9 Comments
May 12, 2023Liked by Brett Andersen

Impressive essay.

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May 12, 2023Liked by Brett Andersen

Absolutely brilliant and necessary. Thank you.

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For those who have not read it, Benenson's book (which I too found through Arnold Kling) is an amazing, slept-on eye-opener, however poorly titled ("Warriors and Worriers: The Survival of the Sexes"). Great required reading for anyone who is either a man or a woman. It has revolutionized my perspective on daily life.

I have to think there are enough lovers of truth out there to spurn the current garbage culture that seeks untruth in so many ways. Improving reality requires starting with reality in the first place.

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May 12, 2023Liked by Brett Andersen

And it’s not just the “university”---It’s the “narrowversity” too, like West Point and Annapolis.

GOOD LUCK fighting our wars with the “worrier mentality” and The Feminine Mystique

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I think there's a critical element missing in your theory - namely, absent anything traditionally considered religious or spiritual, your project is by its own terms doomed to failure. Nietzsche, however great a thinker he might have been, spent his last years as an insane invalid and left behind no children. Absent the felt belief in some form of personal immortality, there really isn't a terribly convincing reason to feel like being of any use to humanity at all beyond what is immediately useful to you in your own lifetime.

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In a way, masculine aggression *is* being channeled into different avenues, it's just being done in an astonishingly foolish, naive way. Look at the West Coast cities. In San Francisco, the police were effectively canceled because they were representatives of traditional oppressive masculinity. This was expected to usher in a peaceful, just, egalitarian utopia. Instead, this just opened the city up to be dominated by different groups of men: smash-and-grab gangs and increasingly aggressive homeless camps.

So, all the more reason to thoughtfully design new ways for men to thrive. Masculine aggression can't be wished away, it has to be dealt with directly.

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Our current social model is the end point of Western civilisation. The security provided by global hegemony has resulted in communitarianism - it is not just women, it is the inevitable result of democracy in an age of plenty.

Western hegemony is coming to an end. There should probably be war and disaster. If this does not happen we will have a brief period of 50 to 100 years before the oligarchy who control the machines, or perhaps the machines themselves, realise that most of us are unnecessary.

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I have never seen Nietzsche go back on his ideas about aristocratic radicalism so without a specific passage from BGE I couldn't really comment on that. Also, Nietzsche wasn't against asceticism as such, he was just against the "ascetic ideal". For some people, an ascetic lifestyle is necessary to bring out their creative potential. Nietzsche was one of those people. But for these type of people asceticism is instinctually acted out, rather than being a kind of war against the instincts (as it is with the ascetic ideal). Maybe I should read Weltgeist at some point.

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Nietzsche was a foundation for many political movements in the early 20thC. The most important of these was Coudenhove-Kalergi's Practical Idealism - https://pol-check.blogspot.com/2015/06/practical-idealism-by-richard-nicolaus.html . It was not only, indirectly, part of the reason for the holocaust but was the foundation of the EU.

The EU is busy suppressing all easily accessible sources for the work of Coudenhove-Kalergi because it is now seen as overtly racist.

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