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The upthread discussion about male role models reminded me of a web essay that I can no longer find (damn it). The author was a male English professor for undergrads. His course satisfied a general requirement, so his male student population broadly represented the student body. In the essay, the author observed that when his male students were given an opportunity to select a text or topic to study, the most popular subject was always power.
I don’t recall the author proposing any reason for that preference. We can come up with a couple.
Broke: They know that power is the ultimate aphrodesiac.
Woke: They are already toxically masculine. The professor should focus exclusively on books by queer women of color, who hate power.
Bespoke: They are thinking about the Roman Empire.
I’ll have to expand on that last one.
Ages ago, I came across someone asking why 19th Century Britain seemed to be so obsessed with Rome. One responder said “Britain found itself with an empire unexpectedly. The 19th Century British culture was looking to ancient Rome to give it context. How should they act? What is it like to have an empire? What can they learn?”
That sprang to mind as I was reading the essay. Those teenage boys knew that they were on the cusp of having power, over themselves at least. They should, at least. What does that mean? How should they behave?
My question, then, is: What would you recommend for those boys, to help them understand the power that they will eventually wield?
The founding fathers of America were obsessed with Rome. Everything bad was like the wicked praetorians, etc. I think men in the 18th and 19th centuries really took Rome seriously.
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As a former boy, I happen to be an expert on this topic. So here's a good reading list that skips the trivialities and gets you directly to the true knowledge of that awful beast.
These on their own should, if you internalize their lessons, dispel idealisms and make you a dangerous politician.
I expect a lot of this thread to worry about the moral question, about what to do about and with power. But for that question to be relevant, one must acquire and wield it first, and understand how it really works.
Most people don't read classical literature (including nonfiction) except for a specific reason, usually school. The size of the population, let alone the size of the young male population, who'd 1) consider reading such things to not be boring drudgework and 2) actually get anything out of them is tiny. Reading such things is no longer considered high status in our society anyway. It doesn't matter whether you personally read them as a boy and found them useful; typical-minding is a thing.
What they should read, or watch, is a variety of things that they mostly read or watch for other reasons, but which have the occasional bit about using power properly because the idea is in the zeitgeist so writers naturally put it in their works every so often. And the only way you're going to get that to happen is to restructure society first. (Although there's an interesting conversation in Fate/Zero.)
Your list is useless unless a boy actually comes up to you and says "I'd like to read some classical literature about exercising power, what do you recommend?" In which case, recommend away, but that won't happen much. It's the political science equivalent of "how do I get my child interested in programming computers?" To which the answer is "You don't, most people are not interested in that."
If there were a fictional series that compiled all this forbidden knowledge in a compelling narrative, I'd recommend that. But that does not exist. The best you get is dramatic tidbits of Machiavelli and maybe eternal truths carried through collective unconscious and archetypes, in say, Tolkien or Death Note.
If there are any artists looking for ideas, here's a under exploited gold mine of narrative tension though.
Tis true, not many have the stomach to learn how to succeed at politics. But I would actually dispute boys can't be made to read this stuff not because I did it, nor because they did the equivalent for decades but because PewDiePie had an ongoing book club with similar tomes and I know for a fact a decent amount of people followed along.
A "decent number of people" out of the size of the Internet is a tiny number of people.
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I'd never heard of "The Mind and Society" so I had a poke about. https://blackwells.co.uk/bookshop/search/author/Vilfredo%20Pareto are selling a new copy for £26. But wait, that is only volume 1. Where is volume 2? Checking https://archive.org/details/ParetoTheMindAndSocietyVol4TheGeneralFormOfSociety/Pareto%20-%20The%20Mind%20and%20Society%20Vol%204%3B%20The%20General%20Form%20of%20Society/page/n11/mode/2up?view=theater there are four volumes, a total of 1900 pages. Pareto seems to be stacking his concepts, maths style, with Greek letter names.
My Dover edition of The Prince runs to 71 pages of ordinary English. Brevity and language make it accessible to a boy, even if the topic does not. But is "The Mind and Society" not a little heavy going?
He's wordier than I like, but the whole psychological model of tendencies within society and the theory of residues is a valuable insight that you won't substantially find in other authors.
I'll easily concede a boy would benefit from the cliff notes version of all these. Which thankfully does exist in Parvini's The Populist Delusion. But it's still an overview rather than the thing in itself.
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Aren’t you overcomplicating it?
When given an open-ended question without a particular incentive, guys are going to pick something cool. I mean cool on a purely superficial, “this will be more fun than studying math” level.
For something to be cool, it can’t be too pedestrian. But you also can’t be too into it, or you’ll be branded a LARPer. (See: weaboos, Neo-Nazis, etc.) Admiring the Romans is much safer. They’ve got great aesthetics, are immediately recognizable, and are known for being winners. What’s not to like?
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Maybe Plutarch's Parallel Lives, and Seneca's Letter's? The first book covers the biographies of many important men of Greece and Rome, and the latter explains how to actually put virtue-based philosophy into practice.
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Anna Karenina. One of the most important choices many of them will make in the next decade or two will be the choice of a mate and forming a family. Anna Karenina is, as it's opening sentance expresses so poetically, a deep dive through all the things that need to go right to make a happy family.
Proverbs (and Ecclesiastes for the GATE kids if they finish), followed by James (and Romans if I'm allowed to proselytize).
Kipling's If.
The Federalist Paper 39 and Brutus Essay 1. Examples of the power of persuasion and the importance of considering the future when exercising power today.
Second this. It's an amazing work of literature that every learned human should read at least once during their lifetime. The Pevear/Volohonsky translation is an absolute tour de force too.
I've tried multiple times to read Anna Karenina, but I just can't ever stick with it. I think the furthest I ever made it was 1/4 to 1/3 through. What inevitably winds up happening is that it becomes a chore I have to force myself to do, rather than something I'm reading because it's enjoyable. And then it's only a matter of time until I stop reading it, and it just sits on the table until my wife or I put it back on the shelf when we're cleaning up the house.
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I've never read a Russian book in translation myself, but I've heard that PV are not considered very good.
Have you compared their translations with other translators?
P&V can be very controversial due to their extremely literal style. I've heard that their process is that V (who is a native Russian speaker) initially converts all the words in Russian into English directly word for word in the most literal way possible, and then P (who doesn't speak Russian perfectly) "beautifies" up these literal english sentences into something that works. It definitely has its drawbacks but equally the final result is something you can't get via the usual process done by a single translator.
For Anna Karenina I've only read their translation (and really liked it, but equally that could have been me liking Tolstoy), but I have read multiple translations of The Master and Margarita and found that I preferred the P&V translation over the two other ones I've read (but maybe this is my personal bias since the P&V translation was the first one I ever read and so perhaps I was subconsiously comparing the other ones to it when I was going over them).
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Presumably you want to cultivate some sense of how you can morally use power, the limits of what you can achieve with power (and no, the answer isn't "just acquire more power" every time), and the real risks (to you AND others) of irresponsible use of power.
Would it be gauche to just suggest "Read the Bible, especially the New Testament?" In a sense, Jesus Christ is an extreme example of a human granted ultimate power over everything, including death itself, who uses it with restraint and refuses to ever be tempted by the offer of earthly power to give in to corruption.
There are plenty of modern critiques of Jesus in the vein of "if I were given Godly power and no limit on how to use it, I could come up with many more creative ways to improve people's lives and the world" which attempt to make a rational case for being more bold and inventive with power, and suggest that Jesus was in fact a 'bad guy' for ignoring most of the suffering on the planet and only intervening to e.g. fix one guy's kid or heal a handful of lepers. Effective Altruism sells itself as being a better investment of resources than tithing to your local church (among other things).
But I honestly think Jesus is indeed the ideal role model in that he represents a human attainable sort of goodness that doesn't inherently rely upon the superhuman ability to resist every single temptation to misuse power, and doesn't require the power wielder to try to anticipate every single possible downstream outcome of their actions so as to optimize the world in ways that can have... unexpected effects.
Using godly power to cure sickness, alleviate hunger and occasionally raise the dead is a pretty good baseline for responsibly using the power you've spent so long acquiring. This suggests if you aren't using at least some of your power to alleviate the ailments and discomforts suffered by people in your local community(even if you can't help the dead ones) you're doing something wrong.
Notice that Jesus pretty much never uses his Godly power to punish wickedness. Indeed, when he drove out the money-lenders he used an old-fashioned whip, he didn't call down bolts of lightning. When his apostles suggested he call down bolts of lightning in retribution for being snubbed, he refused such an act and chastised the apostles for suggesting it. Jesus much preferred to give tongue-lashings or to use a clever allegory to bring 'punishment' than to inflict pain with his power. Indeed, he never used it when it would have been solely for his own benefit. Okay he did fuck up that fig tree that one time. so the message could be it's okay to use your power on plants.
So yeah. Maybe read the Bible. Christian Ethics aren't, perhaps, the most perfect version of practical morality that can be devised in all possible worlds, but if you're planning to follow a path and engage in behaviors to increase your own power, I would humbly suggest that it provides serious grounding for how to avoid becoming the type of person who would gleefully abuse power because you accidentally trained yourself to become that person in the process of gaining power. Also, if you actually acquire the belief that there is a HIGHER power than you, that's a great way to stay humble and not abuse power you acquire because you know exactly what's in store for you if you do.
There's a lot of Scifi books that have some good messages on using power responsibly, and a few nonfiction books that I think are handy on figuring out how to actually wield power with intent (rather than flinging it about randomly), I'll have to think a bit to compose such a list.
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A random selection of old moralizing history books with salient and exaggerated examples of the consequences of leadership. Start with Roman histories and go through medieval histories, only using the best anecdotes selected with wisdom. Like passages from an old book on Napoleon that specifically relates his personality deficits and biases to his campaign failures, with none of the irrelevant factoids that modern historians wrongly believe should be in history books. They must internalize the Great Man theory of history writ as large as possible. They should have an idea of which Byzantine emperors resulted in their people being overrun by Ottomans, and also which Muslims were able to conquer so much territory and with what means, etc etc.
Large-scale history is important because an ambitious man should see that wasting his talent selling overpriced shitty sneakers will eventually — over many iteration of souls — result in the complete destruction of his nation, and means that all of the efforts of his people were for nothing, which history proves time and time again. If the people/nation do not have the right hierarchy and orientation, that’s problem #1 to solve. History teaches that well. The riches of Baghdad meant nothing when one of their leaders decided to insult the Mongols. Who remembers the wealthiest Iroquois? Where are the riches of Mansa Musa?
Great Man theory is essential because it’s the most effective method for information internalization. Man is a social creature who naturally comes equipped with disk space that is only allotted for social information. Our memory for other people is naturally superior than other memory for statistics and rules. And so what you do is you represent human nature as people, dramatized, so that a reader can store as much information as efficiently as possible, imitating and revering some examples, afraid of other examples, and so on. Great Man Theory is the only cognitively correct way to study history for a leader. Academics are too dumb to realize that. It’s something like 1000x more useful to know the narrative of Napoleon in relation to his personality and those of his advisers and foes than to know any date, or any location, or even how to spell his name. At the end of the day what we aim to take away is something that can be applied in our own lives.
So after the highest hierarchy of history, you can move down to lessons about companies and how companies thrive and fail. Because this is probably where an ambitious young man will end up, anyway. So like, essays or passages from essays on IBM, Yahoo, Google, etc. Then I’d suggest an “inoculation against liars”, so some readings about how mainstream news lies about stuff, how to glean truthful information.
Lastly, readings from the Bible and readings from psychology
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Rogue warrior - the non fiction one by Richard Marcinko. Also his other non fiction ones.
Leadership Secrets of the Rogue Warrior: A Commando's Guide to Success The Rogue Warriors Strategy for Success The Real Team
I would also throw antifragile and skin in the game from Taleb and starship troopers. That should be enough.
Amusingly enough, I actually read Rogue Warrior as a kid.
Same - really shaped my worldview about leadership
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Unironically, probably select chapters from volume 1 of Gibbon's Fall and Decline of the Roman Empire, presuming the entire volume is too burdensome. Perhaps his perspective is anachronistic, but his description of the steady decline, destabilization, and loss of virtue in the Roman Empire seems like the perfect encapsulation of "Weak men create hard times". Don't be weak.
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The best training for boys is to take up some physical sport or activity, especially one where they are not competing with, or lead by, women. Boys need to acquire discipline in some kind of mastery, it has to be physical, and it has to involve overcoming failure. Men need to learn the humility of their weakness so they can enjoy pride in their strength.
This is basically impossible in an academic context, but whatever. If I were a parent with young boys, I would enroll them in a martial art or sport of their choice. If I were a professor, I would teach a class combining yoga or swordplay and history. If I were an administrator, I'd organize collegiate sports. And if I were dictator, I'd eliminate Title IX.
I don't think you can lecture boys into understanding. I don't think there is any mental curriculum that will make boys wise. The best you can do is excite them and nurture their passion. The current system mainly bores them with tedium and makework. For most boys, I think you need to replace most of what we teach as "history" with battles and wars. Excite their imaginations. Once they are interested in learning, they will naturally appreciate the disciplines and work.
Any nice ones that won’t kill their brain cells or give them wrestler ears?
Taekwondo is good. There are a million varieties, sometimes called things like Choikwando, or else wrapped up as Karate. But they're all fundamentally the same package, from the point of view of an American consumer. They have different heritage and will strike and train in different ways, but those details are unimportant. Brazilian Jiujitsu is popular for teenagers and guys in their mid 20s, but everyone I know who does it is always pulling something. Boxing is good for boys, but very particular, and I'm not sure I would put my kids in a sport that hits their heads.
The thing to do is see what's in your area. It makes a great deal of difference who's in charge, and who they're trying to teach to. There are a lot of martial arts programs designed for kids to run around and hit things. You can find those anywhere. In my experience, the best programs are family schools that teach to a wide variety of age ranks and groups. The big problem with a martial art, over a "traditional" sport, is that the path is much less defined. If your kids get into basketball or football or hockey the local schools will have programs that they can show up to and train in and hang out with other kids. There are matches and games and championships and teams. Martial arts isn't like that. Competition is basically solo, and not everyone competes. There's a fast rotation of kids coming in and out as they get busy or bored, and so the crew of regulars who stay becomes particular and real. Which means, in my experiences, the best martial arts studios have children and adults learning together, in the same room, and this bridges most of the problems.
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The story of my K-12 schooling. Frivolous busy work eating the hours. But also too little of it, so you mostly sit bored in an uncomfortable hard plastic chair waiting much of the day. This is apparently what education means.
AP classes were much better. Some actual education occurred in them. But as a portion of K-12 they were pretty small.
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Very related to this: one of the most immense feelings of envy that I’ve ever experienced while consuming a piece of media came during reading The Western Way of War, a book on the nitty-gritty minutiae of Ancient Greek hoplite warfare from the soldiers’ perspectives. The author is a professor at UCSD or USC or something (although I later learned that he’s more famous as a conservative pundit now, which makes some sort of sense I guess, although this content I personally haven’t engaged with), and in the book, he off-hand mentioned that he had his class dress up in replicas of hoplite armor, hold replicas of hoplite weaponry and shields, and stage a mock battle against one another, in order to have them better appreciate how the physical constraints of hoplite warfare influenced strategy. Anyway, point of all this is to say that even though it’s not even actual warfare, even though it’s not actual martial arts, even though it’s not actually building skills to be mastered — I always wished I could’ve had a professor like that. I’d imagine that a full-fledged “HEMA and the Thirty Years’ War” class would have a longer waitlist than almost all other courses offered at any given university.
Anyway, forgive my blogposting. Just had to get that off my chest.
Just on that description I'd bet money you're talking about Victor Davis Hanson. He's good.
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My university had a shop class. Using power sanders, bandsaw, drill presses, etc. That filled up within seconds of the earliest enrollment window. Students must have preloaded the webpage and then quickly clicked the very moment enrollment opened.
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ENDORSED.
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I agree with you on getting out of your mind and into your body. I was a skinny, awkward, and introverted kid who didn't do well in team sports so I withdrew from a lot of physical activity (aside from hiking and fishing) until I hit college. I took an introduction to martial arts course for my requisite PE credit. It wasn't until I was flat on my back after a hip-throw from a dude half my size that I really understood what my dad tried to teach me about men's capacity to cause injury and the ethical capacity not to exercise that capacity lightly. I understood them on an intellectual level but getting my ass handed to me pushed it from my brain to my gut.
Yep. I think most guys don't realize their own capacity for violence and as such they don't develop the competence to use it. This has many downstream effects on their psychological development.
Further, though, they don't develop the respect for other people's capacities for violence and, thus, how valuable it is to have rules and ethics to limit the use of violence. It must be hard to teach someone how to wield great power in an effective manner if they do not even know how to throw a punch.
"Yeah I can't even handle myself in a fight, but you can surely trust me to deploy legions of violent armed men against our enemies and to wield the overwhelming authority of the state with precision and efficacy."
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Watership Down. Or, if they have a higher tolerance for reading, Dune. (Those who are already playing Warhammer 40k can read Starship Troopers.) If they're more of a nonfiction type Machieveli's The Prince is concise and relevant. Art of War and On War are good for leadership.
I would back On War if only to get it across to those seeking power that the point is to achieve a goal. it's to instantiate the world you desire. Too many find power, exercise that power, and then are befuddled when they didn't get what they want.
"But I won. I won the fight/beat the army/socially humiliated the opponent. Why don't they give up?"
well, if you didn't get what you want then you didn't actually win now did you? Art of War is great for impressing upon someone that they should maximize their chances of winning On War is great for impressing upon someone that they should know what winning looks like ahead of time and then pursue victory. Not the other way around.
Those are extremely important lessons, but I'm skeptical that Art of War and On War can actually deliver them. I went to the Naval Academy. Everyone was "required" to read these books. We also had various practical exercises related to how to achieve military objectives. I saw no correlation between the people who actually read those books and did well academically and people who understood how/why to achieve military objectives.
Remember the second half of On War when Clausewitz just starts getting really nerdy about old Napoleonic tactics involving skirmishers and such? The Idealism philosophical book isn't useful for the tactical and operational scale. And the tactics he spends the second half on are hilariously out of date.
So I'm less passionate about the idea of the average military personnel pouring over the book than I am about the very idea of establishing On War's prestige in the eyes of the laymen. Sun Tzu has some name recognition and some people have even pretended to read his book. But Clausewitz is pretty much forgotten by the non-engaged public unless you are some kinda warnerd.
But the next time some genuinely asks me "I don't get it. why didn't we just nuke Afghanistan?" I wish I could use an argument from authority using quotes from Clausewitz. Since people think with crude heuristics and assumed knowledge (no condescension. we are all condemned to this) I wish his very basics could be expressed and then get a sage nod of 'well if Clausewitz said so then I guess so" simply because they recognize the name drop. I have managed to actually get normal people to take seriously that war has economic costs by pointing out Sun Tzu.
There's also an effort post somewhere about how obsessions' with winning in the operational sense undermines grasp of the strategic/political reality. You'd think the Nazi's won the war for all the gushing people still have over Rommel and the first year of Barbarossa.
Now that I think about it, this was probably the real reason for including Clausewitz in the Naval Academy curriculum. I definitely saw random O6+s namedropping Clausewitz to get us junior officers on board with their harebrained schemes.
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A fun fact about "Art of War" is that it's just one of many ancient Chinese military strategy books. Possibly the first, but far from the best or the most famous inside China. See for example: https://www.amazon.com/Seven-Military-Classics-Ancient-China/dp/1784289116 with stuff written by generals who were much more advanced and more successful. "Art of War" seems to have mostly become famous as part of the general burst of Orientalism along with Kung Fu and California Buddhism. It's sort of like if the only martial art that most people knew was "Billy Blank's Tai Bo workout."
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It requires a certain mindset that is obsessed about map-painting and an interest in history.
If you read those books and then proceed to completely ignore their lessons and substitute a vague Fukuyamist neoconservatism, of course you wouldn't learn anything. I would say that the American political establishment have a desire for both lengthy wars and wars of ideological vagueness and impossible aims (what does spreading democracy even mean, in an ethnically divided country?) that both books warn against.
If, on the net, reading those books turns you into someone who disagrees with the ghouls in the State Department, then it's a net win.
I suspect PokerPirate's suggestion is something more fundamental; namely that the skillset or talent-set of "good at reading books" and the skillset or talent-set of "good at accomplishing military objectives via maneuver warfare" are not the same skill/talent set.
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Yep. Strong agree there.
I won't say that the methods of acquiring and wielding power are completely orthogonal to those of identifying and pursuing an actual goal in the real world, but focus too much on the former and you won't develop the latter. And that feeling of confusion when you have power but aren't actually happy can lead people to start doing very ill-advised things. Better to figure out where you want things to go before you go about getting power.
I think I have a strong negative reaction to observing someone who has acquiring substantial power but seems unable to do anything with it other than lord it over others or engage in vulgar displays of power purely for the sake of it. There's not much to respect about those persons who have climbed to the top of the hierarchy and then have no clue what they actually want to do once they get there.
This might be why I have an ongoing appreciation for Elon Musk. Whatever power he has, he's using it all towards bringing the world closer to the state he would like it to be in, and he VERY CLEARLY articulates what that looks like to him. Beats billionaires who seemingly have no clue what they actually want to achieve and thus start throwing money around at various causes seemingly at random.
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