Alle Lust will Ewigkeit—,
—Will tiefe, tiefe Ewigkeit!
All desire wants eternity—,
—Wants deep, deep eternity!
Friedrich Nietzche
I have written once before about Andrew Tate. With any luck, this will be the last time I mention him. The influence that he and his lesser imitators in the ‘red pill’ sphere have had on a generation of young, impressionable, spiritually malnourished men is considerable. The problem is that this influence, whatever its rare merits, is often misunderstood by a conservative movement starved of allies in the TikTok shadow-realm as a triumph for the kind of traditional virtues we wish to defend and affirm. The preening bombast and the lewd language get explained away as an eyeball-maximising bug, rather than an essential feature, of a predominantly wholesome message. Even if they do boast more in the way of street-smarts than academic credentials, Tate and his ilk come to be viewed as, in effect, a pantheon of jacked Jordan Petersons.
But these are not conservative men. On close inspection, it becomes clear that the talismanic figures of the online red pill space—Andrew Tate, Myron Gaines, Justin Waller—are not trying to raise the moral stature of a disenchanted world. What they offer, at best, is a loveless how-to guide on navigating a post-moral world.
Resignation is the prelude to their peculiar form of preaching. The bastardised ghosts of Nietzsche, Machiavelli, and Darwin lurk behind their acquisitive, unmistakably modern ethos. Nietzsche’s will to power, Machiavelli’s emphasis on manipulating the contingencies of fortuna in pursuit of personal advantage, and the Darwinian imperative to survive and reproduce by whatever means—these, so far as I can tell, are the sole measures of excellence for a red piller. Our field of action is flattened and desacralized. Not having been called to anything higher than this isthmus of a middle state, all we can do is meet existence on its own harsh terms—and that means playing to win, whatever winning looks like, at all costs. There is an amoral, if not always unintelligent, cynicism to the red pill proclamations on life, career, and sex.
It must be admitted, these people have their limited uses. As should be apparent, the red pillers have no time for political correctness. This can make them seem like a refreshing corrective to the way in which the feminization of men has weakened our civilisation and made the inhabitants of a decadent West more vulnerable to top-down control and social engineering. They encourage young men to reclaim their masculinity, to strive for success, and to take on the burdens of an adventurous, high-octane life. It should come as no surprise that this message is resonating in a culture which, at least according to the dominant narrative, demands that young men—many of whom feel neglected, apathetic, even invisible—apologise for their apparently illicit privileges and prostrate themselves before the altar of equity.
That said, there is more to being a conservative than not being a frumpy egalitarian. A virile philosophy of untrammelled self-actualisation might upset blue-haired finger-waggers, but it also makes a mockery of the conservative premium on duty. The language of sacrifice, piety, and service is degraded on the red pillers’ selfish, materialistic, and in the final analysis unloving account of human existence. Life becomes a game in which only the task of survival at a minimum, and augmenting our own power at best, can serve to fuel and orient us. Anything outside this amoral framework—anything deemed womanly, sentimental, or otherwise rooted in lily-livered idealism—gets dismissed as an impractical diversion.
The result is a hard-nosed, proudly anti-emotional variant of social Darwinism. A dispiriting picture then takes shape. When an ant dies for the sake of the heap, really—according to a Darwinist like Richard Dawkins—this is just the selfish gene in action, willing to dispose of one instance of the genetic organism in order to preserve the larger species of which any particular ant is a dispensable member. To invoke the word sacrifice, to eulogise the way in which our ant laid down his life for his friends, would be to misattribute to this insect the kind of agency that makes moral language intelligible. Yet if man is likewise no more than an earthbound creature, without wings to rise or a heavenly Father to summon us for such an ascent, why should moral concepts not also lose their meaning when we refer, not to the behaviour of ants, but to our own dealings with the world?
Even our much-touted capacity for reason, said to set us apart from the lower animals, is unworthy of celebration if, as seems probable on a materialist account of the universe, reasoning is not by its essence a truth-directed activity, but—like everything else that we do—a pragmatic function, a by-product of evolution by natural selection that simply confers benefits in the struggle for survival. For the red pillers, who instinctively value their agency (Tate has taken to referring to himself as a real-life James Bond), this raises a problem. No doubt these gentlemen feel more heroic than ants. They must recognise that their achievements, such as they are, would lose their lustre if they came to be viewed, both by others and themselves, as the consequence of unchosen genes rather than the fruits of self-exertion. Assuming it could be proved that Tate’s millions were genetically preordained, he might feel more bashful than he does about flaunting them. How could he hope to defend such peacocking if luxury goods are not an outward sign of inner merit?
Indeed, the red pill ethic fetishizes the individual’s will to power while failing to dignify the human person who is said to possess this gift for self-creation. After all, a disenchanted, matter-in-motion universe contains no room for human autonomy. To insist otherwise would be no less than a usurpation of the laws of nature—the same nature that the unabashedly polygamous Myron, as we shall learn in due course, finds worthy of emulation in the animal kingdom. ‘Sacrifice’ is ill-suited to describing the behaviour of ants because, lacking the free will to overrule genetic imperatives, it is absurd to praise an organism for doing what it could never not have done.
This does not fully explain why sacrifice makes little sense to our red pillers. In fact, there is every reason to suppose that logical defeaters are entirely lost on them. If they regard ‘sacrifice’ with suspicion, it is not because they feel duty-bound to accept the philosophical implications of genetic determinism. Rather, it is because the very notion of sacrifice—except in the limited sense of delayed gratification, which at least holds out future benefits for the person who practises it—clashes with the virtue of selfishness that alone makes sense for an intelligent creature trying to survive in an unforgiving world.
Myron in particular seems to be an unwitting disciple of Ayn Rand. As it happens, one of the world’s leading advocates of Rand’s philosophy once told me over dinner that I should never use the word ‘sacrifice’ when trying to persuade an Objectivist. Albeit for different reasons, Myron is equally hostile to any suggestion that sacrifice can be an end in itself. This became clear beyond doubt when he was asked a pointed question by a young woman on one of his shows:
What happens if you were paralysed from an accident and you were unable to take care of your wives? Are they free to leave or will you expect them to stay and take care of you?
The aim, of course, was to test the limits of Myron’s all-consuming belief in self-interest against his moral intuitions. Rather than conceding that there is something to be said for sacrifice, or avoiding the challenge altogether, he bit the bullet: “I understand that, as a man, my duty is to provide and protect, and if I can no longer provide that, then I’m virtually useless and that’s just the cold, hard reality of the world.” The women, in other words, would be more than justified in abandoning their helpless husband. Most tellingly of all, he then added: “This is how it is in the animal kingdom.” Despite our mammalian anatomy and, in some cases, larger brains, man for Myron is no more an inhabitant of the moral universe, with duties to perform as well as powers to exert and enhance, than gene-abiding insects.
He is wrong even on his own terms. There is a monumental slippage in his remark, made only a few seconds later in this same exchange, that young men should be taught to “mitigate risk.” Even if enlightened self-interest is all that matters in Myron’s approach to life—driven, as it seems to be, by the maximally cunning pursuit of self-centred ends—a simple way of avoiding risk, one might have thought, would be to marry a woman who sees her husband as more than a resource-rich featherless biped. It may also help to find a wife who values marriage not for what it has become, but for what it should be: a sacrosanct bond, rooted in love, rather than a conditional bargain driven by acquisitiveness on both sides and therefore cancellable on that same basis.
Then again, according to red pill amorality, we are not called to anything other than our selfish instincts. True, this understanding of the red pill mindset as fundamentally blind to higher duties has been somewhat complicated by Tate’s conversion to Islam—a religion which, while it may be many things, is hardly light on commands. Loyalty, according to Tate, should in certain cases be more than simply conditional on maximising one’s own satisfaction and room for manoeuvre in the world. However, the loveless ethos typified by Myron’s answer to his guest’s incisive question is undoubtedly the one that pervades the red pill universe.
This attitude leads to further self-defeating absurdities. Myron, along with the rest of the red pill pantheon, never tires of deploring modern women as shallow chasers after materialistic status-symbols. His sample is no doubt skewed by the fact that he runs his ‘Fresh and Fit’ podcast out of Miami, which is hardly brimming with young ladies reared in the image of Jane Bennett or Maria Bolkonskaya. At the same time, however, Myron and his cheerleading co-host also encourage men to measure their own value, and indeed work to enhance it, in terms of how readily they can meet these shallow demands and bed the supposedly irredeemable women who make them. The modern female is said to have her values poorly aligned, yet the mark of Myron’s idealised strongman is how effectively he can make these same women eager to sleep with him. Is it not rather more impressive for a man to secure lifelong sexual union from one lady who knows her worth than to blitz through tonnes whose hearts have been scrambled by the cult of autonomy? It is a marvel that Myron fails to see how poorly his advice to young men reflects on his own lifestyle.
In the end, it is only incidental to my critique of the red pillers that talk of ‘sacrifice’ would make no sense on their flattened worldview even if they felt more drawn to it than they clearly are. The more basic point is that even the virtues they do want to acclaim, such as self-reliance, physical strength, and sexual prowess, cannot be considered virtues in the proper sense if their prevailing conception of man as no more than a cognitively gifted subject of the animal kingdom is correct. These attributes cease to be accolades containing any moral significance and become the mere behavioural consequences, unpraiseworthy because unchosen, of genetically determined causes. No virtues are possible, the ones we claim to like and the ones we profess to loathe in equal measure.
The real tragedy of the red pillers is that they peddle a chronically limited view of masculinity as its pinnacle. Whether it is worse to trash men in broad daylight or to glorify an exceedingly narrow version of what we can be is an open question. Either way, the red pillers are guilty of the latter sin. Justin Waller, for example, has advanced the eccentric theory that men forfeit their potential for greatness by tying themselves down to a woman. There is a vanishingly small grain of truth to this. It cannot be a complete accident that only three of the major philosophers, namely Socrates, Aristotle, and Hegel, had wives. Nietzsche once quipped that “a married philosopher belongs in comedy.” That said, he did not compose Zarathustra in the belief that it would give him his pick of the local ladies, as Waller might be tempted to believe. The point, if Nietzsche has one, is that a life spent in philosophy, like one spent in holy orders, is its own marriage-like vocation.
Still, what about the other heroes of Western civilisation, the men who have dealt more in action than thought? If men are really driven to excellence by a desire for vast quantities of women, as Waller contends, how do we explain the accomplishments of Lincoln and Churchill, both of whom managed to combine preternatural courage with living as dutiful husbands? It would be truer to say that men are at their best in their desire for admiration from worthy women. ‘Look at me, Mum!’ never really dies. This is a much stronger motivator, I would venture to suggest, than momentary pleasure with the sexually ‘liberated,’ broken women whom the red pillers spend almost as much time deriding as they do boasting about having consumed.
Plus, apart from the fact that Waller’s Mad Max sexual utopia only ‘works’ when women are drugged up on birth control, if the reward of constant sexual thrills is required to drive a man on in life, perhaps that man himself is the problem. Either that or he has a reductive understanding of what counts as thrilling. Religious ecstasy, intellectual exertion, the smell of cordite—can such things hope to compete with seven squalid nights a week with a different status-obsessed stranger? To say that men are essentially driven, rather than merely tempted, by a desire for unlimited sexual conquest is like saying that the stomach is hardwired to expect three bargain buckets a day.
It is possible for us to imagine a man for whom the promise of fast food is a strong incentive to do almost anything, but we will be in no hurry to make a hero of him. In fact, if self-discipline—at least prior to the cultivation of the virtue as a matter of habit—is more admirable in proportion to its difficulty, then in the vast majority of cases the man who forswears sex with an attractive randomer deserves a great deal more credit than the one who passes on KFC. There is a happy middle ground between languishing as a sparkless beta-male in a vitality-sapping domestic prison and remaining a randy adolescent for life, a man whose potential can only be teased out by a non-stop supply of floozies whose virtue and good opinion are, at the very best, secondary considerations.
Much of the time, the red pillers also mistake the technical capacity to do something with moral permissibility in doing it. If pressed, Tate will argue that he does not need to be monogamous in the ordinary fashion, because he is an extraordinary man. The perception of high-status in the sexual marketplace is considered permission enough for a man to behave in whatever way he can without suffering some disadvantage or riding roughshod over the consent of others (whether the Tates are innocent or guilty of the charges against them in Romania is not my present concern). He can then add these women to his illustrious body count, wearing them as trophies while simultaneously calling their ‘value’ into question with the insistence that promiscuous women belong on the scrapheap. In any case, while ought implies can, can never implies ought.
Like much of what we feel and do, love seems to require a sense of its eternal significance. The red pill obsession with ephemeral pleasures and finite luxuries may not be the most objectionable fad in the world, but its power to galvanise the human spirit is pitifully weak. It owes more to the cult of modern consumerism than it does to the older spiritual spurs, from love of one’s own people to unwavering Christian conviction, that used to inspire collective feats of everlasting greatness—and may yet do so again. Even the more recent critics of modernity, those who have dissected the beast from the inside, would never have pointed to the superficial allure of Bugattis, Rolexes, and scantily clad women as adequate compensation for Western man’s loss of faith in both Christianity and himself. Nietzsche’s notorious line about the death of God was as much a jittery lament as it was an audacious prelude to something joyous, life-affirming, potentially redemptive.
There is a world of difference between an exceedingly bleak, materialistic vision of life, forced to make do without a transcendent horizon to discipline our conduct or redeem our condition, and one in which our moral instincts and the ecstasies of love—far from being reduced to a handful of chemical reactions among billions of others—achieve a kind of sanctity. In the history of thought, this has been most compellingly pulled off by accounts of man which, starting from a belief in our relationship to an eternal God or divine pattern, offer us more than the prospect of rummaging around on a ball of celestial dust, eking out what advantages we can in a flat, finite, ultimately meaningless existence.
As a committed atheist, Nietzsche could not distinguish the Platonic and Christian notion of a divine Hinterwelt, in the transcendent light of which man strives to make sense of himself and his calling, from an ignoble superstition, a species of wishful thinking to which those of us too afraid of life to confront it make ourselves captive. Then again, he equally despised what—by the 19th century at least—had become the reigning alternative: the idea of a mechanistic, clockwork universe in which the human spirit, unless committed to further unveiling the physical world’s laws through the methods of modern science, struggled in vain to find a place. It was out of this intolerable binary, this choice between the ostensibly credulous metaphysics of old and the soul-destroying materialism of his day, that the strangest of Nietzsche’s doctrines, his belief in ‘eternal recurrence’ (ewige Wiederkunft), emerged as an imaginative salvo.
The basic suggestion is that all of history, including our day-to-day conduct, moves in repetitive epicycles, so that every single event, from the smallest to the most sublime, will occur again and again in a never-ending loop. There is some debate over whether Nietzsche intended this to be taken as a logically watertight metaphysical doctrine. I am inclined to believe that he was not epistemically committed to the idea with every fibre of his intellect. His concept of eternal recurrence is more like an imaginative leap, its literal truth irrelevant to its power to stir us into living as no vulgar Christian or dreamy Platonist ever can: not only with maximal but with self-generated purpose of a quintessentially modern kind. In other words, it is not a logical dogma, but a flight of fancy, pragmatically justified insofar as the death of God opens up the possibility, the necessity even, of deifying man. And only a man who believes his conduct to be eternally significant can, in his efforts to fill the hole left gaping by disenchantment, be stimulated into courses of action he would otherwise find worthy only of gods.
Eternity is restored as a regulative ideal, even if it is just an ennobling conceit. Nevertheless, this magnificent myth is one from which very real kinds of greatness can be expected to burst forth. Rather than wooing us with the cheap surfaces of a finite world, Nietzsche honours our hankering after eternity for what it is: an inextinguishable eros in the human soul. This makes him more profound and humane than the smooth-talking snake oil salesmen we find in Tate, Gaines, and Waller, if it needs saying.
In strict logical terms, however, without a genuinely eternal source of redemption in which we are granted the freedom on earth to win a share, all that we feel, erotic desire included, is indistinguishable from a kind of slavery—either to genetic imperatives or to socio-historical laws, depending on the form of determinism we sign up to (as if we have a choice in the matter if either version is true). Our very dignity as beings both capable and worthy of love thus depends on the red pillers being not only short of the mark, but epically mistaken.
