Sheridan’s book about amateur and professional fighting.

This indomitable spirit is a

major theme in every heroic journey. In sports, it’s part of the comeback tale. A guy faces
his toughest challenge and then, when all but a few have counted him out, he comes back
—running on pure “heart”—and triumphs over his opponent. It’s the climax of every
Rocky story and it was a gimmick in most of Hulk Hogan’s professional wrestling
matches. In every Die Hard movie, John McClane manages to save the day only after he’s
been beaten and bruised and comes back from the brink of defeat. These heroes have a
push inside that keeps them coming back again and again after others would have given
up.
A man who is obviously game can step ahead of a man who is not, simply because
he can expect the man who is less game to yield to him. Some people talk about
masculinity by attempting to determine who is “alpha” and who is “beta” in a given
situation.[22] A good friend put it to me this way: “If you can treat another man like he is
your kid brother, you are the alpha.”[23] The alpha will be the man with more push, and
he will push ahead of the beta.
Feigning gameness can be an effective strategy, so long as no one calls your bluff.
Gameness can be feigned through body language, through vocal inflection and through
word choice. Creating a sense that you are ready to push as hard as necessary to get what
you want is a way to establish authority, whether you are a prisoner, a businessman, a law
enforcement professional, a parent or someone trying to discipline a dog. Most people
will not test someone who is feigning gameness if the actor is convincing enough.
Feigning gameness is a means of asserting one’s will, and people do it all the time even in
primitive societies. Failed attempts to feign gameness—trying to look tougher than you
are, and not pulling it off—are what feminists point to when they talk about “performing
masculinity” or putting on a “tough guise.” What they are recognizing is the fact that
men today still go through the ritual of establishing hierarchies and sizing each other up,
even though most are untested and few will ever fight. It can seem silly to watch
precisely because it is divorced from the deadly serious tactical reality of a survival
scenario.
Feigning gameness can also unfortunately lead to delusional behavior. Many people
affect the attitudes and postures of violence even though they have no experience with or
expectation of physical violence. There is a fearlessness that comes with knowing you can
say whatever you want because there is a large, heavily armed man standing behind you.
People can talk tough without having to do the primitive math of violence, because they
believe that law enforcement will either intervene and stop or punish an attacker.
Delusional gameness relies on the deterrent of men and women who are prepared to use
violence to enforce the law. Delusional gameness is only possible when there is almost no
danger of violent escalation. In less secure, less luxurious times and places, assertiveness
must be accompanied by physical courage and daring. When there is no expectation that
you will be “saved” or that most people fear the violent retribution of the state, it is
foolish to provoke a dangerous looking man unless you are prepared to fight him.
 The raw courage of gameness may correlate with the surety of greater size and
strength to some degree, but many smaller men are as game as or more game than their
larger counterparts. Flyweight fighters are a good example of men who are extremely
game, though they are far less strong than many larger men who are less game. Weight-
classed combat sports show that men of all sizes can demonstrate terrific gameness.

Both men and women can be game, but status for human females has rarely
depended on a woman’s willingness to fight. Demure, polite, passive women are
attractive to men and are generally well-liked by other women. Even today, many men
will jump at the opportunity to harm a man who harms a female stranger. Because of
this, many women can be assertive or make displays of gameness with relative impunity,
and some become delusional about their ability to make good on their threats or defend
themselves if their taunts result in violence.

Gravitas is another old word that we still use to talk about manliness, especially in
actors and politicians. We say a man possesses gravitas when he makes us believe we
should take him seriously. We get our word “gravity” from the Latin gravitas; it means
“heavy.” The Romans used gravitas the same way we do—to say that a man or a thing is
to be taken seriously. Contrasted with the frenzied imagery of a game pit bull, it balances
out our sense of what manly courage is. Courage is not only the desire to leap into battle
or move up in a hierarchy, it is also about defending position. Masculine men make it
clear that they are to be taken seriously, that they have weight, that they won’t be pushed
around. Men want other men to know that they will be “heavy” to move, and must be
taken seriously.
Courage is the animating spirit of masculinity, and it is crucial to any meaningful
definition of masculinity. Courage and strength are synergetic virtues. An overabundance
of one is worth less without an adequate amount of the other. In any gang of men
fighting for survival, courage will be esteemed and respected in the living and it will be
revered in the dead. Courage is a crucial tactical value. One can choose to be courageous,
and even in its basest form, courage is a triumph over fear. It’s associated with heart and
spirit and passion, but it is also a drive to fight and win.
Courage is abstract, and it has many aspects, so I have summarized its definition as
it relates to our attempt to understand The Way of Men and the gang ethos.
Courage is the will to risk harm in order to benefit oneself or others. In its most
basic amoral form, courage is a willingness or passionate desire to fight or hold ground
at any cost (gameness, heart, spirit, thumos). In its most developed, civilized and moral
form courage is the considered and decisive willingness to risk harm to ensure the
success or survival of a group or another person (courage, virtus, andreia).
Comparing his own experiences as a fighter to watching dogs fight, Sam Sheridan
wrote:
 “They writhe furiously like snakes, twisting and spitting and slavering, growling like
bears. Fury epitomized. Their tails are wagging, this is what they are meant to do,
and they’re fulfilling their purpose, they’re becoming. There is blood, but the dogs
don’t care, turning and pinning, fighting off their backs and then clawing their way
to standing [..] any pain they feel is overwhelmed by the desire to get the other dog. I
know that feeling.”

Plato (or Socrates) also compared men to dogs. One of the great tragedies of
modernity is the lack of opportunity for men to become what they are, to do what they
were bred to do, what their bodies want to do. They could be Plato’s noble puppies, but
they are chained to a stake in the ground—left to the madness of barking at shadows in
the night, taunted by passing challenges left unresolved and whose outcomes will forever
be unknown.
Mastery

Men have always recognized themselves in animals. They have worshipped animals
and claimed totemic lineage from animals. Men have traced their origins to gods who
were like animals, part animal, or who could change into animals. Heracles was depicted
wearing the skin of a powerful lion he killed. Norse berserkers wore the skins of wolves
and bears to intimidate their enemies and inspire ferocious courage in battle. In the
Aztec military, it was the elite Jaguar Warriors who went to the front. Military units and
sports teams around the word adopt the names of formidable animals to represent their
own gameness and strength.

Throughout this book, I have compared men to dogs and to chimpanzees. However,
in sport and in war and in life, there is another manly virtue that is universally and
specifically human because for the most part it requires human intellect.
Animals succeed or fail largely due to a combination of their circumstances and
their inborn genetic fitness for a given situation. An animal who is stronger, nimbler or
more game will triumph over an inferior animal. We have to project our own humanity
onto animals to make them masters of strategy. In all but the most intelligent animals
like higher primates and orca or dolphins, what we read as skill is most often instinct—
not the product of thinking or tinkering or trial and error. The desire and ability to use
reason and to develop skills and technologies that allow one to gain mastery over one’s
circumstances—over oneself, over nature, over other men, over women— is a human
virtue, although it is also man’s Achilles heel.

If you ask men what it means to be good at being a man, you’ll often get answers
that start to sound like a set of minimum skill proficiencies in a job description.
While the job description for men undeniably changes according to time, place and
culture, the primal gang virtue that unifies them all is “being able to carry your own
weight.”
Women are more comfortable with accepting the benevolent aid of the group
because they have always required it. A healthy adult woman must accept aid from the
group if she is to carry a child, give birth and care for an infant. And, especially when
men have achieved a level of security and prosperity beyond mere survival, women have
been evaluated by men based less on their utility than on more nebulous qualities like
attractiveness and social charm. When they have the means, most men will happily
support a woman who seems to be carefree, pretty and charming.
This has not been the case with men. It is far rarer for women or men to volunteer
to support a grown, able-bodied man. It is rarer still for them to support him without
resentment. There is no point in an adult male’s life when he can be excused from
carrying his own weight, except when he is sick, injured, handicapped or old. Human
societies accommodate all of these exceptions, but competency has always been crucial to
a man’s mental health and sense of his own worth. Men want to carry their own weight,
and they should be expected to. As Don Corleone might put it, women and children
could afford to be careless for most of human history, but not men. Men have always had
to demonstrate to the group that they could carry their own weight.
Until you can function as a competent member of the group and carry your own
weight, you are a supplicant and a drag on the collective. A child is a child, but an
incompetent adult is a beggar. One of the problems with massive welfare states is that
they make children or beggars of us all, and as such are an affront and a barrier to adult
masculinity. It has become clichéd comedy for men and women to laugh at men who are
concerned with being competent. The “men refuse to stop and ask for directions” joke
never seems to get old for women, who are more comfortable with dependence, or
socialist types, because reducing men to a childlike state of supplication and submission
to state bureaucrats is required for big-government welfare states to function. Masculine
loathing of dependence is a bulwark to the therapeutic mother state.
Dependency is powerlessness. Yet, men have always been cooperative hunters, and
in a survival scenario they will fall into hierarchies based on strength and gameness. Men
have a certain natural comfort with interdependency. Claims of complete independence
are generally bullshit. Few of us have ever survived or would be able to survive on our
own for an extended period of time. Few of us would want to. A child is completely
dependent and powerless. It has no control over its own fate. Controlling one’s own fate
within the context of group give-and-take has to do with figuring out what you bring to
the table and making yourself valuable to the group. The bare minimum required for
moving from dependence to interdependence is competence and self-sufficiency—the
ability to carry one’s own weight.
Becoming an interdependent, rather than completely dependent, member of the
group means mastering a set of useful skills and understanding some useful ideas. We
send children to school to master a set of skills and a body of knowledge that we think
they’ll need to carry their own weight in society and function as adults. Most militaries
send men to boot camp. At boot camp, men learn a basic skill set and body of knowledge
necessary to function within the military. Boot camp graduates can theoretically be
expected to at least carry their own weight in an offensive or defensive scenario.
Understanding The Way of Men means understanding how men evaluate each other
as men, and how they accord status to men within the context of a primal history
common to all men. The amoral masculine gang ethos is tactical and utilitarian. It’s kind
of like picking men for a sports team. Before people care about whether or not you’re a
good person, they want to know if you’re a good player. Speculating about the morality of
professional athletes is a popular form of male social gossip, but when the athletes take
the field, what matters most is how they can contribute to a team’s success. Men want to
know if they have the physical ability, the gameness and the mastery of the skills
necessary to help the team win.
The Way of Men, the gang ethos, and the amoral tactical virtues are fundamentally
about winning. Before you can have church and art and philosophy, you need to be able
to survive. You need to triumph over nature and other men, or at the very least you need
to be able to keep both at bay. Winning requires strength and courage, and it requires a
sufficient mastery of the skills required to win.
Stated as a manly virtue:
Mastery is a man’s desire and ability to cultivate and demonstrate proficiency and
expertise in technics that aid in the exertion of will over himself, over nature, over
women, and over other men.
Advanced levels of mastery and technics allow men to compete for improved status
within the group by bringing more to the camp, hunt or fight than their bodies would
otherwise allow. Mastery can be supplementary—a man who can build, hunt and fight,
but who can also do something else well, be it telling jokes or setting traps or making
blades, is worth more to the group and is likely to have a higher status within the group
than a man who can merely build, hunt and fight well. Mastery can also be a
compensatory virtue, in the sense that a weaker or less courageous man can earn the
esteem of his peers by providing something else of great value. It could well have been a
runt who tamed fire or invented the crossbow or played the first music, and such a man
would have earned the respect and admiration of his peers. Homer was a blind man, but
his words have been valued by men for thousands of years.

Women also earn their keep through mastery of one kind or another, and mastery is
by no means exclusive to men, but mastery does have a lot to do with competition for
status between men. If necessity is the mother of invention, it is the need to compete for
status and peer esteem—to find a valued place in the group—that drives many inventors
to invent. The drive to gain control over something is part of the drive to master nature.
Strength, courage, and honor make a tidy triad, because they are all directly
concerned with violence. But the picture of how men judge men as men is incomplete
without some concept of mastery. Strength, gameness, and competition for status are all
present in animals, but it is the conscious drive to master our world that differentiates
men from beasts. Whether you’re a benevolent king or a ruthless gangster, a man with a
special skill, talent or technology can be as valuable as or exponentially more valuable
than your toughest thug. It is mastery more often than brute strength that allows the
elite to rule. Masculinity can never be separated from its connection to violence, because
it is through violence that we ultimately compete for status and wield power over other
men. However, mastered skills and technology provide deciding advantages in fighting,
hunting and surviving for human men.
Honor

The idea of honor shines an ancient light so warm and golden that everyone wants
to stand in it. This is the most natural desire in the world, because honor in its most
inclusive sense is esteem, respect and status. To be honored is to be respected by one’s
peers.
Thomas Hobbes wrote in Leviathan that what was honorable was, “whatsoever
possession, action, or quality, is an argument and a signe of Power.”[24] Hobbes believed
that honor existed in a free market, where value was accorded to men based on what men
had to offer and the value that other men placed on it. For Hobbes, honor was a form of
deference, an acknowledgement of power and influence over other men.
In our rudimentary gang of a few men depending on each other in a hostile
environment, this definition of honor is directly related to the other three masculine
virtues. In a hostile environment, strength, courage, and mastery are all absolutely
necessary for survival and everyone in the gang understands this to be true because
external threats are regular and imminent. Men who exhibit these traits will have greater
value to the group and contribute more to the group’s survival and prosperity. Deference
acknowledges interdependency and loyalty.
In a relatively secure society, while power ultimately comes from the ability to use
violence, there are so many middlemen involved that the person who wields the most
power and influence may simply be the person with the most wealth or popularity. For
instance, teen singing stars and talk show hosts can wield tremendous power and
influence, but their power has little or nothing to do with the esteem of the fighting men
who gave the word honor its heroic glow.
According to James Bowman, there are two types of honor. Reflexive honor is the
primitive desire to hit back when hit, to show that you will stand up for yourself.
To expand on Bowman’s theory, reflexive honor is the signal of the rattlesnake,
communicating a reputation for retaliation summed up by the popular old motto Nemo
me impune lacessit, or “No one attacks me with impunity.” To protect one’s honor is as
defensive as it is offensive—even if attack is pre-emptive, as it often is. People are more
likely to leave you alone if they fear harm from you, and if men give way to you because
they fear you, you will gain a certain status among men. This is equally true for a group,
and in a survival scenario it is generally a tactical advantage to appear to be fearsome.
That is, it is tactically advantageous to cultivate a reputation for strength, willingness to
fight and technical mastery.
 A man once said, “If I allow a man to steal my chickens, I might as well let him rape
my daughters.” That’s reflexive honor.

Bowman also recognized the idea of cultural honor, which he defined as a sum of the
“traditions, stories and habits of thought of a particular society about the proper and
improper uses of violence.”[25]

Bowman’s definition of cultural honor has a moral cast to it. While Bowman links it
to violence above, he notes throughout his book that there is a conflict, especially (but
not uniquely) in the Western mind between manly public honor and private, moral honor
that has as much to do with one’s personal philosophy and a desire to be a good person
as it does with one’s reputation for violent retaliation in the eyes of men. While Bowman’s
view of cultural honor follows from reflexive honor, cultural honor is ultimately
concerned with being a good man, not being good at being a man.

Because it is linked to morality and what is valued culturally, the cultural code of
honor can morph into virtually anything. We see this in the way the blood is wiped from
the blade of honor today. Honor is used to indicate almost any sort of general esteem,
deference or respect. School recognition programs like The National Honor Society
continue the meritocratic, hierarchical sense of honor—because study is an attempt at
mastery—however gender-neutral and non-violent. The deference that Hobbes
recognized in honor is now applied to abstract concepts that have little or nothing to do
with traditional honor.
For instance, the slogan “Honor Diversity” is popular with gay rights advocates,
who reject traditional, hierarchical ways of defining both honor and masculinity. “Honor
Diversity” is an interesting slogan, because it essentially means “honor everyone and
everything.” If everyone is honored equally, and everyone’s way of life is honored equally,
honor has no hierarchy, and therefore honor has little value according to the economics
of supply and demand. “Honor diversity” doesn’t mean much more than “be nice.”
If honor is to mean anything at all, it must be hierarchical. To be honored, as
Hobbes recognized, is to be esteemed, and as humans are differently-abled and
differently motivated, some will earn greater esteem than others. Americans have a
strained relationship with the idea of honor. They have always been a little drunk on the
idea that “all men are created equal” and politicians have spent two centuries flattering
every Joe Schmoe into thinking his opinion is worth just as much as anyone else’s—even
when he has absolutely no idea what he is talking about. American men profess the
creed of equality, but if you put a bunch of American men in a room or give them a job to
do, they work out their Lord of the Flies hierarchies in the same way that men always have.
The religion of equality gives way to the reality of meritocracy, and there’s not too great a
leap between Geoffroi de Charny’s motto “who does more is worth more” and the rugged
individualism of the American who was expected to pull himself up “by his own
bootstraps.”