance hierarchy of silver is the same as the hierarchy of all the people who have agreed to play by civilised rules. The uncivilised can contest the dominance hierarchy of iron by bashing and stabbing each other, but in doing so they will fall down the hierarchy of silver, because civilised men will not respect them.

In practice, the hierarchy of silver often represents the hierarchy of wealth. When it comes down to it, this hierarchy is an extension of the hierarchy of iron because silver gives you the opportunity to hire men of iron to do your bidding. Wealth can buy loyalty, even if only temporarily. It can also buy land, weapons and propaganda.

However, social status can be afforded to people on the basis of their knowledge alone, which is why the hierarchy of silver can, on occasion, promote a knowledgeable man above a wealthy one. This is most obviously the case in the university system, where extremely knowledgeable people are afforded a high status.

The third form of dominance hierarchy is much more subtle, and consequently it corresponds to the realm of gold.

The spiritual hierarchy reflects those who are most closely attuned to the Will of God. Because every person has their own idea of what the Will of God is, it’s rare that people openly agree as to who is at the top of the spiritual hierarchy. Therefore, this hierarchy is subtle, sometimes even occluded.

At the top of the spiritual hierarchy is the person with the greatest knowledge of God. In most cases, this will not only be a person who believes in God, but will also be a person who maintains a practice that keeps them in connection with God. This means that they have explicitly repudiated the other two dominance hierarchies and no longer contest them.

These three hierarchies interplay with each other in many ways.

The hierarchies of iron and silver clash all the time in civilised society. The hierarchy of iron is almost always topped by a male aged between 20 and 40, because it’s in these years that men possess maximum physical strength. The person at the top of the hierarchy of silver, by contrast, will have achieved their position after decades of building social and financial capital, and so will be much older.

This means that the person at the top of the hierarchy of iron is almost never the same as the person at the top of the hierarchy of silver. This is all but inevitable if the population is larger than 50 or so. With two different people at the top of two different dominance hierarchies, conflict between them is possible. This is why some ancient tribes used to split leadership into a war chief (man of iron) and a peace chief (man of silver).

Likewise, the person at the top of the hierarchy of gold will not be the decision-maker all the time. This person will only be in charge as long as others put their egos down and seek wise counsel instead of trying to force their will on others. As long as people choose to fight, then they will fall behind the leadership of either the best physical fighter or the best social fighter, and neither will follow the man of gold.

Because of the Conceit of Silver, people of silver will regularly fancy themselves to be people of gold. This leads many people of silver to adopt the trappings of the people of gold and to start mimicking them. Therefore, one can never be sure that anyone claiming to be a believer in God really is one. This means that the hierarchy of gold cannot be measured.

The hierarchies of silver and gold naturally clash with each other, as those driven by egoic desires for self-aggrandisement clash with those driven to minimise the suffering of all sentient beings. The men of silver are generally happy to cause suffering to other sentient beings if it grants them more power, but in doing so they inevitably provoke the ire of the men of gold.

These three dominance hierarchies can be observed in virtually all human groups. The interplay between physical strength, social strength and moral strength all but ensures that ultimate decision-making power is never held in the same hands for long.

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If you enjoyed reading this essay, you can get a compilation of the Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2018 from Amazon for Kindle or Amazon for CreateSpace (for international readers), or TradeMe (for Kiwis). A compilation of the Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2017 is also available.

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