ABOUT THE GRIPING IN THE MANOSPHERE

"The Night Watch" by Rembrandt

by Henry Dampier

The manosphere (referring to the loosely-affiliated ecosystem of small web publishers writing for men and running discussion forums) as a market phenomenon exists owing to censorship in the professional press, where anyone who deviates from the leftist party line winds up ostracized and unable to be published steadily, apart from a few exceptions here and there.

Christopher Hitchens, for example, was able to publish articles about why women aren’t funny in magazines like Vanity Fair, but probably only because he had spent decades contributing to magazines like The Nation and acting as the standard-bearer for atheism. The original piece is apparently no longer even hosted on the Vanity Fair website, although there are countless rebuttals to it.

If even a long-time Trot like Hitchens can’t get away with the mildest criticism of female equality, no one really can. However, reality keeps on being real, even if the way that our cultural organs try to depict reality is blatantly at odds with the thing itself. The manosphere grows in the absence created by censorship and the interference in the creation and maintenance of all-male organizations.

It’s in effect, occupying a grey market niche, and reaping profits from it.

Part of what the men do with this grey market is to air grievances that get no hearing from other sources. The state has decided, as a comprehensive campaign, to level society across gender lines. To achieve this, it needs to hobble men, saddle them with legal risks, defame them constantly, and create a New Egalitarian Man at least in concept in order to achieve its political goals. Many, many more men aspire to be the New Egalitarian Man than the older version, because professional propaganda tends to be of higher grade than the gray market stuff.

It also needs to suppress and belittle the grievances that come up with respect to this raft of policies to make them appear to be more popular and successful than they really are.

Because egalitarianism is a revolt against nature — it works against natural impulses rather than channeling them — it’s very resource-intensive to maintain.

Grievances against the sovereign that come to be aired — but go unresolved — tend to frustrate people, especially because the democratic psychology expects those grievances to be heard by the sovereign, and then acted upon by that sovereign. When grievances are aired but ignored, to the democratic mind, it seems like the universe isn’t operating as it’s supposed to. It’s ‘supposed’ to go whine → complain → protest → wise legislator passes reform.

In particular, some hope that family law will be reformed.

This will never, ever, ever happen, because egalitarianism has a certain historical momentum (‘leftward drift’) that must accelerate or it must implode. A perceived halfway reversal would threaten the entire sensibility of modern democratic civilization, so even a prudent reform isn’t possible.

Dürer's Melancholia

The griping can also be seen as an attempt to coordinate during a time when the state (as it ought to in order to protect itself) is working hard to prevent such coordination. Because the state doesn’t want (and shouldn’t want) a competing culture to emerge within its own territory, the people in the alternative men’s media who succeed the most tend to be the ones who encourage men to coordinate to become better parasites on the shuddering carcass of what was good ol’ Western Civ.

They create a bandit culture which praises excellence in banditry. Which would make sense, because we’re in conditions which are conducive to banditry as a strategy.

Parasitism is adaptive, however, until it isn’t. Americans tend to believe that ‘economics is cyclical,’ believing in narratives of ‘stock market recoveries’ which exceed every downturn. But civilizations and economies more often go through profound phase changes which aren’t cyclical at all. The ‘business cycle’ can be more like a one-way ratchet of dysfunction, and the same goes for the other social phenomena.

Without religious consolation, Americans instead have psychological consolation: they believe things like “everything happens for a reason,” “it will all turn out OK,” “I’m OK / You’re OK,” “there’s someone out there for everyone,” “It gets better,” “50 is the new 30,” and a whole lot of other gibberish that acts to ease the pain of existence.

Actually, it’s not going to be OK, most of you aren’t going to make it, it’ll all be terribly unfair, the new 50 is probably worse than the old 50, and you squandered your opportunities in your 20s, and few people even like you, much less love you. Also, you’re going to become old, die, and you’re probably not going to a good place, either, after that’s done with.

Much of the griping in the manosphere is an attempt to gain consolation for individual despair by spreading despair to others as well. The justification sometimes goes that if everyone is demoralized enough together, something positive will happen. The only thing that results in that is that people just come together in their misery — feeling less alone in their individual unhappiness, but doing little to resolve anything.

At some point, Westerners will have to start recognizing that there’s less of a ‘we’ in this than we’re accustomed to thinking. Many Western countries aren’t going to make it. Many regions aren’t going to make it. Many religious groups aren’t going to make it. For small groups of men to solve problems, the problem space has to be shrunk down to a manageable level. Fixing the US isn’t possible; salvaging a portion of it is.


Originally published at henrydampier.com