On the off chance that I have any young subscribers, young men in high school or college age zoomers, than this post is primarily written for you. Its a cogent vision of being that I wish I would’ve arrived at sooner, but then again, maybe that was the whole point of the journey towards it to begin with.

This is also directed at the whiny cohort of older generations that constantly black-pill and doom and talk about adventure being dead and there being no new frontiers—as if the Marine Corps or Merchant Marines or offshore oil drilling or even Key West don’t exist.

I find this dooming and “adventure is dead” talk to be really despicable, ideologically insidious, and potential killing. And I didn’t always find it that way. In fact, I have quite often participated in that sort of discourse myself. And that is especially ironic as a country boy who joined the Air Force right out of high school, had quite a strange and exciting job while I was in, and was stationed in Las Vegas.

I literally did find adventure. I’ve also snowboarded all over the West. I’ve hunted and fished and hiked all over the place. I’ve gotten blackout in bars. And some of my adventures are tinged with a bit of youthful embarrassment. In hindsight, some were preposterously stupid or irresponsible—one of the blessings and curses of the male brain maturing at 25 and finally being able to calculate risk.

There’s not a lot about me that I would say is natural talent. I’ve never found myself to be particularly gifted athletically, at least as far as coordination goes, although I’ve always been very fit. I’m not musically talented and have a singing voice that will clear a pew, and most of my success at any given thing can probably be boiled down to a plough horse like grit, a willingness to learn, and a willingness to try. And I say all that to let you know that I’m not an outlier.

But I did live most of my early twenties with the idea of having an adventure at the very front of my brain. Of doing things for the adventure of it. Sure GI Bill was nice. A steady paycheck was nice. Everything else was nice. I’m not stupid.

But I wanted the stories and experience that come with taking paths less traveled.

This thirst for both stories and adventure is no doubt attributable to just being a man. But I would also credit a steady diet of westerns and military memoirs and Louis L’Amour books in my teenage years for helping to fertilize this wanderlust.

But suffice it to say that I should (should’ve) known better than to ever participate in this whole “adventure is dead talk.”

Modern day ennui gets to us all I guess. I understand it.

And to bring this all back around to why that talk is so harmful, it’s because it’s rooted in learned helplessness. Truly, the disease of our time. AI will only ensure that more people get filtered by it. C'est la vie.

But it doesn’t have to be that way.

Learned helplessness is defined as “a condition in which a person has a sense of powerlessness, arising from a traumatic event or persistent failure to succeed. It is thought to be one of the underlying causes of depression.”

So what does this have to do with adventure?

Well everything. To strike out on your own, or to have an adventure and survive, means that you must have some level of competence AND some level of confidence in your own competence.

The paradox is, you don’t typically have that competence or confidence when you first strike out. Especially when you are young. The adventure gives it to you. Life kicking you in the shins gives it to you… but the cost of entry is life kicking you in the shins.

Competence is perhaps the primary fantasy of action/adventure fiction. The adventure is the vehicle for arriving at this competence. Part of the reason a training montage trope is so integral to the action/adventure genre.

This is what people intuitively mean but don’t know how to articulate when they say, “adventure fiction is necessary for young men” or “young men need books written for them.”

“Well why?”

“Err… um… to teach them how to be good man… uh positive masculinity…”

“But what does being a good man mean?”

“You know it when you see it!”

Often they won’t even get as far as the homeric virtues, things like courage or loyalty, which would at least be an acceptable answer to the question.

Instead, they stumble past the what and the why.

But what is masculinity if not competence, both as a provider and as a defender—as the ability to solve problems and actualize goals.

It’s not chest hair or Indiana Jones fedoras or beard cream or even being kind, although magnanimity is a virtue.

Women know all of this by the way. Because competence and generosity are the primary things they find attractive when selecting a mate.

Money and “bad boys” are all just surface level markers of competence in a man, either as a provider or protector.

This is why PUAs, if they follow the game’s internal logic far enough, often end up happily married and on a farm somewhere. Picking up women is what they thought they were after, but really it was fixing their own incompetence and insecurities. Women just provided a strong enough motivation to start the adventure and the whole thing ended in self improvement. Many such cases, am I right?

Learned helplessness decapitates all of this potential by keeping you from going on the adventure or trying new things or even trying to do anything at all. Low confidence creates a failure feedback loop that eventually ends in a failure to try. Learned helplessness is the siren song of the incel, the doomer, the black-piller.

Attempt > Failure > low confidence > no new attempts > depression, anxiety, stuck in a rut = learned helplessness

or

Attempt > Success > higher confidence > new attempts > more success = competence

If one stacks enough failures, they run the risk of destroying their own confidence and getting stuck in stasis. Stasis kills you. It keeps you doing the same old same old. It makes you depressed and anxious and neurotic.

Fear is the mind killer.

Stack successes, even just small ones, and it builds your confidence and makes forward action feel good. Testosterone helps modulate this by the way, which is why T levels will surge when playing competitive sports or starting a fight club.

The higher confidence also gives you a higher probability of succeeding because you actually believe in your ability to succeed. Faith being the powerful thing that it is.

The real trick to all of this, like just about anything in life, is both in the knowing and the doing.

You can’t avoid failure, only get used to the idea of it as part of the process. The knowing allows you to rationally override the low confidence brought on by failures and make new attempts even though it feels awful. This is what people are getting at when they say, “fake it until you make it.”

And if you want to be smart about it, you’ll back off trying the thing that keeps making you fail and lower the bar a bit.

That doesn’t mean you give up on the big goal forever, but that you start breaking it down into more achievable parts. This enables you to start stacking successes and build your confidence and continue to build your competence until you are ready to take another swipe at the big goal.

It makes the psychological toll of failure more tolerable because you at least have some successes to show for it. And because you are failing more, you build up a failure callous that makes you able to stomach more of it. Go far enough and failure won’t even touch your confidence, because you will have internalized that it’s part of the process.

Imagine yourself as a platoon leader, but the private you are responsible for is YOU.

It’s your job to give him missions he can complete. It’s your job to monitor his morale and try to keep it high. It’s your job to make sure he has the tools and skills he needs. It's your job to build his confidence and make him a killing machine.

A shitty platoon leader sends his guys on suicide missions. A shitty platoon leader motivates through fear and abuse and shame and guilt.

And in a Vietnam, that guy would get fragged!

A lot of people are working for some of the most abusive and tyrannical platoon leaders imaginable—themselves.

Take this abuse far enough and the private gives up. You give up. You say things like “adventure is dead.”

I like to ragebait my wife… who is a planner like most women are… by telling her that “plans are for the unprepared.”

Of course, she’s right—weekend plans and vacations can typically use more forethought than I like to give them.

But my slogan is still sound. You must be confident in your abilities to adapt.

Plans suck. You often don’t know what the fuck you need until you get where you're going. As Brady taught me on the pod last week solvitur ambulando or “it is solved by walking.” This doesn’t mean go for a literal walk to do more overthinking like a lot of dopes seem to think.

No, it means that you solve the path by walking it. You can’t overthink your way over obstacles. You have to climb them. You figure it out by doing it. The way becomes clear once you are there.

Action trumps thinking, hence retardmaxxing.

But if you are trapped in this cycle of learned helplessness you can’t take the forward action necessary to improve your odds of success.

Special Forces aren’t special because they are extremely fit, or excellent marksman, or even especially large dudes. They are special because they are excellent problem solvers. Of course those other things matter too, but only as tools that help them solve problems more quickly and more decisively than anyone else on the battlefield.

And that is the heart of competence. Its skills and ability to solve any type of problem that comes your way. And you can only attain those by putting yourself in a position to have previously solved them or problems adjacent.

The SAS motto is “Who dares wins.”

And that is this whole essay in three words. Talk about articulate. They get it. When in doubt, dare!

Failure, as we’ve seen, comes with a high amount of psychological risk. So managing your failures needs to be high on your list of priorities. BUT, if in doubt, move forward, take action, and have faith. Failure isn’t the enemy. The faster you fail, the faster you can succeed.

This is all ironically what Jordan Peterson was getting at with “clean your room,” but he likes to talk in riddles instead of plain language. Cleaning your room is the smallest win you can stack. The goal is to keep stacking larger and larger wins.

And this is why doomscrolling and the constant glut of black pills online are so harmful. This learned helplessness is baked in. You can now skip step one and two of the failure arc (the attempt and failure) and cruise right on over to low confidence and stasis and depression and excuses.

These learned helplessness traps are all over the place and they get tossed to you all day long. It might be an offhand comment, someone saying adventure is dead, headlines, X threads, Substackistani whiners, general demoralization.

Running for local government won’t solve anything, Anon.

If you don’t reject even the most benign instances of this way of thinking you run the risk of internalizing it, even subconsciously, and you slowly lose the ability to move forward with max confidence and high aggression. The things most likely to allow you to succeed.

So of course adventure isn’t dead. It is literally scattered across the entire globe. But it’s a trite thing that people say which allows them to stay on the couch.

I recently finished reading The Outlaw Ocean by Ian Urbina as part of my research for my upcoming novel Once Upon A Time in Argentina. And one of the things that really struck me, was how crazy and criminal the oceans still are. They are a true frontier in the sense that International Waters are essentially lawless.

You have slaves on fishing boats. You have poaching. You even have eco-terrorists harassing said fisherman. You have piracy and counter-piracy. Floating arms depots for mercenaries.

When people say adventure is dead, that is all cope.

It’s why the “I don’t want to die for Israel” crowd is coping too. But I get it. I understand this is an ironic time to publish this.

But most young men don’t join the military because they want to die for anything, even your freedoms. It’s for adventure and the promise of personal competence. And so if you want to join the military, do it, but do it for yourself!

There is a reason the recruitment statements are things like “Be all that you can be” or “Army of ONE” or even “Army strong.”

The Marines have had “First to fight” or “We don’t promise you a rose garden” or “The Few, The Proud, The Marines” and now, “Battles won.”

The promise of competence is baked into every single one!

But the military isn’t the only place where adventure and competence live. Its all over the place.

When I was vacationing in Key West, me and my bros chartered a boat to go lobstering. The dude on it was super cool and his job was super cool. He got paid to fish, to guide, to be on the water all day and be in the bars all night.

He said he moved there to fish from who knows where. He was a young guy that just picked up and went. He got a job with another fisherman and saved up enough money to buy his own boat. Then he started chartering. Dude was living his dream. It’s hardly an impossible dream. It just required him to dare.

You can just do things.

An engineering degree and a job at SpaceX is an adventure.

Joining the merchant marines or signing up to be a miner in Australia is an adventure. It’s one you can do today.

Hard and exciting jobs are just lying around waiting to be done.

Shit, even if you aren’t militaristic. There are a thousand peace orgs, some shadier than others, that will ship you off to somewhere godforsaken.

The reason I hate this whole “adventure is dead” refrain is because it’s demonstrably false. And its whole existence is as a means of cope.

Adventures are often miserable. They are hard and challenging and heart wrecking. They can destroy your body. They put you close to death.

That’s why it’s an adventure.

It’s easier to just doom scroll and decry the lack of it, to bury oneself in turn of the century adventure fiction as a means of wish fulfillment and coping. And don’t get me wrong. I like my historical adventures. I write them! But they should never become cope. And sometimes I feel like that’s how they are getting used.

“Ah, if only I was born 100 years earlier.”

Really? Losers outnumbered the adventurous back then too.

This is the magic of Taylor Sheridan’s shows and movies. Whether that be Yellowstone, or Landman, or Sicario, or Lioness, or Tulsa King.

He is a master at finding the adventurous in the modern. Most of it involves crime, and all of it is farfetched. But he finds the plausible opportunities for adventure and drama and competence in the modern day, whether its a washed up mob boss in Oklahoma, a landman in Texas, or a mega-ranch in Yellowstone.

I have no doubt he could do a hell of a take on the international fishing industry.

The dude has made oil drilling in Texas seem glamorous and dangerous and adventurous. That’s writing! Whatever you want to say about it. And those types of stories are everywhere if you look for them.

So as the SAS would say—Who Dares Wins! So dare. Dare to do anything, anon. Retardmaxx and full send. Live life and log off. Pick up a hobby. Fifty of them and get gud. Get gud at things in the real world. Get competent at boxing, or jiu jitsu, or working on cars. Get a motorcycle and take a cross country trip solo. Join the Merchant Marines. Join the real Marines. But don’t walk around with a playstation controller in one hand and a phone in the other and say “adventure is dead.”

Of course, what that blurb leaves out is that the desert school is quite literally a hippie commune full of deformed leftist freaks and very attractive white women. In between blanket weaving, poetry slams, and improv they all talk about how evil the traditional, white townspeople are and how peace and love and “just following your passion, man,” would make the world a paradise.

Now, I knew somewhere in the back of my mind that this was liberal/hippie/boomer core. And seeing that it was made in 1971, I knew it was going to be a little libtarded. I did not expect it to be just straight up gay race marxist propaganda. I’m also watching this four days after a leftist terrorist assassinated Charlie Kirk so maybe it struck home a bit harder.

Anyways, this essay is not really about the movie’s politics, we are all well acquainted, having lived under the thumb of these types for the last ten years. What I’d like to discuss is what made it so effective. The left honestly kind of forgot how good it was at propaganda. Because they really don’t make them like this anymore. As a writer, it’s pretty interesting to reverse engineer a weapons grade mind virus.

The opening of the movie begins with a group of cowboys herding wild mustangs into a pen, and then getting ready to shoot them so that they can be sold to a dog food company for 6 cents a lb.

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The line in question and context is below:

With all that said, this essay isn’t really about Bond, but rather, what is downstream of this type of discourse. There is a lot of talk at any given moment about “taking back men’s fiction” or “making fiction that men and boys would want to read” that amounts to a whole lot of pablum. It is well intentioned, but nearly as harmful as the cultural trends its frantically trying to correct. And that is because 99% of the people involved have been almost permanently and irreparably mind-raped by the idea of “toxic masculinity.” We are all caught in the grips of this term in ways that we don’t even recognize. There is this idea that masculinity would be good if we could take all the little toxic bits out, when the truth is, all the toxic bits are what make masculinity capable of doing good in the first place. Taking the “toxic” out is a little bit like taking the alcohol out of beer. Sure, it tastes like beer, but its capacity to either relax you or fuck you up is completely gone.

According to Webster’s Dictionary, masculinity is the quality or nature of the male sex: the quality, state, or degree of being masculine. In other words, it is a biological reality modulated primarily by the sex hormone testosterone. It is not a philosophy, not aspirational, nor can it be toxic, nor can it be healthy. Masculinity is purely a grouping of biological traits. There really isn’t and shouldn’t be any ethical or moral value judgements assigned. To label some aspects of masculinity as healthy is just as obtuse as labeling some aspects toxic.

There is this idea that Masculinity™ is some sort of “build your own” sandwich, where one can go about picking and choosing traits, while adding and subtracting for severity. The biological reality is that High T levels lend themselves to doing two things really well—fighting and fucking. Those things kind of go together. It’s why the United States Marine Corps has a curfew in Japan.

James Bond, whether he is heroic, aspirational, or was even meant to be, exists at one end of the spectrum as an archetype of extreme masculinity. Also James Bond types abound in Special Forces, if we want to talk power fantasies, there are far better examples. James Bond is a power reality. Regardless, he is always horny, always ready for round two, has a license to kill, and is eager to use it. He puts himself in harms way because no one else is as competent or as willing to as him. Why men find him aspirational is readily apparent. This isn’t hard stuff.

He is not heroic in the traditional sense, because he is not doing any of this for the “right reasons” but purely for the love of the game. And that is ok. In fact, that is mostly how heroism comes packaged. And I actually think it is a precursor to all heroism. To try to cut this step out is nonsense and a misunderstanding of masculinity and the heroic.

Paul Zweig in his very well argued book The Adventurer: The Fate of Adventure in the Western World has this to say:

The lives of these equivocal heroes are articulated by a series of dramatic faults. Starcatherus, in the Gestum Danorum, is a dangerous betrayer. The Third Horace, after his exciting victory over the champions of Alba, kills his own sister in a fit of uncontrollable anger. Indra’s career involves a number of forfeits committed in the line of duty, but nonetheless reprehensible. Behind these widely different heroic figures, one glimpses the profile of an archaic Indo-European adventurer god, a profoundly ambivalent character whose gift for violence and extreme action creates a problem for those who need to make use of him. The unruly wanderer, which his mystical vitality has made of him, must be harnessed and tamed. He must be caught in the snare of civilization (Conchobar’s procession of naked women, the harlot seducing Enkidu in the epic of Gilgamesh) before he can be calmed into a hero. Even then the hero form will alter and slip; the archaic energies will reassert themselves.

These are also reasons that I have always found the reluctant hero to be a fairly noxious genre convention and mostly antithetical to Adventure Fiction™. The reluctant hero assumes the classically liberal framing that violence and masculinity is bad (hetero sex is also on a short leash). BUT, to be fair to this trope, a hero is feminized. As Paul Zweig argues above, the man of action must be caught in the snare of civilization and female magiks before he is pliable enough to be a traditional hero.

Modernity has sought to forget this transformation and just simply skip to the heroism. But there can be no heroism without there first being a berserker fury and strength. Now, the reluctant hero amounts to nothing more than a feminist approved version of a hero. All masculinity is toxic, therefore it follows that all heroes must be reluctant. The hero must be reluctant to use his masculine virtue, reluctant to use violence, reluctant to take forward moving action. He is to be bound behind a glass wall of feminine shame and guilt for ever having had masculine traits at all. At least until there is a big enough emergency, then the glass can be broken, and it should only be broken if the emergency threatens the liberal order. Gone are the stories about answering an ad that promises adventure and treasure and tells you to bring money for your own burial. That inciting incident won't do.

We can watch these gender politics play out in Hollywood in hilarious ways. Gone is the fan favorite plot of a heroic man saving or protecting a female love interest. This of course still remains a fan favorite, so you’ll see it snuck into media as a father figure saves daughter figure. It scratches most of the audience’s itch, but doesn’t step on any liberal sacred cows. Namely, that women can do everything a man can do, just twice as well.

But this essay, as the title alludes, isn’t really directed at the ladies. If some of them don’t find Bond particularly compelling, then I can’t say I’m particularly surprised. In fact, I find it very ironic that the debate itself is so indicative of the very metaphysics Zweig laid out above. Women are the TAMING and CIVILIZING force. It’s to be expected. But we can’t forget the ingredients of heroism. We must strive to promote and cultivate the terrifying and destructive energies first, if women and civilization are to have anything to tame into a hero.

And thus this essay is directed at the poor guys who find themselves brow-beaten by a world full of hormone disruptors and estrogenic foods. Men who've been beaten over the head with this idea of toxic masculinity for most of their lives. The natural reaction is to think that one could have it all back if only they could rehabilitate “masculinity.” Perhaps, if we could just make it “healthy” or demonstrate “healthy masculinity” then we can once again have safe streets and live in a place not ruled over by the tyranny of the masses and administered by eunuchs and women. And so we find ourselves with a glut of “Men’s fiction” that is constantly looking back timidly to see if the spector of schoolmarms past is going to rap them across the knuckles for writing something too violent or too horny or too off color. The truth is, you should be writing to piss everyone off so that the people that love you can find you. And if fiction is going to be advertised as Men’s this or that, then it should have tits, and off color remarks, and sexist jokes, and violence. It should have a vitality and virility that makes some people uncomfortable. Otherwise, just call it Adventure or Action or Crime. What exactly is being advertised by the word Men’s!

I am no better, either. We are all trapped in endocrine disruptor hell and we are all at various stages of trying to escape the humiliation ritual. All our heroes have done nothing but apologize for being heroes. All of them are reluctant. The Joker was outright raped because we dared like a version of him too much. None of them have ever been allowed to scare the hoes. And if they do, then they get updated for modern audiences (see the recent James Bond re-printings).

The mind trick that is “toxic masculinity,” is all in its framing. After all, why are you a sexist misogynistic and evil pig, anon? Why did you beat your wife this morning? There is no way to answer these questions without sounding guilty.

It is one small step between this premise, this idea of toxic masculinity, and the DSM-5. Masculinity itself has been pathologized. Again, according to Webster’s, to pathologize is to view or characterize as medically or psychologically abnormal. This plays out all around us in increments and iotas until we are so captured by a disordered world view that our very attempts to extricate ourselves dig us in a little deeper.

Psychotherapy in and of itself isn’t necessarily bad. I enjoy dipping my toes into some Carl Jung every once in a while. What is bad, is the psychologization of everything. We have all met these people. The ones trapped in a hall of mirrors called self help. They use therapy speak and march around with the sort of authority only the most victimized can muster. Everyone in their life is a narcissist or some flavor of sociopath, even though that is statistically impossible. Just last week, they learned what Machiavellianism is from some article in Buzzfeed or The Atlantic about the Dark Triad.

So let’s talk about the dark triad. The dark triad is narcissism, psychopathy, and machiavellianism. Now, my point in bringing this up is not to run apologia for psychopaths and Cluster B personality types. But it is to show you that these labels can be very dangerous political tools when placed in the hands of a society administered by women and low-T men. As such, let’s play a game and rebrand each of these as masculine traits. Narcissism could look like self confidence, honor, or pride. Psychopathy could look like a capacity to commit violence or even an ability to control one’s emotions. Machiavellianism can look like charisma and guile. Odysseus was known for his guile by the way. He was Odysseus the Cunning not Odysseus the upright citizen. In fact, guile might be one of the most overlooked characteristics of a good adventure hero, but that is probably another essay.

Obviously Odysseus belongs to this second category of heroes who are not heroes at all. They share all the qualities of the “moral” hero, but one: they are not loyal, nor are they disloyal. The question simply does not arise for them. Their loyalty is directed towards the turns and chances of their own destinies. We call such a hero an adventurer.

The Adventurer: The Fate of Adventure in the Western World by Paul Zweig

My point here, and the point in the video above, is that dark triad traits in disordered men attract naive women because they look very similar to highly desirable masculine traits (and in some evolutionary situations might even be highly desirable, see Total Neanderthal Death).

Where all of this becomes more than a bit dangerous, is when normal masculine traits get confused for Dark Triad Traits or outright labeled that way because moderns have gotten so soft. Fighting, disagreeability, competition, charisma, cunning, pride, honor culture, hazing—all of these natural and important masculine impulses get curbed and shamed because they scare both hoes and tyrants alike. This also explains why no one is having sex, because it turns out, despite what they say, the hoes like to be scared (see every romance novel ever written).

Young People Are Having Less Sex Than Their Parents Did at Their Age

What we are seeing is a mass infantilization and sterilization of the populace through safetyism and just outright hormonal hallucination. REN speaks on this. And let’s forget masculinity for a second, a whole essay could probably be written on the pathologization of being human. Lower testosterone, round off the corners, and make it gay, that is what is happening nearly everywhere. It’s leaking into our fiction and into our lives.

It’s a bit disheartening to see pearl clutching over hard-nosed characters in men’s adventure fiction. I hate to break it to you, but nobody is buying your youth pastor as an adventure hero. And nobody wants to. Let’s not confuse castration for virtue. The guy that manages temptation by keeping his libido as low as humanly possible through a mix of prayer, Bisphenol A, Doritos Locos Tacos, and a lack of exercise isn’t who we need to use to rebrand masculinity. Onan the Librarian is relevant here. In fact, I would make the argument that he almost by definition can’t be heroic because he doesn’t have the virility and inherent destructiveness necessary to become one.

A low libido and chronic depression doesn’t make you chaste just because you can’t get laid. You want to test yourself against the sins of the flesh, try walking around with T levels that would make a United States Marine blush while dime-pieces throw themselves at you. Then we can talk about your virtue and discipline.

Let’s take Samson in the Bible, it turns out that a man who was strong enough to kill lions with his bare hands and tear through a thousand Philistines with the jawbone of an ass, also had an achilles heel named Delilah. Or King David and his many wives and concubines. Ironically, I just realized that the Philistines primarily defeated Samson by using the feminine sex magiks on him. I’m not advocating for harems here, but I am trying to get across that character flows logically out of biology. High T males are confident, like to fight, and are very horny. None of this needs to be or should be apologized for or censored. It is reality.

This is important for fiction authors why? Because often I see a lot of well intentioned pablum getting tossed around the space and no real ideation about what is needed or even wanted. I’m writing this mostly to work out my own ideas, but also to give anyone listening some ideas as well. We need more executable ideas in the space. Less hyping each other up. More arguments! We have all allowed ourselves to get much too intellectually lazy.

I’m heartened by the renewed interest in Adventure Fiction that I have been seeing all over the place. I also think it’s telling that Adventure has been identified as this sort of lost category of literature and is at least intuitively linked to masculinity and men’s fiction. But I think it’s a mistake to try and conflate adventure and the heroic too closely. I believe the two stand in tension with each other. That tension can’t exist if we are always trying to castrate masculinity and present it as “healthy.” Adventure is almost by its very name, individualistic and self indulgent. Adventurers do it for the love of the game, for the love of danger, and the idea of proving themselves. Adventure is a man’s game.

For the love of all that is holy, let’s just own toxic masculinity. Fuck it, who cares.

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I have been struggling to find a definitional guide to the adventure genre and its conventions for a while. At least, one that I agree with. I find Big Genre’s definitions unconvincing and poorly thought out at their best, and downright subversive at their worst. Regardless, after a couple of years of stewing on this problem, I feel a series of essays brewing. Ultimately, the purpose of this essay is to try and hyperstition new genre conventions, and subsequently a new style of stories.

So for this essay, I want to start with one of the core promises I think a good adventure delivers on—The Cure To Male Loneliness. Hanging with the bros is one of the most integral fantasies a classic adventure should deliver on. This could further codified as a brotherhood or camaraderie theme.

But first, let’s do an autopsy and address some ways the adventure genre has been degraded, erased, and subverted over the years.

Starting with the most obvious, the categorization itself, it is no longer just called Adventure, but rather, the Action-Adventure genre. And in the most egregious instances, just the action genre. Additionally, everyone now thinks that if they put an explosion or a fist fight every third page it makes for grand adventure.

This forms a sort of feedback loop that gets adventure fiction classified as pulpy schlock with little redeeming intellectual value. Or take the idea that adventure action-adventure fiction can’t or shouldn’t be cerebral (Michael Crichton would like a word). Or literary! Think Moby Dick or The Heart Of Darkness. That it should just be car chases, gun fights, and action set-pieces. And on top of this, action often makes for incredibly boring fiction because fiction is all built around tension. Subsequently, action acts as the release valve for said tension. So, if you are hitting the release valve every third page, it all gets a bit tiresome and boring. You can see this phenomena play-out in real time when you fall asleep during the 20 minute action climax of the newest Hollywood slop. The world is exploding and you are asleep, anon. Why? Because it’s boring.

StoryGrid has totally dropped Adventure from the genre tag and just refers to it as the Action genre now. This is tantamount to total erasure for the Adventure genre. And I say that because StoryGrid is ground zero for Big Craft and Big Genre not only in trad publishing but self-publishing as well. You see, StoryGrid is Oz in the castle called “write to market slop.” We can learn a lot by taking a critical look at what normies are being told to create.

Here are the obligatory moments for the Action-Adventure Action Genre according to Story Grid.

You should read the StoryGrid definition, because it’s quite stupid and largely nonsense. And it really really shows not only how misunderstood men are by the industry but how goofy the industry is when it even tries to think about men’s stories. And I am trying very very hard to keep this from devolving into a rant about how literally any and all media that appeals to men has been ritually massacred.

Also can we acknowledge what a recent invention and feminized beat this is.

Imagine Conan or James Bond “lashing out,” like some effeminate prima donna. This was not a beat 80 years ago. It just wasn’t. (I swear if you come at me with some Joseph Campbell mumbly-gook…")

And why under the Action Genre is The Hobbit, Treasure Island, and The Wonderful Wizard of OZ all listed as trope or convention codifiers. All are clearly Adventure stories more than they are action.

We all know that Adventure is a real genre with real fans (mostly men) and we know it when we see it, so then where did it go? How has it been defined away. Lumped in with Action. As stated earlier, the purpose of this essay is to start the process of hyperstitioning new genre conventions, and hopefully now you see why we even need to.

So how do we do that?

Enter what I would like to call the “hangout plot.”

Some examples of the hangout plot would in my opinion be Lonesome Dove, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, and Rio Bravo. Or think about Moby Dick, The Wild Bunch, or Master and Commander. Camaraderie would appear to be a pretty big genre convention, but I have never seen anyone point it out.

In the article A Brief History of the Hangout Film, Jake Orthwein postulates:

“Unlike the traditional, narrative-driven film, the hangout film doesn’t rely on tension to maintain interest. Goal-oriented characters with burning wants and needs are traded for principled ones who are just trying to get by. This difference is not merely a matter of narrative strategy; it’s a different view of life. From the standpoint of the hangout film, goals and conflicts aren’t the substance of life but a distraction from it. The emphasis is shifted from action to reflection, from doing to being. These films take to the extreme the old cliché that “it’s about the journey.” Road pictures, for this reason, often make great hangout movies.”

And this sort of ties together my central contention with the Action-Adventure genre as it stands. Action set-pieces, lone-wolf heroes, plot-plot-plot-and-more-plot, are all anathema to “it’s about the journey.” If Adventure as a genre had even a single tag-line one would imagine it to be “it’s about the journey.”

But apparently its actually:

“Life is preserved when the protagonist makes a sacrifice to overpower or outwit their external and internal antagonists. But death results when the protagonist lacks the courage to sacrifice for the survival of self and others.”

- Story Grid

What kind of bullshit… that’s a definition, but not for adventure?

I am telling you. Adventure as a genre has been systemically undermined and erased. Everything about true adventure is anathema to current day safetyism, societal mothering, and general feminization.

Adventure fiction is and always has been about hard or strong men who go looking for danger because they live for it. That is who they are. They are Gus McCrae from Lonesome Dove. They are Bodhi and Johnny Utah in Point Break. They are The Dirty Dozen, The Wild Bunch, and The Professionals.

It is about answering an ad in Soldier of fortune magazine that looks like this.

Adventure genre has been subverted by people who have either no experience with actual adventure or actively hate the genre altogether. Anyone who has served in the military will look back incredibly fondly on the relationships they made while in, even if it was the absolute shittiest of times. That’s called camaraderie. Camraderie and brotherhood are at the heart of a good adventure. And that requires a group of men. Not a group of people. That is called Found Family, and it’s a fine trope for blue-haired baristas, but that’s not who I am writing for or what I like to read.

The Cure to Male Loneliness

All this to say, the central promise (or fantasy) of the adventure genre is camaraderie. Everyone grasps this subconsciously, which is why it is a meme. But where has it been intentionally codified as a genre convention? The answer is nowhere. At least not that I can find.

And I posit that one way to reinvent the adventure genre is to deliver on this promise and this very masculine need. One that seems to have been erased. The last 6,000 years of civilizational progress has been won by the war-band, the mannerbund, the army unit, the tribe, and the gang. Not the Lone Wolf. We can do away with the lone wolf and the reluctant hero. Or at least less of it. Instead, we need a trusty group of men that can bounce off of each other and bond while going through the shit.

Using the hangout formula we can opt for less plot driven adventures and more character driven ones. Sure, you can still have action set pieces and you still need a plot. But really, what dudes want when they read adventure fiction is the cure to male loneliness. Which means spending more time having your characters just hang-out and be fully fleshed humans. We don’t have to rush around from set-piece to set-piece with no time to breathe. It means taking some cues from the literary world and making the adventure novel a bit more character driven.

Like once a week someone publishes an article about men not reading, and it almost always mentions memoirs as one of the genres that men enjoy reading. Common sense and personal experience tells me they aren’t reading Eat, Pray, Love as much as they are reading military memoirs, gang and crime memoirs, etc. I posit that the reason memoirs are so popular among men is because they are essentially adventure fiction. And a key part of many a good memoir, is the friendships made a long the way.

The adventure genre is ripe for innovation. In fact, it’s more or less completely dead. But I think we can resurrect it. But that starts with thinking critically about what promises stories and genres are really looking to deliver on, who our audience is, and then analyzing where current conventions can be changed.

You have a crush on a beautiful black-haired girl that lives three lodges down, the one with the hour glass shape and the aquiline nose. You think often of marrying her.

The problem is you have no marriage gifts to offer her father. Nor have you proven that you would be a good provider. Your own dad was killed three years ago in a scalp raid on the Crows. You, your mother, and your two sisters have more or less lived off your uncle’s charity for the last few years and soon you will be expected to start making a place for yourself.

While you do have your own horse, a gift from your father when you were eight years old. He’s getting old now, and he’s not particularly fast, and he was never nearly smart or brave enough to be a Buffalo Runner. All this means that even if you want to go on a Buffalo hunt this summer, you’ll have to beg someone to loan you a horse in exchange for a portion of your kills. Your mother already gave all of your father’s horses to your uncle as thanks for his generosity.

But then you hear that Kills Many Bulls is organizing a horse raid on the Cree. It’s just whispered about. You have gone on two horse raids before as an apprentice, though you were not really allowed to participate in the actual stealing. But both were successful, and you’ve grown in skill.

So you go visit Kills Many Bull’s and you make your case to him, you talk about your raids with Talks To Beaver and Red Wolf, where you carried their extra provisions, and mended their moccasins in exchange for their mentorship. You tell him about the coup, your first coup, that you counted on one of the Root Diggers you stumbled upon in the foothills last winter.

And to your relief, he says he’s had his eye on you and your ever growing skill on a horse and with a bow. He says yes…

So now what?

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While writing Medicine Woman, I did quite a bit of research on the Blackfoot Tribe. And in the course of said research, I discovered The Blackfeet: Raiders on the Northwestern Plains by John C. Ewers which I leaned quite heavily on. In it, Ewer’s gives a thorough look at the Blackfoot way of life and war. Especially interesting was his description of Horse Raids, the mechanics of them, and the motivation behind them.

Before I expand on the specifics of Blackfoot horse thieving, some background: the Blackfoot Confederacy, broadly consisted of three bands of Siksiká speaking people—The Kania or Bloods, and the Northern and Southern bands of Piikani. Siksiká being an Algonquian language family.

On the image above, you can see that the Blackfoot inhabited the Northwest plains of the United States and Canada near present day Montana. They were a warrior people, and in the mid-1800s, quite feared by the surrounding tribes like the Crow and the Snakes. The white frontiersmen found them to be equally fierce.

Indian warfare on the plains was rarely genocidal, the Comanche and Apache war being something of an exception, and generally not focused on the capture of territory or the systemic elimination of enemy populations. Instead, the American Indian typically practiced a form of limited warfare, which morphed into horse raids after the introduction of the horse rapidly evolved the Indian way of life.

In the late 1700s, the burgeoning white population on the East coast set off something of a chain reaction in the plains. Tribes were pushed west and as they did so, they sought to displace other tribes already living there.

Simultaneously, tribes were also adapting to the horse, already introduced to the plains from the Spanish in Mexico.

What we end up with then is the introduction of a new military technology at the same time massive existential migrations are occurring. This is some of the context behind the Comanche and Apache war mentioned above. Similarly, the Blackfoot to the North displaced the Shoshone.

But once this reorganization of territories was complete, it appears everyone settled back down into a more limited version of warfare. This likely would have occurred regardless, but disease, or rather the interpretation that it was a curse for hyper-violence, may have also played a role in the natural limiting of warfare as explained in Counting Coup and Cutting Horses.

Evidence suggests that this disastrous epidemic caused the tribes to decrease their warring for a time. Even the belligerent Comanches briefly sought peace with the Spanish. In the northern plains, Saukmappe maintained that war changed after the Blackfeet caught smallpox from a raid on an infected Shoshoni village. He explained the strange disease as the anger of the bad spirit toward his children for overindulgence in war. “We were fond of War, even our Women flattered us to war and nothing was thought of but Scalps for singing and dancing,” he told Thompson. “Now think of what has happened to us all, by destroying each other and doing the work of the Bad Spirit; the Great Spirit became angry with our making the ground red with blood; he call the Bad Spirit to punish and destroy us, but in doing so not to let one spot of the ground be red with blood, and the Bad Spirit did it as we all know.”

Saukmappe defended the opinion, held by at least part of his adopted tribe, that it would be preferable to have less full-scale war that destroyed entire villages and instead concentrate on small expeditions for “cutting out,” or stealing, horses. In fact, Saukmappe said, horse stealing took greater bravery than destroying a small enemy camp because “it required great courage and conduct, to be for several days in the face of a large camp undiscovered; and each of you to bring away a horse from the enemy instead of leaving your own scalps.”

- Anthony R. McGinnis, Counting Coup and Cutting Horses

The horse made war much more dangerous and devastating for everyone involved. Raiders could penetrate deeper into enemy territory, strike faster, retreat faster, and overwhelm any braves that did not have a horse. On the flip side, having a horse quickly became a matter of life and death, and subsequently, having many horses became a status symbol and extreme source of wealth.

With all this in mind, it’s easy to see how the horse raid would become something of a proxy for actual war. While still violent and potentially deadly, the stakes were considerably lower than whole villages going head to head and wiping each other out in mounted charges. A horse raid was a lower stakes game that still rewarded braves with horses, now the dominant form of wealth. Additionally, a horse raid provided war honors, and while still dangerous for the individuals involved, it was not existential at the tribal level.

These raiding parties were typically raised on the fly by some experienced member of the tribe looking to better his position. Every so often, you’ll run across the idea that Indian tribes were big matriarchal socialist utopias and that nobody had to worry about anything, and everybody shared according to their ability and took according to their needs. But, that is hardly true. Just like literally every other group of humans to have ever lived, status and wealth mattered. Wealth and status on the plains may not have looked like dollar bills or a house on the corner, but it still very much existed. Instead, it looked like a healthy herd of horses, lots of buffalo meat, and piles of hides. Scalps and war honors were the same thing as country club membership. Like in our opening example, if you did not have access to good and fast horses, you may be able to survive off familial generosity, but you would never win the girl next door or have the respect of your peers.

Therefore, when a raiding party was raised it was often by an ambitious brave seeking to enlarge his herd and expand his influence in the tribe. Additionally, with increased wealth and status, came increased access to women. In the quote below, you can see the full spectrum of male motivations.

Many of the most active Blackfoot horse raiders were members of poor families who were ambitious to better their lot. They were inclined to take the most desperate chances. Some acquired horses, settled down, and became respected members of the middle class. A few became wealthy. Many lost their lives in actions with the enemy. Most sons of middle-class families needed more horses than their fathers could give them if they were to marry and set up their own households. A few cowardly fellows and some sons of rich young men never went on horse raids. But there were also rich young men who loved the excitement of these raids and coveted the prestige that could be gained through success in war.

- John C. Ewers, The Blackfeet: Raiders on the Northwestern Plains

Often these raiding parties were a chance for the youngest braves, boys in their middle teens, to learn the art of war and prove themselves. Generally, they would play apprentice to the older warriors, carrying extra supplies and doing most of the camp chores in exchange for just being allowed to tag-along and learn. Often, they would not participate in the actual raid, unless it was pulling guard or minding the horses, and thus would not receive any horses for their efforts. And like in our example above, a couple of these apprenticeships under one’s belt and the young braves would be allowed to participate as raiders themselves.

Generally, spring and summer were the favored time for raids. Winter raids were occasionally carried out against other plains tribes east of the Rockies, but never against tribes west of the Rockies. It was believed that enemy tribes were a bit less vigilant in winter. Additionally, a well timed raid could make the harsh weather an ally as a raiding party fled enemy territory. Snow covers tracks quite well.

The leader of the raiding party was typically a war chief or head man, or as the white trappers would call them, a “Partisan.” These were more mature and experience raiders, and often the oldest man in the party. It was also not unusual for this man to be approached by a group of young men and ask him to lead them.

Most of the horse raiding parties were relatively small, numbering a dozen men or less. While large parties did happen, they were also rare. Just as rare, were parties of two or three men.

Interestingly, this size mimics another unit known for stealth and direct action—United States Special Forces. A typical Operational Detachment Alpha (ODA) team or A-Team is often made up of a dozen men. And this size seems to make equal sense whether in the context of a horse raid or rolling up a High-Value Individual (HVI). In either case the group of raiders needs to be small enough to move through the country undetected, yet large enough to put up a fight and survive a retreat after they finish the hit.

A horse raid, much like a special operations hit, would be marked by stealth first, followed by direct action, and then a running fight.

The raid itself was often carried out with the blessing of the Band Chief or sometimes the Medicine Man. The War Chief or Partisan would be responsible for obtaining this permission and informing the Band Chief of the horse raider’s objective and destination.

Most interesting, is that the raid typically started out on foot, because men on foot can conceal themselves much easier. Therefore, the penetration into enemy territory, right up until horses were stolen from the enemy camp, was all done on foot. A dangerous game indeed.

Each man carried a light pack containing several pairs of moccasins, one or more rawhide ropes for catching, riding, or leading horses, an awl and sinew for repairing moccasins, a small pipe with a short willow stem and some tobacco for an occasional smoke en route, and the raider’s personal war medicine. These things were wrapped in a blanket roll carried on the back by a rawhide strap over the chest. Each man also carried his food for the early stages of the journey—some dried meat or pemmican in a rawhide case suspended by a shoulder strap or tied on top of his pack. Each also carried a sharp, heavy-bladed knife in a rawhide sheath at his belt. It served both as a tool and as a weapon. With it he cut firewood and timbers for temporary shelters, butchered animals killed for food, and, if the need arose, silently killed an enemy and lifted his scalp. Each also carried another weapon—either a short bow and quiver of arrows or a muzzle-loading flintlock with shot pouch and powder horn.

- John C. Ewers, The Blackfeet: Raiders on the Northwestern Plains

According to Ewers, this equipment likely weighed a little less than twenty pounds including a rifle. Personally, I find this weight to be a bit far fetched, as the average flintlock would weigh ten pounds by itself, and I can only imagine what a hide or wool blanket would weigh.

Regardless, this was the general makeup of each man’s pack and possibles. As the journey into enemy territory might take the party 600 miles or more, they hunted for game along the way. According to Ewers, the average raiding party could cover around 25 miles a day on foot when moving at a steady pace. Meaning incursions into enemy territory to steal horses would be long and tiresome affairs.

The raiders would typically stop just short of enemy territory and build a war lodge in a thickly wooded place or some other generally well-hidden spot. Here, they would rest up and prepare for the second part of the raid. They would also kill as much game as possible, cure it, and lay up food for the return journey home.

The war lodge acted as a base of operations where the War Chief could wait and send out scouts in ones and two’s to locate the enemy camps and secure vital intelligence for a successful raid. Things such as where the enemy picketed their best horses, where they moved the less valuable horses for night pasture, and vulnerable areas in the camp’s security.

When the scouts located the enemy camp, they watched it from a concealed position long enough to determine its size, the number of men, and the quality of horses. They then returned to the war lodge as rapidly as they could. As they came in sight of their waiting comrades, they approached in a zigzag course, signifying that they had found the enemy. While the leader went to meet them, the others set up a pile of sticks near the lodge. Returning with the scouts the leader kicked over this pile of sticks, and all the men scrambled for them. Each stick a fellow retrieved was considered a prophecy of a horse he would take from the enemy.

- John C. Ewers, The Blackfeet: Raiders on the Northwestern Plains

With the prize located and valuable intelligence gathered, the raiding party would pray for success, sing war songs, apply war paint, and don their war medicine. War Medicine itself deserves an essay that I am sure I will write one day, but I’ll try to be brief.

You can think of “medicine” as “magic.” These were magical totems, often feathers, but sometimes shirts, necklaces, weapons, or even whole lodges which were believed to be imbued with magical properties by dream or the shaman. For example, a buffalo shirt that ensured no arrow could hit its wearer or a necklace that influenced the weather.

Typically, this medicine or magic came with ritualized prescription for maintaining the magical item, for example, never letting it touch the ground, hanging it in certain places and at certain times, and specific and sacred dances associated with activating and maintaining that specific item’s magic.

Medicine could be transferred from one owner to another, or even traded for, and it often was. Additionally, the item’s sacred dances and specialized rituals would be passed along with it. Fathers and uncles could pass medicine down to sons and nephews. Head men could trade medicine off in exchange for horses or other gifts. The gifting and trading of medicine was a source of pride among warriors, and it was seen as a great boon to grow old and have held and used many different medicines.

Additionally, Medicine and the creation of magical items often originated in the dream world. Instructions on how to make and decorate the item would be transmitted in dream via an animal helper or some other member of the supernatural world, as well as instructions on the ritualized maintenance of the item. Upon waking, the dreamer would then go about creating the item.

This is where the western fiction trope of killing the leader of a war party to stop the attack originated. No doubt actually occurring and then being ported into fiction. I’m not sure the average western audience grasps the mechanisms of said trope. It’s not that Indians were cowards or put so much stock in their leader, but that they believed in magic and more importantly their leader’s magic. A key part of leading a war party, in addition to experience, was the perceived strength of the leader’s medicine. So when our trusty Cowboy draws a bead on Chief Pakawa who is wearing his magical bullet proof shirt, and the cowboy then blows him out of the saddle with a cool squeeze of his trigger, the rest of the party would indeed be terrified. That Cowboy just broke the Chief’s medicine. How much stronger is the Cowboy’s medicine then?

Back to the raid, you and your friends have successfully navigated into enemy territory on foot, built a base of operations, and located the enemy horses. Zero hour approaches. You now head for the enemy camp.

You move at night and conceal yourself during the day. You may have applied cottonwood sap to yourself earlier, or rubbed sage over your clothes to mask your scent and make the horses easier to lead off. The smell tickles your nose. Just before dawn, you and your fellow raiders make your move.

You distract the enemy camp’s dogs with little scraps of meat taken from the pouch at your waist, your only food if you get separated, and you pray none of them start barking, and if they do, that they don’t wake anyone.

You then cut away the finer horses picketed in front of their owner’s lodges while some members lead away some of the pastured herd. Depending how greedy the party is, and how successful the first attempt at horses goes, the party may leave the stolen horses with the apprentices they brought along and go back for seconds.

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It is not a question of if the theft will be discovered, but when, for even if you and your fellow raiders get away cleanly, the missing horses will be discovered as soon as the camp wakes up. Therefore, the getaway is a matter of speed and stamina, with the first two or three days being the most important and the most dangerous.

Horses in hand, you must now cover hundreds of miles with only a few hours lead on your pursuers. Pursuers that will kill and mutilate your body if they catch you. Your scalp will be someone else’s trophy. Your nose and ears cut off and made into trophies. Your body left for vultures.

The first day out, there is no stopping except for the most minor breaks and maybe a quick smoke. The tobacco steadies your nerves and fine tunes your senses.

You do not stop to sleep for the night, and instead continue riding. You eat dried meat and pemmican in the saddle, and only pause long enough to swap to a fresh mount. You ride like this for three days and two nights. The second night is the worst, but by the third day you are in good spirits, somewhat loopy, but on your third wind and quite sure that you are invincible. Your animal helper visits you, loping alongside your horse. It is wolf. He encourages you to keep riding and tells you that the raven-haired beauty back at camp waits up for your return.

Obviously, driving such a herd of horses under duress is a very troublesome experience, so you and your fellow raiders are prepared to leave any horses that are too troublesome or slow you down.

Kills Many Bulls eventually feels that you are sufficiently safe now that you are two or three days out from the enemy camp. Regardless, you have slept no more than three hours in that time, and must stop soon any ways. You all stop for your first overnight sleep, catching a full seven hours before departing ahead of the rising sun.

You ride onward, coming to the war lodge. You stop briefly and retrieve the meat and supplies you laid up for the return journey back.

Another two days of riding and you will be on the edge of Blackfoot territory, back on home soil. You have not seen any of the Cree that you stole from and you are thankful for that, but part of you was spoiling for a fight. Part of you wishes the beautiful dun you ride atop was draped in Cree scalps. You wonder if they even followed at all. And if they didn’t, is it because the party secured most of the fast horses or because the Cree are all cowardly.

Solidly in Blackfoot territory now, Kills Many Bulls calls a halt. You divide the horses, each raider making claim to as many as he feels are obligated. Some feud and squabble over the finest horses. Kills Many Bulls settles these disputes with a harsh word, and in one case, his fists.

Now for the final leg of your journey home, you and your fellow horse raiders will travel at a more leisurely pace, and before getting to your home village, you’ll stop to paint your faces and will again don your war medicine.

My older Blackfoot informants, men who had raided for horses, could not recall that any Blackfoot party had brought home as many as one hundred horses, although they knew of parties that had driven off more than that number from enemy camps. Forty to sixty horses was considered a very good haul.

- John C. Ewers, The Blackfeet: Raiders on the Northwestern Plains

You then ride into the village shouting and shaking your fist. Your face is painted black and red. Some of your comrades fire off guns. You drive before you the stolen horses. Three of which are yours, fine ponies. One even seems fast enough to hunt buffalo. It’s a respectable start to a horse herd. Probably not enough to gift the father of the black-haired beauty you long for, but it’s a start.

The women stand outside their lodges laughing and smiling at your return. The braves that stayed behind come to greet you and admire the sturdy animals you’ve brought home. Some look jealous, and their looks fill you with pride.

Now that you are home, the horses will be further distributed. Some will be given to family, such as fathers or father-in-laws, and some to the band Chief.

Young members who have traded for war medicine on loan, will repay their benefactors with promised horses. The youngest members would now have some experience under their belt, and may try to secure medicine of their own and go as proper raider themselves on future ventures.

And as for you, you start planning for the next raid. Another one and you may be able to make a play for the girl smiling at you across the victory fire.

As always, thank you for reading. If you enjoyed, you may also like my new novel Medicine Woman.

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“Gur-na”was a word of hatred and horror to the people of the caves, for creatures whom the tribesmen called “gur-na,”or man-apes, were the hairy monsters of another age, the brutish men of the Neandertal. More feared than mammoth or tiger, they had ruled the forests until the Cro-Magnon men had come and waged savage warfare against them. Of mighty power and little mind, savage, bestial and cannibalistic, they inspired the tribesmen with loathing and horror —a horror transmitted through the ages in tales of ogres and goblins, of werewolves and beast-men. They were fewer and more cunning, now. No longer they rushed roaring to battle, but cunning and frightful, they slunk about the forests, the terror of all beasts, brooding in their brutish minds with hatred for the men who had driven them from the best hunting grounds. And ever the Cro-Magnon men trailed them down and slaughtered them, until sullenly they had withdrawn far into the deep.”

— Robert E. Howard in Spear and Fang

Them & Us is one of those books that scooped me up, held me high, and then pile-drived me straight into the ground. As in, I couldn't stop reading it, and now, two weeks later, I am still thinking about it. I am a notorious grazer. I like to read eight books at once. Not the case here. I devoured this book in a three day haze, and rose again wanting to write Cro-Magnon Blood Meridian.

The nexus of psychology, anthropology, war, storytelling, myth, and of course, primitive man fighting hideous monsters was special made for me. This is what I imagine Michael Crichton would write if fiction wasn’t his muse.

The Coen Brothers' putting "This is a true story," on the opening title card of Fargo also comes to mind. This book would work really well as fiction, but it works even better if you are allowed to believe it is entirely true. Which brings me to my next point. I am not remotely qualified to evaluate the ideas in this book based off of their biological science or the archeological evidence.

However, anthropology and psychology are both fake. I don't make the rules. So on those fronts its all fair game.

I kidd.

But really, I am but an author with a lot of niche interests who likes to read about myths and legends, believes oral traditions are often good primary sources, has read a few books by Carl Jung, even more about primitive peoples, and at one point in my life watched way too many episodes of Joe Rogan.

On the other hand, Danny Vendramini, the author, bills himself as a theoretical biologist. However, a bit of a deeper dive into his background, and we discover that this is but a second or third career. He has also had successful careers as a theater director, film director, and scriptwriter. Which sort of explains why his theory of Neanderthals helping to force-evolve a peaceful-ish hominid into Conan the Barbarian includes a "dark night of the soul" beat just before the third act. And while this is probably a serious strike against him among serious scholars, I don't believe it should be.

You see, many fields of study (archeology, anthropology, and psychology) have all been totally captured for years. Both ideologically and intellectually captured, wielded as political bludgeon by bow-tie academics who have never been in a single fight in their lives. That someone challenges some of these stale notions should be welcomed.

There has been a movement in the last 100 years to erase primitive man's more base impulses and replace him with a nature loving, pacifist fiction. A fiction most recently perpetrated on the American Indian. One must spend little time with primary source materials to discover many a hard and warlike people that did not need any help conceptualizing rapine and genocide prior the arrival of the “white man” (whoever that is). For example, Indian Depredations in Texas will give you plenty to think about. So will Empire of the Summer Moon.

Personally, I find the pacification of Native history by bow-tied and oft liberal scholars to be the insult to the injury of actual pacification. Dressing up the implicit conqueror vs. conquered message in aggrieved morality speak only makes the message more diabolical. Take a people's land and life, ok, but when you take his heroes and his history, you no longer have a man, but a docile victim incapable of ever conceptualizing fighting back.

War Before Civilization: The Myth of the Peaceful Savage by Lawrence Keeley is another good book that puts up a fight against modern anthropology tropes, because that really is what a lot of modern "science" is. Carefully concocted tropes. Fictions that have all the trappings of well written stories—beats, tropes, and messages replacing theory and facts. That the trope is headlined by the word Abstract is often the same as a Coen Brothers title card.

This effect cuts both ways.

And all that is prelude to say, Them & Us is an excellent and much needed book if only for the fact that it dares inject some creative theory-spinning into a stale and totally pacified past. A past that we are closer too in our souls than we are far away from.

Act One

The basic premise of Them & Us is that Neanderthals were far from being the anthropomorphized brother species that modern scholars would have you believe. Neanderthals were not just slightly dumber humans, who we (for no reason at all) savagely wiped out with superior social technologies and more advanced weaponry.

No, they were more like wolves with knives. Literal planet of the apes stuff.

Like this:

Or this:

Or this:

I can tell you… if whole clans of those things tormented my people for years and then I discovered the bow, I'm not stopping until they are gone. Total Neanderthal Death. By the way, how horrific these things were is probably the most well supported idea in the book. And thats important to note because the rest of the theorycrafting builds on this notional terror.

The rest of the premise is that a bunch of hominids that were mostly omnivores had pushed up from Africa and were hanging out in the Levant, which would later be known as the Lands of Milk and Honey, and were just living their life like monkey people do. Having sex out in the open, going into heat once a month, occasionally raiding another familial clan for females (like chimps), hunting a bit, gathering a bit, and generally living in caves.

Then from the great white north of present day Europe came these things. These orcs, these wild men, these boogey men — these mosters. They started to push down into paradise and slowly started displacing their brother species via both actual predation and sexual predation. These orcs were likely covered in hair, nocturnal (red eyes), scent-hunters, and cannibalistic. Basically everything humans are instinctively scared of and disgusted by.

Act Two

So over a period of about 50,000 years, these omnivoric hominids, after years of running, hiding, and fighting from these terrifying monsters, evolved into something a bit more human. Cro-Magnon man. A more gracile hominid, capable of sprinting away from these things. A primate that bathed and wore clothes in order to control its scent. The only primate where female estrous occurs internally. And gradually, this new primate got a bit smarter and a bit more traumatized by this pre-historic hunger games.

Now a lot of this smacks of straight up Lamarckian evolution, but it’s not. Not really.

There is a bit of that magic going on in the subtext but not enough to discount the ideas Vendramini is exploring. All evolution reads like magic to some extent. Central to Vendramini'sprocess is an evolutionary bottleneck (which very much appears to be supported by the archeological record) and TEEM theory.

We will start with TEEM theory, which seeks to explain where instincts come from in the human animal.

For example, a baby chick will cower and run away from the silhouette of a hawk, but won't react to the silhouettes of other birds. Keep in mind these are baby chicks that have never seen a hawk. Where do those instincts come from? Clearly, predation has left both a genetic and psychological mark.

It's hard to deny that Man. Man who prides himself as Apex predator now, also retains much of his prey psychology. Isn't this what it is to be human in some way? This duality of man. Both victim and victimizer. Both predator and prey, all at once. Man who is terrified of the dark, and has long identified red eyes as evil. [Red Eyes being caused by light reflection off the tapetum lucidum, a protective membrane in nocturnal eyes.]

But back to TEEM theory. Teemosis, according to Vendramini, is a way for adaptive environmental information to be encoded into DNA without contaminating the genome with a bunch of nonsense data. The trigger for this theoretical process is powerful, traumatic emotions generated by stressful environmental circumstances (predatory attacks, sexual encounters, accidents and misadventures) genetically encoded into an animal's ncDNA. Once encoded, these traumatic emotions (teems) become heritable and provide offspring with an emotional memory of a traumatic event.

Now, this theory seems to be original to Vendramini, and it seems ridiculously plausible. Especially, when stacked up against Jung's ideas about dreams and the collective unconscious. To be scared of the dark and monsters is a universal human experience. That archetypes live within us is abundantly clear. Now none of this connection to Jung was mentioned. Scratch that, Joseph Campbell gets referenced quite a bit, who was mostly working off Jungian ideas. Regardless, to anyone familiar with these ideas, the connection is profound.

And so let’s see how this supposedly works. Let’s name our hominid ancestors Lucy and John. Lucy is chased by a terrifying ape-beast with a flint knife and somehow escapes. This experience is encoded into her DNA, and she passes a very strong instinct down to all of her offspring that causes a fear or disgust response every time they see something vaguely hominid (uncanny valley and AI discourse anyone), covered in hair, sporting bulging eyes with snake-like pupils, and having a hunched posture.

The human propensity to see faces everywhere and the ability to read micro expressions seems relevant here.

Subsequently, Lucy's daughter is probably not going to want to mate with Greg, who is the hairiest of the clan and has a hunch to his shoulders. And so sexual selection combined with teemosis creates a powerful vector for humans to get less hairy, more upright, and have more prominent noses, and generally look less and less similar to neanderthals and other hominids. Thus the first beauty standards were born.

Assuming Lucy is caught by the beast and carried off to his cave. And in a daring feat, escapes, but comes back pregnant. John's teems from this experience mean he and later his sons, will kill any baby that comes out a bit too hairy or a bit too wide in the head, or just generally doesn’t look enough like a “man.” This is artificial selection and the birth of philosophy (iykyk).

Now you also have natural selection going on in the background. Hominid Bob is kind of dumb, and a bit too curious. Dead. Or Greg, who refuses to bathe in order to minimize scent. Dead. Or Jane who goes into external estrous and is a bit too sexually liberated. Dead.

Lucy and John start having sex in private, multiple times a month (estrous is now internal), specifically in the missionary position because doggy style is too beast-like, and so things like proto-monogamy, proto-romance, and patriarchy start to naturally become a thing. Lucy must also be controlled and protected because she is a vector of attack and species extinction via hybridization.

And let's say all this death and predation just escalates until you end up with about 50 to 100 of the species left, trying to carve a life out of nothing in some hidden valley. What you have is an evolutionary bottleneck. This occurs when numbers drop so low that traits get bred into a population instead of bread out. And so genetic drift becomes extremely limited. This was the "dark night of the soul" beat by the way. What emerges is a pure-bred human.

Act Three

Regardless, these are the four evolutionary mechanisms Vendramini proposes as Meta selection: natural selection, artificial selection, sexual selection, and genetic drift. When combined, they give rise to an entirely new species of primate forged in an especially hot predation furnace. Cro-Magnon Man. Or at least something like him.

An interesting sidenote, was Vendaramini's observation that most animals are suprisingly susceptible to shock. Most all die in heavy percentages when captured, or tortured etc. Even most other primates aren't as trauma proof as humans. But not man. We have shock-proof nervous systems. Capture us, enslave us, starve us, bind us up, cook us in a wok—we still won't die of shock.

We are a pretty depressive and neurotic bunch though. A bit skittery and always on edge, like most prey animals. I guess some things never go away.

Anyways, Cro-Magnon with his trauma proof nervous system and his lady on a leash rises out of this evolutionary bottleneck like a phoenix from the fire with a better brain, a penchant for ultraviolence, and an especially strong disgust/hate reflex for anything that looks remotely like a neanderthal or an “other.” Thus xenophobia or the “fear of strangers and outsiders” is born.

After getting his shit kicked in for 50,000 years man learns to fight back.

And scrap we do.

"The strategic adaptations which I propose played a pivotal role in humans gaining the upper hand over their historical enemy are a disparate lot. They include high intelligence, cruelty, male bonding and aggression, language capacity, the facility to interpret intention from behavior, organization, courage, guile, conjectural reasoning, a genocidal mindset, improved semantic memory, consciousness, competitiveness and the ability to form strategic coalitions, or proto-armies."

Vendramini argues that there is not an adequate anthropological model to explain the human preoccupation with the hero's struggle against the forces of evil. However, in the context of an adversarial struggle between two sibling species, it makes sound evolutionary sense.

Bloodlust Teems

Courage, bravado and proactive aggression are normally anathema (or last resort) to prey species. From a survivalist perspective, it makes more sense to be timorous and cautious. But, because killing Neanderthals would require hand-to-hand combat, getting into close contact required courage, audacity and even self-sacrifice. Gradually, timid defensive individuals lost out to a new breed of aggressive, courageous, tough-minded individuals.

It is not difficult to see how a 'blood lust teem' could be encoded. If a group of Skhul-Qafzeh men came across a wounded or infirm Neanderthal, they might easily work themselves up into a highly agitated state and beat him to death before pounding his corpse to a pulp. This kind of frenzied excitement (observed so frequently among wild chimpanzees) could generate enough excitement in one individual to precipitate a directed (or teemic) mutation in an intron (the nonprotein-coding region of his DNA). If the affected intron happened to be on his Y (male sex) chromosome, the bloodlust emotions he experienced during the melee would be permanently encrypted into his ncDNA and subject to patrilineal descent. Once inherited by male descendants, the archived bloodlust emotions could precipitate the same kind of reckless and frenzied aggression.

Only in this specific and atypical ecological context were reckless daring, proactive aggression and self-sacrifice adaptive behaviors. When it came to fighting Neanderthals, risk-taking became both a laudable human attribute and a functional adaptation. In this context, foolhardy machismo and reckless bravado became laudable heroism. American anthropologist Joseph Campbell once said, "A hero is someone who has given his or her life to something bigger than oneself." And, while the great cause was genocide, for those Skhul-Qafzeh humans it would have been a noble cause. Heroic males would not only be praised and appreciated as altruistic and self-sacrificing by the folk they defended, but would also be highly sought after as sexual partners by admiring females. Even today, research shows that when choosing a mate, women place significantly greater importance on altruistic traits than anything else.

Thus, the nascent genes for courage, altruism, self-sacrifice—indeed for heroism itself—dispersed through the community, transforming the Levantines from a timorous prey species into a proto-militaristic tribe.

In this world, machiavellian intelligence, psychopathy, xenophobia, courage, ultra-violence, creativity, gender differences, division of labor, and organization all start to take on adaptive functions. What is strange is how much of human behavior and peculiarities start to make sense when viewed through this theory.

"The enormity of the task was mind-blowing. For a timid prey species to turn the tables on the top predator on the planet would require the reversal of an ancient and well established predator-prey interaction and would almost certainly have been unprecedented in the animal kingdom. Humans had to evolve into a militaristic species, the likes of which had never been seen before. They would have to become more intelligent, ruthless, cunning, aggressive, cruel and determined than their lethal adversary—become a new super-warrior species with one specialist skill: to kill neanderthals."

And it would appear we did. The age of man began, and continues, marching on towards the future. Someday we are conquering mars. And then we are going to launch a fleet to the Centauri system and wipe out the Grays.

Why is most every culture inundated with myths and legends about sexually devious wild men carrying off fair maidens to some den or cave and subsequently needing rescuing by some upstart hero?

Why is every man’s fantasy to die in a gap?

Why is camradrie such a powerful male emotion?

Lots of questions this theory deftly answers.

An aside on myth and story:

I imagine the lasting popularity of the Planet of the Apes movies could be traced back to these very primal teems. This is anecdotal of course. But I’ve always felt the movies tug on something especially ancient.

In the original, with Charlton Heston, when we first catch sight of humans being herded like animals into nets by Apes on horseback, tell me you didn't feel some sort of deep primal urge. Fear and loathing. The need for a hero.

The humans look so fragile. So gravile in comparison to the apes. They look like prey.

Also totally would… save her.

Or why did this song, originally made to be satirical, become an underground hit.

I hope you are listening. Doesn’t it stir something up inside of you? Don’t you want to light a cigarette, take a deep pull, and wait in the gap while wife and kids escape behind you.

Or for the same reason the most popular male-centric fantasy franchise in recent memory is the Imperium of Man wiping out populations of demons and aliens.

We don't have to get into female fantasies. Mostly, because this is already long and I'm running out of time.

I kidd.

Really, I joke around.

Ok, last one.

I can keep going. You should see all the werewolf romantasy covers I could have inserted here.

And I know that might seem bad taste for a pretty heavy topic, I hope not, and hopefully humor makes it more palatable. But my point is that clearly something very terrible happened to us at some point and we have not been the same since.

Something engrained these urges towards Shakespearian tragedy and Faustian victory. We have been roleplaying that last stand at the evolutionary gap ever since.

And that is perhaps what makes this theory so much fun. It’s such a cohesive framework of ideas, that you can throw pretty much anything at it, and it sticks. For the extremely intuitive thinker high in openness, Vendramini has created a conceptual playground for explaining the peculiarities human behavior.

Modern Man

Some closing thoughts. I don't know how to square Neanderthal theory with Creationism or even God, and I won’t attempt to. Really, don’t feel the impulse too either. I believe man was created by God, and I also think he is governed and influenced by natural processes. It’s also fairly clear there was some type of human population outside the Garden of Eden in my reading of the biblical text.

But, my point is that even if you pick up the book and don’t agree with any of it at all, its still reads as a pretty dramatic origin story for humanity and damn good speculative non/fiction.

I don't think you can square anything totally. I also don't think that humanity was forged in a vacuum absent biological and evolutionary forces. And we also know lots of things can be true at the same time. And sometimes, multiple things can be true that don't appear to gel on their face. I'm not really here to herald the factuality of this book nor to decry it. But I do think he’s onto something.

And that doesn’t mean all of this went down exactly like Vendramini supposes, but I do think some of it is plausible. Most of the book is speculative even if well researched and logical.

Teem theory is perhaps his most interesting insight. Discovering a biological pathway for the sort of collective unconscious we instinctively know to be real (because we are accosted by it every day and night) would be a pretty big deal.

Vendramini seems to get a lot of hate in reviews and around the web as some sort of crackpot, which to be frank, seems very unfair. But that is the world everyone lives in now. One stifled by credentialism, ideologues, moralizers, and character assassinators. Loopholes are the game. Double-standards the lever of power. Truth, owned by whoever can manufacture it the fastest and the cheapest. That this book is littered with references and research, and contains a hypothesis that passes the gut check, will not matter to the unimaginative, the ideologically driven, or the average redditor.

It truly is a hypothesis. One I would like to see taken seriously, tested, and picked apart. Preferrably, in good faith.

Certainly, his credentials could be more robust. But simultaneously, I'm not sure how many evolutionary biologists would truly grasp the deep connections between theory and myth that he seems fascinated by. His background in story obviously lent itself to a unique perspective. It’s this unique perspective and a willingness to test new ideas, and new theories, even when outlandish, that is the traditional core of science. Btw, this is what “diversity is strength” actually means. Variety of perspective.

I also think this book takes a realistic view of human impulses, the good the bad, and the ugly. Much of human behavior, behavior that often makes moderns uncomfortable, such as jealousy, patriarchy, xenophobia, adventure, courage, and guile have all been evolutionarily adaptive. And often remain so. That we have self-domesticated and come up with circuit breakers for male aggression seems obvious, necessary even, but what happens when all the lions are lambs and the wolves with knives show back up in some new form or another? Simultaneously, this does not mean higher things aren’t reachable.

For example, racism and xenophobia only appear to become a net negative for a people group when nations become multi-ethnic economic zones first and countries second. Ethnic coherence be damned. This is one of the reasons projecting classical liberal and progressive ideals back in time is largely disingenuous and unfair. Our ancestors conception of reality is and was entirely different than ours, but no less robust, and was perfectly adaptive to the environment they found themselves in. Being too open to strangers, being naive, being more open to an out-group (that itself holds in-group preferences) than ones own tribe or clan has for most of the human experience been maladaptive.

Law and order was a social technology that allowed us to escape this zero sum game of survival. Equal under the law is largely an American innovation for a reason (don’t you dare pedant me in the comments). And it is also why the breakdown of law and order is so gut wrenching and terrifying to watch. Absent good and fair laws, we stare at a crowded jungle.

Tragedy is the death of potential. Hope is law and order.

This is unsurprisingly seen in how our founding myths have continued to evolve. The knight slaying the dragon and rescuing the damsel, was to some extent, displaced by the western with its sturdy and upright Sherrif entering stage right to clean up the town and uphold the value of the law. There have of course been many myths and legends in between. Yet all these eventually fade, and in the distance, the jungle, that wild plain, encroaches.

And a thanks to and his very good review (When Orcs were Real), which is the reason I even discovered this book.

A portion of my curiosity can be ascribed to the fact that “they just don’t make westerns like they used to,” and there’s a lot of reasons given that ultimately strike me as nonsense. Reasons like audiences got tired of it—which is a pretty blatant lie given the “The Great Rural Purge” of 1971, when CBS killed off most of its western and rural focused programming. This is also the excuse given for the imminent death of the superhero genre. And talking heads believe they’ve stumbled on some great new point when they draw the comparison. But I believe, they ultimately miss the forest for the trees. Audiences are exhausted, they say, while paying very little attention to what made the genres important and popular in the first place. That audiences might not like the new “western myth” or the new “superhero myth” being proposed is given very little attention.

I believe the western, as cowboy myth, operates on two levels. It works as a feedback loop, between American history and contemporary American society. There’s an important caveat with that last statement. There is the way contemporary society is and the way the talking heads, the media, the NGO’s, the whoever you want to blame at any given moment would like you to believe it is. Faking consensus is the foundation of most modern society. The feedback loop remains mostly organic. If you change the fundamentals of a story and it dies, this should be viewed as society rejecting it. If you change the fundamentals and it succeeds, you have now evolved the myth, you have found some spiritual truth that deeply resonates with a majority of the populace or a fandom.

This is important for writer’s and artists alike because you can’t create great art or change culture by moving backwards. Time and culture moves in one direction, forward. There are branching paths, of course, but it never moves backwards. Change is constant.

Ultimately, I believe the so called "death of the western" has less to do with it going out of style than it having been evolved into a dead end, much like the rest of American culture over the last fifty years. The anti-western truly was an apt myth for its times. But death always comes before rebirth, and I think the western will return, but it won’t look like the Traditional western that started it all or the anti-western that ended it all. It will look more barbarous, more dangerous, and again be apt for our times.

The Western as Myth

Central to the western mythos is the concept of Manifest Destiny. Manifest Destiny being the belief that American settlers and by proxy the American Republic was destined to expand westward and tame the continent. While this helps us establish the central theme of the western myth, some may find it hard to contextualize manifest destiny in the contemporary for the sake of our feedback loop. For this task I submit another word: progress.

John Truby in his book The Anatomy of Genres keys in on this central theme of the western and describes it as society vs the individual.

"Here lies the fundamental contradiction of the western hero: in blazing a path to the wilderness, the cowboy makes it possible for others to follow him and build the nation. The common people creating their homes out of the dystopian land are like the Israelites wandering in the desert. The cowboy hero is Moses."

Another way to think of this idea: A strong violent horse barbarian, in order to protect the woman he loves (who is most likely the daughter of a farmer), must stop a gang of other strong and violent horse barbarians from preying on the weak farmers. With this frame, we can immediately see the western as the anthropologically ancient story that it is, with farmers being the harbinger of civilization. Again, the idea being described is progress, or in this case civilizational progress.

In the book Comanches: The History of a People, T.R. Fehrenbach makes the argument that the introduction of the horse actually stunted the Comanche's civilizational progress. Hunter-gatherers are almost always preoccupied with survival, so much so, that they have no time or reason to build villages, much less cities. Farming is a first step on the tech tree towards civilization. This is doubly true when condemned to a nomadic life on foot. Necessarily, the evolutionary pressure of starvation then pushes some bright young man to come up with the idea of growing food instead of chasing it all over hell and back. Farming provides a food surplus. The people can survive the lean winter months off what they've grown in summer. They also no longer need to constantly move to new hunting grounds. This means permanent structures make sense, which leads to villages and eventually cities, and thus—civilization.

In fact, the Native Americans, broadly speaking, had already made this leap with the Mississippi Mound Culture established around 1200 A.D., which led to one of the largest native cities ever founded on the continent. The remains of this ancient city is known as Cahokia and its remains are preserved near modern day St. Louis.

By around 1400 A.D. this civilization collapsed for reasons that can only be speculated on now—drought, war, or the civilizational decay that necessarily follows human sacrifice. In some ways, the natives found at the time of European contact could be thought of as post-apocalyptic survivors, but aren't we all if you go back far enough (I long for Atlantis to return). Three apocalypses take place in the first eleven chapters of the Bible. Humanity’s story is one of collapse and rebuilding. Losing and conquering. From darkest night to brightest day, and back around again.

Regardless, the (re)introduction of the horse in the late 1600s meant that the Comanche no longer felt the evolutionary pressure to ever become farmers. The horse transformed them into ultra-violent super predators capable of treating the Buffalo herds as their own grocery store, and their neighbors 800 miles away as luxury boutiques for such things as more horses and women. They were also one of the only tribes that fought mounted and selectively bred their horses. They were so fierce that the Spanish, who conquered the Aztecs, decided it may be best just to leave them alone. Had the Comanche not met the Anglo-Saxon and German settlers flooding west in the 1800s, it does not seem farfetched to say that the next Genghis Khan could've been Comanche.

Digressions aside, by using the word barbarian we can see the Western's ancient roots. Structurally, it is quite an old story. It is the story of civilizational progress and the strong individual’s role in bringing it about. This is one of the reasons The Magnificent Seven could so smoothly adapt Kurosawa's Seven Samurai, almost beat for beat, and still be considered a quintessential western. Indeed, East does meet West.

Interestingly, Story Grid actually classifies the Western as Western/Eastern Genre. And from them, we find the central question that the western seeks to answer: "Is the autonomous, self-reliant individual in society dangerous to law and order or necessary to protect the powerless from tyranny?"

Put another way, and combining these two ideas—how does the individual relate to society and how does that affect civilizational progress?

Narrative Structure’s Role in Myth

As mentioned previously, I believe the western, as cowboy myth, operates on two levels. The first as a way of understanding American history, and the second, as a way of understanding and navigating contemporary American society. For a genre to be a best-seller it has to first and foremost operate on the latter level, by recontextualizing the contemporary in terms of the past. What I am not talking about is deconstruction or rewriting history, although this sort of structural analysis can and has been used for those ends. Deconstruction of myths is the real reason “the western is dead,” and supes are on life support. But once a myth dies, the answer is not to reanimate its corpse in the form of pastiche and parade it around like a weekend at Bernie’s. No, it has to be fundamentally remade, reconstructed in a way that satisfies the feedback loop that exists between our times and the past.

Progress is neither good nor bad. It is both simultaneously. That is the tension at play in the western. How the individual relates to society, and progress, is the central question the western strives to answer. What makes an emotionally satisfying answer to this question, thus fulfilling the purpose of myth and fantasy, looks very different depending on the current relative strengths of the individual in relation to current society (or its proxy in the form of government).

While I have been circling this idea for a while, it wasn't until Will Wright's book Six Guns & Society: A Structural Study of the Western published in 1975 that I read my own roughly-hewn thoughts repeated back to me. Wright takes issue with the anthropologists and scientists who say myth does not exist for modern man, as modern man has literature, science, and history to explore the world around him and no longer needs myth.

I tend to agree with this take, and would even go so far as to say Conspiracy Theories are valuable, broadly, as a form of modern myth, explaining spiritual truths and providing story context to a nonsensical (via information capture and institutional gaslighting) and increasingly hostile world. But again, likely for a different essay. The primary value of story and myth is to teach people how to navigate situations. The idea that modern man has no myths is absurd when they exist all around us.

Wright outlines four variations of the western myth which he then ties to the "attitudes implicit in the structure of American institutions" occurring at the time of their evolution. Wright takes a very economic facing approach, one that I feel takes too narrow a view on modern man and his relationship with society, yet I find his structural analysis very useful. Wright also identifies Four Axis on which the Western myth turns:

1. Inside Society/Outside Society

2. Good/Bad

3. Strong/weak

4. Wilderness/Civilization

Also important to Wright's framework is the idea of Narrative Sequence, which can most quickly be identified by the Inside Society/Outside Society axis and to some extent the wilderness/civilization axis. Good/Bad and Strong/Weak are important, but primarily act as weighted values on the social participants and the outcome.

The Classic Western Structure (1930 - 1955)

Wright correlates the narrative structure and the time period of the Classic Western structure with that of a market economy. The individual starts off clearly distinct, and separate from society, often even lower than the social group he is trying to enter: think the ex-gunman, drifter, outlaw, saddle tramp.

"Thus, in the classical western we have an aristocratic tendency with a democratic bias. Under threatening circumstances it is reasonable and proper to rely on a strong, elite group of men; but when the danger has passed, they must become equal with everyone else, a requirement, in fact, they have been fighting to ensure."

"Above all, it is an egalitarian society where no one, except a villain, sets himself apart from others. All are legally and morally equal, and though abilities differ everyone is assumed to be decent and kind. This is the society the hero chooses to join by surrendering his unique position of status and power; and this renunciation is necessary—if the hero did not give up his status, society would be different. If he maintained his position, the hero would change its egalitarian nature and create a powerful and undemocratic elite."

Below is the Classic Western Plot:

1. The hero enters a social group

2. The hero is unknown to the society

3. The society recognizes a difference between themselves and the hero; the hero is given special status

4. The hero is revealed to have an exceptional ability

5. The society does not completely accept the hero

6. There is a conflict of interests between the villains and the society

7. The villains are stronger than the society; the society is weak

8. There is a strong friendship or respect between the hero and a villain

9. The villains threaten society

10. The hero avoids conflict involvement in the conflict

11. The villains endanger a friend of the hero

12. The hero fights the villains

13. The hero defeats the villains

14. The society is safe

15. The society accepts the hero

16. The hero gives up or loses his special status

"This is the bourgeois ideal of a society based on interaction and communication as well as the concepts and actions of market individualism... "Equality"—the natural claim to status and power followed by the voluntary relinquishing of it—constitutes a remarkable narrative tribute to the strength of this bourgeois view of the "good society."

In short, the Classic western and its variations structurally support the fundamentals of a democratic republic and market economy. You can see the myth of George Washington embedded in the ending. The hero relinquishes his special status at the end, much the same way Washington supposedly decided that two terms was quite enough for any one man. America was to be ruled by an elected leader, not a king, and when the time came he voluntarily stepped down and reintegrated with the rest of the citizenry.

In the Classic Western, the man of action puts down his gun, steps down from his position as leader and hands the reins of governance back to the inept and weak town once it is saved from the villains. His happily ever after is quite often the transition from horse barbarian to longhouse, as there is quite often a love interest involved to facilitate this transition. In its most base form it is the aspirational tragedy of self domestication. The wilderness dies to make way for civilization and society.

The Vengeance Variation (1955 -1960)

1. The hero is or was a member of society

2. The villains do harm to the hero and to the society

3. The society is unable to punish the villains

4. The hero seeks vengeance

5. The hero goes outside of society

6. The hero is revealed to have a special ability

7. The society recognizes a difference between themselves and the hero; the hero is given a special status

8. A representative of society asks the hero to give up his revenge

9. The hero gives up his revenge

10. The hero fights the villains

11. The hero defeats the villains

12. The hero gives up his special status

13. The hero enters society

Here we have a variation of the Classic western, except society and progress are a bit further along. The hero starts as a member of society. Domestication has already taken place. He suffers some wrong at the hands of a villain, and society or the law is too weak or is already too corrupt to enact justice. So the hero rewilds, separates himself from society, and seeks punitive action against the villain.

Ultimately, the hero often gives up his revenge by the end, thereby upholding the values of a liberal democracy. That he is still forced to fight and kill the villains, is necessary for an emotionally satisfying ending, and another reinforcement of the classic western theme—fighting and killing is ok in the name of protecting the weak. Now he is doing it for the “right” reasons and not personal satisfaction.

The pillars and morals of the classic western remain intact. The feedback loop between the western and contemporary society where the rule of law is valued and respected is ultimately upheld even though it was originally questioned.

Most notably the Italian spaghetti westerns rejected this American variation in favor of a much more aristocratic ending. The hero takes his revenge and gains his own personal satisfaction, refuses to reintegrate into the weak and corrupt society, and rides off into the sunset, usually with a whole pile of gold bars or the price of a bounty. That this caused pearl clutching about amorality and violence in America is no surprise. The Roman Empire remains in all our hearts and minds.

Transition Theme (1950-1955)

Wright picks out a mere three films here as logical transition films from the Classic Western plot to that of the Professional Plot. The transition theme is a reversal of the Classic Western Structure. Where the Classic western maps a heroes path from estrangement to acceptance by society, the transition film maps the heroes journey from acceptance to estrangement with society. Wright submits High Noon, Broken Arrow, and Johnny Guitar as these three transitional films. In these movies society starts off strong, so strong in fact, that it is more powerful than either the heroes or the antagonists, and society itself is revealed to be the "big bad." Here the villains merely serve as plot device while society takes on the role of villain.

Broken Arrow and High Noon are both classic westerns, even if they ultimately come to the conclusion that the individual retains the moral high ground and decides against society. The pre-cursors for the anti-western exist here, in that society is irredeemably corrupt and weak and will eventually overwhelm the individual, but by keeping the hero a moralist, it manages to still uphold the classic western values. Remove the moral hero, and you would have an anti-western.

Professional Plot (1958 - 1970)

1. The heroes are professionals

2. The heroes undertake a job in return for money

3. The villains are very strong

4. The society is ineffective, incapable of defending itself

5. The job involves the heroes in a fight

6. The heroes all have special abilities and a special status

7. The heroes form a group for the job

8. The heroes as a group share respect, affection, and loyalty

9. The heroes as a group are independent of society

10. The heroes fight the villains

11. The heroes defeat the villains

12. The heroes stay (or die) together

It is the Professional Plot where we really start to get into anti-western territory. The Wild Bunch or Butch-Cassidy and the Sundance Kid are both westerns that use the professional plot, but ultimately decide on an anti-western theme. Typically, an anti-western requires that the heroes die at the end (my rules). And usually it is a meaningless death. The Magnificent Seven is a classic western with a professional plot, where a majority of the heroes die at the end, yet it is not an anti-western. This is because of the moral arguments being made. They die to save the society or Mexican farmers. The kid even gives up his dreams of being a gunfighter in order to become a farmer and marry the señorita he has fallen in love with, thereby fulfilling the demands of the Classic Western. Yul Brynner and Steve McQueen while they don’t integrate into society, move on like the wandering ronin they are, voluntarily stepping down from their position of power in the village.

Structuralism

More from Wright:

"In most analysis (anthropological), the primary interest has been in the social symbolism of the myth rather than in the movement of the story, the conflicts and resolutions of the plot. The narrative aspect of the myth has been taken for granted as a necessary framework for the expression of the symbolism, not particularly interesting in itself; like the stadium for a football game, it is useful for the game but does not need to be included in the commentary. By stressing the narrative structure of the western, I have tried to show that it is through the narrative action that the conceptual symbolism of the Western, or any myth, is understood and applied by its hearers (or viewers).”

“When the story is a myth and the characters represent social types or principles in a structure of oppositions, then the narrative structure offers a model of social action by presenting identifiable social types and showing how they interact. The receivers of the myth learn how to act by recognizing their own situation in it and observing how it is resolved.”

“Thus, it is in the narrative structure that the relationship between a myth and its society is most apparent, and it is because they have generally ignored the narrative dimension that most commentators on myths have interpreted them as revealing universal archetypes, biological traumas, or mental structures [he's taking shots at Jung and Freud here] rather than as conceptual models of social action for everyday life."

Now, Wright never mentions Joseph Campbell, who of course wrote The Hero with a Thousand Faces and condemned us to a billion permutations of the Hero’s Journey ( yes, I like a good hero as much as the rest of them), but they both appear to be speaking the same language. Campbell was much less concerned with archetypes than say someone like Jung, and much more concerned about the narrative structure and sequence of events that made up the heroic journey. In a way, Wright is attempting to accomplish the same thing here with regards to the Western myth.

"But for this very reason, history is not enough: it can explain the present in terms of the past, but it cannot provide an indication of how to act in the present based on the past, since by definition the past is categorically different from the present. Myths however, can use the setting of the past to create and resolve conflicts of the present. Myths use the past to tell us how to act in the present. In tribal societies, since the mythical past is the only past worth knowing, myths can stand for history. In our society they cannot, but they can fulfill a major function, which is to present a model of social action based upon a mythical interpretation of the past."

Keep in mind this book was written in 1975, far before “woke” culture was explicit, but definitely came after the cultural revolution of the 60’s. To those sick of the culture wars, every time Wright mentions "social action," I am sure it grates on the ears. I was unable to pick up on his personal political leanings, even if he does throw around the term bourgeois. So ultimately, I’m not sure if I have stumbled onto a Marxists university dissertation reprinted as a book on Western cinema. Probably, its a coin toss. Personally, I don't think he was approaching this analysis from a Marxist framework, but rather a purely structuralist one as it relates to myth and contemporary economic society. And overall, while I disagree with some of his correlations and analysis, I think the framework he provides is quite useful.

Simultaneously, this is quite obviously a structuralist analysis of the Western. Structuralists hold that reality can only be understood by the wider systems that shape individuals and events. Structuralo-Marxism is a school of thought that attempts to fuse the ideas of Marxism and structuralism. Now that is not to say that Structuralism is inherently Marxist, but Marxism tends to be inherently structuralist.

When we start talking structuralism, especially in the context of story and myth and subversion and social action, that should clue you in to how story and myth are subverted and colonized by the politically organized.

It's also possible to take issue with Wright's presentation of history as objective fact. If that was true, there would be no reason for certain political forces to actively attempt to rewrite it. By rewriting history, they are attempting to subvert the myth or even erase it all together. So called "message fiction," from the left or right so often fails because it wears its message on its sleeve. While I am no advocate for message fiction, I'm neither so naïve as to assume that all art isn't in some sense inherently political, either purposefully or subconsciously.

To truly plant seeds for “social action” in the minds of a reader or viewer, the message must be buried deep in the narrative structure—at the level of myth making. That is how you build culture or subvert it. That is how you edify or weaken. That is how you create mind viruses. Just because the blockbuster propaganda of today is sloppy does not mean it always was. Structuralism has become very important to Leftism, because it allows them to deftly deconstruct "enemy myths" the same way a crack team of ethnically ambiguous demolition experts might target the key beams in a skyscraper. But if we view structuralism as a tool for analysis, then we also start to see how it can be used to reinvent myths that jive with the time.

The problem with deconstruction is that it just kills a myth or story off. It doesn’t replace the story with a new one with lasting power. This is why we can have fifty years and one million iterations of the Classic western plot, but only ten years and a handful of anti-westerns before most everyone moves on from the genre altogether. For a story to have the sort of timelessness that gives it lasting power, it has to tap into some sort of inherent and optimistic truth.

For those looking to rebuild culture, it begs the question, can structuralism be used to rebuild or tweak new systems or new stories? Has this myth already organically started to emerge? Are outside forces trying to strangle it in its crib?

Anti-westerns

The Western is a good genre if reasonably done. It’s a morality play, and it went along that way for 100 years. I contributed to its downfall when I made The Wild Bunch. But notice, since we made it, almost all Westerns have gone to ultra-violent.

L.Q. Jones on his role in the Wild Bunch

Defining an anti-western is a messy science. Things get especially squishy when you start coming at it from a structural point of view. Things also get squishy when a protagonist displays homeric virtues but not liberal ethics.

In my opinion, it requires two main things from a structural point of view:

• Amoral or villainous protagonists.

• Society as the enemy

• The protagonists die in the end

In my opinion, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969) and the Wild Bunch (1969) would probably be the templates for a structural anti-western. Ironic and telling, that both of these closed out the end of the culture revolution in America.

All kinds of westerns get classified as anti-westerns that I don’t believe belong there. There is an argument that any western that rejects the basic tenants of a liberal democracy is an anti-western, which is how you get lists filled with spaghetti westerns, or The Outlaw Josie Wales, Pale Rider, Unforgiven, and modern neo-westerns like No Country for Old Men, Hell or High Water, and Sicario.

The Outlaw Josie Wales is one of my favorites, and structurally it is 100% a red blooded Classic Western right down to the hero reintegrating into society.

No Country for Old Men definitely qualifies as an anti-western. The chaotic nihilism of Anton Chigurh playing stand in for modern society. The death of Llewelyn Moss. And the ineffective and terminally confused Sheriff Bell succumbing to time and progress itself.

My ultimate point is that we have to draw lines and try to carve out the placement and story beats and themes that turn a western into an anti-western if we are to start playing around with the myth and shaping it into something new. Or even defining that something new when it emerges.

Unforgiven, Hell or High Water, and Sicario are that something new in my opinion. Perhaps, even a bit ahead of their time in the case of Unforgiven. I think they represent an evolution of the western myth in a new direction.

The Returning West

Unforgiven (1992) would like you to believe it’s an anti-western for most of the whole movie. It spends almost its full run time picking apart the myth and the tropes that make a classic western. Society and its laws are corrupt. The hero was a murderous outlaw. Killing is meaningless and not cathartic. The west was nothing more than a legend. In short, everything about the myth is rotten to its core. America was built on a lie. If this was truly an anti-western, William Munny played by Clint Eastwood should die at the end in a blaze of glory and the Sheriff and the town should go on being corrupt.

But that doesn’t happen. The whole movie does a heel turn in the last 10 minutes. William Munny marches into the Saloon and lays down the law at the end of a gun in some of the most cathartic violence you’ve ever experienced. The whole argument the movie has spent the last two hours making is flipped on its head.

“That's right. I've killed women and children. I've killed just about everything that walks or crawled at one time or another. And I'm here to kill you, Little Bill, for what you did to Ned.”

It should be noted also that although William Munny was a murderous outlaw, he reformed after marrying his wife (now dead), and tried to become a better man. Whether this change actually stuck or not, or is possible, remains the central question of the movie throughout.

After Munny kills the corrupt Sheriff, played by Gene Hackman, and his acolytes, he begins to ride out of town but before doing so shouts that if they ever get out of hand again, he will ride back and burn the whole thing to the ground. The final scenes are Munny returning to his farm. Again, outside of society.

It should also be noted that what finally breaks this dam of violence loose on the corrupt town isn’t the whores that were cut up, or even the pursuit of the bounty, its a homeric loyalty to his friend Ned who’s body decorates the Saloon. It is Justice’s primordial father vengeance. The hero does not integrate into society in the end, or even give up his place as aristocratic avenger. His promise to come back and burn the town down demonstrates as much. No, he stands outside society as an avenging angel. The strong and violent individual who acts a balancing force against society and its petty tyrannies.

Hell or Highwater makes a similar argument for the supremacy of the individual and even the family unit. The whole movie is set against the backdrop of the 2008 recession and the corrupt banking institutions that have absorbed and subjugated the common man. The protagonists are bank robbers, with limited qualms about who they shoot back at. The Texas Rangers are the “good guys” who carry water for a fundamentally corrupt society built on the back of usury. The movie is half-western and half-crime thriller. It ends with the hero getting away. He uses the bank money to buy back the land that has a lien on it, just in time to lease the mineral rights and position his progeny on piles of generational wealth. He does not die (although his brother does), and the law does not win. In short, the movie asserts that providing for one’s family is a higher moral ideal than protecting usurers.

Where an anti-western demands the individual hero lose against the march of progress and an increasingly corrupt society, this new western shows how the individual can win. He wins by returning to more base and barbarous moral systems and leverages violence and wit against the society in order to recapture or protect his sovereignty.

Sicario is much the same. Kate Macer, played by Emily Blunt, is the face of law and order. She is an FBI agent, a girl boss. She is the face of modern society and its institutions. But the frontier is pushing up from the border. As society grows more weak and inept, the edges begin to rewild. What is needed to quell its advance is pragmatic and targeted violence. Again, revenge fills in for justice in the form of Benicio Del Toro’s character Alejandro. The Cartel has murdered his family. He is now prosecutor turned hit man for the CIA. That he was a lawyer demonstrates quite viscerally how the law has failed to do its job in the face of this rewilding. And when justice is finally doled out, Alejandro kills the Cartel leader’s whole family. This is a return to the primitive. An eye for an eye is taken. A lineage is wiped out and the earth is salted.

I don’t believe anyone has tried to classify these westerns or these stories, maybe the argument that they are significantly different from what has come before has not yet been made. That they have been immensely successful and popular, demonstrates a positive feedback loop between contemporary society and the myth that holds a new valuable truth.

If we were to try to boil down this type of westerns basic parts, it would almost be the anti-western but reversed. Perhaps, we could call it the reactionary western or the Rewilding Plot. But I think the recipe would turn on the following structural elements:

• Society and the law have lost legitimacy in the eyes of the individual

• A strong individual must return to more primitive moral systems to win; perhaps even homeric virtues (physical prowess, courage, loyalty, guile and the fierce protection of one's family, friends, property, and, above all, one's personal honor and reputation).

• The ending reinforces the value and sovereignty of the individual over the needs of the society. In short, society may remain corrupt at the end but the individual triumphs and leaves it a bit weaker or somehow changed while seperating himself.

I think the key to understanding this new sort of myth is to understand how it relates to contemporary society. Ask yourself, how does the average American relate to society and governance at large. A Republic for the people and by the people, hardly seems like a good faith understanding of what America looks like to most people post 2001 or 2008. Corporations, banks, and global NGO’s now seem to be bigger power players in the American government than any one group of little old citizens. But instead of an all powerful monstrosity, the empire appears to be crumbling at the edges. Every day, new gaps in law and order appear. Important institutions appear to be crumbling under a competency crisis. The average citizen is crushed by debt. Everywhere, people consciously or subconsciously recognize that things are slowly getting worse.

The frontier is reemerging, and it needs new heroes and new thought processes. New paradigms for navigating treacherous waters. Whether we know it or not, we feel like the Mississippi mound builders watching as our civilization of dirt slowly passes away, and on the horizon a new breed of warrior (re)emerges, from a time before our corn and human sacrifices—the horse barbarian. Men of old. This is the anxiety of our time, the feeling of it, and this is what the new western myth demands us to reflect.

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