“The vulgar, that is, indeed, all mankind, a few excepted.”
–David Hume
“The crowd is untruth.”
–Soren Keirkegaard
If you read the biographies of great philosophers from the days when Philosophy meant a way of life, rather than just a recondite branch in the academic “knowledge” industry, you will see that very few of those great men from the pre-Socratics up through Nietzsche were much for marriage and social life. Most were loners. Many were solitaries. Very few married. For, given the quality of their minds, and in some cases, the quality of their characters, they could not relate well to most people. So they went their own way, devoted to loftier pursuits than power and pleasure.
But you don’t have to be an erudite genius to choose (wisely) to spend much or most of your time alone. One of the more difficult truths about the human condition is that people don’t understand us in a deep sense any more than we do them. Our deepest thoughts, feelings and values are hard, and in many instances impossible, to share or communicate. The knowledge of this becomes plain as we get older, and it then becomes natural to spend more and more time alone.
Now time alone may be understood as a kind of measure of a person’s value. Strong and well-cultivated men require and cherish it. With stupid and weak men—that is, the majority—the opposite is true. Their Facebook is like a woman’s, with its 2,421 friends; and it’s also obviously rare for any woman to be a loner, since in themselves most women are nothing but objects of desire and vehicles of external validation.
If you look closely at what most people call friendship, you will see that, in our time, there is often little to it besides the pursuit of base pleasures and the mutual reinforcement of the illusions and delusions that sustain people. In order to get through life, most people seem to insulate themselves in a weird bubble of rationalizations, lies, expectations, hopes, entitlements, and so on. They also get a powerful forward drive from indulging in a variety of pleasures, usually of a coarse and vulgar kind. Their friendships will consist of those who live in the same type of bubble and who enjoy the same kinds of pleasures. Yet quite often, there is no real deep sympathy or love involved here. We know this from the common complaint, made in times of tragedy and hardship, that when a person really needed someone, his friends and family were not there. Of course, they were there in the easier days, offering up all sorts of herd platitudes: “Everything happens for a reason,” and so on.
Now let’s suppose you are a man with an exceptional mind, and perhaps your character isn’t altogether corrupt. For you, friendship may well be problematic, for the same reason that you have to be mindful of the PC police at work: most people do not, and indeed cannot, see the world as penetratingly as you do. So, the truths which you take for granted are likely to burst the dear bubbles without which the majority of humankind cannot go on.
The red pill is not for everyone. Most people live in ignorance and cling to comforting fantasy like the junkie does his last bag of dope. And where you see hard-won yet necessary knowledge, the majority see only the views of “bad guys,” even if they are such great spirits as Socrates and Jesus.
The main driving force in human life, it’s overwhelmingly clear, is self-interest, and people, on average, are so self-interested that unless they depend on you to meet their vital needs, you would do well to regard them with a certain amount of prudent distrust. Of course, human beings—and the Second Sex in particular—have a way of being all smiles and “nice to meet you.” Many things in life are not what they seem, and the danger of having to do with other people is something we learn only once they have harmed us. We must then become more self-reliant, cultivating rich and satisfying interests that will keep us from wanting to be among the ignorant and depraved crowd.
In Gulliver’s Travels, Jonathan Swift—a very edifying misanthrope—wrote:
My Reconcilement to the Yahoo-kind in general might not be so difficult, if they would be content with those Vices and Follies only which Nature hath entitled them to. I am not in the least provoked at the Sight of a Lawyer, a Pick-pocket, a Colonel. . . . This is all according to the due Course of Things: But, when I behold a Lump of Deformity, and Diseases both in Body and Mind, smitten with Pride, it immediately breaks all the Measures of my Patience; neither shall I ever be able to comprehend how such an Animal and such a Vice could tally together.
In other words, it is not so much the defects of human nature, as the fact that these so often come with an intolerable self-regard, that makes so many human beings deserving of contempt, and the loner’s life therefore necessary. Our time is full of men and women who are not only a blind mess on two legs, but who also expect you to kiss their stumbling, foolish feet. That person may be your boss. It may be your wife.
The age of text messages and social media, ironically, finds many people being loners in spite of themselves. Whether you are sending lots of texts, or constantly on Facebook and Twitter, you are engaging in mediums that are actually quite cold, sterile, and impersonal. You may have a lot of “friends,” but in fact, few care much about you; and your interactions with other people are certainly very empty if they are nothing but words and images on a screen, whether it’s your computer or your smartphone.
But many people today were not alive in the days before smartphones and social media. As such, they may not be able to understand what it would mean for human relations not to be so utterly deprived. Then too, when you are conditioned as the young are today—with so many interactions filtered through technology—is it not natural to conceive of other people as nothing more than a means to your own ends and expectations?
Again, today other people, more and more, are nothing but words and images on a screen. Here, what room is there for ethics, for keeping your word, for notions of duty and obligation? Nobody cares. No one else is there. It’s ultimately just you and your impulses, and your computer and your smart phone.
I notice, also, that today most people who have a good professional job, or who are in college working toward having one, are simply too busy to have much in the way of a social life. They are lucky if they see their friends and romantic partners more than a few times a month. It would seem that meeting our basic animal needs should not take up most of our time. But it does, so for this reason, too, many of us are compelled to be loners—or at least lonely!
I look towards the future, with current cultural trends in mind, and predict that, for men, being a loner will become more common in the next ten to twenty years. Smartphones and social media have turned American women into entitled flake machines. At least eight out of ten of them are good for nothing but sex. In other words, their company cannot be deeply satisfying. They allow you to scratch an itch—that is, some respite from your burdensome need to get laid. Intellectually dull and morally repugnant, they are merely attractive bondage; they have no other value.
Meanwhile, for men like us—I mean who men read sites like this one, some of us familiar with wise classical conservatives like Edmund Burke and Samuel Johnson—male camaraderie is becoming increasingly rare. I myself have a handful of male friends who view the world as I do—undraped, that is to say. But most men I meet, and especially those under 30, seem to me quite deserving of taking orders from Americunts and the sniveling oligarchy of corporate beta males. They are spineless, and usually driven by a bland narcissism not so dissimilar from the twentysomething Americunts in my phone. In a time like this, which seems likely to get worse, being a loner who relies on his hobbies and interests for meaning and fulfillment is a rare type of good fortune, however difficult.
Conclusion
Being a loner, as I said before, is a prideful test of strength, both of your character and of your mind. If you feel you are surrounded by fools and charlatans—well then, welcome to the human experience: the world has always been like this, and you are among the rare few who sees things clearly. As such, your surest source of happiness lies in devoting yourself to a project or projects that will keep you productive and employ your creativity. In this way you will not depend on other people to pass your time, for that is always a dangerous endeavor, especially if they look good in a dress and heels.
Read More: Why Being A Loner Makes You A Great Leader
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