Post: #1

This is a pretty interesting piece that Jack Donovan retweeted, maybe some of you have already seen it. I have never heard of the site medium.com or the guy who wrote it, but I have a couple friends who were in the Restrepo documentary that Sebastian Junger was involved with.

The article offers some interesting thoughts on war and masculinity that aren't groundbreaking to a red pill guy, but it is an interesting read nonetheless.

Quote:by MATTHEW GAULT

Sebastian Junger is a rare filmmaker. His trio of documentaries about soldiers fighting in Afghanistan neither praise nor demonize America’s troops. Unlike most popular war films, he doesn’t turn soldiers into superheroes.

The Oscar-nominated Restrepo is about the job. Korengal is about the men. The Last Patrol is about those men trying to come home. In a long and discursive interview, we talked with Junger about warped perceptions of the troops, why he went to war and modern conceptions of manhood.

Junger argues that Americans are enamored with war, even when they say they don’t believe in it. He also thinks young men in the west no longer have a sense of what it means to be a man—and some of them go to war to find out.


“I’m a journalist,” he tells me. “I don’t put any political agenda into my work. I think the right wing tends to idolize soldiers—you can’t talk about them critically in any way. The left wing went from vilifying them in Vietnam to seeing them as victims of a military-industrial complex.”

He laughs over the phone. “Both views of soldiers are just absurd.” More than just absurd, Junger sees both views as harmful.

“No one should be beyond commentary and criticism,” he says. But he also cautions against thinking of soldiers as victims. The way Junger sees it, soldiers choose to fight.
“They’re very proud that they are soldiers,” he says. “It really undermines the idea that in our society people are able to make choices, and the choices they make are ones they can be proud of. It’s very elitist.”

The power of choice—and its consequences—is one of several themes Junger explores in his work. One of the most moving moments in Korengal comes when team leader and former Sgt. Brendan O’Byrne explains why he hates the phrase, “You did what you had to do.”

According to O’Byrne, he chose to go to war. He has to live with that choice. People telling him he did what he had to do robs O’Byrne of his agency.


“The whole society is fascinated by war,” Junger says. He tells me about giving lectures across the country. He’ll stop in the middle of his talk and ask people to raise their hands if they’re against war.

“Everyone raises their hands,” he notes. “And then I’ll say, ‘But who here has paid $12 to be entertained by a Hollywood war movie?’ Just about everyone raises their hand.”

“War is so compelling that you can even get a room full of pacifists to pay money to be entertained by it.”
It also makes for a strange media landscape. As I write this, American Sniper is number one at the box office. James Fallows’ recent article for The Atlantic—about the disconnect between soldiers and civilians—is the most talked about think-piece of the season.

Junger understands both the media’s obsession and the disconnect. “The narratives in war are just more powerful and dramatic than the narratives in peacetime,” he says.

His sister lives in a small, liberal town outside of London. “Every year,” he says. “They light bonfires and the teenagers—boys and girls both—reenact the Battle of Hastings with cardboard swords and shields.”

“My sister is a complete and utter feminist and pacifist,” he explains. “She doesn’t see the irony. She’s participating in this wonderful festival … that’s reenacting a battle. Nobody reenacts the Treaty of Ghent. [It] just isn’t that compelling.”

“We all want peace, but we’re all fascinated by the drama of war. It transcends our moral beliefs.”

“I think people would have a more honest, realistic relationship to the important topic of war,” he continues. “If they could actually acknowledge that part of themselves that responds to it positively.”

War is hell, the cliche says, yet a lot of people are still drawn to it. Why would so many young men risk their lives? Junger thinks it comes down to biology and rites of passage.

“Young men go to war for the same reason that young boys play war,” he explains. “War is an extremely compelling endeavor for a lot of young men.”

What’s arguably more important, however, is that men bond extremely well together when subjected to the stress of combat. They “have an extremely strong affiliating response to each other,” he says.


When young men in America turn 18, they suddenly find themselves in the adult world with little direction. Some go to college, some find full-time work and others join the military.

“I think there’s a lot of cultural reinforcement,” Junger adds. “You know, you’re not a man until you’ve done something really difficult? And war is very difficult.”
War gives young males a chance to find a peer group and purpose to their lives. That’s important in a society where a lot of young men don’t have either.

“I think this is probably the first society in history that actively discourages an intelligent conversation about what manhood should require of men,” Junger tells me. “Simultaneously, our society is asking adult males to be men,” he continues.

But what’s a man, anyway? “[Society should] help define it. So that I can achieve it. So that I can know when I’ve crossed the finish line. And then everyone shrugs their shoulders and says, ‘You know, it’s actually not polite to talk about it like that.’ It’s really confusing to young men.”

Buy Sebastian Junger’s book ‘War.’
We talk about tribal societies that have clear rituals and expectations of adulthood. “There’s a lot of initiation rites for young men around the world that involve torturing young men,” he explains. “So that the young man can then demonstrate that he’s willing to undergo an enormous amount of pain in order to achieve adult status.”

“They could actually live untested lives, if left to their own devices,” Junger says. But “they don’t want 30-year-old males wondering about their manhood.”

“That’s not functional,” he adds.

Readers who’ve followed the GamerGate controversy, read a Men’s Rights forum or spent too much time in the wrong bar on a Saturday night have witnessed the effects of adult males insecure about their masculinity.

It’s not a pretty sight.

But initiation rites help define the line between childhood and the adult world, and they define what manhood is. “We don’t have anything like that,” Junger says. “But I think it’s wired in us. It’s certainly wired into our language when we talk about, ‘C’mon, be a man about it,’ or ‘Man up.’”

“I remember as a young man just having no idea,” he continues. “How do I become this thing I want to be? How do I do it? So what happens is young men try to devise their own rites of passages.”

Taken too far, these rites can be harmful to ourselves and society. We smoke cigarettes, do drugs, damage property and do other dumb stuff to prove our manhood.

“One way to do it,” Junger explains. “Is to join the Army. It’s in there, in the male brain—‘Okay, if I go to war, surely I’ll come back a man.’’
When he asked soldiers in Afghanistan about their reasons for joining, it was a common response. “Some said, ‘I joined the Army because of 9/11. We were attacked and we have to defend ourselves,’” Junger says.

“Some of them were just straight up, ‘My father fought in Vietnam, my grandfather was in D-Day … I don’t wanna break that lineage of men in my family fighting.’”

“And some guys are a little more thoughtful,” he adds. “‘Well, I sorta thought it might make a man out of me.’”


I ask him about the origins of the current confusion in the American male. When did we stop knowing what it meant to be a man?

“I think the feminist initiative from the ’60s and on very rightly understood that the distinctions made between men and women—culturally and biologically—serving the wrong hands could be used to form the basis of discrimination and repression,” he says.

He pointed to racial politics, explaining how generations of white males used pseudo-science and pseudo-biology as pillars of an oppressive system.

“There are no biological differences between the races … but there are biological differences between the genders,” he says. “So feminists—very understandably—got quite nervous at any discussion around that topic of innate differences.”

“You can have real biological differences between the genders and have absolute equality,” Junger says. “It does not mean the genders are going to be identically good at all the same things.”

According to Junger, these theories are strongly rooted in academia, and particularly the social sciences.

“I have friends who are anthropologists and primatologists and evolutionary psychologists … [who are under] an enormous amount of pressure to generate data that shows that all gender differences are cultural.”

“In that kind of environment,” Junger continues. “If you dare talk about what it means to be a man, what you’re saying is men are different from women.”
And that means no one can have an honest conversation about manhood.

“We aren’t asking, ‘What does it mean to be a human being?’” he says. “‘What’s it mean to be a man?’ Once you have that conversation you offend a lot of academics.”

This discussion of manhood, Junger continues, inevitably leads to a discussion of war. “There is a huge debate in academia about whether war is an eternal human experience, or an artifact of the organized city-state or nation state.”

“That is patently absurd,” he says. “But there is this idea … if you say that war is a natural thing in the human experience and gender differences are biologically based, you get accused of trying to aid and abet the implementation of a system of violence.”

He tells me about a primatologist friend of his who studies chimpanzees. He began to study how chimpanzees wage war. “He was literally told by a fellow academic, ‘You’re undermining the cause of peace,’” Junger recounts.

“Men are clearly wired for [war],” he continues. “The male response to war is an evolutionary adaptation that clearly works for our species.”

He points to behavioral studies of chimpanzees. “[Male chimps] are more aggressive. They will dominate rival troops of chimpanzees and take over their territory. They’ll kill the adult males, and take over the females and take over the territory. Exact coordinated aggression clearly serves them really well.”

“It’s a left-wing version of the Christian right rejecting the theory of evolution,” he says. “I mean the far left is also now rejecting the theory of evolution, which is just insane.”

Junger certainly struggled with his own masculinity. That’s why he became a war reporter. “It just seemed dramatic and compelling and sort of heroic and important,” he explains. “Just the words, ‘war reporter,’ sounded kind of badass.”

Before journalism, Junger climbed trees for a lumber company. “I took trees down,” he says. “Hanging from a rope with a chainsaw. That also felt like a very intense, slightly heroic job and it was very dangerous, and I absolutely loved it.”

But he didn’t want to climb trees for the rest of his life. “War reporter sounded like a more respectable person … barely,” he laughs.
Junger has been to war and back. He chronicled America’s longest conflict in gritty detail. It worked for him. But what do you do when you come home from war?

“I don’t want to be in combat,” he says. “There’s something to be said for the experience of combat and the atmospherics of it. It makes very powerful video.”

He doesn’t see the sense in repeating those experiences. But that won’t stop millions of other young males from going to war to find out for themselves. For many, war is a shortcut to adulthood. It’s a clear rite of passage in a society that’s increasingly confusing, complicated and contradictory.

Junger also suspects that’s why so many alienated Americans have problems coming home from war—a topic he explored in The Last Patrol. He says he’s writing about that alienation for Vanity Fair. His focus is, again, the troops.

He admits his take on post-traumatic stress disorder is subversive. “Society has the problem,” Junger says. “Not the soldiers.”

Post: #2

Good article. Another Junger, Ernst Junger, also knew why young men go to war.

Post: #3

Junger definitely has a good point I think most Americans are obsessed with the glory of WW2 and it's had an echo and propaganda effect since then. I do think the U.S. soldier is still just a typical blue collar working man though so he's easily identifiable to most. He's also ignorant and vulnerable to the major machinations from the political and industrial machine. These social and political subtleties is not something America has yet fully grasped. Europe tried..but they swung far left to their own demise.

Post: #4

The WWII effect is a real thing. I remember the first time I saw Band of Brothers it seemed like the most profound experience that a man could possibly have. I think everybody who joins wants to feel that sort of thing to some extent whether they admit it or not.

This military is so profound and misunderstood, especially the masculinity aspect of it. Very few of the guys that I have known over the years really grasp the significance of the experience. It makes me hate people. It has changed me in ways that are hard to explain.

I think his idea that “Society has the problem. Not the soldiers" is very accurate.

Post: #5

(01-30-2015 12:45 PM)El Chinito loco Wrote:  Junger definitely has a good point I think most Americans are obsessed with the glory of WW2 and it's had an echo and propaganda effect since then. I do think the U.S. soldier is still just a typical blue collar working man though so he's easily identifiable to most. He's also ignorant and vulnerable to the major machinations from the political and industrial machine. These social and political subtleties is not something America has yet fully grasped. Europe tried..but they swung far left to their own demise.

I was under the impression that this isn't as true today as it used to be. Pretty sure I have read more than one article that stated active military members are more educated than the general populace. Part of this is probably due to a large number of college students getting tired and dropping out or getting kicked out after failing for a few semesters and then joining up to pay off their student loans and have a better job than washing dishes.

I may be wrong but I think the military also has some programs to forgive student debt after so many years. So, if you do get a degree and then can't find a job going into the military and using your degree works like a reverse GI bill.

Post: #6

"It makes no difference what men think of war. War endures. As well ask men what they think of stone. War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner. That is the way it was and will be. That way and not some other way.

...it endures because young men love it and old men love it in them.

Men are born for games. Nothing else. Every child knows that play is nobler than work. He knows too that the worth or merit of a game is not inherent in the game itself but rather in the value of that which is put at hazard. Games of chance require a wager to have meaning at all. Games of sport involve the skill and strength of the opponents and the humiliation of defeat and the pride of victory are in themselves sufficient stake because they inhere in the worth of the principals and define them. But the trial of chance or trial of worth all games aspire to the condition of war for here that which is wagered swallows up the game, player, all."

Cormac McCarthy changing a man's philosophy page after page.

Post: #7

I just ran into this article elsewhere. I knew there had to be a discussion going on this here.

(01-30-2015 01:39 PM)General Mayhem Wrote:  The WWII effect is a real thing. I remember the first time I saw Band of Brothers it seemed like the most profound experience that a man could possibly have. I think everybody who joins wants to feel that sort of thing to some extent whether they admit it or not.

I'm sure Band of Brothers was compelling to you, but trust me, every generation has its reasons. There's a Roman general whose name escapes me who wrote something like "no great reliance should be placed on the willingness of young men to fight, for the prospect of combat is appealing to those who have yet to experience it". We've always had stories of war heroes and most boys grow up dreaming of being heroic in combat.

(01-30-2015 01:39 PM)General Mayhem Wrote:  This military is so profound and misunderstood, especially the masculinity aspect of it. Very few of the guys that I have known over the years really grasp the significance of the experience. It makes me hate people. It has changed me in ways that are hard to explain.

I think his idea that “Society has the problem. Not the soldiers" is very accurate.

That's the core idea and I agree. His basis is that in the past, a much larger proportion of the population had some direct relationship with war - 75% in WWII vs 33% today according to the James Fallows article he links. That's a good read too: http://www.theatlantic.com/features/arch...y/383516/. Fallows hammers on the idea that we're so disconnected from war that we can't have a reasonable discussion about it, so the military is held basically unaccountable. I don't totally agree - the military is held accountable for atrocities committed on the ground, and somewhat for collateral damage from aircraft, but when it comes to money, it's just like "think of the children!", you just say it's for the soldiers and no expense is too great.

Back to the original article, his discussion of public debate on masculinity is great, especially around the debate about innate vs. learned differences, where he closes with this:

Quote:“Men are clearly wired for [war],” he (Junger) continues. “The male response to war is an evolutionary adaptation that clearly works for our species.”
...
“It’s a left-wing version of the Christian right rejecting the theory of evolution,” he says. “I mean the far left is also now rejecting the theory of evolution, which is just insane.”

Oberyn, what book are you quoting there?

Post: #8

'War is to man what motherhood is to a woman'- Benito Mussolini

Post: #9

I have seen the first two documentaries and thought they were good. Nice find on the article OP. I look foward to reading this discussion.

Post: #10

Yeah his book War is pretty good.

He tells a story about it that they made the movie Lone Survivor based on. Also it is basically the book for the film Restrepo.

Very good watch if you are into army stuff.

Post: #11

Quote:But initiation rites help define the line between childhood and the adult world, and they define what manhood is. “We don’t have anything like that,” Junger says. “But I think it’s wired in us. It’s certainly wired into our language when we talk about, ‘C’mon, be a man about it,’ or ‘Man up.’”

No shit. And we lack initiation rituals or rites for young men, and have for a good century or more. This is part of the sickening influence of feminism: this is more than cultural - I believe at certain points culture can start being absorbed into our genetic makeup, in the same way our bodies have adjusted as a large group to different (perhaps better) nutrition. Feminism would take away this semi-genetic need and provide nothing to replace it. Ask a feminist what she says the appropriate initiation ritual for a young man or woman should be, one that matches and is as affirming as the initiation into adulthood practiced in ages past, and she'll either look at you blankly or suggest some weak, pastel sort of thing where everyone gets to graduate and nobody is left behind.

Don't forget that initiation was not automatic or ubiquitous to all male children. There was generally a test involved, and if a man didn't pass it, he existed in a twilight world -- the world of the perennial man-child, the world most of our 20 and even 30something men live in right now.

(Tangentially, one of the best fictional initiation rituals I've ever seen is that specified in Stephen King's The Gunslinger: boys enter a long tunnel leading to a room where they confronted their teacher and had to beat the snot out of him in a fair fight. If they succeeded, they went on to leave the tunnel through the west entrance, from that day forward considered men. If they failed, they left through the east entrance: back the way they had come, and into exile, forever not-men. When the teacher grew too old to administer the test, he retired. This was, to me, a perfect interpretation of a truly masculine rite of manhood: you are not a man until you can beat in a fight the man who trained you.)

Post: #12

If you are interested in this subject, I highly recommend that you read Where Men Win Glory by Jon Krakauer.
It tells the story of Pat Tillman in great detail, has really interesting stories, and gets into the reasons of why.

Post: #13

Quote:When young men in America turn 18, they suddenly find themselves in the adult world with little direction. Some go to college, some find full-time work and others join the military.

“I think there’s a lot of cultural reinforcement,” Junger adds. “You know, you’re not a man until you’ve done something really difficult? And war is very difficult.”

War gives young males a chance to find a peer group and purpose to their lives. That’s important in a society where a lot of young men don’t have either.

I think this is the most important passage.

This is actually one of the central themes to one of the main characters in the book I mentioned I've written. How a young kid who is clueless in life is essentially forced to become a man and find his masculinity through the chaos of war.

(04-19-2015 03:42 AM)Paracelsus Wrote:  Don't forget that initiation was not automatic or ubiquitous to all male children. There was generally a test involved, and if a man didn't pass it, he existed in a twilight world -- the world of the perennial man-child, the world most of our 20 and even 30something men live in right now.

Every culture has had something like this. Sparta's is perhaps the most brutal since it involved a young guy coming out of training being required to kill a Helot. If he failed or got caught, he was essentially a loser.

The only thing our culture is giving us is being trained in left wing indoctrination and then going to be a cog on some corporate wheel. It's essentially empty, equality tripe without any deep meaning.

Not that killing a Helot would be desirable to us, but there are countless more humane and yet more fulfilling examples.

Post: #14

I recently read this article published in 1984 by William Broyles Jr (Vietnam veteran turned writer/screenwriter who wrote Apollo 13, Castaway, et al.). He talks a lot about similar feelings of loving war and hints at how our culture's repression and denial of that male instinct made it impossible for returning men to feel whole. Some quotes:

"In part we couldn't describe our feelings because the language failed us: the civilian-issue adjectives and nouns, verbs and adverbs, seemed made for a different universe. There were no metaphors that connected the war to everyday life. But we were also mute, I suspect, out of shame. Nothing in the way we are raised admits the possibility of loving war. It is at best a necessary evil, a patriotic duty to be discharged and then put behind us. To love war is to mock the very values we supposedly fight for. It is to be insensitive, reactionary, a brute."


"War is a brutal, deadly game, but a game, the best there is. And men love games. You can come back from war broken in mind or body, or not come back at all. But if you come back whole you bring with you the knowledge that you have explored regions of your soul that in most men will always remain uncharted. Nothing I had ever studied was as complex or as creative as the small-unit tactics of Vietnam. No sport I had ever played brought me to such deep awareness of my physical and emotional limits."

Good article and worth a read http://public.wsu.edu/~hughesc/why_men_love_war.htm

Post: #15

(04-19-2015 03:42 AM)Paracelsus Wrote:  (Tangentially, one of the best fictional initiation rituals I've ever seen is that specified in Stephen King's The Gunslinger: boys enter a long tunnel leading to a room where they confronted their teacher and had to beat the snot out of him in a fair fight. If they succeeded, they went on to leave the tunnel through the west entrance, from that day forward considered men. If they failed, they left through the east entrance: back the way they had come, and into exile, forever not-men. When the teacher grew too old to administer the test, he retired. This was, to me, a perfect interpretation of a truly masculine rite of manhood: you are not a man until you can beat in a fight the man who trained you.)

Maybe this is colored by my dislike for Stephen King's pretentious literally style, but that ritual seems absurd and utterly self-defeating. All those men getting cruelly cast out of their society, not actually being worthless despite having temporarily failed on that day, would eventually return and overwhelm the few "winners".

Some sort of test of manhood with respective rewards is needed for a healthy society, but a society that goes around it in such a way is actually doing it for its own pride, not for the benefit of its members, and is doomed to fail the way Sparta eventually did, replaced by a culture that did not bully, kill or exile its non-elite members but instead made something useful out of them.

To paraphrase Jesus, the term "manhood" is there to serve men, not the opposite.

Post: #16

It's interesting about Junger finding war such an interest to him. He's an interesting dude because in high school (a very snooty prep school outside of Boston) He was in my graduating class. We were close friends. "Seb" (as he was called) was always looking for some sort of adventure. In fact, he and I had quite a few adventures together in high school, mostly doing outdoor stuff like winter camping and long hiking trips in New England. One time, I borrowed my dad's canoe and we spent a week canoeing down a river in Maine.

We sort of stayed in touch for a few years. I had some adventures on my own (gap year after high school) but we reconnected after he published "The Perfect Storm" At 53, he's still in search of adventure and is doing quite well with it. He obviously sees the cultural and social issues that young men face and he knows about evolutionary psychology. It's interesting to point out that Seb never had his own kids. He's also divorced and likely has seen the serious problems with feminism women of his and my generation of women. So he's examining the culture of young men without being a parent, much like many of us do here in this forum. Seb and I haven't communicated in a few years but I would not be surprised if he has read my blog or other Manosophere blogs. It would be interesting if he popped up here. He's a writer who could easily write about the 'Sphere from a cogent and understanding point of view and then get the attention of serious print media outlets

Post: #17

That's really interesting Private Man, maybe sending some links to him like Donovan's "The Way of Men" would be up his alley.

Might be helpful to see more voices like his added to the conversation in the mainstream media, or to spread the ideas of neo-masculinity.

Post: #18

(04-20-2015 02:01 PM)LeBeau Wrote:  That's really interesting Private Man, maybe sending some links to him like Donovan's "The Way of Men" would be up his alley.

Might be helpful to see more voices like his added to the conversation in the mainstream media, or to spread the ideas of neo-masculinity.

As an aside, there were so many mistakes in that comment I wrote, I'm embarrassed!