How to be a member of the counter-culture in one tweet: Be a real man. Concern yourself with self improvement, world travel, useful skills, and ditching the 9-5 consumer lifestyle. Command respect from everyone, especially women. Educate other men when applicable. That’s it. — Western Mastery (@WesternMastery) December 18, 2017

I have never been someone who wanted to mindlessly fit into the in-crowd or any mainstream group. This fact about me goes back as far as I can remember.

It’s not so much that I was a total rebel when growing up, but rather I was someone who distrusted a lot of mainstream thought, group-think, and other things that were popular. Even when I was a kid, I saw what was wrong with a lot of popular thinking.

I didn’t totally shun out everything popular, and I still don’t today. But overall, I definitely didn’t entirely fit in with what everyone else was doing.

Even then, however, I was way too young to truly understand the foundation of lies that our society has been built on. I had no idea that those in power had vested interests in maintaining those lies. Frankly, I don’t think any of us did.

My mindset was a big reason why I had very little difficulty swallowing the Red Pill when I discovered it in college. The Red Pill put into words many of the things I saw wrong with the world, and then a lot more. I was young, impressionable, and generally distrustful of the world, even if I hadn’t fully realized or expressed it yet.

This is certainly not true of all men exposed to the Red Pill. Many find the information very difficult to swallow and accept, and have gone many phases in order to truly understand it and incorporate it into their worldview.

Once I swallowed the Red Pill, my view of society and women changed forever. I wasn’t quite obsessed with it, but it ended up taking over my worldview. Still, it took me years to truly incorporate all of its lessons into my worldview to truly take myself to the next level.

And although I grew up a liberal, it was not long after graduating college and having the time to learn economics on my own that my political beliefs switched from control and wealth-redistribution to freedom. Understanding the leftist agenda with more clarity, largely due to my Red Pill awakening, was also a significant part of this.

The Red Pill is nothing short of a massive wake-up-call for men. It’s intended to unplug men from the lies that they are told, and it greatly assists them with everything else that stems from this process.

So whether you want to call it the Red Pill, conservatism, traditional masculinity, or something similar: as Red Pill aware men who are focused on self-improvement, cultivating our masculinity, and fighting the degenerate culture of our time, we are the counterculture of our era.

The Novelty and Rebelliousness of Countercultures are Advantageous

Counter-cultures tend to have a perceptual advantage straight out of the gate. The novelty and contrast they provide to the dominant culture are typically considered cool, unique, and just about any other synonym you can think of. And just as importantly, unless they’re based on traditional ideas, most of them haven’t existed long enough for the effects of their ideas to be under full scrutiny.

Countercultures feed off of people’s dissatisfaction with the dominant culture at the time. The more dissatisfied people are with the dominant culture for various situations, the more appealing the counter-culture appeals to them.

Various countercultures (and countermovements) are more legitimate than others, of course.

Second-wave feminism was a significant aspect of the counterculture movement of the 1960s. To the general public, it seemed like a good idea at the time to let feminist thought become prominent — few had the foresight to see what was wrong with it. But after many decades we have seen the problem with feminism: unhappy women, sky-high divorce rates, men dropping out of marriage and traditional society, and a lot more.

A lot of countercultures and counterculture figures seem to rise just because they’re different. Look at Eminem back in the late 90s and early 2000s. Many people thought he was cool. He was different. He insulted almost every mainstream artist and sung about controversial topics such as beating women. He was a white rapper in an industry dominated by blacks.

I don’t think he necessarily fed off of people’s dissatisfaction; perhaps somewhat. But he had a lot of talent and stood out for being different. To say he’s fallen off significantly since then is a major understatement.

Anyway, as cool as it might be to be in the counterculture, there are downsides to being a part of it as well. Because of the potential for ostracization, many would-be members don’t go all-in, especially in public. Countercultures, like any movement, have their share of die-hard supporters, fairweather fans, and people who privately support their ideas but publicly show little support for various reasons.

The Changing Tides of the Counterculture

Read a book, go to the gym, embrace your gender, skip college, buy bitcoin. This is how the youth rebel against a degenerate culture. — Mike Cernovich 🇺🇸 (@Cernovich) December 26, 2017

The tides of the counter-culture change as the dominant culture changes.

Let’s look at the most famous example: the counterculture movement of the 1960s and 70s.

People were against authority and the government. They were against the Vietnam War. They wanted to rebel, and they wanted to openly express their rebelliousness.

People openly protested the government. Traditional views on society were challenged. Sexual activity shot up significantly. Drug use was becoming widescale and provided people an escape from society. Hippies came about.

Many elements of the counterculture movement of the 1960s became embedded into culture today. Feminism, sexual promiscuity, and civil rights, for instance, are all now ingrained in today’s culture. What was rebellious then is accepted as the norm now.

As a second example, think back to Germany in the 1930s. The German populace was poor because of the post-war economic conditions, plus the weight of the reparations paid in the Treaty of Versailles. They needed someone to blame for their hardship.

This rough situation made them much more susceptible to Adolf Hitler telling them everything they wanted to hear: they were victims, they deserved more, and they had a group to blame: the Jews. As immoral as he was, Hitler was an incredibly powerful and persuasive speaker.

The tides of the post WWI era strongly affected the culture and left an opening for a powerful figure such as Hitler to step in. The opportunity allowed him to take power and establish the dominant ideology of the era.

Of course, his ideas were made much more powerful because he was a political figure who gained control of the military. His ideas became widespread throughout Germany, and concepts such as anti-semitism and racial biology were taught in primary and secondary schools.

Now, perhaps as a side note to show you how things can change in your lifetime, just listen to popular music in the 2000s. Sure, everything was computerized, but not as flagrantly as today. More importantly, the themes then were not as blatantly degenerate as today.

Multiculturalism was considered “in,” but race relations were relatively good. While feminism and you-go-girlism were a strong element of many popular 2000s songs, the songs were still put out without too much blatant Marxism. Compare that to the garbage you see today, and you’ll see that some of it was headed in this direction, but it wasn’t nearly as extreme. If you look back at 1990’s music, you’ll see an even bigger contrast to today.

So what’s the overall point here? Thoughts and beliefs that dominate a culture can change quickly, and when they do, the counterbalance to that changes as well. What’s considered counterculture in one decade often becomes the dominant culture the next decade.

When that happens, especially as people become unhappy with the status quo, opportunity strikes and the next counterculture can be formed. Depending on circumstance and the spread of its values, the counterculture can fade out and die, or it can become more powerful and often a significant part of the dominant culture.

Today’s Counter-Culture is Being Traditionally Masculine

I’ve thought of all the different ways I’ve been against what was mainstream, and I’ve decided that being Red Pill and spreading its message has been the most meaningful way I’ve personally challenged society.

When mainstream culture condemns almost all of your values, and when it has caused clear damage to society as a whole, it’s incredibly easy to justify going against it.

Frankly, it’s only what should be common sense that forces us into the “counterculture” that we’re a part of. I didn’t wake up one day and say “fuck it, I’m fighting the world!” I just swallowed the Red Pill about nine years ago, and over time I realized and incorporated the majority of what I had learned.

As we know, modern Western Culture, in its most mainstream forms, is primarily a byproduct of Cultural Marxism and any movements and attitudes that stemmed from Marxism.

Every day in the West, you see people who have fallen into the trap of Marxism and consumerism. They work jobs they hate to pay their bills and to fuel the mindless consumerism their remaining salaries afford them. They have stunted views on subjects such as their personal health and male-female relationships because it’s all they’ve ever known or seen.

Even if they see what’s wrong with some of the culture, they still adopt many of the values of degeneracy that our culture promotes. People accept these values “as-is” because they grew up believing in it, and they have never taken the time to examine their belief systems and change their actions.

But as Red Pill men, we aim not to fall for any of this.

Our counterculture is to be cultured. To give a damn about ourselves as men and to care about traditional Western values and history.

We value freedom, masculinity, hard work, and realizing our true selves instead of living the harmful cookie cutter lifestyle that is laid out for us. We value being in charge of our relationships with women because we know it gives us more freedom and because it’s exactly what women want.

Aside from merely looking at the obvious results our values give us, one easy way to confirm our legitimacy is to observe the actions of leftists and any other groups that oppose our message. They attempt to shut down free speech, and when pressed, they reveal that their beliefs are self-justified with emotion, not logic.

Logical debate is simply not encouraged by the left because they know they cannot win. Read the book Rules for Radicals (a very important book for men to understand) and you’ll see that it’s an intentional part of their playbook.

This doesn’t mean that we don’t suffer from flaws in logic, plus emotions such as bitterness and disgust with some of our members. There’s no such thing as a movement that doesn’t have some of these elements from at least some of its members. You must look at the overall picture, and the overall picture of our movement is powerful.

Conclusion

As a final point, let’s say this: you can wave this counter-culture flag as much as you desire.

Some have argued that we’re not a counterculture, we’re just cultured. That’s a good point, but it doesn’t fit into the overall picture of our society. Any culture strongly against mainstream culture is the counterculture by definition, whether its members bill themselves that way or not.

We don’t have to go out of our way to grab attention in degenerate ways (see: feminism, trans rights, and liberalism in general) because we simply don’t have to.

We’re men. We know what the hell is up.

We’ve been given the information we need, and we know that we must act. We’re strong, we seek self-improvement and enlightenment, and we know that when we do this, everything else falls into our favor naturally. That’s why our values have been repressed by the dominant culture.

Let me finish this post with some additional resources and a belated Merry Christmas to everyone. As always, follow me on Twitter if you haven’t already, and subscribe to the email list below to get all new posts sent directly to your email with no spam.

Further Resources:

Again, the book Rules for Radicals is an extremely important book to understand. It describes the left-wing playbook to a tee. If you understand what tactics are being used against you, you know how to counter them much more effectively.

And lastly, here is a video discussing conservatism in general as today’s counterculture: