The modern man is little more than a designer dog. While still technically a dog, he hardly looks the part and though he has instincts, he fails to carry out any of his aims very well. Compared to his ancestors his body is weak, the noises that come out of his mouth are mostly shrill and meaningless, and any remnants of a desire to pursue is backed by no ability whatsoever. He is judged solely on his appearance rather than his capability or character. Typically, he can be found aiming to please women rather than working alongside men, or lounging casually in the comforts of home rather than trudging forward through the unknown with ferocious resolve. Despite this, he still requires the fulfillment of his ancient drives. Like the designer dog, the modern man attempts to satisfy his needs in much more domesticated ways than his forebearers, and though he may feel his modern lifestyle adequately meets these, his contentment will never approach that of the untamed man.
From birth until death, men hunger for adventure and thrill. Living in the city and working a nine-to-five is hardly enough to satiate most men, so they search for adventure in the places most accessible to them and in agreement with their personalities. Men historically found themselves hunting, traveling on necessary journeys, taming land, and overcoming any number of day-to-day challenges that are absent from modern city life. Today, men find similar satisfaction hiking for pleasure, playing video games, doing drugs, watching movies, or engaging in planned, and more or less controlled, thrill-seeking activities. Moreover, without the physical exhaustion that came with the past outlets for adventure, men now require the gym or sports to blow off extra energy and stay healthy. This means that men today must intentionally set aside valuable time to exercise, whereas before they could kill two birds while they completed necessary work. I enjoy sports as much as the next person, but I can’t play sports as much as my body would require to stay healthy—there is no time for that if you’re acting responsibly—and the gym is simply uneconomical in its time spent exercising muscles that may or may not be useful to productive life. Muscle conditioning is more important and effective than simply muscle building. This is accomplished by building strength through functional activities that engage large networks of your musculoskeletal system as opposed to training a specific group of muscles under limited circumstances. If you live in an apartment, the gym and sports may be your best bet to stay healthy and manage stress, but it would be far better for you to perform chores on a property you own to train the muscles you need every day. Case in point, no matter how much you work out in the gym, nothing will prepare you better for bucking twenty tons of hay for your winter stockpile than handling those 100-pound bales daily.
Another much needed outlet is one of creation. Man is a created being who was made to create. Most creative projects are worthy in and of themselves, with past creations often being functional and outwardly concerned, and modern creations often being cerebral and introspective. Thanks to modern advancements in infrastructure, industry, and agriculture, men no longer need to create out of necessity, but instead have excess time to drain their creative energy into discretionary projects. Music, hobby crafts (furniture making, tinkering, vintage car restoration, etc.), drawing, home landscaping, and writing are some typical creative activities engaged in by men. Something shared by most modern creative activities is that they are luxuries, and I certainly wouldn’t advocate we dispose of such luxuries—I enjoy both art and music. However, men used to exercise their creativity by solving problems related to homesteading, building structures, or making things that were needed by their families. I would argue that successfully harvesting a vegetable garden is a much more rewarding creative outlet than maintaining a barren flower bed or pesticide-laden lawn. This isn’t to say that there is no place for creative engagements solely enjoyed for the purpose of creation, but I do think men would find additional fulfillment incorporating some practical creative projects into their lives.
Though men spend much of their time ruminating over many daily challenges and pleasures, a large portion of their thoughts are devoted to acquiring sex and money (read: power). Since western men have been programmed since youth to be hyper-fixated on lust and prestige instead of marriage and legacy, their aspirations are predictable: secure a professional position that makes the most money possible with secondary regard for the craft itself, and sleep with as many women as possible. To accomplish these, a man will pursue careers he doesn’t particularly enjoy, excessively groom himself, overly concern himself with fashion trends, and waste hours on social media promoting himself on the basis of sex appeal and wealth acquisition. He’ll court women with no intention of marriage, let alone a relationship; watch pornography; and masturbate almost daily. Compare this to the goals of the historical man seeking to secure a woman for marriage and build an inheritance for his children. This man of days passed is focused on achieving recognition based on his status among peers in his trade, his standing among the local community, the size of his family, and the amount of land, livestock, and fortune he may leave to his children. He doesn’t squander his time chasing women to indulge sinful appetites and instead engages in purposeful dating with the aim of marriage.
The final major need of man is spiritual. Man was formed in the image of God and will always require a healthy relationship with God to feel content. The modern man feels the emptiness resulting from a damaged bond with his creator, but foolishly builds idols and worships other gods to fill this void. He worships at whichever altar popular culture instructs him to and makes unholy sacrifices of his time, talent, and treasure to false gods. The traditional man understands his spiritual needs can only be satisfied with a relationship to the Most High. Men can reflect on the intimate relationship God once shared with Adam before his fall, walking with Him in the Garden of Eden, and strive to walk spiritually with Him in our fallen world.
There are countless more examples of the modern man behaving in ways that are but a shadow of how his predecessors would have engaged in their world. All of this is a direct result of our collective sin and the environment we created and now inhabit. The timescale for the analogy of breeding wolves into lap dogs doesn’t really work for the rapid degradation that has been affected in men, though the magnitude of the change is strikingly similar. Perhaps a better analogy would be the taming of wild animals; if you put a lion in a cage and discourage wild behaviors while encouraging domesticated behaviors, over time you could start to tame the creature, but it will still remain mostly wild. However, if you take that lion’s offspring and train them from birth to be manageable, just one generation later you will have something that is quite docile. Combine this with effective punishments for undesirable behavior and an overabundance of rewards for desirable behavior and the beast will do anything you want. In spite of this training, should the lion grow tired of punishments for his natural impulses, crave something more than the scraps you’re feeding him, and simply recognize that he is a lion and feel his instincts confirm this, he may decide that he wants to reclaim his wild nature. Nevertheless, most lions in this situation, save a few, would never reach this point. This is precisely the situation men find themselves in today.
Certainly, this predicament is not the fault of any man today, but it will either be propagated or corrected by him. A cursory look at our society will reveal all you need to know about how men arrived at their weakened state. Men would rather watch porn than abstain until marriage, would sooner party into the night than wake up early for a productive day, worship women rather than God, and be nice instead of honorable. Male testosterone levels are in decline and I would wager that porn addiction, drug and alcohol use, and unhealthy lifestyle are among the leading causes of that.
Men should resent what they have become, and they probably would if there were any abundance of proper male role models to compare themselves against. Unfortunately, our tyrannical feminine society has all but eliminated virile Godly men—even in rural conservative areas these men are hard to come by. Men must look at themselves in an honest way, recognize they are falling short of their potential, and take aggressive action in the war that has been waged against them. The West has taken a timber wolf and turned it into a Pomeranian. It’s time to renounce our complacency and repossess our masculinity. We must embrace the responsibilities we’ve shirked and expel the poisonous pleasures we’ve consumed. Stop masturbating, stop drinking, stop eating garbage, and start following God’s law.
Unfortunately, the vast majority of men are unlikely to change course, but the more introspective and ambitious of us can awaken from our slumber and battle the enemy that has waged war upon us—Satan and his principalities of darkness. Remember what our King told us: “The kingdom of heaven suffers violence, and the violent take it by force” (Matthew 11:12). We can raise ourselves up into righteous men and father sons who succeed where we faltered. We will nurture our God given instincts and guard ourselves against domestication by Satanic forces. Today, that means engaging in a deep examination of our souls and uncovering the productive ways we were meant to satisfy our needs as men. Eventually, it means undergoing a spiritual evolution to reclaim our place in God’s family as wild, untamed, men.
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