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[From "What Makes a Man?"]

Slaves and Citizens
Wow, look at you. Mommy’s big boy, all grown up. You can do anything, now that you’re an adult. You can eat all the cake, drink all the craft beer, and watch all the porn into the wee hours of the morning because nobody can limit your consumption now that you’ve shed the trappings of childhood and become a man. Or, have you?

Take a step back and look at who you have become. Today, the average American male is a pale specter of manliness that was present just a few generations prior. Grip strength tested today is down 20% over a span of 30 years. We spend more time indoors and are sedentary, our short-term memory is basically non-existent and we’re sicker than ever. Compare yourself to men of the past and ask if you really deserve the same title as them.

Comparing the Greek words Aner vs Anthropos reveals us how a distinction that once existed between men and the rest. Real men have been, and will always be, rare – while all others will just be shadow figures. While both terms described human males, aner went farther, to distinguish said men as those who were more than just the base. Consumers, and modern NPCs, all fit the definition of anthropos. They do not rise in any discernible way past the flesh heap of common man. Therefore, they do not deserve any higher title than that. Why then would there be no further distinctions between the two?

Slave Societies and the Military State
The great slave societies of the past included, but were not limited to, the Greek city states, the Roman Empire, and the antebellum South. Each of these civilizations maintained large slave populations that constituted significant portions of their labor force. Sparta stands out as one of the most stark examples of a slave society in that slaves, or helots, constituted around 80% of Sparta’s population. The slave population, at its peak, in Dixie constituted around 33%, despite being a mere 13% of the total U.S. population. Being that Sparta, and to a lesser extent other slave societies, contained so many slaves, there were constant and realistic fears of slave uprisings that could threaten the lives and business interests of the rest of the population. It is no coincidence that each of the great slave societies maintained strong military traditions and standing forces at the ready to check against uprisings.

[...]

The South, like other great slave societies, was not just a militaristic one, but the sort of society that simultaneously fosters a culture in which social refinement blooms. Southern poets, authors, artists and statesmen were, more often than not, the leading talents in their fields, even after the end of the War. Southern military schools did, and have continued, to produce leaders in many fields disproportionate to their competitor schools. The Southern military tradition even continues today with over 50% of the combat forces of the United States being produced by the Southern states, wholly disproportionate with the country’s population.

[...]

As in the novel Starship Troopers, you could not vote or become a citizen if you did not complete your military service requirements. The end product of this agoge and military service allowed the numerically disadvantaged Spartans to reign over their more numerous helots with an iron fist, while simultaneously warding off enemy nations. Compared to the heroic Greek soldiers of other city states, the Spartans were, for the most part, the professional elites. Not only this, Sparta was also home to some of the most iconic artists and architects of the time, something that similarly occurs in other great slave societies. The agoge was such a revered system that nobles, from all around the Greek world, would fight for a chance to send their child through the same system.

All this and more was required just for Spartans to attain the rights and privileges that you, as that special grown-up boy that you are, think you are entitled to. What though have you done to earn said rights? While you may believe that the rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are inalienable, and God given, can you really believe that all men are equal? Can two individuals of different size, or even importance, be entitled to the same share of finite resources within their country? Why should a self-diagnosed depressive, bipolar lgbtqaipsuv demikin have the same rights and privileges as someone who contributes to society? Why should the average person even have the right to vote?

I’ve written before about chattel slavery and how the absence of self-mastery would result in your enslavement. How then, can people who fail to master themselves, have responsibility to weild a tool to oppress others?

The byproduct of the great slave societies’ need for military tradition bore out the pleasant side effect that those who bore through the rigors of said systems were rarely below average and often outpaced their contemporaries.

A Little More on Bullying

I mentioned in a recent post that, like Bonald at Throne and Altar, I actually support bullying under certain circumstances. Let me flesh that out a little more.

Actually, let me just state my rule for bullying: if it's used as a means of enforcing normative behaviors, I'm all for it. And yeah, that means giving shit to fairies and tomboys and so on.

Normative behaviors exist for a reason. Like tradition, social norms tell us provide us a measure of what is good and just, especially for those who are too stupid to figure it out on their own. Social disapproval of immoral behaviors (like homosexuality, adultery, etc.) is often a more powerful disincentive to commit them than legal consequences; there are limits to others' ability to probe into your legal indiscretions, but the stench of a social brand in some degenerate's ass can linger in a community's collective hindbrain for generations. And so it was that, for a long time, it was wholly unnecessary for governments to police morality: communities did it their own damn selves.

Of course, one can say, "Well, who are you to force the norm of traditional family on, say, some good-hearted, hard-working single mother?" But one would be an idiot for saying that, given the abundance of studies (at least one by no less-respected a medical journal than The Lancet, a casual Googling revealed) demonstrating that childen raised in single-family are worse off in pretty much every way: they exhibit higher rates of mental illness, suicide attempts, injury, alcoholism, drug addiction, and all-cause mortality, even after adjusting for socioeconomic status and parents' health. Traditional societies knew and understood that children did best who were raised in a norm-conforming household; it is only in our (supposedly) enlightened modern society that we make virtuous angels out of the sluts and cads who ruin their kids' lives so that they can find themselves (or whatever). That's why traditional societies ostracized such people while modern societies make movies about them while ignoring all the evil they bring into the world. Likewise with the destruction of traditional gender roles (in the form of flamboyant homosexuals, cross-dressers, and transgender freakazoids).

So to the extent that people bullied today are serial violators of perfectly rational social norms, they ought to be subject to social disapproval -- even quite severely so. Those who imagine there is a "right" to attend a school without being bullied are deluded: one never has a right to behave however one wishes without consequences. Accepting this fact is a key step toward maturity. I'm torn on the extent to which this ought to entail physical bullying (certainly, I think it's justified when one is being an asshole about defying social norms, as in the case of the transgender abomination that got his/her ass unceremoniously pummeled into a seizure at a Baltimore-area McDonald's recently for belligerently insisting on using an occupied women's restroom), but I see nothing wrong with quite persistent verbal ribbing.

But to the extent bullying represents mindless, irrational cruelty (for instance, assaulting those whose only crime is being skinny, awkward, smart, or whatever), it ought to be brought under control. Unlike defiance of social norms, being skinny or fat or awkward or smart really doesn't hurt anyone -- and there's no sense in punishing them for it. It's intrinsic to the nature of demographics, after all, that not everyone can be ripped, engaging, and of modest intellect). Of course, that's no reason to have to associate with them (and awkward people really shouldn't have any friends until they learn to go out and make some on their own), but again, it's no reason to subject them to punishment, either. An Unmarried Man has a good post on the topic related to fat (and pregnant) women; it's worth a read.

One may object to my characterization of bullying in defense of social norms as not only valid and reasonable but right and good as fighting fire with fire. It is, of course -- but sometimes that's perfectly advisable, as when one stops the spread of a firestorm by burning away the flammable brush in a certain circumfrence around it. It's worth bearing in mind that the same liberals who decry bullying are perfectly content to bully in defense of their own social norms, at the expense of Christians and non-sexual deviants and so on; FIRE is dedicated to fighting these types of bullying in universities, where it has the potential to devastate a person's future to an extent routine beating-up-fags stuff doesn't . If there is, in fact, something like a war going on to determine whose social values ought to be ascendant, I see no reason why one side should be expected to unilaterally disarm.

Even for the sake of the children.