My ventures in attempting to lift myself up by my bootstraps led me to videos filled with hyperbolic exhortations aimed at motivating young men just like me. “Absolutely everything that happens in your life—whether it’s good or bad—is completely your fault,” typifies the rhetoric, in this instance as delivered by Andrew Tate. “If it rains tomorrow, I am responsible for the rain,” says Tate, “I could have looked at the weather forecast and flown to another country to avoid the rain.” More inflammatory and entertaining than figures such as Jordan B. Peterson or Joe Rogan, Tate regularly dispenses wisdom that is scarcely distinguishable from the absurd.
The basic message of this brand of hypermasculinity is this: if men stop blaming their parents, oppressive systems, or other circumstances for their problems and start taking complete responsibility for their lives, they will achieve their goals and find fulfillment. Among other things, bootstrapping plays off a voguish reactionary backlash against progressive commitments to such things as gender sensitivity, diversity, and inclusion. But while bootstrappers regard liberal progressivism as little more than an enfeebling variety of delusional thinking, they engage in their own form of delusion-mongering—this one aimed at strengthening the individual through sheer willpower and internal fortitude. But can one realistically hope for one individualistic delusion to cancel out or correct another?
Taking personal responsibility for one’s life is certainly not simple. “Men make their own history,” Karl Marx famously wrote in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, “but they do not make it as they please … but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.” So, to grapple with the simplest of facts: my life, my freedom, and existence itself are neither entirely the products of my own making nor the results of systemic forces alone. They emerge, rather, out of the unpredictable interplay of both. Put simply, they are gifts. Such an awareness of the givenness of things has helped me to see past warring ideologies, whose greatest error is perhaps their tendency to make their adherents take themselves too seriously.
Adventures in the manosphere
My first foray into bootstrapping came while listening to podcastress Anna Khachiyan describe Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as emblematic of the “normalization of pathological narcissism.” “Beware,” warned Khachiyan, echoing the musings of the American historian Christopher Lasch, “of the manipulativeness of affluent college students who were neglected by their parents, who turn everything into a stage for their psychodramas.”
I once happened upon a viral reel of ‘AOC’ proclaiming at a town hall meeting that the imperative to lift oneself up by one’s bootstraps “started off as a joke,” since to do so would be “a physical impossibility.” Though I knew this comment was made with regard to the plight of the economically disadvantaged and of racial minorities, I must admit to having appropriated such an argument several times to my own advantage.
“I think that all millennials,” continues Khachiyan, “especially the ones that are drawn to political involvement or activism in this day and age, contain shades of sociopathy [and narcissism],” especially those who were “overly empowered in all the wrong ways” and whose parents told them “how great they were and bought them shit and invested in their education.”
Khachiyan distinguishes her non-American upbringing from the Congresswoman’s, focusing on the vastly differing ways their respective fathers’ early deaths shaped their growth. “I look at somebody like AOC and think, ‘wow, you’ve learned nothing from this earth-shattering experience that should remind you that you are ultimately unimportant,’ and that the only way to live is in service of other people.” She contrasts authentic service to those in one’s immediate surroundings—offering examples like caring for her newborn baby and her boyfriend or becoming a reliable friend—from a “rhetoric of altruism” which is the projection of a “need for attention and validation onto other people in the guise of pursuing social justice or a moral crusade.”
Having recognized myself implicated in Khachiyan’s accusations against the generation of which the Congresswoman is symbolic, I took up experimenting with the precepts of bootstrapping gurus like Peterson, such as standing up tall with my shoulders back and making my bed every morning. Yet I could never really take myself seriously when doing so. I briefly attempted taking on arduous regimens of exercise—listening to the idiocies Andrew Tate espoused in his motivational videos and guzzling my pre-workout blend to an attempt to “get pumped” for my next training session. But the sight of guys next to me at the gym flexing in the mirror for their Instagram posts caused me to burst out in laughter.
The specter of the nerd
Men, we are told, are most affected by the culture of victimhood, and those most in need of lifting ourselves by our bootstraps. Too many men, claims the pseudonymous Internet sensation known as the Bronze Age Pervert, carry themselves like insufferable nerds. “Nietzsche said manliness is the first requirement of the philosopher, but there’s no one farther from the philosopher than the unmanly nerd,” writes ‘BAP’, who has made a name for himself by repackaging Nietzschean thought for the contemporary world (though his reliance on caveman-speak and explicitly racist tropes diverge from the acumen and subtlety that can be found within Nietzsche’s work).
The numerous videos of Peterson crying about how society furthers the plight of men make me sad. Well, they also make me laugh … not so much because he’s a nerd or a sissy, but because he sounds awfully similar to those to whom he so often puts himself in opposition. For someone who is so keen on responsibility and stoic strength, and who is so harshly critical of harping on social issues and pointing the finger at the moral failures of others, Peterson sure seems to enjoy indulging in the same attention-seeking ploys of his imagined opponents. But the Peterson crying videos mostly make me sad for him because of how seriously he takes himself, and how rarely, one finds the man laughing. These videos also make me think of something even sadder than—as Slavoj Zizek once remarked—how difficult it is to “elicit from [Peterson] a joke”: the life and death of Friedrich Nietzsche.
Self-reliant bootstrapping rhetoric draws heavily on the Nietzschean exaltation of the Ubermensch and the will to power. Yet ironically, Nietzsche’s death was sadly unNietzschean. Lonely, physically ailing, driven to madness, and plagued by an “urge for the truth” (which he “so detested”), he found himself calling into question the worldview he constructed upon the rejection of all external authorities.
“Individualism” claims G.K. Chesterton, “kills individuality.” While perhaps formulating a subjectivist paradise devoid of “pure” objective rationality, Nietzsche opened the door to a form of individualism that led to a new extreme of impotence and feebleness that the Enlightenment might never have reached. Peterson’s dour temperament, juxtaposed with the well-adjusted temperaments of the jovial Chesterton and the vivacious Zizek (who unlike Peterson, as Amber A’lee Frost reminds us, “actually f*cks”), testifies to the death of individuality under the tyranny of individualism.
Looking beyond individualism
To base one’s moral compass on lived relationships with real people outside of one’s head, rather than on abstractions of their selfhood or of “humanity” broadly speaking, seems to be both a necessary and perplexing conundrum. The self, for Chesterton, was perpetually caught in a tension whose dynamic was relational. Existence and freedom are not to be harnessed and regulated, nor outsourced and relieved of responsibility. They are gifts … and at times curses, but always given, implying a relationship between a gift-giver and the self as receiver. “Most modern freedom is at root fear,” writes Chesterton, “It is not so much that we are too bold to endure rules; it is rather that we are too timid to endure responsibilities.” Responsibility for Chesterton is not so much a matter of lifting oneself up by one’s bootstraps, but a response to the One who gives one his existence. Thus, we are faced with Chesterton’s ability to hold together the paradox of the power of free will, but also its fragility and limitations.
One of the best known of Peterson’s twelve rules for life is to “set your house in perfect order before you criticize the world,” starting with the simple task of making one’s bed every morning. I never particularly enjoyed the act of making my bed, but as I’ve made a habit out of it, I can say that I enjoy looking at a clean and beautiful bedroom. This act of starting my day with beauty has in a way become a gesture of gratitude for the gift of waking up another day, which I’ve come to accept that no amount of bootstrapping responsibility rhetoric can guarantee me. It turns out that the awareness of the givenness of things is a much better motivator than the grating voice of Jordan Peterson urging me to “take charge of my life.”
Manosphere discourse is quick to gloss over the fact that it usually takes intimate, interdependent relationships with those who exist beyond one’s head to activate and sustain the proper use of one’s freedom, and that it is precisely in said relationality that human freedom finds its fulfillment. I’d dare to conjecture that many young men find in Peterson’s books and videos not so much rules for getting their lives in order but rather a proxy father figure to look up to and make them feel like their existence actually matters.
The parasociality that drives Peterson’s success might seem in some ways kind of pathetic, but it also reveals something important about what young men are seeking. “Because our expression is imperfect,” says Chesterton, “we need friendship to fill up the imperfections.” This intuition about the frailty of human freedom and its need to be guided and sustained by the concrete presence of another (rather than an abstract ideal or outsourced to a distant impersonal mechanism) was central to the political vision of Chesterton and other Distributists like Hilaire Belloc, Dorothy Day, and Peter Maurin. Perhaps less known for their ideological musings and more so for their practical vision and on-the-ground efforts, these proponents of a communitarian society, which avoids the extremes of both individualism and statist interventionism, saw the tension between the freedom and “the system” to be full of hope and opportunity.
Day, who founded the Catholic Worker movement with Maurin in 1933, once observed that many prefer “getting aid from the state … to taking aid from their family. It isn’t any too easy … to be chided by your family for being a failure … They prefer the large bounty of the great, impersonal mother, the state.” And yet, Day insisted that “no matter what people’s preferences, that we are our brother’s keeper … that we must have a sense of personal responsibility to take care of our own, and our neighbor, at a personal sacrifice.”
Self-Deprecation as Self-Help
Aside from being unrealistic, bootstrapping ideology and the self-help industry are boringly self-serious, reminiscent of those who John Ruskin feared “dwell only on the duty of self-denial but exhibit not the duty of delight”—a line Day referenced on numerous occasions. Yet not all who peddle self-help suffer from such dourness. In an interview, novelist Sean Thor Conroe half-jokingly referred to his novel Fuccboi as a self-help book. Fuccboi tells the story of a thirty-something year old trying to “investigate this whole thing” (meaning “masculinity under late capitalism”) and “to toxic-masc his way through it.”
An interviewer writes that the book “is the story of a man cracking up because he’s a man.” Conroe himself is just as keenly aware of the “cracks” in his lifestyle as he is willing to “crack up” at himself. “A lot of that book is from a place of, like, Nothing matters. I’m f*cked up,” he said. “And, you know, I was f*cked up.” The interviewer goes on to tell us that Conroe “recently moved to Brooklyn, where it’s quieter. He’s playing a lot of basketball. He’s taking cold showers.”
“I’m on my body-fascism sh*t … That was a joke,” he assured his interviewer. Conroe’s self-deprecating brand of irony is dismissed by some critics as an amoral form of nihilism or self-indulgence. But it seems to be that his refreshingly unapologetic lack of self-seriousness is what enables him to begin to look at his strengths and weaknesses objectively and begin to live with a legitimate purpose.
“Any quick perusal of the self-help section of a bookstore,” writes academic Matthew B. Crawford, “teaches that the central character in our contemporary drama is a being who must choose what he is to be, and bring about his transformation through an effort of the will. It is a heroic project of open-ended, ultimately groundless self-making.” Crawford concedes that while his book The World Beyond Your Head “has therapeutic implications,” it primarily aims to provide “an occasion to examine the big anthropological picture we have been operating within since the Enlightenment, and to revisit the question of how we stand in relation to the world beyond our heads. Anything less far-reaching would be inadequate to the challenges we face.”
Ironically, it has been the figures with a self-deprecating sense of humor that have allowed me to take my life more seriously—which is to say that they have taught me the essential lesson of taking myself less seriously. The simple ability to laugh at my weaknesses, rather than to earnestly correct them by the sheer force of will power, has helped me to appreciate the marvelous gift and tragic folly that is my freedom and to value its incontrovertible connectedness with things, people, and forces “beyond my head.”
To conceive one’s responsibility as an actual response to external forces, to allow my freedom to be elicited by what Chesterton would call the element of “surprise,” is risky business indeed. It implies forging relationships and making commitments to things and people who exist beyond my control. It’s no wonder so many of us prefer the allure of total self-reliance or, as Day insisted, to accept support from the impersonal “mother State” than from one’s kin. Day remembers once walking out of confessional “feeling stupid” for “how wrapped up I had become in myself, in my words, in my reputation.” Of course, we must commend the moral fervor of both stringent bootstrappers who want to improve their lives and impassioned social justice warriors who want to correct systemic failures. Yet the ironic reality is that it tends to be the people who are more full of self-deprecating humility (and humor) than moral seriousness that demonstrate a greater capacity to change both themselves and the world around them. That, and they tend to make for more pleasant company. May we all aspire to get out of our own way and receive the gift of our own existence, in all of its complex beauty and stupidity.
