Long before King Leonidas became the darling of American gun-owners with his challenge to the Persian millions to “come and take” his Spartan warrior’s spears, before the Spartan Ephors taunted Philip of Macedon with their defiant “if” to his threat of invasion, it was Lycurgus, the Solon of Sparta, who bestowed the most humorous trait on the otherwise humorless Laconic society. Plutarch praises him at ironic length in his Life, and in the midst of the long-winded Boeotian’s adulation, he recounts a rather telling instance when Lycurgus was engaged by a man who sought “by all means” to establish in Sparta an Athenian-styled democracy. The Father of Sparta responded, “Go thou… and first establish democracy in thy household”.

This is truly a father’s retort. Only a father can truly appreciate how little broad distribution of power and authority can exist in a household for it to survive. The household is inherently monarchical or anarchical, with no middle ground between; children grow and learn by testing boundaries—as the adage goes, “if you want to destroy a man, give him everything he wants”. Paul Harvey attributed that aphorism to that nebulous tribe “the ancient Greeks” – a favorite attribution for older Americans who cannot identify a source but find the quote under scrutiny to be magisterial. Whoever dreamed it up certainly had watched children being given all they desire and recognized the dangers of complacency born of satisfaction: a vicious mind, a hardened heart, and a dead soul. One will find among societies that seek to provide all necessities and satiate all appetites a certain reversal of hierarchies parading as an abolition of those hierarchies. In particular, we see in our own decaying monument to egalitarian social thought a marked overvaluing of women and undervaluing of men from childhood.

The household—and its extension, the clan—teaches people not just about authority, but about the common law by which all men abide in all societies, those arbitrary laws of social norms, taboos, and mundane expectations that are the true root of authority in any given place and time, in spite of and opposed to the supposed “rule of law” dictated by a state. The real sovereign in a community is always the opinion of others—and the degree to which the broader population tolerates divergences from common practice reveals the degree of social cohesion and stability present in that population. Communal justice and legal justice exist in a careful balance, or neither exists at all: this is the essence of the term anarcho-tyranny, which is really nothing more than the absence of communal justice, where the law takes its cue instead from the more theoretical, nebulous, and therefore academic definitions of social justice. Social justice is defined by how thoroughly it problematizes, complicates, and unpacks the fundamental truth Spiridon shares with Nerzhin in Solzhenitsyn’s First Circle:

“Can anybody on this earth possibly make out who’s right and who’s wrong? Who can tell us that?”

Spiridon’s frown had disappeared, and he answered as readily as if he’d been asked which guard would be on duty next morning. “I can tell you: Killing wolves is right; eating people is wrong”.

“What? What’s that you say?” The simplicity and certainty of Spiridon’s answer took Nerzhin’s breath away.

“Just that”, Spiridon said. “The wolf killer is in the right; the man-eater is not”.

In the household, on the other hand, the maxim is unspoken and assumed: “The wolf killer is in the right; the man-eater is not.” Thus, the household, and by extension the clan, has ever been assumed to be the basis of a functioning society—implicit in Lycurgus’ retort, explicit in the writings of Confucius, whose whole world is nothing but the imitation of the relationship between father and son—the master householder and his apprentice.

Even where the household is not a model of social action, however, it remains a heavy influence on society and political power structures. Societies are inevitably governed according to a style that reflects the dynamic of the household and family and will either perpetuate the form of family life that reflects its governance or subsume family life altogether into governance. Strictly speaking, in traditional societies, the clan is the final arbiter of right and wrong and the first loyalty of a man after God; thus the state and the clan are essentially joined. Conversely (at the risk of committing a horseshoe fallacy), a progressive society will always see the state as the final arbiter of right and wrong and the only loyalty of a man (since God is not an option). As a result, the family is eliminated and men share in common only that they are equally dependent on and attached to the state. Historically, a key shift is observable in the West between one form of society and the other; this shift is from a social reality in which households are dedicated to the sustainability and health of the family whole to a social reality in which they are dedicated chiefly to the and material well-being of the family unit. There are, therefore, two shifts taking place: first, from a definition of “family” from a consanguine community to a conjugal community and, second, from “family” in the historical sense to the same in the more immediate sense. In short, “family” has ceased to represent a continuity and community and has come to represent an isolated unit of both time & physical beings.

The rise of the nuclear family and its opposition to the more ancient and traditional family structure of healthy societies has been in the air for so long that even The American Conservative has taken note of it—though, like their academic predecessor on the subject, Jan de Vries, they mark it as a positive change. Even for the historian de Vries, however, the focus is on the narrowing of the family in place rather than in time. More sacred, after all, to the liberal mind than the nuclear family as an economic unit is the equality of the sexes, dogmatically defined at the beginning of the 20th century. The abandonment, therefore, of the forward- and backward-looking family, that is, the clan, goes unremarked upon because the clan and tribe are neither egalitarian, nor complementarian in reference to the sexes.

Visited upon Sons of Sons

The family, in both the conjugal and consanguineous sense, grows in but two ways: horizontally, through marriage and the procreation of children, and vertically, through the successful continuation of this process in multiple generations. These two are not, of course, and cannot be mutually exclusive—they are dependent on one another. However, one must always be given grater place than the other, depending on the values of the society in questions, for one is focused on the preservation of a family line and, thereby, on long-term stability, while the other preserves cohesion of the household unit and, therefore, short-term familial stability. Which one of these a society chooses to value dictates the stability and longevity of that society and the culture that gives it shape. More simply put, a people which devalues inheritance devalues its own posterity and survival.

There are two varieties of peoples who place greater emphasis on horizontal than vertical growth in a family unit: the tribal and the peasant. In a primitive tribal society, in which survival is the rule and history is confined to a broad collection of orally-conveyed didactic tales, marriage patterns are almost wholly lateral; a general sense of equality among the tribes is the tendency, since inequality is always momentary. Certainly a tribe may be more powerful or weaker than another, but this trait is not innate—it is, rather, dependent on the tribal leaders of any given generation and upon tribal numbers within that generation. There are, in short, only strong tribes, not strong bloodlines, in such a society, meaning that the surest guarantee of security is to be or to be tied to the strongest tribe in any given generation. Power relations shift generation to generation, and horizontal family growth is of greater value because greater numbers increases power. In such a situation, male and female children are usually valued equally, since both can bring momentary stability to the tribe through transaction.

We see this especially in societies like the Mongols, the Celts, and the Khmer; another thing we observe in such societies is the elevated status of women—feminist histories gush profusely over the empowerment of such figures as Boadicea of the Britons and Truong Trac in Vietnam. However, in the case of both the Celts and the Vietnamese, we have two societies which had either left behind or altogether failed to create an advanced civilization. In the case of the Gaels, particularly, the matriarchal quality of Gaelic society, especially among the Irish, is a trait of the late Middle Ages and later. Even in Caesar’s commentaries, one finds remnants of the patriarchal society evidenced by the disproportionately male bog bodies of the late Bronze Age, when Celtic culture was at its zenith. This vanishes and then reappears when the Celts are absorbed wholesale into emerging Western civilization, when we once again see the practice of reckoning their heritage by male line (i.e. the emergence of naming conventions using the now common Gaelic ui—“son of” and mac—“whose ancestor was” to denote heritage).

The second society which values horizontal growth greater than vertical is what Spengler called the peasant, whose status divorces them from a sense of history and makes the expansion of families of greater importance for their survival. This can be observed in particular in the reproductive habits of late antiquity as the practice of infant exposure was abandoned and families were deliberately bred large to work land. It is seen again during the Industrial West where children were bred to enlarge the productive potential of the emerging proletarian. A similar pattern is seen among the fellaheen of Egypt. Closer to home now, there is a drive among the emerging fellaheen to increase birth rates for their own sake, without regard to individual bloodlines. Women and men in the contemporary West are entering marriage either without the goal of producing children at all—an undeniable social evil—or, further right in the same cohort, entering marriage contractually to have a family of a set size, either for later support or present signalling. Such people, even rightists, are not concerned about the sex of the children in question – the fellaheen quality of these concerns is illustrated in the rhetoric arguing for these families.

Questions like “who will remember you when you’re gone” and images of cat-ladies dying alone still suggest a drive that is primarily horizontal rather than vertical—the rhetoric still regards children as existing primarily for their parents, rather than for their own children. It will become clear in the course of this discussion that horizontal growth is not a sustainable civilizational model, because it provides only generational stability. This is the type of marriage pattern that dominates the intermediate periods of human history, between great civilizations. It indicates both the place of our society in human history as well as the limitations we necessarily suffer.

In contrast to these, we have complex societies with established hierarchies. In the broad sweep of human cultures, upwards of 44 percent reckon inheritance through the male line. This is rooted in a natural tendency among males to deal with threats in a preventative fashion; as hunters, providers, and protectors, males must possess and cultivate skills which either enable them to respond to danger or to stave off disasters. Consider, for example, the survivalist, a peculiarly forward-thinking bunch. We must take into account that many preppers are married to or at least cohabitating with someone of a similar outlook (after all, the extreme quality of the doomsday mindset makes them unlikely to maintain a close relationship with someone who is otherwise inclined), but the numbers still demonstrate a higher degree of urgency on the part of males in putting up savings and purchasing materials for dealing with a political or natural crisis (females outpace males slightly in reacting solely to natural disasters, but otherwise there are more males who fit the definition of “prepper”). Indeed, the “fight or flight”/”tend and befriend” dichotomy also clearly indicates male preference for confronting and avoiding crises and the female tendency to seek and provide comfort in crises.

Likewise, these cultures also use marriage as a means of alliance between bloodline and tribe—rarely, if ever, were matches made solely in reference to the man and woman as individuals being joined in marriage. This is no less true in Christian European culture; indeed, the vows in Western marriage especially are meant to guarantee the free-willing participation of the man and woman, an important element encouraging the investment of these future parents in the future arrangement of their children’s alliances with other families. This is not, however, unique to Faustian man—several European civilizations have given rise to similar attitudes and practices, and, it may be argued historically, such attitudes towards marriage and family relations is essential to the survival of European civilizations, from the prehistoric Celtic civilization of Western Europe to the Classical civilization of the Greeks and Romans in Southern Europe to the Germanic Faustian civilization of Central Europe and beyond.

In all cases, European tribes and races who place greater value on the well-being, success, and proliferation of female offspring than the same for male offspring will inevitably implode, deprived of a sense of race and reduced to an ahistorical world-feeling, and non-European peoples who overvalue girls show a decidedly lower propensity for birthing higher civilizations. It goes without saying that this rule applies most decidedly to societies with high fecundity, but likewise that high fecundity is natural to any society that values what men bring to a family—that is, vertical growth through the drawing in of females from other families. Neither are artificially high rates of fecundity (such as were encouraged in Fascist Europe) viable alternatives, since these still indicate a society with higher horizontal concerns.

The counterpoint offered by China, which historically seems to favor boys, is perhaps the best example of the incorrect valuation of male offspring, desiring them for status and therefore for the horizontal impact they have on a family. Boys are more judged more valuable because of what they do for the family in the present rather than what they can provide in the future. (This is, of course, a cancerous perversion of more ancient Chinese mores to be expected, if not altogether natural, in a late-stage civilization.)

Social Stability and Social Sustainability

Society, we have already asserted, is built upon the foundation of the ethos of the household; in societies in which households are dominated by horizontal concerns, the society will have a higher chance of being ahistorical, aracial, and reactive in terms of its social problems just as vertically-concerned households produce a society that is deeply historical, has a strong sense of race, and is proactive in its social problems. This also means that a horizontally-concerned society will be given to more liberality and diversity of both moral absolutes and cultural influences. It will be a spiritually, genetically, and intellectually miscegenated and therefore wracked with uncertainty of its identity, deriving a sense of self from what people do rather than where they come from. In contrast, a vertically-concerned society will be more cautious and conservative, favoring a single absolute Truth and discouraging cross-pollination with other cultures, races, and religions; it will be given to clannishness, isolationism, and perhaps some dogmatism, with a strong and defined sense of identity derived from a clear historical sense of both where its people come from and where they are going. It does not take much thought to conclude which of these two we presently live in.

It is incredibly important, however, to note that the horizontal tendency in thought and emotion by no means suggests that it must be stamped out. A nurturing mind requires a horizontal orientation; it is essentially feminine because it is essentially—even uniquely—maternal. Motherhood must always be present-oriented, and likewise women in society are most concerned with addressing and assessing immediate dangers and threats. The tend and befriend stress reaction is structured precisely to respond to localized crises and threats to inner stability in the family. Even in a Biblical interpretation, women are most concerned with addressing immediate needs. God used this tendency in the case of Rahab especially, who betrays her own gods and people in aiding the Hebrew spies in Jericho, as well as with Rahab’s daughter-in-law Ruth, whose personal loyalty to Naomi drives her to seek favor with Boaz. Indeed, in our first ancestors, Adam is given the place of law-giver, naming the animals and thereby appointing them their roles, since every name was derived from what he decided was their defining trait. This is in its essence a forward-thinking undertaking, and Adam was therefore created by God to serve a far-reaching purpose. Eve, on the other hand, was created by God to satisfy a need of man that is at its very basis immediate: the need for companionship that can only be provided by another human being. Eve’s transgression was a violation of her nature in supporting Adam in his present need: Adam’s transgression was the refusal to accept his own fault, rejecting his nature in favor of his present feeling of pride and guilt. Eve sinned in her temptation of Adam; Adam sinned by his blaming of God (“the woman Thou gave me”) rather than repenting. An even less flattering contrast is that of Joseph and the wife of Potiphar, wherein Potiphar’s wife is cuckolding her husband, neglecting her feminine role of maintaining stability in the house, while Joseph, who might have easily given in and never been caught, prefers instead to stand accused of raping the woman so that he might avoid the long-term impact of cuckolding Potiphar. The message is clear: those things which now require empirical research to demonstrate were known by the Hebrews.

It follows that because of their thirst for stability in the here-and-now, women tend to be more concerned by nature with equality and fairness, men with righteousness and ritual. Likewise, women will of course be more emotive. Leonard Sax is the latest in a long line of best-selling pop-psychologists telling American parents how to do something that should be instinctual (parenting). Nevertheless, he offers the highly unpopular opinion that biological sexual differences are both real and have a serious implication in the way boys and girls approach the world. Some examples he furnishes include studies of boys and girls at play—asked to choose between a grey truck and a colorful doll, the overwhelming majority of boys chose the truck and the overwhelming majority of girls chose the doll, because the truck engaged the activity-oriented parts of the brain active and the doll engaged the sensory-oriented parts of the brain. Likewise, asked to draw pictures, girls nearly universally—regardless of cultural background, race, or other social condition—drew two-dimensional scenes located on a horizon with a person and flowers with an occasional animal or pet. Boys, on the other hand, nearly universally drew three-dimensional scenes with action and motion towards or away from the viewer: violence is common, such as drawings of soldiers attacking a fortified position. Sax interprets this in a manner consistent with a female-dominated society, which views the two as different, but equal ways of thinking, seeking equilibrium between the two. However, this neglects historical evidence of male behavior patterns, especially in the West.

Men are not just three-dimensional in their boyhood doodles and action-oriented in the toys of the nursery. Men are goal-oriented by their very nature; practical, forward-thinking, planning, and therefore valued in traditional societies as governors and perpetuators of a family name and bloodline. The best leader thinks in terms of sustainability—planting trees, as the proverb has it, whose shade he will never enjoy. Women are not, in the broad scope, capable of this: their goal is to stabilize and maintain a family in the now and they think in terms of social stability. Girl children are thereby more valuable and important in the present. Their naturally higher pain threshold and ability to balance multiple tasks, as well as the tendency of the female to react more immediately to a crisis, all of which have been demonstrated thoroughly by behaviorists, makes a woman naturally suited to maintain stability in her home, in her community, and in her life, so long as she is not exposed consistently to high-level crises.

Here, therefore, men have always filled the social demand for endurance. In the household, the forward-thinking man prevents greater crises to better allow the present-minded woman to deal with lesser crises, thus minimizing stress on one another and maintaining both a stable and a sustainable household situation. Women are by their nature nurturers. Men are instead given to imbuing children with traits of survival. Men by nature provide sustenance for the family, sustaining it. Women by nature distribute sustenance for the family, stabilizing it. This also plays out in the marriage market. Tribes are by their nature competitors—different communities, especially those bound by blood, will naturally be drawn into conflict over territory, resources, and prestige if they live in proximity to one another, even if all their material needs are otherwise met.

The simplest and most direct way to manage rivalry and conflict is through incurring shared risk. The easiest way for families and tribes to introduce shared risk is the exchange of members—historically, this has been done through marriage. Likewise, marriage contracts in European society have always served for the perpetuation of a male line, meaning that by marrying a woman, a man is benefiting her family with status and stability (unfitting matches among males were evaluated along these lines) and, subsequently, by marrying a daughter off a man was guaranteeing his tribe had a stake in a greater or equal tribe, ensuring benefits for both his grandsons by his sons and his grandsons by his daughters. Women, on the other hand, enter marriage for the sake of the men who construct and contract that marriage—her father and her husband. In the end she will be perpetuating someone else’s family line. Thus, while a woman is useful in improving a tribe’s generational situation, sons are far more so because they perpetuate a bloodline directly.

Strangers in a Strange Land

Only a particularly well-off society with very little concern of tribal conflict has men to spare for a celibate priesthood (and, in fact, where tribal and clannish conflict did not subside, priests did not remain celibate; consider, for example, Renaissance Florence and Rome, eleventh century France—or seventh century Ireland and Scotland, where even monks and nuns were married and producing children). Likewise, consider the social value of virginity: globally, female virginity is valued higher than male virginity; when a woman removes herself from the marriage market, her virginity loses value, while when a man becomes a celibate, his virginity increases in social value. This is because a woman must be intact and untouched to fulfill her social role as the exclusive mother of one family—while a man might still contribute to the vertical growth of a family even if he procreates with multiple partners (in fact, this could even be seen as an effective—if immoral—survival strategy for a bloodline). These things reinforce the general conclusion that men perpetuate and sustain family lines by carrying the family name and directing marriage contracts, while women guarantee family stability and tribal peace through entering marriage alliances and by bearing and raising children.

What has been unfolded is an argument for a natural state of man, which is not to say a “state of nature”, but rather a status conforming to the laws of Creation and those traits inherent to the sexes. On the assumption that all beings have a functional place and purpose within the great expanse of Creation, it follows that there is decided intentionality in those traits which sociobiologists have observed in men and women. It is likewise true that what Spandrell has come to call Bioleninism has been in action in the Western world for long enough now that these traits have come under direct and constant attack, and the assumed motives for allowing them to dictate social outcomes are no longer taken as granted. Amidst the discussion of transsexuals, incels, and furries, even perversions like sodomy and incest become blasé and ordinary to anyone following along. Things once assumed—that parents choose mates for their children and that the household is the basis for social stability, not the nuclear family—have been forgotten because they were pushed out of popular acceptance generations ago, to the extent that such a suggestion today is not only absurd but even innovative. Now, people can’t even agree on the definition of marriage, let alone how to conceptualize it in a social setting.

This has tremendous political implications—there is a great deal of talk about Donald Trump being the last of his kind to be elected to public office. This may be true, but it has a great deal less to do with demographics than most suppose. Trump the simulacrum is more important than Trump the man; Trump the simulacrum is the ultimate masculine authority and the reassertion of a patriarchal tribe. Flanked by his latest nubile mate, surrounded by his sons (far more active in the campaign than in his presidency), and children of multiple marriages, Trump is a tribal chieftain reasserting the natural state of man. When he was declared God-Emperor by his frog army, this revealed a deep need on the part of Westerners for a dynastic authority. It is also why Trump is so hated—the Never Trump Traddad sees in this simulacrum the reality of his own inferiority as a man, and he therefore hates it. The reality is that he likely has more in common with Trump the man than he thinks.

These same people, however, who innately crave the simulacrum of masculinity, authority, and order that Trump represents have guaranteed that they are only ruled by Trump the man—a pragmatic Boomer himself, convinced of his own infallibility, subject to the whims of his favorite daughter and the family of which she has become a functional member. These same people would be completely incapable, and indeed do not desire, to recreate the tribal chieftain they have fetishized because such a concept is unthinkable to them. Trump’s three marriages and infidelities are ignored, not tolerated, after all—he’s no Lorenzo de Medici. Trump is “a family man” who loves his children—his planning for the future of the Trump clan is not relevant to his persona. The rhetoric and framing of Trump in the public eye and mind remains profoundly horizontal. No future, however, is possible to a people who are horizontal thinkers. They will remain effeminate, ahistorical, and subject to the arbitrary rule of simulacra of natural masculine authority or the tyranny of the Bioleninists.

To become worthy of rule, therefore, is not merely to take on the appearance of an alternative, but to offer the real restoration of a male-driven society. The Männerbund is impossible unless it is driven by the vertical concerns of men more than the horizontal concerns of a feminized manhood. If we are not worthy of our sons over and above all other things, we are not worthy of anything at all, for our sons are all we have to offer to our grandsons, to our great-grandsons, and to God.