Thursday, April 13, 2006

MGTOW Activism - Part Two

In MGTOW Activism - Part One, we explored the notion that MGTOW is about "Taking the Personal Out of the Political," which is more congruent with the male principle of individuality and freedom than the female herding instinct which creates thoughtless movements like feminism. Also, we touched on the fact that movements which beg the government to make our lives better simply creates organisms which serve no other purpose than to empower themselves while increasing the scope of power big government has over our lives. Such movements are not compatible with the MGTOW Manifesto, which states its only three goals as "to instill masculinity in men, femininity in women, and work towards limited government." Therefore, we concluded that MGTOW is not a political movement, but rather it is an Awareness Movement.

In this article, we are going to explore these notions a little deeper, namely, discussing what men can actually do about fighting back against the situation we find ourselves in. It is not in men's nature to sit idly by and passively wait for others to fix things for them. Just the opposite. Men's nature is to Shut Up and Shovel the Fuckin' Gravel!

When Doing Nothing is Actually Doing Something 
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A friend of mine has a niece living in Ontario who is around 18 or 19 years old. Like many girls that age, she met a boy and fell madly in love with him. And yes, you guessed it, he is not particularly what one would call a Nice Guy. At any rate, I suppose the young couple felt that the world was against them, but none of that mattered because they could live on their undying love. So, the girl quit her job, and the two of them packed up her car and ran off together with about $1,800 between the two of them. She also skipped out on the payments for their escape vehicle, for which her grandfather had co-signed the loan, forcing him to take over the payments. After a few weeks, they wound up in Newfoundland, broke, where they requested some charity of her other grandparents who lived there. These grandparents had an old cabin on their property where they told her they could stay... the only thing is, the cabin had no electricity or water, and it was March, and still very much winter. They had to chop wood for the stove for heating and cooking, and also, had to carry buckets of water into the cabin from the frozen creek. It didn't take too long before the phone calls back home started coming, requesting money to help them out. The answer was, "No, get a job." A little while later, more phone calls, "But we don't like chopping wood and carrying water!", to which the reply was another simple, "Tough. Get a job!"

The whole extended family agreed to "do nothing." And in doing so, they very much did, "do something," didn't they?

The same strategy can be applied to Western women. As The Eternal Bachelor (used to) have on the top of his blog, "Giving Women the Husbands They Deserve: None!"  

There is no point in arguing with women and trying to convince them to see the light. That door was closed several decades ago. Many of you have read Rollo Tomassi's excellent essays on "The Female Imperative." Essentially, women "are" society, and what their wants are is what society's wants are. What women find disagreeable, society finds disagreeable. They are "the herd" and the males in the herd either serve their purposes or they are ejected from it. Women also don't understand the laws of cause and effect very well. The only way to get women to see that it is in their benefit to have men respected is to make them suffer the consequences of treating men so poorly. Since women control our social mores, once having men dis-empowered in society starts to harm them directly, there will be no stopping them in agitating for men to be re-empowered.

Lots of MRA's whine and moan that "we must get women on board." True enough. The problem is that women won't get on board until it is in their best interests to do so! This is something that really chaps my ass about Trad-cons and Christians. They want to "save" marriage, and encourage men to keep marrying, without expecting that women must change to make it worth men's while, nor addressing that marriage itself must be restored to its original meaning - and then they point to the Bible and blah blah blah. All I have to say to them is: "Until you get off your asses and create a form of marriage that actually represents what the Bible intended, STFU and keep your spinster daughters for yourselves! Don't expect me to immolate myself upon the marriage pyre for a false notion of marriage in a society that actively criminalizes everything about men and Biblical marriage as God intended it!" (You might even, like, you know, try to use that "rights" thing called Freedom of Religion.)

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Only when it is in women's (society's) best interests to re-empower men, will women (society) re-empower men. They hold all the cards on that level - it is where their power lies. But to keep propping women up, simply because it's what men have always done, will not work. It just enables further bad behaviour. If my friend's family had just sent the niece money and propped her up despite her behaviour, she wouldn't have learned her lesson either.

However, men also have to start realizing where their own power lies. We might be the lowest on the totem pole as far as human sympathy goes (Men love women, women love children and children love puppies), but the whole of society only works so long as men are willing to be invested in it. Women, children, and the government all need men far more than we need them. Men can survive with a pocket-knife and a garbage bag. Everybody else, not so much.While women are demanding their new husband, big government, give them affirmative action to be equally represented in the cush and often non-productive jobs, like government bureaucrat, tenured professor in women's studies, or executive board members, they still expect that men will continue to do all the shitty jobs that need to be done in society, like digging the ditches, keeping the electricity and sewers running, and providing fodder for enemy gunfire. We used to do all of these things because of the of the respect which women (society) gave to us for doing them. In other words, we wanted women's social approval and affection for these things, and we used to get it. Now, we are told we are looooosers for doing it, but they still want us to "man up" and do it all the same.

Hmmm. I wonder what would happen if the men just worked enough to get by, and then eventually quit showing up and went ghost? Such a strategic retreat is what men must do, and thus, we are Men Going Their Own Way.

We Speak Our Views on the Internet

The internet has been the greatest thing to happen to free speech since Gutenberg invented the printing press.
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Actually, it is beyond the printing press! We are sharing our stories and our life experiences in ways men have never done before. One thing we are finding is that we are not alone in our observations. Thus, we reach out to other men in the hopes that they may learn from our experiences and our mistakes. It is not much different than what every women's magazine has done for decades, except that our views were historically suppressed to satisfy the feminine imperative. (Women, er, society, has never liked us talking of these things in the same way women have talked of us).

There is no right way or wrong way to be a MGTOW Activist - it is one of the features of MGTOW, so I'm not going to try and shoehorn in what makes an MGTOW or not. However, there are certain things we have discovered that worked for us in the past. 

Start Your Own Blog or Website
A long time ago now, I used to regularly read William S. Lind's columns about Fourth Generation Warfare. Now, of course, I am not advocating doing anything violent, but rather taking the concept of decentralization found in Fourth Generation Warfare and adapting it to the internet. There is no "leader" of MGTOW to attack or discredit. We are all leaders of our own movement, and if one of us is removed, there are more nameless people to take his place. Just like in Vietnam or the recent wars in the Middle East, it really doesn't matter how many multimillion dollar, high-tech jet fighters you bring to the battlefield when the enemy is not engaging you in the air, but rather with booby traps made from bamboo or low-tech car bombs parked on the side of the street. It doesn't matter how many drills your platoon practices, nor how informed your CO is on military battlefield tactics, if your enemy refuses to engage you openly on the battlefield. In fact, if you can't even identify your enemy from the friendlies, the entire notion of organized armed conflict gets completely demolished. We can take these concepts and adapt them in a non-violent fashion for use on the internet.  

Now, of course, blogging can be a lot of work and not everyone has the time nor the ability to regularly do it. I spend a lot of time writing my articles - often six or seven hours or more of thinking, researching, writing and then re-writing. Some people can whip out articles like it is nothing, but not all of us can. There are other things you can do to create awareness though. Just simply starting a blog aggregator is a good idea. Even better are aggregators that print out the entire article. Why is this beneficial? Because many of us who do run blogs get attacked by people like Symantec/Norton AntiVirus, or Google will monkey with our search results or, our websites simply disappear - as often happens with Proboards. When an aggregator copies our entire article, it circumvents what these a-holes are trying to do to silence us, because now there are more places on the internet to access the information and be picked up by search engines, and it also provides an automatic back-up of articles in case a website does "mysteriously disappear."

Another easy thing to do is simply find a blog or a particular article that you endorse and then enter the url for it along with your name & other info when you make comments around the internet, so that you are giving exposure to ideas you endorse simply by making the comments you make already anyways. A few years ago, I used to regularly get hits from a fellow who commented all over the internet on a variety of subjects as "L. Walker - Man of Color", and for each place he commented, he linked in my Marriage is Fraud article, and thus I got exposure from oodles of places, and it took hardly any effort from him at all. Thank-you, Mr. Walker. A really good web-page to use for this is Wedded Abyss, because it was designed for this purpose - to give a brief summary of our views, while linking to a variety of sites where people can go to explore these concepts at a deeper level.

If you do start your own blog, here is a quick tip: don't publish all of your articles all at once. What I mean is, lots of guys start up a blog, get really excited about it, and crank out one or two articles a day - every day, and then find that within two weeks they are burnt out. What you need to do is make a post every three days or so when you first start out (later, after you are established, an article every week or so will keep the hits rolling in). So, when you have all that energy at the beginning, go ahead and write your articles, but schedule them accordingly by spacing them out. You will be glad you did, I promise. It will also give you the luxury of not being under the gun to write something simply to keep your blog running, and thus, you will find that if you are writing two weeks ahead of publication, your articles will be of much higher quality. Also, keep in mind that when you first start your blog, your hits will be minimal, no matter how many articles you write. So don't blow your brains out over articles that hardly anyone will read. Your goal should be to provide something every few days so that people will know to keep checking in, and thus, you will begin to get exposure by others linking to you.

Furthermore, if you find yourself frustrated with writer's block, never forget that you can always plumb the depths of The Wisdom of Zenpriest and Eye of the Mind. Zed has given explicit license for any of his words to be used by anyone, in any way, to further the cause of men. In the same spirit, I have given permission at the beginning of The Philosophy of Men Going Their Own Way for it to be used by anyone wishing to promote the philosophy. I am not doing this for fame or money. I am not using my real name and I haven't made a dime from what I've written - nor ever intended to. I am doing this because I want men to get up off their asses and stand up for themselves. If taking one of my articles and using it directly for your own blog, either in full or in part, helps to accomplish this, then do it! That's why I put them there!   

Linkage is Good for You
Be sure to link to others, especially those that link to you. I check my stat-counter almost every day, and if I see that a new blog has linked to me, it will automatically get linked in my blogroll. I want them to get exposure, and further, the more exposure they get, the more I will get in return! I also link to blogs that I have read which don't yet link to me, but I go through my blog list every few months and clean out the ones that have not provided a reciprocal link to my blog. Why? Because I want those who scratch my back to get the most amount of traffic I can provide them with, and clogging up my blog list with oodles of links to those who are unwilling or just don't care enough to link me back, lowers the exposure those who do support me will receive, and this in turn harms me.
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An exception I have made to this is linking to blogs which are run by women. You might think it misogynist, but that is not my motivation - in fact, to a certain degree, I think some of them have more or less decent insights, although they are always clouded by the female imperative, and many of them are pretty sneaky on entirely different levels. The reason I don't link to them is because of men! Nothing pisses me off more than offering a man the red-pill, and then watching him run with it to some woman to request her approval for whether he should swallow it or not. I notice this phenomenon every time some woman enters the manosphere. They really don't say anything significant compared to the men in the manosphere, yet within a few months they become one of the most popular bloggers around, while men with far more profound things to say languish in No Man's Land for years before they get similar traffic - from men!

What is really going on is that women have enormous social power, while men do not. Even though it is merely words on the internet and not a real woman, many men in the manosphere seem desperate to get a woman's social approval for their views, or they believe a woman's views are "more correct" than the men's. It kinda reminds me of how a cat will catch a mouse and then bring it to you, believing you are the head of the pride, to see if you want to eat some of it too. It's really come to piss me off over the years to see yet another bimbo show up in the manosphere, write a few trite comments about men in society, and within six months her site is getting 2,500+ hits a day - from men! It's like the Pied Piper playing her song "Not All Women Are Like That!" These men are desperate to find at least one woman in the world to keep on the pedestal and I just refuse to provide them with the illusion of it. Plus, nearly all of the women I have seen in the manosphere will, eventually, betray their ideals the moment it becomes in their best interest to do so. The whole situation is enough to make one a full-fledged misanthrope!
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"Where my exposition is anti-feminine, and that is nearly everywhere, men themselves will receive it with little heartiness or conviction; their sexual egoism makes them prefer to see woman as they would like to have her, as they would like her to be." -- Otto Weininger, Sex and Character, Author's Preface
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Another thing I tend to avoid is linking to big blogs. First of all, they don't link to me so I don't "owe" them anything. Now, I get it, if they linked to everyone who linked to them, they would have blogrolls that numbered in the thousands. But on the same token, if they are so large, then they certainly don't need me to link to them in order to get exposure. Everybody knows who the big blogs are already, whether I link to them or not. Also, it kind of negates the notion of "decentralization" to have big websites acting as a clearing house for all of our ideas. I prefer to send my traffic to the smaller guys so that they may get their legs under them and grow into big blogs themselves. I'd like to see dozens and dozens of really big blogs dealing with men's issues, but this will never happen if we ignore the little nuts who may grow into a mighty oak, in favour of only looking at the full grown oaks and simply wishing there were more of them around.

Back when MGTOW first debuted in 2006, we used to do something called "shout-outs." Basically, anyone who showed that they were flying the MGTOW flag and were committed to maintaining a blog, got a public shout-out to the other MGTOW bloggers so that he would be entered as a link on everyone's sidebar, and also to provide the newbie with some traffic to get his legs under him. It also had the benefit of providing the person who did the shout-out, to be able to take a few days off of blogging while directing all of his traffic to someone who needed it, while still providing one's readers with, well, something to read. Here is a shout-out for someone you may recognize. Marky Mark just did one the other day. And here was mine.

When I got my shout-out, it was probably the most significant thing that happened to me in my entire blogging career. Before that I was only getting about 75 hits a day, but suddenly I was getting Eternal Bachelor's 2,000 hits a day all directed to my site and I was like "Holy Smokes! I'd better sit down and write some good stuff while I can!" After the shout-out disappeared into Eternal Bachelor's archives, my blog settled in to about 400 hits a day, and from there it steadily increased. In part it kept on increasing because of the exposure I had received, but even more so, once I had the exposure I was highly motivated to keep it by continuing to provide my readers with more content. And here I am, seven years later, still running my blog! So, don't forget to take care of the little nuts, for they will be the oaks of tomorrow if just given the chance to grow.

Don't Delete Your Blogs
Of course, not all people will want to keep blogging forever. If you no longer feel the motivation, that's fine. It is a thankless job and the pay sucks. But please, oh please, don't delete your blog! Not only does it remove from the internet a significant body of work that others might find and read, whether old or not, but it also removes all of those links in the articles, in the comments, and on the sidebar, which support those of us who still are blogging. Most guys who quit blogging have not lost the faith in the message, they simply are fed-up with blogging. There's nothing wrong with becoming a Man Going His Own Way (MGHOW) and moving on - in fact, it is one of the natural conclusions of MGTOW. But please, if you've found a path to enlightenment through MGTOW and the manosphere which resulted in you starting up a blog, leave your work up so that others may find it, and so that the links in your blog may direct others towards those who are still actively blogging about it.    

We Legally Reduce Any Tax-Paying
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MGTOW does not advocate doing anything illegal - ever. It does, however, promote thinking outside of the box in order to dis-empower those who seek to bring harm to men either for profit or for the desire for power. Therefore, it goes without saying that you should boycott the products of companies who disrespect men. Companies like Norton AntiVirus, who produce terrible products anyways, are easy to identify. But there are many others - many, many others. Trojan condoms used to have an ad portraying men as pigs, and General Motors thought the way to attract females into buying Cadillacs was by showing ads of inept men being scorned by a snotty bitch of a woman. I notice lately that almost all boat manufacturers now portray women at the helm in their brochures, with the man playing kitchen-bitch in the background, despite the fact that boat purchases are predominantly a male dream instead of a female one. The list is endless. But it goes further than simply switching products, because no matter what, even if you went to another company, they will sell men down the river in a heartbeat too if it means expanding their sales by even one percent.

The best way to hurt consumer culture's desire to crap on men in order to create greater profits is to find ways to remove yourself from needing their products as much as possible. Longtime MGTOW, Richard Ford, has a blog called Six Million Pounds that focuses on finance, and further, about working less and stretching your dollar. One simple thing that can be done to harm consumer culture is to buy high-quality products that will last you a lifetime, rather than cheap garbage that keeps you coming back every few years to replace it.

Another thing you can do is focus on getting yourself debt-free, so you no longer have to work like a slave to pay for useless crap you don't really need as a MGTOW. (For example, if you are a single guy, do you really need a three bedroom 1500sf house, or would a 750sf cottage do you just as well,  and cost you less in upkeep?).

All of these things attack the very system that purposefully harms men. First off, it obviously decreases the profits of those companies, but furthermore, it also harms our biggest enemy, Big Government, by decreasing their tax revenues. What do you think all of the "stimulus" the government has injected into the economy over the past years is all about? They want to do things like re-inflate the housing bubble, so that people will feel richer and go back to borrowing against their home equity to buy useless crap. In other words, they know that our economy is fueled by debt, and the best way to keep the economy going, and thus their tax dollars coming in - which funds vast bureaucracies which further harm men, like Women's Studies - is to keep people perpetually enslaved to debt in their desire to "get more useless crap." It does this on several levels. First off, you work harder to make more money, thus the government takes more of your money through income taxes. But also, the more profits these companies make, the more the government makes from them in taxes. Furthermore, the more people spend, the more the government receives in consumption taxes, like sales taxes. And, the more people desire to buy useless crap, the more these companies will hire other people to produce that useless crap, thus providing the government with more people's incomes they can tax, and so on, and so on, and so on...

Another thing you can do to harm those who are harming you is what I call "victory labour." Think about it in this way: Here in Canada, it costs around $2,000+ to heat one's home for a year. Now, in order to come up with that $2,000, I have to go into the work-place and exchange about $3,000 in labour, so that after the government takes off its income tax, unemployment insurance premiums, pension plan deductions etc. etc., I am left with around $2,000 net, which I will then apply to my heating bill. So really, the heating bill costs me $3,000 instead of $2,000. If I made $17.50/hr working 40hrs/wk, I would come to about $3,000/mo in gross income. So, it would cost me one full month's labour to make enough money just to heat the house for a year.

On the other hand, my province of British Columbia is chock full of trees. I could spend two or three 8hr days cutting down trees and carting them back to the house, and perhaps another four or five days chopping wood to burn in the wood-stove, and that should be enough to keep me warm for the year.

Well, in the first situation, I have to work 172hrs in order to have heat in my home. In the second situation, I only have to work around 60hrs to heat my home for the year. What do you think pays better? (I'd be earning the equivalent labour value of $50/hr in the second situation). And, as a further bonus, I've legally avoided giving the government $1,000 in income taxes, which they will use to fund the bureaucratic organizations which harm men. Further, I will have robbed them of taking tax income from the gas company's profits, and also, I will have reduced the income tax they are able to siphon off of the gas company's employees. Ha ha! Now we are talking about kicking them in the pants, aren't we?

This can be applied to hosts of things. Victory labour in the garden. Victory labour by fixing my own car. Victory moose-hunting, and so on. The quicker you get yourself debt free, the less beholden you are to a paycheck, and the more you can put concepts like victory labour to use.
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A MGHOW victory-fishing for the cause!
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And just think, with all the free time you have created, you might even be able to become a MGTOW blogger like me!

Further Reading:

Zenpriest #42 - Activism

Zenpriest #56 - MGTOW's Trademark Copyright Philosophy

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