Your warrior archetype: To rage or not to rage?
The destructive - and often self-destructive - warrior male archetype describes the man prepared to dismantle, sacrifice and cut his losses, if it means staying true to purpose. He is unafraid to let go of his sunk cost when he has to, and he ignores the toxic manipulative motivators goading him to “never quit.”
Don’t get me wrong; the warrior is not the manipulable submissive pawn-soldier. You know, the trigger-happy manlet who pretends that subservience is a virtue, and who hopelessly hopes that blind obedience to perceived “authority” will finally get him approval from daddy. It doesn’t take much for this type to be egged on to kill and die for his government after falling for propaganda - as well as the insecure male’s lust for war and pillage in a desperate attempt to prove his non-existent manhood. This is not what the warrior is.
Ronin > Samurai
The warrior is the opposite of the subservient pillage and rape-hungry soldier. Despite war-glorification propaganda, a soldier is nothing more than an obedient submissive yes-man, a useful idiot following orders from repressed-homosexual military officers and fat pederast politicians. No, a warrior is more than that. A fitting analogy is the Ronin, a masterless self-owned lone warrior, as opposed to the Samurai, a brainwashed collectivist obedient slave faux-praised with pretentious honours.
The Samurai’s “honour” is just internalized toxic shame: shallow and meaningless. There is nothing warrior-like about blind obedience and subservience to the whims of whomever wears a silly hat. There is nothing warrior-like in a dog of war, unless the fight is against its true enemy: those who presume to hold its leash.
The true warrior is a man who uses his anger to rebel against adversity, aggression, and superior force. He is a self-sovereign individual, since he is too rebellious to allow himself to passively be dumbed down to a Borg-like drone.
A warrior uses his rage when he needs to make tough calls that come at a price. However, he knows when not to be angry. He lets go of his anger when it doesn’t serve him anymore, lest it become toxic to him and others around him who have never aggressed against him. Carrying around anger with you all the time is insecurity and weakness; it makes you snappy, paranoid, and unable to first think logically BEFORE erupting in anger. Thus, a warrior’s default setting is calm, control, logic, indomitable.
A warrior is secure enough to be calm and give people the benefit of the doubt. He is confident that he can take on any challenge brought by the risk of his calmness being mistaken for weakness. In contrast, the perpetually angry twitchy spastic individual is constantly defensive because he is constantly afraid that his calmness will invite aggression; but that’s fear from a place of weakness.
This is where Stoicism gets such a bad rap. With a stoic mindset, a man’s strength is his ability to place mind over matter, to be dispassionate, and to put logic over emotion, always, even if that comes with risk of inviting aggression. Critics of stoicism misunderstand - they assume that stoicism is about passivity, subservience and turning the other cheek. They forget that it’s actually uncontrollable passion and rage that renders men the most manipulable to exploitation, war propaganda and every other form of manipulation.
I don’t like loaded labels like Stoicism, but a warrior’s stillness is his confidence in his ability to address any provocation or challenge. It doesn’t mean he’ll remain calm in submission; far from it. Because he maintains self-control, his pent-up emotional reserve fuels his directed energy whenever he has to erupt.
If a male is constantly angry and emotional, he is constantly weak and edgy, drowning in catabolic stress hormones. How will he then be a rock to his woman? How will he bring order to her chaotic emotional nature? How will he make her feel safe next to him when he’s irritable and stressed? She won’t, because she knows that the reason he chooses to be constantly angry is his fear, and the distrust in himself to handle adversity and provocation in a controlled manner.
The warrior is calm… until it’s time be angry.
The concept of the Hulk represents the concept of the warrior archetype: Dr. Bruce Banner is the logical calm gentleman. He thinks through everything and tries to find logical solutions to problems and disputes until logic doesn’t work anymore. He is a peacemaker, and violence is the absolute last resort. When he has to, he allows his anger to take over to bring a resolution to his predicament. He turns into the Incredible Hulk to destroy systems and relationships that could not have been salvaged through logical discourse. What’s key here is that, after he has solved his problems through properly channelled anger, he must quickly return to his calm logical state, otherwise he becomes destructive to himself and others; others who are innocent. Walking around being perpetually and pre-emptively angry “because you were once hurt by someone” is just generalising from weakness and insecurity. It turns you into a jumpy, stressed, cortisol-soaked bugger. And it is this weakness and insecurity that is the motivation behind every thug, bully, wife-beater, child abuser and repressed homosexual military enthusiast.
The Hulk allegory shows you how to use your anger to make hard calls; but you must quickly set it aside the second it stops serving you. This doesn’t make you weak or subject to abuse. Quite the contrary: it shows that you have control over yourself, your anger, and the people who want to do you harm. Selecting when to display anger is strength because it means you trust yourself enough to be calm and calculative, and call upon your anger exactly when you need it. Being constantly angry is petty, fearful, and catabolic.
The Spartan mindset is a similar representation of the warrior archetype (even though I have my issues with the collectivist brainwashed Spartan ideal - topic for another discussion). The term “to be Spartan” means to be minimalist, serious, humble, calm, controlled, unemotional; basically mind over matter. Spartans overcome their emotion through logic. For them, anger is just another emotion that they have to control, and not the other way around.
As a warrior, when you must and only then, you release your bottled up anger against an accurate target - your provocateur, your aggressor, your manipulator, your hopeful master. After you resolve the conflict, you allow your anger to subside; you let it go because it does not serve you anymore. You are confident enough that you’ll be OK without desperately holding on to it. You are not scared to let go of your war stick. A warrior knows he can be calm, and evoke his anger at a moment’s notice. He also knows that, when he holds a hammer, everything looks like a nail. You are not afraid to put the hammer down.
Being calm and controlled does not mean granting your unrepented enemies undeserved forgiveness, nor does it mean dropping your guard; far from it. Releasing yourself from the burden of anger means remaining logical so that you can reasonably identify the deserving target of your rage the next time you are provoked. If you constantly remain angry and confrontational, your anger runs wild, makes you paranoid, and you end up being the bully, since your anger attacks people who were never at fault. And when you spend your energy on false targets, you miss the ones you should truly be angry at. See spectacle sports, for example, where the naive masses waste their anger on meaningless rivalries instead of directing it against their true mutual enemy - the state - where they should be directing it. No wonder the state sponsors spectacle sports.
Constant anger distracts you, and it renders you overly suspicious, defensive and scared. This way, you allow your emotions to override your logic, and you then become even more susceptible to manipulation, abuse and oppression.
In the movie Poolhall Junkies (2002), Christopher Walken’s sensational lion speech illustrates the-calm-and-the-furious nature of the warrior male archetype. He essentially describes the ideal stoic-warrior archetype.
He is the calm controlled man above petty annoyances; but when those annoyances become audacious, he unleashes his inner lion.
"You got this lion. He’s the king of the jungle, huge mane out to here. He’s laying under a tree, in the middle of Africa. He’s so big, it’s so hot. He doesn’t want to move. Now the little lions come, they start messing with him. Biting his tail, biting his ears. He doesn’t do anything. The lioness, she starts messing with him. Coming over, making trouble. Still nothing. Now the other animals, they notice this. They start to move in. The jackals; hyenas. They’re barking at him, laughing at him. They nip his toes, and eat the food that’s in his domain. They do this, then they get closer and closer, bolder and bolder. Till one day, that lion gets up and tears the shit out of everybody. Runs like the wind, eats everything in his path. Cause every once in a while, the lion has to show the jackals who he is."This the true warrior masculine:
He is calm and controlled. He doesn’t get rattled up easily. He’s too dignified to deal with petty annoyances. He can’t get offended; he doesn’t get emotional. He isn’t sensitive to insignificant provocations. He is above pettiness. However, when his calmness is taken out of context and exploited, it’s time for him to break systems, situations, relationships and faces; so he does so. He destroys physical and social structures by using his rage, because he is well prepared to live with the consequences of his destructive actions. But he needs calm logic before he can make this rational choice. When he’s rageful all the time, he cannot logically make a choice to live with the consequences of his rageful actions.
The warrior’s rage is guided by his logic precisely because his rage is rare. And because it’s rare, it’s strong, accurate and meaningful.
What makes a warrior so powerful is his ability to destroy relationships whenever they start eroding his individual self-ownership.
A warrior is not afraid to break any relationship at any given time because he is self-reliant, and he has too much dignity to maintain relationships after they stop serving him; or after he feels unable to offer value himself. This doesn’t mean that his relationships are cheap and meaningless; quite the opposite. It is precisely BECAUSE he can destroy any relationship at any given time that every relationship he chooses to have bears true meaning and value. It means he isn’t desperate for any relationships. He is OK without any. He doesn’t NEED his relationships; he WANTS them. It means he doesn’t consider them an entitlement; he considers them a choice for which he must work to earn, and thus feel gratitude for. You cannot truly appreciate what you need, because you resent feeling helpless in needing it; and once you get it, you take it for granted.
A warrior’s non-reliance on relationships creates a scarcity about him that makes a relationship with him all the more valuable and meaningful to others.
A warrior is also unafraid to kill his own obsessions that keep him hopelessly hanging on to pipe dreams. It takes courage to give up something when you have to. A warrior pays no heed to the toxic manipulative “motivators” who cry “never quit.” Indeed, it’s important for the warrior to maintain an unwavering focus on his purpose, but sometimes, quitting is the most courageous and righteous thing to do, especially when your purpose proves meaningless. For example, a boy obsessed with acquiring his abusive father’s purposefully withheld approval will have to give up this pointless dream, if he could ever hope to become a man.
Either being calm or angry is a false dichotomy. You don’t have to be calm all the time, and you certainly don’t need to be angry all the time. Being angry all the time is jumpy, emotional, and quite gay if you ask me - all those female stress hormones. Then again, being calm all the time may give you more control over yourself, but not your environment. The thing is, you lose control over your life if you don’t ‘lose control’ when you have to. In other words, it might be ideal keep your cool until it’s absolutely necessary to lose it. And when you do lose it, keep it directed and keep it brief.
Rage can be fruitful only if it’s brief. From a physiological sense, adrenaline hormones are meant to give you a fight-or-flight edge for a short amount of time. You then need to rest lest you become catabolic and weak.
To end this warrior’s monologue…
The warrior male archetype is calm. He won’t erupt if you don’t provoke him. You’ll need to provoke him a lot before he loses his cool. But when he does, he won’t be afraid to even take himself with you, if it means maintaining his integrity and dignity. In any case, his anger is brief, whether he wins or loses.
Samson’s mutually assured destruction
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