| A Code of Honor is made up of The pursuit of Strength, courage, mastery, and to a lesser degree, the moral virtues. |
| Shame: the recognition that a person has failed to live up to the group’s code. Honor that cannot be lost is not honor. |
| Vertical Honor: Giving praise and esteem to those “who are superior, whether by virtue of their abilities, their rank, their services, to the community, their sex, their kips, their office, or anything else. It goes to the man who not only lives the code, but excels at doing so. |
| For vertical honor to exist, horizontal honor must first be present. Without a baseline of mutual respect among equal peers, winning praise and esteem means very little. (Example: a novelist prefers praise from other novelists over their parents). |
| Honor is the value of a person in his own eyes, but also in the eyes of his society. It is his estimate of his own worth, his claim to pride, but it is the acknowledgement of that claim, his excellence recognized by society, his right to pride. |
| The basic code of honor: Courage, strength, mastery. To a lesser extent: moral virtues. |
| It is good to be stronger than other men in your group, but it is important that your gang is stronger than another gang. The former prepares the latter. |
| With honor, you don’t gain respect and praise simply by existing. If you live up to the group’s code, you are given rights and privileges; if you don’t you are named and seen as inferior. |
| An honor not worth dying for is not honor at all. |
| Honor is designed to act as a check on people’s claims to merit and force them to stand behind and defend their insults; exaggeration of one’s deeds or shameful actions are carried out and challenged by one’s associates. |
| Traditional honor is inherently intolerant; if you fail to flow the code, you are shamed, you are despicable, you are out. |
| Honor is the moral imperative of men; obedience is the moral imperative of boys. |
| Honor based on respect is a superior moral imperative to obedience based on rules and law. |
| When men function out of rules and laws, they do the bare minimum they can without being punished. |
| “That he who imagines condemnation and disgrace, not to be strong motives to men…seems little skilled in the nature or history of mankind.” -John Locke |
| Without honor, mediocrity, corruption and incompetence rule. |
| The individual superhero is a fallacy. Men want meaning in their lives, meaning that comes from being part of something larger than themselves. But they are often unwilling to trade their unfettered individualism to get it. They want honor, but they don’t want obligation to others, duty to others, responsibilities to anyone other then self that go along with it. They want honor, but they are unwilling to trade their time, and the freedom of gratifying their own desires whenever, and wherever they’d like, in order to sacrifice for the good of the group. |
| “….Compared to that, dying was easy. Dying was over. Cowardice lived forever.” |
| And in any small group of men, if you strip everything else away, the essential core of the honor code comes down to 1) not engaging in behavior that will weaken the group, and 2) having each other’s backs. |
| Every honor group needs a framework of honor that explains why the group exists, how it operates, and what is expected of the men who are members. |
| Aristotle called arête: strength coupled with virtue, bravery combined with character. In times of crisis, a man must be able to fight and prevail; in times of peace he must be able to care for his family, cultivate his mind, and serve his community and state civically. At all times he must stand ready to serve in whatever capacity he is needed. |
| “I want to have him feel the determination to put the wrong-doer down, to make the man who does wrong aware that the decent man is not only his superior in decency, but his superior in strength.” |
| Theodore Roosevelt believed that honor was found not only in living a life of virtue, but being brave and strong enough to defend that virtue when needed. |
| Good leaders know that exhaustion is partly state of mind, though, and that the men who succumb to it have on some level decided to put themselves above everyone else. If you’re not prepared to walk for someone you’re certainly not prepared to die for them, and that goes to the heart of whether you should even be in a platoon. ‘He can’t be smoked here,’ I heard O’Bryne seethe to Sergeant Mac in the dark, “he doesn’t have the right to be.’ The idea that you’re not allowed to experience something as human as exhaustion is outrageous anywhere but in combat. |
| Personal lack of vigilance could compromise the safety of everyone else; what happens to you happens to everyone. |
| A cadet will neither lie, cheat, steal nor tolerate those who do. |
| Put team above self. Chastise, and possibly expel, those who don’t. If you want to experience traditional honor in your own life, you’ll need to be willing to subjugate your personal wants beneath the needs of your honor group. By helping others survive and/or thrive, you help yourself do likewise. Those who put self first compromise the goals of the rest of the group |
| People of character do the right thing even if no one else is, not because it will change the world but because they refuse to be changed by the world. |
| Aristotle framed courage as a moral virtue, as a will to noble action. |
| Courage, as Aristotle noted, in its highest and purest form, involves the willful risk of bodily harm or death for the good of the group. |
| Nemo me impune lacessit, or “No one attacks me with impunity.” To protect one’s honor is as defensive as it is offensive—even if attack is pre-emptive, as it often is. People are more likely to leave you alone if they fear harm from you, and if men give way to you because they fear you, you will gain a certain status among men. |
| “If I allow a man to steal my chickens, I might as well let him rape my daughters.” That’s reflexive honor. Reflexive honor is the signal of the rattlesnake, communicating a reputation for retaliation. “Nemo me impume lacessi” |
| Flamboyant dishonor is not a failure of strength or courage. Men who are flamboyantly dishonorable are flagrant in their disregard for the esteem of their male peers. What we often call effeminacy is a theatrical rejection of the masculine hierarchy and manly virtues. Masculinity is religious, and flamboyantly dishonorable men are blasphemers. Flamboyant dishonor is an insult to the core values of the male group. |
| The religion of man is not a moral code. It is a honor / courage / mastery code. It is a code of value. Value used to achieve status and primacy. |
| Some men fear the feeling of fear and therefore don’t even approach their edge. If you are this kind of man who is hanging back, working hard perhaps, but not at your real edge, other men will not be able to trust that you can and will help them live at their edge and give their fullest gift. |
| Patriarchal gangs are much more conducive for fighting off rival gangs who inevitably compete for resources. A matriarchal structure simply cannot work under such conditions. But under conditions of post-scarcity or at least of resource plenty, patriarchal structures become demonized because they do not align with the female sexual strategy that tends to win out relatively under such conditions. The problem today is that we exist at a time of plenty. But that is by no means a guarantee of conditions into the future. Feminized / matriarchal structures, if it becomes the primary sexual strategy for a society, will be decimated by a patriarchal opponent when a time of scarcity comes around. |
| Don’t fear a dragon-like opponent, fear a pig-like teammate. |
| Be it so. The burning of widows is your custom; prepare the funeral pile. But my nation has also a custom. When men burn women alive we hang them, and confiscate all their property. My carpenters shall therefore erect gibbets on which to hang all concerned when the widow is consumed. Let us all act according to our national customs. |
| A person who is not inwardly prepared for the use of violence against him is always weaker than the person committing the violence. |
| No non-violent behavior can be judged or criticized except the behavior of those who judge or criticize anything but the most banal and inconsequential consumer choices — like what someone wore or what car they bought. People still naturally giggle and gossip, as they have for thousands of years, about social awkwardness and who fucked-who, but passionate moral condemnation and public shaming are now reserved for racists, sexists, religious “extremists” and all of the phobes: homophobes, xenophobes, transphobes, Islamophobes and and anyone else who limits or excludes or defines by separating or distinguishing. This tactic of associating all non-universalist moralities with fear is itself a shrewd subversion of male honor. By equating any discriminatory position with cowardice, lonely male consumers without the sense of identity and belonging that comes from a strong group of bonded male peers can be easily manipulated by their natural desire to avoid association with groups of men who are socially recognized as cowards. |
| But the tribal man is also free in ways a man afflicted with a universal morality can scarcely imagine. He moves through the world responsible to and for only a select group. He is not responsible for determining what is objectively true or universally right. He doesn’t have to pretend to know the unknowable. He is concerned with what works, what doesn’t, and what is best only for his people. By this measure, the barbarian is comparatively nimble, and sees with a practical clarity that is impossible for the man burdened and made tentative by a commitment to objective truth and universal right and wrong. |
| You can either choose to float invertebrate along the media’s current and care about whoever the subjects of the Empire are caring about today, or choose to anchor your heart and mind to a select people and, like every comic book telepath, learn to tune out the cries of the multitude and focus your vitality on your people. Giving everything to your own people, to your own tribe, means leaving nothing for strangers. You must harden your heart or be at the mercy of the many. This is not hate. This is selective love, and practiced indifference. Your heart is like your eyes. Everything is a blur until you focus. |
| In any functional tribe, every man should be expected to carry his own weight — at the very least. A successful and respected man also helps carry the weight of some others. He doesn’t merely survive, he produces some kind of surplus, some kind of prosperity that can be shared by others within the perimeter of the group. He works to support not only himself, but the women and children and truly infirm or disabled. Every true leader of men I know feels a strong sense of responsibility to those who depend on the surplus he generates, and this sense of responsibility motivates him to work harder, to produce more and thereby increase prosperity and quality of life for his friends, his people, and his family. A good man in any tribe shares the bounty yielded by his strength. |
| Each man must think not only of himself, but think of his buddy fighting alongside him. We don’t want yellow cowards in the army. They should be killed off like flies. If not, they will go back home after the war, goddamn cowards, and breed more cowards. The brave men will breed more brave men. Kill off the goddamn cowards and we’ll have a nation of brave men. |
| Greatness means strife for nation and man alike. A soft, easy life is not worth living, if it impairs the fibre of brain and heart and muscle. We must dare to be great; and we must realize that greatness is the fruit of toil and sacrifice and high courage… We are face to face with our destiny and we must meet it with a high and resolute courage. For us is the life of action, of strenuous performance of duty; let us live in the harness, striving mightily; let us rather run the risk of wearing out than rusting out. |
| We despise and abhor the bully, the brawler, the oppressor, whether in private or public life, but we despise no less the coward and the voluptuary. |
| “The hour for your departure draws near; if you will but forget all else and pay sole regard to the helmsman of your soul and the divine spark within you – if you will but exchange your fear of having to end your life someday for a fear of failing even to begin it on nature’s true principles – you can yet become a man, worthy of the universe that gave you birth, instead of a stranger in your own homeland, bewildered by each day’s happenings as though by wonders unlooked for, and ever hanging upon this one or the next.” -Marcus Aurelius |
| “Responsibility” is the noun form of a much older adjective, ‘responsible,’ itself related to the verb “respod,” meaning to answer; its Latin ancestor is respondeo, whose root (sponde) means to promise sacredly or to vow. |
| ‘When people hear me speak about responsibility and meaning, the room goes dead quiet. Not a cough. Not a sneeze. They sit there and whisper, “Is that the secret? Is that the secret? The voluntary adopting of responsibility?” They lean in, they look on with hope. And they hear a resounding, “Yes!” That’s the message of the West, to pick up your cross and bear it.’ |
| Bare is the back of a brotherless man. |
| Better to live vigorously, better to fight, than to simply wait for the end…in peace. |
| A leader can’t look scared or tense; it’s contagious. |
| Punishment must be so unusual as to be significant, to deter, to instruct. |
| The noblest fate that a man can endure is to place his own mortal body between his loved home and the war’s desolation. |
| “…Because he has to be flogged; neither you nor I can take it for him, even though the fault was ours. Because the regiment has to see what happens when [Principle X] is violated. Our fault…but his lumps.” -Robert Heinlein, Starship Troopers |
| If you ask yourself what you believe is right but do not and go do it, you are out of integrity. |
| If in the first attempt to create a world of free men we have failed, we must try again. |
| People are always looking for a reason to have their character corrupt. Because if it is, you get to lie. You get to cheat. You don’t have to put in the effort that honesty requires. |
| Justice too long delayed is justice denied. |
| Tolerance of intolerance is cowardice. |
| Strategies are amoral. Goals and intentions may not be. |
| Courage is almost a contradiction in terms. It means a strong desire to live taking the form of a readiness to die. |
| For the only courage worth calling courage must necessarily mean that the soul passes a breaking point and does not break. |