“All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.”
– Arthur Schopenhauer
Why you really don’t need the manosphere
I got really tired of writing this blog. I’d even made some basic plans to sell it. Some guy was going to pay handsomely so that he could have the domain. It was perfect for a new product called “30 Days To Detox” he said. It would have saved lives. Even better, he said, was the fact that it would make him rich. More importantly I would have been free. No more daily posts. No more whiny emails. Just pure bliss.
There’s a reason that most blogs close up after a year or two. You eventually run out of things to say. A man can only tell others that they need to hit the gym, start a business, and read good books so many times before it gets redundant. After a while the winners will migrate to new territories ripe with conquest while all the deadbeats coagulate around your site and continually spam you with their stupid questions and annoying requests.
I’ve been around the manosphere, mainly as a reader, since 2011. During that time I’ve watched as losers and the dregs of society slowly began to infiltrate the movement. Once upon a time the most popular blogs were about lifting weights, traveling the world, and growing as a man. Now the movement’s magnum opus is little more than Cosmo for men. To call it disheartening would be an understatement.
If you’ve ever read this site before you’ll know that I like to listen to philosophy books on tape. It’s easier for me to understand what the central idea is when I hear someone narrating it. Afterwards I go back and read over the actual work to pick up on the finer details.
Early this week I decided to check out Arthur Schopenhauer and listen to Studies in Pessimism. the whole recording is free to listen to on YouTube and only lasts for three and a half hours. It’s shorter than a lot of movies and you can knock the whole thing out in an afternoon.
What blew me away about the work was how relevant it still is. While good philosophy never dies, there are a lot of works that most people can’t really relate to anymore. Thomism might be interesting but the majority of it is beyond my grasp and isn’t something that I can connect with. Schopenhauer, on the other hand, addressed many of the same complaints that modern man has.
Schools are corrupt institutes, marriage is a shame that makes men unfathomably miserable, society is built upon a precarious pile of lies, and people would rather live in a fantasy than face the truth about their own existence. “Your University professors are bound to preach optimism; and it is an easy and agreeable task to upset their theories” sounded like a modern complaint. Yet men who lived over 100 years ago, back when everyone was a gullible chump who had never seen a free WordPress blog, were making the same insights that today’s modern and edgy bloggers are just unearthing. Modern men sit around and circle jerk about how feminism has ruined women, blissfully unaware that the words “to marry means to halve one’s rights and double one’s duties” were written long before their grandparents were born.
On women, which can be read for free at Danger & Play, has more to say about sexual dynamics than all the game gurus combined. Any comedian who “pushes the envelope” by making jokes about women being unable to sit through an entire movie or conversation without checking their phone is just rehashing one of Schopenhauer’s many brilliant observations.
“You need only observe the kind of attention women bestow upon a concert, an opera, or a play–the childish simplicity, for example, with which they keep on chattering during the finest passages in the greatest masterpieces. If it is true that the Greeks excluded women from their theatres they were quite right in what they did; at any rate you would have been able to hear what was said upon the stage.”
As much as guys like to talk about how edgy and groundbreaking their various blogs are, great thinkers have already mapped the entire territory centuries ago. Men might enjoy talking about how the manosphere has allowed others to “see the light,” but they fail to realize that a lot of the same conclusions were reached long before the Internet was ever created. If you want to stay up-to-date with what the latest bloggers are uncovering simply read great works from past centuries.