Last year when Daniel Penny subdued an attacker on the New York subway the Right justifiably criticized the differential treatment of hero and villain: the hero’s whiteness was a liability in a justice system tilted in favor of black criminals at the behest of moneyed white elites. Some observers noted that, but-for Penny’s whiteness, no charges would have been laid, and concentrated their attacks on Progressives. But this criticism elided a more fundamental problem with the official response to Penny’s actions, one that connects it to a multi-generational, state-sponsored degradation of masculinity: the intentional characterization of manly behavior as “anti-social.”

Consider a scenario where there was no racial dimension. Would we still predict no outcry? Of course not. A fierce termagant gust of virtue-signaling outrage would have arisen from the Longhouse mavens, eager to assert authority where they otherwise have none. This is because Penny’s case is indicative of an older, more serious sin. He acted like a man. He heroically subdued a danger to the community. However, he failed to solicit the presumptive legal authorities for help and thus, in psychology argot, he was guilty of anti-social behavior. Those arguing for more heroism like this missed the point entirely. Penny’s heroism was proscribed precisely pour encourager les autres. Moreover it was proscribed not just by the official organs of the State, but by its social media paramilitaries who arbitrate social norms.

 

And look how many Grecian tents do stand?   

It’s worth a short examination of how we went from a society that lauds heroes to one that bays for their blood—a reversal of common sense in which millennia of cultural values and language were undone in a century. The swindle of the Longhouse has always been a long con. This has certainly been the case with the definition of “anti-social,” a term that once applied only to vicious and patently misanthropic acts but that now works against acts of altruistic bravery. Taking the long view was, of course, necessary to achieve that which could never be achieved by political means. In fact slowly changing the nature of all definitions is the principal feature of their program.

In the later 19^th century when thinkers noted the decline of masculinity there was no debate about what we were talking about. Unjustified violence was always contrary to statute as well as English Common Law. There was a small debate about what constituted “justification”, but that’s beside the point. The Longhouse pioneers in the temperance movement found this unsatisfactory. They could barely influence men to stop drinking by law, even after women gained the vote. But they found their Trojan Horse in the enervated elite’s new refuge of psychiatry and sociology. Not being hard sciences with hard definitions, these disciplines (and others unable to alter policy by constitutional means) glommed on to the notion of “anti-social” to castigate the behavior they found objectionable. They conflated its meaning with “violent” and then slowly, but surely, began to boil the frog. This is the classic Longhouse strategy.

Now they had their beachhead and they slowly moved inland, policing and transforming language, and slowly expanding the meaning of “anti-social.” What they have successfully done is to conflate anti-social with violent, while also demonizing harmless behavior captured by “anti-social”, like someone who “just doesn’t want to hang out.” There used to be nothing wrong with that. Except now they do care if you don’t want to hang-out. They care about your deepest, most intimate preferences. Why else has sexuality and sexual orientation become fetishized to the point of parading even the most private desires on billboards and bios?

Conflating word meanings is the vanguard of the assault on social norms. We’ve seen it done with a host of words like “problematic”, “harmful” (more on that later), “toxic”, “dangerous” and “exclusionary”. The insidiousness of this lexical alchemy is that each of these words is now a shibboleth for the anointed, while the unanointed are left to either take the knee or out themselves as an enemy of the people. The purveyors of Longhouse doublespeak never openly engage on the problem of “problematic”, or the danger of “dangerous”—taking it for granted that the hearer has already been indoctrinated in progressive definitions of wrong-think. But that is their intention: to avoid engagement as any discussion would collapse their semantic wave-function into a losing conversation on the merits.

They specifically target words with bipolar connotations, casting their pejorative meaning in stone while memory-holing other understandings. Take “discriminate,” for example. There are naturally cases where one wants to see discrimination. Your favorite sports-ball team for example would be worthless if anyone could play. Don’t worry, they tell us, they’re not trying to change that. Until, inevitably, they do. But by then they’ve shifted the Overton Window far enough that they no longer need to justify what they once swore they would never do. Anyone who now objects is labelled “anti-social”. This is how Progressives enforce a meaning that is exclusively negative and stigmatize the very act of choosing, to any degree. What was that pithy warning Ulysses delivered to the feckless Greeks?:

Degree being vizarded,
Th’ unworthiest shows as fairly in the mask.
…
O, when degree is shaked,
Which is the ladder of all high designs,
The enterprise is sick.

 

It’s no wonder that any worthy thinker now laments not only the state of discourse but the entire psychic health of our civilization.

One final note in this retrospection. “Anti-social” is, of course, only used to describe what they consider negative male traits. It never applies to deleterious behavior like passive-aggressiveness, useless perseverating, self-pitying, perpetual indecisiveness, ostracizing or judgmentalism. I wonder why?

 

Harm Discourse: The Movable Goal-Posts of Language Policing

The reader doesn’t have to wonder for long. The refrain we invariably hear is that male “anti-social” behavior is harmful. If Aristotle argued that all democracies devolve into tyrannies, a post-modern corollary might be that all discussion of rights devolves into harm discourse. Why do you care? It’s not harming anyone is the universal retort we hear from all Progressives when criticism gets leveled at their favored client castes. The genius behind this reduction is that it makes any substantive rhetorical victory impossible: the victor is the party that controls the definition of harm. It’s irrelevant that passive-aggressiveness or self-pitying are patently harmful. Harm is a tailor-made term, constantly being mended and altered to suit the needs of the Longhouse.

Underwriting this ad hoc philosophy is the principle that civilization’s coherence is attributable mainly to “social” behavior—that is, to domesticated behavior, the kind subject only to social norms and not legal or constitutional norms. This contrasts with the dominant Indo-European view that civilization coheres because conflicting social actors achieve an equilibrium of legal or constitutional interests on account of their ability to oppose each other. The difference is glaring. Social norms are decided by a consensus of notions—there is no debate about them, let alone an open debate. When norms do change they’re driven by capricious “taste-makers”, again without debate. Opposable norms, on the other hand, are only “norms” so long as no third party openly disagrees. Once the “norm” is contested it is no longer a norm – even if continues to receive adherence. Much, if not all, of the opposition takes place in the open and, due to long-established political precedents (going back millennia), done in accordance with a set of rules – mutually agreed upon by the relevant political actors.

The drive behind “social” norms then is a latent influence attempt by those dispossessed of authority. This made sense in ancient times or in highly patriarchal societies. Women (or men without status) might create behavioral norms to influence the rest of us, or even those in power. Ever thus the Longhouse strikes at civilization.

 

Bring me my bow of burning gold

We’ve seen what the dearth of heroism has done, and any cognitively sensate person agrees that more actions like Penny’s are necessary, if not to rescue hapless commuters then to penalize the violence that the wards of the Left are incentivized to perpetrate. However, after at least a century of moving the goal-posts on what constitutes “social” behavior what’s needed is a full-throated war-cry of those masculine behaviors due for a revenance.

Risk-Taking

To start we must lionize risk-taking. Forget de-stigmatizing, it’s time we raise our voices in unison about the social good of taking risks. After all, what is more masculine than that—at least since the advent of Indo-European culture. Our steppe ancestors lived in a world of perpetual risk-taking, whether it was the calculated risks of cattle pasturing or the spontaneous risks of plundering a rival’s herds. This is not about celebrating more Silicon Valley/Wall St. douchebags for betting other people’s money on yet another influencer-image-filter app or liar-loan mortgage derivatives. I’m talking about valorizing the person who leaves their exsanguinating corporate job to start a small business, the family that leaves the city and makes a go at farming, the man who risks cancellation to publish news of important events otherwise ignored, the academic that calls out his ideology-driven, plagiarizing peers… these are the actions we need to laud.

Look at the perception of risk-taking behavior in the social context. Young women are increasingly steered by media (social and legacy) to value feminized versions of men. Bad boys are most definitely out. In fact so are bad girls—even Britney’s or Lindsey’s antics would be cancelled today. Parents are increasingly warned to keep their children out of sports (for fear of injury), from playing outdoors (for fear of climate change), from playing with other children (for fear of the unvaccinated or… gasp, encountering “anti-social” behavior). Now even the most trivial activities are subject to a Karenized safety analysis, pioneered by lawyers whose job is not merely to be risk adverse, but to be risk paranoid. To elites all risks must be eliminated.

Just as disquieting is the perception of risk-taking behavior in the economic context. Once viewed as the sine qua non of capitalist enterprise, it is now disparaged by the billionaire class, and their acolytes, eager to foreclose the possibility of being tossed from their perch by new money and ideas. Even the economy it once underwrote has been immunized against risk by capital incumbency rules and financial repression from the Federal Reserve. Zombie firms that should have been quickly composted by bankruptcy are encouraged to fester with low interest rates (at least much lower than you’ll ever get).

If these aren’t terminal signs of failure by a class of rent-seeking elites I don’t know what is. The attempt to excise risk from our daily lives doesn’t make us better or safer for the obvious reason that risk cannot be destroyed—only transformed. It will, however, make everyone’s children poorer and weaker. The only reason for this irrational swindle is to perpetuate the Longhouse fantasy that stability can be achieved without cost.

 

Adversariality and Aggression

Next we need more praise for adversariality and combativeness. The Longhouse has always chirped about the supremacy of consensus in decision-making. But all life is fractious, and “consensus” is almost never real or desirable. It is almost always a euphemism for socially-coerced consent. The Longhouse understands the obviousness of this, which is why it fights to preserve its social control by condemning even the smallest disagreements. Gone are last generation’s critiques of how the adversarial process in law or science “marginalizes” women. Here now are the scarlet-letters for micro-aggression.

The canonical argument that “aggression” leads to violence is moot: the possibility of violence is always present. It is how that possibility is controlled that makes society livable. The Longhouse controls it by denying nature. Masculinity controls it is with adversariality because it allows people to practice conflict where the stakes are lower and without violent repercussions. Once you take that away you’ve removed one more safety barrier from the abyss.

I would even go one step further and suggest that boys should learn self-defense and martial arts in school. This is common in many parts of the world that are far more peaceful than America. Such training would be a win-win-win for boys, society and even women—natural tendencies being channeled into usefully controlled expressions. But the Longhouse would lose a powerful (if specious) argument against the myth of the patriarchy. So it remains condemned.

 

Defiance

From the first day of school boys are punished for “defiance”—the perpetual bugbear of scolds and hall monitors. But we need more acting-out and talking-back. This normal (Indo-European) male behavior has been characterized as “anti-social” now for several generations. Arguably the modern concept of public schooling is rooted in the worst of form of control psychology. Borrowed from puritan New England (and other “dissenter” religious traditions), modern schooling prioritizes obedience: sitting still, paying attention, being quiet, passively absorbing information, regurgitating doctrine and rote-learning. Not only are these profoundly unmasculine characteristics, they are profoundly dehumanizing characteristics to be ingrained in anyone. Is it any wonder that schools are a microcosm of the Longhouse?

Historically most elites achieved their positions after an experiential education, not by years spent in a classroom. While elevated (inflated?) educational credentials are now necessary to manufacture new Modern Major-Generals, this farce is simply a novelty of our late-stage imperial decline. The credentialization is at best a necessary evil to signal potential employers since most modern corporate work is counter-productive to shareholder value. Thus skills like sitting still, paying attention, etc, not only demonstrates one’s ability to perform mind-numbing work, they also signal the degree of obedience the supplicant will carry into the corporate structure.

The straw-man argument here is that “defiance” and “disobedience” are destructive of morale, cohesion and productivity. The pearl-clutchers ask, How could our most brilliant firms and schools possibly operate if unadulterated masculinity unleashed the chaos of “talking back?” But they are confusing obedience with discipline. Just like with violence, defiance is natural and no one disagrees that it requires control. The Longhouse’s answer is total domestication of this instinct. Instead boys need to learn that defiance is good and that true influence comes from tempering that instinct to channel it into power. The defiant must learn the value of keeping their powder dry.

Much like the linguistic conflation practiced with words, the Longhouse achieves its long sought-after reward by stigmatizing defiance: all criticism is chilled for fear of falling within the dreaded ambit of “anti-social” behavior. Therefore we need more defiance, more talking-back, more acting-out, more speech they gasp at, and more “no’s.”

 

Aspiration Husbandry

Finally, Longhouse mission creep has vitiated the notion that a man should want to take care of his family. The goal has always been to eliminate the last social bastion free of state control. Since the notion of husbandry has probably been with us since the invention of fire-based cooking (at least a million years) all but the most coercive legal attempts by the state to interfere have failed. The invention of Marxist ideologies revived this perversion: the state would be your spouse and your parent. From the Longhouse perspective this means infeudating the ghettos of minority clients while promoting the state-marriage relationship as the apotheosis of feminism to the girl bosses, who form the main constituents and authors of state policy.

Recent policy and propaganda efforts by the Longhouse have hastened this shift. Zoning laws, environmental building regulations, inflation, toleration of crime, industrial offshoring and the intentional deterioration of transportation and energy infrastructure have been skillfully manipulated to deprive most Americans of the dream of a stable family life. The Regime’s acolytes, who still can afford it, cling to their prerogatives like the minor nobility of the late Middle Ages, except blithely unaware of the futility of their struggle against an absolutist state on the rise. Subsequently men are being conditioned to consider it normal not to be providers, even though this flies in the face of millions of years of evolution. Where they can’t be conditioned their attitudes are condemned as “anti-social” for “being on the wrong side of history.”

 

Negate. Defy. Resist.

The Longhouse will have, for the foreseeable future, an impermeable seal on almost every elite institution. And while the Right has slowly—painfully at times—moved to absorb working class concerns, that constituency is too busy working to get involved in politics unless there is a crisis directly affecting it. And while we must prepare to take advantage of that crisis when it inevitably comes, any opposition today must come from literate classes of right-thinking people. And we must be very anti-social. Every chance we have to say “no” we must take, and every opportunity to challenge their truisms must be seized. Every time we hear that some new element of our nature is “problematic” we must insist on a full accounting of what those problems are, and why, and refuse to concede even the most fundamental premise. We must pronounce that we care a great deal because their ways are unnatural. We must act proudly and disdainfully “anti-social,” after all, why should we want to be part of that society anyway?

The key will be to progressively disengage from that society and found parallel institutions. The basis for those institutions is already forming, and a new literacy founded thereon is emerging as well. These institutions must start as informal networks of similar (not same) minded people, committed to acting “anti-social”-ly and who will double down on each spurious and predictable challenge to that behavior.

My father-in-law, a true Hellenist, once opined that there is the ‘way of the free’ and ‘the way of the slave’: the difference between ἔργον and δουλειά. In the negative-sum political economy that is our late-imperial burden, the Longhouse drive toward the latter becomes more desperate with each rhetorical lashing. But to paraphrase a point I’ve made more poetically elsewhere, the way of the Longhouse is not the way of the Indo-European. There can never be harmony between the Serpent and the Wolf.

A.J.R. Klopp is author of the novel The Toll of Fortune: An Indo-European Origin Saga, the first book written in The Thirteen Fathers series.