I have been spending some time lately reading in the androsphere,[1] and based on what I have learned from scratching the surface of that huge and passionate discourse, I feel rather hopeful about the prospects of the men who participate therein. Most of them, to be sure, seem stuck for the time being in a slough of despond. They are cynical, skeptical, nihilistic. I will not go so far as to say that they are nihilist, as most of them still affirm the existence and value of manly virtues – some go so far as to affirm the value of womanly virtues. Mostly, though, they are angry, or bitter. But that’s no way to live, over the long run. So they won’t, I figure.

My hope for them springs from two sources. The first is that, in their own jargon, they have “taken the red pill.” They have made a conscious decision, that is to say, that they shall no longer partake of Political Correctness, in any of its forms. Their first clue to the Emperor’s nakedness has been delivered to them by a rude awakening to what they take to be the reality of the relations between the sexes.[2] But once one has taken the blinders off in respect to one portion of the PC dogma, the rest of it quickly collapses.

It is not hard to see how this happens. The androsphere is alive to the differences between alpha, beta and gamma males. Androsphereans have dedicated themselves to the arts of manliness; which is to say, of cultivating alpha. It is a short step, a mere sidle, from a conviction that some men are simply better at manhood than others, to the realization that egalitarianism and the universal franchise are silly, if not lethal, and to an embrace of the notion of natural hierarchy and authority. The full panoply of Traditionalism follows logically, and ineluctably. So I view androsphereans as all incipient Traditionalists.

And this brings me to the second source of my hopes for them. That androsphereans are implicitly Traditionalist seems clear. But that is not quite enough, is it? For, there is the Traditionalism of despair, which is to say, the Traditionalism of the unbeliever; and there is the Traditionalism of the believer. The former – call it mundanity – is dead to the transcendental dimension of life, the latter – call it supramundanity – is not.

The supramundane man (called “the sage” in the traditional literature of all cultures) can understand his personal moral struggle as participant to the War in Heaven, and pledge glad fealty to his Lord and Captain in the battle, knowing certainly that he fights on the side of the Good, whose eventual and complete victory is metaphysically assured, so that no sacrifice he might be called upon to make can possibly be vain. He can be happy about the essence of things, no matter how poor, barren or dire his own accidents. He can be serene, and even wise.

The mundane man, by contrast, is pledged to a hopeless, bootless, endless struggle on a darkling plain, where ignorant armies clash by night; where, since the warriors all die without ultimate causal significance, in chaos and dissolution, the whole shooting match is essentially meaningless and stupid.

My basic argument is that life shorn of a transcendental dimension, such as that to which the merely mundane androspherean is doomed, is not worth living.[3] You work hard, and then you die. That’s it. In this context, the androspherean pursuit of the manly virtues amounts in the end only to, you work really hard, and then you die.

Big whup.

A conviction of the ultimate meaninglessness of life, and the ennui implicit therein, cannot form an emotional basis adequate to the pursuit of manly excellence. Should androsphereans conclude to any nihilist metaphysic, their devotion to the manly virtues would be completely sapped. Why take a risk, or invest time or labor, in respect to something that is totally stupid, and also doomed to eventual and total failure?[4]

Androsphereans are committed to an unflinching recognition of the truth of things. If they are honest and careful, then, their raw experience of what it is like to pursue, and to achieve, any manly excellence at all must vitiate the notion that life is ultimately without meaning, for the achievement of excellence is inherently valuable, and pleasant. One cannot be good at something without feeling truly, cleanly good about it. Thus the inarguable goodness of virtue as a brute fact of experience stands in stark contravention to the notion that there is no such thing, really, as goodness.

Mundane Traditionalism, then, must eventually lead either to madness or dissolution on the one hand, or to religious conversion on the other – to supramundanity, and thus to a noble magnanimity. There is no other way out.

Thus I feel confident that, in the long run, most androsphereans will end up supramundane Trads, and as Trads, traditionally supramundane – i.e., orthodox. The alternative, after all, is an absurd death of some sort. And to die meaninglessly is to be pwned, totally.

Update: Here is a moving essay by an orthospherean who made the journey from liberalism to game to Tradition and orthodoxy. His conversion story exemplifies the sort of metanoia to which I suggest the androsphereans may be particularly susceptible. He writes, “Learning about “game” was the first deep and sustained puncturing of my bubble of liberal non-reality, and from there I began to question everything I had believed.”

[1] I refuse to call it the “manosphere,” on account of the dysphony, as for different reasons I refuse to call the Leviathan of Moloch the “Cathedral.” [2] I find their models inadequate to the reality; but then, this shortcoming is endemic to modeling per se. That a model is inadequate does not mean that it is devoid of all intelligence, or that it fails utterly to deliver any knowledge. [3] I was not surprised, then, to find that suicide is frankly discussed in the androsphere as a respectable, even honorable option. Ditto for vasectomy, or a rejection of marriage and family, which amount to almost the same thing, from a supramundane perspective. [4] Is this despair the beginning of the young man’s Fall into addiction to gaming or porn – into, that is to say, a retreat from real, and really consequential, combat and love?