The issue of masculine development is largely a financial one, at least in societies wherein value is determined by monetary or social currency—so all of them. For one thing, it enables the boy to have adequate nutrition and education so that he may grow to his full genetic potential. Conversely, penury hinders the boy's development and then strips the man of dignity while limiting his social options.
A typological clarification is needed because recent trends have muddied the definition of masculinity. It is laughably confused as "doing more chores" or "supporting a family," wherein the line between support and servitude becomes blurred. No, masculinity—in the anthropological and very real sense of the word—means to conquer or maintain the social/status zenith by employing strategic compassion and aggression. To remain at a low level means reduced resources and sexual options, and so the only viable strategy for a man then is to adapt and dominate any and all social spheres so as to garner the best chance for personal and sexual survival. Sometimes, aggression is the dominant strategy, whereas in more modern, softer climates, compassion is seen as more virtuous and desirable. Usually, a combination of the two is required for optimality.
All of this becomes evident when we apply this theory to practical scenarios. For one thing, a man is only as free as wealth permits. If he falls under the employment of another man—or worse, a system—then those forces will dictate his waking and sleeping hours, his labor, and his pay. He has, for all intents and purposes, limited himself to within that hierarchical sphere. His employer and other supervisors all claim "limited" ownership of the man, for he must submit to them.
The unfree man's ready submission to these employers and systems has psychosexual ramifications, for it isn't only another man he submits to. Women have become the supervisors and the order-givers, and so the unfree man develops the sexually degrading act of accepting a low position on the status hierarchy, far below women. Let's add more practical dimensions to this theorizing. If his wife were to see her husband berated and talked down to by another man or woman, that would signal to her primal instinct that her husband inhabits a low status position. This is important to the woman, whose survival depends upon status and resource gathering.
There is certainly then a paywall to masculinity, that being the mobility between the low and high social stratospheres. For the ultimate man, the one at the highest of any social pyramid—all throughout ages—has always been the strongest and most wealthy, from kings, to emperors, to warlords and merchants. Drawn to these resources and the security afforded by their political power, women as both concubine and wives proposition themselves. The poor and the unworthy, on the other hand, are shunned by the same female who dotes upon her king.
Contentment is not the man's goal—he may aspire to be the king, but he mistakenly believes that once he inhabits that position, then he may relax. That couldn't be further from the truth, because the king has many enemies and there are always men vying to oust him. Masculinity is something that must be defended and maintained through ritualistic displays of power, through flaunting of wealth and status, through those strategic acts of aggression and compassion, whatever will secure his position. Once he has established himself, he then possesses the ability to sway politics, culture, and his own inner life and circles.
While the economic net continues to tighten around the average man, he finds such lofty goals further from reality. They have drifted to that realm of fantasy that men wish upon but never achieve, and deteriorating financial straits threaten to push these fantasies into myth and legend. As it is, wealth is pooling into a shrinking pyramidion—the top of a pyramid. Below, men continue to fight for the scraps, while the women claw and scratch each other to climb to the highest position of man they can attain.
All this to say: the dominant man has become so effective that he has now largely eliminated further competition. No one can challenge his pyramidion because it is lost in the clouds, too high for the bottom half to conceivably achieve. Meanwhile, women continue to flock to the highest status male—a natural biological process disrupted by the advent of cellular and internet devices.
No longer are social hierarchies determined by locales or small communities. Instead, sexual appeal corresponds to an international hierarchy of sexual desire. Dating applications, television, and movies have artificially lofted women's natural conception of dominant hierarchies. Men are now competing against phantom "alpha males" who don't generally exist within their local communities. Even the men who find themselves in relationships are still competing against such illustrious men who make the rounds on the woman's various devices—television, phone, computer.
Man, the competitive animal, cannot survive in an environment that is so one-sided he has no hope of winning. Hollywood has duped the average person into expecting a feel-good ending, a message of hope amid the despair. There is none I can offer. With increasing taxation, inflation, and worsening employment prospects—which in themselves constrict the man's freedom and power—there is no practical, immediate solution that a man can implement in his life today to make any change, or purchase any hope of rising in this invisible, yet very real environment, where a man's worth is determined by his wealth and social status. An answer, however, may lie in a brief survey of the modern man's behavior.
The men, from both a qualitative and quantitative view, have become increasingly passive. To discuss the testosterone drop and the decreasing incidence of organized and successful revolts within the American populace would be beyond the scope of this paper. But it doesn't require an investigative report to know that the common man has become weak and passive. He doesn't strategically employ aggression or compassion. Rather, he has been beaten into submission, into a weak affectation. Compassion has not served him well—it has ruined his life, his economy, and his country. Yet still, he supported feminism despite the illogic of it. He supported immigration and the welfare state. A more aggressive approach may be necessary—but it must be intelligent, and it must be effective. Man must develop a more tactical intelligence when it comes to the survival of himself and his race. He must be unapologetically aggressive in his beliefs and his objectives. As of right now, he fails the test, he fails the game, and he fails himself. Redemption lies in the forceful taking of power. Otherwise, he continues to fall. The bottom of a pyramid gorges, the pyramidion grows higher and the unfree man is somewhere at the bottom, killing himself for scraps.
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