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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   2748 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for August 13, 2023

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I just wonder why are all these men on the fringe of politics so obsessed with MMA? Zuck, Elon, Joe Rogan, Sam Harris, Lex Friedman, Mark Andreeson. Maybe it’s just my complete lack of interest in fighting or learning to fight, but I find it a bit annoying. Whatever happened to playing golf and tennis?

men on the fringe of politics so obsessed with MMA?

Fringe? MMA is mainstrean, it's just a normal part of dudes rock normie culture. Several of my friends are into it, and even back in high school sime of them were throwing watch parties for big fights. I went on a date the other week at a sports bag where they were playing a big MMA match and everyone was watching and cheering. The general public, in all times in all places, has enjoyed watching professionals fight. The change is that thirty years ago it would have been boxing, whereas now MMA has mainly taken over.

Rogan and Musk et al. probably just represent average dudeness better than, say, Mitch McConnell, Bill Kristol, Pete Buttigieg, or any other normal mainstream male political figure.

I just wonder why are all these men on the fringe of politics so obsessed with MMA?

Some of these guys are more into BJJ than MMA (I pretty sure with at least Sam and Lex Fridman). The two kinda go together though: the founders of BJJ popularized it in the US by founding the UFC to take on challengers and there's lots of crossover.

As for why they're into BJJ? It's a martial arts that's shown effectiveness in competition (so you don't feel like a 90s karate or kung fu nerd), it doesn't involve as many traumatic punches to the face and it has a reputation at least of being more cerebral and lower-impact (and coaches are willing to accommodate at least celebrities here).

You can see the appeal for a certain type.

Rogan is an ex-fighter himself, isn't he? As for the rest, nerds LARPing masculinity isn't really a new thing.

As for the rest, nerds LARPing masculinity isn't really a new thing.

I think when you attain the ability to physically overpower and subdue/KO 90ish% of the male population, you're not really roleplaying so much anymore.

Is the LARPer who actually gets really good at, say, medieval archery, no longer LARPing? (I don't think the answer is obvious.)

I think being a nerd or a jock or something is decided early on in life. Certainly by high school this kind of status is solidified. It's like beauty, which is discovered rather than wholly created. Say you take a plain or ugly overweight 30 year old woman, and you subject her to a stringent fitness regime and several hundred thousand dollars of cosmetic surgery. She might be hot as a result, might have pretty privilege, might bag a 'high value' husband or whatever, but it's never the same as the girl who realized she was beautiful at 12. It just isn't.

Not even that is necessary; if I was a billionaire who wanted to recruit people like this, I'd find a way to screen for women with puny jaws but otherwise good-looking faces. I'd then offer them free jaw surgery and braces in exchange for participating in my study. Picked jaws because clinical micrognathia - to the point where a surgeon's thinking about breaking and resetting your lower jaw or sometimes both - makes you look rather unattractive. Fixing it is pretty easy from a surgical perspective and the transformation is dramatic. Massive weight loss is impressive and admirable but whatever bad habits contributed to the weight are a confounder. Jaws are given out in the genetic lottery.

I think being a nerd or a jock or something is decided early on in life.

Fridman can still be a nerd inside and not be "LARPing" masculinity.

Jocks are masculine but you can be authentically masculine and even active without being a jock.

You can radically self-improve yourself, but you'll always have the "lived experience" of your previous self, which is unchangeable. Goggins was always a jock, yes he radically improved himself after he left the military the first time to become a Navy SEAL, achieved insane physical feats, but his social status as perceived by himself didn't radically change. As he writes, he was always that kid who wanted to join the military. He just did it twice and achieved extraordinary success while doing so.

Goggins is probably the single best human exemplar of human malleability. He's like a fascinating edge case of what happens when somebody just ... has infinite willpower.

@2rafa 's argument can I think charitably be phrased as "The grooves in your psyche are carved by the time you are 12 or so and it's impossible to recapture that time."

But I suspect you have different definitions of identity and different definitions of nerd and jock here.

Excellent post, but I think Goggins is a spectacularly bad example.

First of all, he was an Airforce TACP at 20, then got obese after leaving the Air Force and working a dead end job, before working his way all the way back to the SEALs. The SEALs are obviously more famous/prestigious and arguably more difficult, but it's hardly too big a change of genre from TACP. Reaching the SEALs, and then going on to do various crazy things with ultramarathons and pull up records and whatnot, was arguably a return to form for him moreso than a change in lifestyle.

Second, he is insane. I don't mean that negatively or judgmentally, he's awesome and I enjoy his podcast appearances and I love his challenge heavy gut-it-out approach to fitness. But he's very different from most people. The experiences he's had have carved deep grooves in his psyche, among them is a recognizable insecurity and fear of going back to where he was. I've noticed that among the handful of people I know who have lost similar amounts of weight or made those kinds of fitness changes. One of my best friends throughout my life, we were both skinny teenagers, then he for various reasons (graduating high school and no longer playing soccer, leaving home and eating too much McDonald's) ballooned to 260 lbs. He since has lost a ton of weight, through a tremendous effort of cutting almost all carbs out of his diet for over a year, and while he's no Goggins he went from getting physically carried through a Spartan Sprint to running multiple Spartan Trifectas a year and placing top-10. But the scars remain: I have a very different relationship to food than he does, despite being the same weight today. He has a fear of food that I don't have, because he's seen what it can do to him. Goggins, similarly, is going to have a different mentality than someone who spent their whole life on one track from High School Cross Country star to Ultramarathoner. That difference is visible when you listen to him talk.

As for the prophets, I do think it means something that, for example, Sidhartha Guatama came from a Kshatriya warrior family, not from a Brahmin family of fellow sages or a Shudra family that was pissed on. A sermon I heard many years ago talked about the legends of Buddha meditating under the Bodhi tree, and demons appeared and threatened him with armies and tempted him with pleasures. The sermon talked about how depending on the translation, it's not clear that he was threatened with the armies, but perhaps was tempted by them. "Come on, let's go conquer and fight and rape and pillage like warriors should! It'll be a good time, we'll war and win and bleed." Buddha understood both the temptations of ease and of leisure, and the temptations of strife and of struggle. Both Type I and Type II fun are desires that must be extinguished.

Personally, I think that human identity is based primarily on hierarchy. The question of one's identity is the result of trying to differentiate oneself from others. One isn't a jock because one is big and strong, one is a jock because one is (or perceives oneself as) bigger and stronger than others, and defines oneself by that. One isn't a nerd because one is smart, but because one defines oneself by being smarter than others. As a result, one of my goals is to make sure that I raise my children by exposing them to as many different hierarchies where they will fit in differently and discover and develop different sides of themselves.

Mentality isn't really metaphysical. It is not a novel idea that the way people think is based on the way their youth went and is slow to change afterwards.

Money and muscle, that’s what I want; to be able to do any damned thing I want and get away with it. Money won’t do that altogether, because if a man is a weakling, all the money in the world won’t enable him to soak an enemy himself; on the other hand, unless he has money he may not be able to get away with it.

  • Robert E. Howard

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