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Writer's pictureCameron Macgregor

Men and the City 38: Western Man’s Dark Night of the Soul before Dawn

Updated: Mar 7



 

Men in the city are beginning to find within themselves a new path. Western men live in a time of corruption, of isolation, of estrangement from mainstream society, a time of compression, squeezed by a system that hates them. Since the Sixties the tidal waves of feminism, the Great Replacement, bureaucratic emasculation, financialization, and the sexual frustration of a toxic dating marketplace has left Western men and society battered and broken. Social breakdown begins incrementally, almost imperceptibly as droplets before the downpour. Eventually, small cuts become deep lacerations that bury the self under layers of psychological scar tissue until what you have become is wholly unrecognizable from what you were.



Masses of men find themselves living through a dark night of the soul, crawling through glass in the emptiness of the abyss. Desperate to change their situation, to revive the boyish enthusiasm and optimistic vigor that once fired their libidos men are hoping against hope for salvation. As prayers go unanswered and pleas for a release fall on apathetic ears a masco-derangement detonates, and men lash out. A grim awakening sets in after years, perhaps decades: first the blue pill shades into purple, next red, until men choke on the black pill and hit rock bottom. Men give up because it’s over, nothing can be done, and all is lost.


Loss of faith anchors men in the abyss where they remain as long as it takes for a new faith to sprout.

 

It is at this point when men are reborn. A glimmer of light flashes in the darkness, a barely recognizable crevice opens in the cave, and a new hope ignites. Not all men experience a dark night of the soul, some tragically never make it through, only the worthy emerge from the blackness. This is what Dostoevsky meant when he said, “There is only one thing that I dread: not to be worthy of my sufferings.” Our suffering is not ours alone, it is a collective suffering we must endure for the sake of Western Civilization’s kith and kin. There is hope on the horizon, a flicker in a tunnel dimly lit by the fireworks of revolt. A clash between good and evil is enveloping the globe and the forces of good desperately need you.   

 

The Alchemical Journey 



I recently had a conversation with a random guy at a café who said to me, “everyone senses America is on the edge of disaster.” Wherever I travel in Europe or America, even inside the elite bubbles of Berlin, Paris or NYC folks I meet tend to express a similar foreboding. Most choose to dismiss signs of distress opting instead to “extend and pretend.” If I ignore it, perhaps it will go away and problems will right themselves, so the thinking goes. Normies are conditioned to ride the wave wherever it takes them, they are anvils for life’s hammer. Such a strategy is befitting for them but not for us, not for the awakened, not for the Neo-Masculine Movement.


"everyone senses America is on the edge of disaster.”

 

An alchemical shift is transforming the minds of men. There were many antecedents leading to the current sickness: communist revolutions, self-destructive World Wars, subversion of institutions, collapse of faith in God, family and community, and the disintegration of national borders and identity. What remains is a system of spread sheets and faceless digits, of gig economies, vampiric pop culture and woke politics. In such a world gone mad masculinity is at best obsolete and at worst quarantined as a hyperactive agent destabilizing to a soul-crushing materialistic reactor. “Behold,” Diogenes said, presenting a dead chicken before Plato’s Academy; “your man.”


The cure for nihilism is nihilism, sin for sinfulness, chaos for chaos.

 

The “featherless bipeds” of Plato’s thinkery are the sexless men of today. And yet the grating churn of nihilism, of vulture capitalism, and woke antagonism is also stripping men naked, back to bare bones. Ultimately, it seems, the cure for nihilism is nihilism, sin for sinfulness, feminization for feminism, and chaos for chaos. To ascend the spiritual heights has never been easy and it requires a dark night of the soul. Only after crashing to the base of the mountain are men forced to confront the ugliness within themselves and the world wherein they begin the arduous climb upwards. It is in the chasm that minds open to new ideas, new movements, new paths, and it is there where salvation is found.

 

The Coming Extremism



Loss of faith anchors men in the abyss where they remain as long as it takes for a new faith to sprout. It is unsurprising that there is renewed interest in Dostoevsky, Jung, Nietzsche Solzhenitsyn and others who foresaw tragedy (or lived through it) at the hands of communism, materialism, nihilism and positivism (the seeds of Globalism). So insidious were these ideas that Dostoevsky called them Demons, and Solzhenitsyn wrote, “During my time in the camps, I had got to know the enemies of the human race quite well: they respect the big fist and nothing else; the harder you slug them, the safer you will be.” Only a vigilance born of extremism is sufficient to exercise these demons.

 

Some feared the coming extremism. Jung put it like this in The Undiscovered Self:




 

“The individual who is not anchored in God can offer no resistance...to the physical and moral blandishments of the world. For this he needs the evidence of an inner, transcendent experience, which alone can protect from the otherwise inevitable submersion into the mass.”






Jung’s faith in God (his “collective unconscious”) was perhaps stronger than his faith in humanity. Over 50 years removed from his death (1961) the ongoing duel between Civilization and Globalism is back in full swing and a newfound faith in transcendence is germinating in response. However, contrary to Jung’s dictum above, individuals must be enlisted into mass movements for the forces of good to prevail against the forces of evil. The process by which that happens is extremism: as was the case during the early spread of Christianity, Islam, and the Reformation. We have experienced the same in America during the Great Awakenings, the Temperance Movement, and the Social Gospel Movement culminating in Women’s Suffrage and Prohibition.

 

Homo Faber and the Crucible of Neo-Masculinity



Victimization is the path to self-destruction. Men today are understandably despondent about the troubled state of their lives. However, the words of Wayne Dyer must give us pause: “The state of your life is nothing more than a reflection of your state of mind.” The flow of events over time is not something we can control but it is something we can influence, and so surrender is not the solution. Going MGTOW and swallowing the black pill cannot be the answer because both lead to victimhood and disempowerment.


Victimization is the path to self-destruction.

 

A better path is the way of Homo Faber – “man the maker.” The story of civilization is one of the conquest of man over environment using man-made tools and the manipulation of nature. In his alluring book The Forge and the Crucible, Mircea Eliade explains that what propelled primitive man and tribal society into the modern era required the mastery of metallurgy, the “mastery of fire.” It started with the Neo-lithic period’s experimentation with copper followed by the axe of the Stone Age and reached its zenith with the Iron Age when early alchemists became smiths (artisans, blacksmiths etc.).



 The hammer and anvil and the smith who forged them became symbols of super-natural power. The power created is both external (material) and internal (spiritual), for as the smith “takes up and perfects the work of Nature” he is simultaneously perfecting himself. Male dominated societies began with rituals of initiation, trials by fire. Like the blacksmith who manipulates intense heat to forge his weaponry “the warrior becomes heated during his initiation fight.” In many religious societies men are expected to walk across hot coals to test their devotion; pledging a fraternity or graduating from boot camp often terminates in a crucible (the word means a metal container of substances subjected to intense heat), a final event or challenge.



Neo-Masculinity too is a crucible, a desperate fight to reclaim masculine power inside a sickened society disintegrating around us. To do so we must convert the heat, the fire, the rage within us into coherent action to better our lives and reform society. Western men cannot do so alone, we need each other, we need a Neo-Masculine Movement to empower us. We are traversing the dark night of the soul, a trial by fire, a fight against a system rigged against us. Doing so has has been painful, but it has also transformed us, opened our minds, and awakened our souls to faith and tradition, as well as to a new path, a Neo-Masculinity.

 

What comes next? Why and how are the forces of evil gathering now? And why is a broader clash imminent? These questions and more will be discussed in future essays.


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