Right now we are seeing a marked swing from individualism to collectivism in the men’s self-development space. This seems to me a shame – for reasons I’ll expand upon here – but more than that, it is directly contrary to the original ethos of the sphere, and for that reason it should be called out. Collectivism is a misguided project. At best you can say that it might result in the best for society over the long term. At worst, it accomplishes nothing but misfortune for the individual – which is contrary to the notion of ‘self help’
Let’s be honest – the vast majority of men come to this part of the internet in order to learn something that will directly improve their lives. Some men want to understand how to get better with girls and dating. Others want to learn about fitness – about how they can shape up and get the body they crave. Others still are in a precarious position financially, and need strategies for building a business, being more efficient with money, or both.
These three pillars – love, health and money – are all essentially self-interested. No one seeks dating advice so that others may date better, just as no one picks up a book on how to be rich in order to that others around him will prosper.
This is not to say that human beings are solely self-interested – of course they’re not. In fact, it is quite conceivable that many have egalitarian secondary motives for seeking to improve themselves. A man might want to earn more money so that he can better support his family, for example. But we cannot deny that self-help is predominantly driven by a desire to improve one’s own lot. The clue is in the prefix ‘self’.
The current male self-development ‘movement’ – if I can be forgiven for aggrandising it with that term – came about directly as a result of guys searching on the – then nascent – internet for tips on how to meet and date attractive girls. While ‘how to meet girls’ guides had of course existed before, they were largely relegated to the seedy small ads sections to be found at the back of low-rent magazines.
Further to this, the internet in any case allowed for something entirely new – the ability for hundreds of thousands of men (maybe millions) to share their experiences with women from all over the world. Now you were no longer relying on the unverifiable expertise of some relatively anonymous author who claimed to have discovered the key to attraction. Instead, data in a grand scale became available, which enabled sharp-minded men to identify trends in the dating and sexual marketplace, to analyse these, and to determine the best course of action as a result, depending on their goals (i.e. short-term flings or a monogamous long-term relationship).
As we’ve already seen, there was nothing remotely collectivist about the desire for such knowledge. Sure, guys (and more than a few girls) were willing to get involved and help each other out by sharing nuggets of information, tips and techniques. But in almost all cases the man searching for the information was doing so in order to increase his own personal slice of the romantic / sexual pie, not that of his friends and neighbours.
The Rise of Collectivism
However, that was then (2004 or so) and this is now. A whole 15 years has passed by since I first became interested in self-improvement and started following developments in this area. And in that time a lot has changed, most notably technology, and along with it the monetisation of the scene. Tech because, with the rise of YouTube and to some extent Instagram, guys have been able to show real-world examples of their dating techniques, as well as exercise programmes, business advice and so on. And monetisation because . . . well, in the early days it didn’t really exist. And as soon as people woke up and realised that there was gold in them there hills, inevitably that was going to have an impact on the direction and tone of the content published.
But something else has happened over those 15 years – something that perhaps none of us expected. We have seen a marked shift from the individualism that caused the creation of that early content – and fuelled its consumption – to the collectivism that we are increasingly observing today.
Again, I am at pains to stress that I am not saying that this space was an entirely nihilistic and self-interested entity in the early days – far from it. A great many guys (and girls) created amazing content that they gave away for free. And even those who were charging for programmes, seminars and products (RSD, for example) often gave away a damn sight more free stuff than paid-for merch. And that’s not to mention all the anon posters on forums who gave away (and still give away) gold on a daily basis. In fact, if there’s one positive thing we can take from the history of this space it’s that it’s shown just how willing people are to help out virtual strangers by sharing information freely.
However, the message in the early 2000s was always very much ‘do these things and YOU will improve YOUR life in these ways’. And now, in the last few years, we’ve seen that message change to ‘do these things and create a better world for EVERYONE’.
At first glance this might seem perfectly OK – an improvement on the status quo, in fact. After all, isn’t it better that we are unselfish? That we extend the hand of comradeship to help others as much as we can? Well, yes and no. It really depends on what we are being asked to do. And we must also scrutinise the motives of those who are asking us – in some cases – to make sacrifices. In whose best interests are they acting?
These days in the men’s space we see a lot of so called trad-cons (traditional conservatives, often of a Christian bent) exhorting men to get married young, to ‘settle down’, to work hard to support their families, to be pillars of the community and so on. While this is diametrically opposed to the earlier ‘go out to clubs to meet girls’-type advice that proliferated in the 2000s, on first sight it doesn’t sound like particularly bad advice – especially when you place it in a societal context, as these voices invariably do. Thus, you get ‘classics’ such as ‘settle down and have a family and help stave off the decline of Western Civilisation™’
The thinking goes along these lines: if everyone was a reckless libertine playboy then the world would collapse, since the foundation of a stable society is family, law and order, and so on. And depending on your viewpoint they may be correct (all other things being equal). But a problem occurs when the individual is being required to do something that he or she doesn’t want to do, or that is not in his/her best interests, in the service of the ‘greater good’ of society.
An example of this is encouraging young people to put down their ‘degenerate’ ways (i.e. drinking, clubbing and the like) in favour of marriage and responsibility at a young age. Yes, it sounds good – until you remember that research shows that people who get married too young tend either end up getting divorced, or at least experience unhappiness as a result.
It stands to reason, after all, that anyone is going to be in a better position to choose the right person to get monogamous with after they’ve lived for a few years, made some mistakes, and learned about what they want, and how relationships work. And so pushing people into committed relationships in their early twenties or before, because of some misplaced idea of what is ‘right’, is ultimately counterproductive in many cases.
Another thing to bear in mind is that just because you act in a non self-interested manner, it doesn’t mean that those around you will follow suit. Hypothetically, then, you could end up being the dude who marries straight out of high school and regrets it, only to find that the course of society is has not changed one iota despite your ‘doing the right thing’.
To suggest that people act in selfishly because others might too may sound defensive, and even a little twisted, but let’s face it, that’s the way of the world. It’s precisely the reason why Machiavelli’s The Prince and Robert Greene’s 48 Laws of Power are so popular – because people recognise that life is not fair and that corrective action of some kind is required.
Sometimes you have to decide whether to be idealistic or pragmatical, and for me the latter has always been the natural choice.
We must also examine the motives of those who are asking us to ‘man up and do the right thing’. I don’t want to get into ad hominem here, and nor will I mention individuals by name. But just have a look at the backgrounds of many of the Twitter ‘gurus’ on the trad com / purple pill side of things. A great many of them have either got married young and lived very conventional, white-picket-fence lives; others are selling products – such as relationship counselling and dating advice – from which they benefit from having a large proportion of their audiences having gone down the trad route.
I am not suggesting that such people are necessarily being dishonest or manipulative in their prescriptions and marketing – although of course that is always a possibility. But you must keep in mind that even when a message ‘sounds’ good – e.g. ‘be a good boy and it’ll be great for society‘ – it may be benefitting the messenger more than it will benefit you if you take the advice.
There are two key issue with collectivism as a life plan as far as I can see. The first is that, as I’ve already suggested, you can’t know for certain that it’s going to have the desired effect. In other words, doing something because it might help a nebulous entity like ‘society’ somewhere down the line is a loser’s game, since it might not. And also, you make yourself vulnerable and open yourself up to all sorts of potential negative consequences along the way.
In addition, helping society is all very well, but what if I simply want to please myself? At this point, the trads will throw up their hands in horror and start reciting hail Marys. But the fact remains that unless you are doing anything to hurt other people, there’s nothing inherently wrong with individualism. In fact, it’s the natural instinct and inclination of all human beings. None of us asked to be here, and none of us are coming back, either. That being the case, we might as well do everything in our power to have the best lives that we possibly can. This, it seems to me, is at the root of the Ayn Rand-style objectivism that captured the men’s sphere a few years ago, before all this lily-livered ‘but what about the children’ stuff came into vogue.
Perhaps because I was brought up in the eighties, but for me Michael Douglas’s famous line from Wall Street still rings true: greed is good. Again, I should reiterate that I am not saying you should harm others, or deliberately do things to the detriment of society. But you are the captain of your own ship, and it is up to you to squeeze the orange of life as hard as you can to get all the juice out of it.
If you want to live a trad life, get married at seventeen and have twelve kids than that’s absolutely fine – as long as that’s really what you want, and not just something someone else has told you it would be a good idea if you did.
But if you don’t, then you would be wise to disregard all of the virtue-signalling collectivists out there, and point yourself firmly in the direction of your dreams instead
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