Human Nature Archives - Page 3 of 4

Israel is Separated from Other Nations

One of the greatest examples of seeing God’s intention to separate His people from the rest of the world is found in His commands to Israel. They were to be separate from all the other nations. There could be no intermarrying or relationships.

This is because the incredibly negative influence of the other nations would be so powerful that it might sway Israel towards evil. And in fact, it did sway them time and time again. We read in the book of Judges how over and over again the people of Israel disobey God, worship idols, intermarry with the locals, and behave poorly.

“You shall not intermarry with them, giving your daughters to their sons or taking their daughters for your sons, for they would turn away your sons from following me, to serve other gods. Then the anger of the Lord would be kindled against you, and he would destroy you quickly.”
Deuteronomy 7:3-4

It is easy to understand why they did this. It was because of the sexual activity involved in the various worship services of the foreign gods.

But some in the modern world might wonder why God did not allow them to intermarry so they could be a “good influence” on the people of Canaan. We are too simplistic in our thinking if we are contemplating this. We should know that the pull of a negative influence is far more powerful than the pull of a positive one. And we will always be more drawn towards evil than towards good. This is simply a part of the human condition, something we must think about as we do war with the flesh.

“For the flesh desires what is contrary to the Spirit, and the Spirit what is contrary to the flesh. They are in conflict with each other, so that you are not to do whatever you want.”
Galations 5:17

Israel could never be a good enough influence to change the people of the world

Sure, there were probably a few people here and there who wanted to join Israel and changed their beliefs. But these were the minority. Most people never change the way they are. And this is why God’s command was to totally annihilate these people from the face of the earth. None of them could be left alive.

“Completely destroy them—the Hittites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites—as the Lord your God has commanded you.”
Deuteronomy 20:17

If you are removing cancer from the human body, you obviously want to remove the whole thing. If you leave even a small portion of the cancerous tumor in the body, it will simply grow back to full strength.

This is why Israel was required to completely remove the cancer that was the pagan nations in Canaan. There could be no place for people who engaged in homosexuality and offered their children as burnt offerings to their gods. Imagine sacrificing your kids by burning them alive just so you could have a better life or a better harvest the next year. It is absolutely despicable behavior. And it was precisely this behavior that required those people to be utterly destroyed.

We live a similar life today.

The modern church overemphasized the idea of being a “good influence“. They do this in the same way that they place too much focus on accountability. These are good tools, but they should not make up the bulk of our practice. We are never going to be able to exert as much positive influence as the world will be able to exert a negative influence. The negative is always more powerful in a face-to-face assault. This is why we must be more strategic in our approach.

We have to control our environment. The best way to avoid negative behaviors is to make sure we do not have the opportunity to engage in them.

You cannot eat junk food if it is not in the house. You cannot be pulled into worldliness if you are not surrounded by people of the world. People who would be forcing their extremely powerful influence on you.

Influence always comes from a position of strength, you cannot influence someone unless you have some power or unless they look up to you in some way. There is no way around this. Influence, as well as help, always comes from a position of strength. This is a fact of life.

We have to arm ourselves and separate ourselves from the negative influence of the world. We have to split from the pack if we ever intend to become strong.

Israel failed time and time again because of negative influences.

We cannot allow our lives to be lived in the same way. Separate yourself from false ideologies and evil behavior just like you would remove yourself from a leper colony. Treat evil like a plague and hide from it. We rarely have the strength to engage it in full frontal warfare, we need to be strategic and maneuver around. Work the enemy’s strengths into weaknesses. Do not allow them to touch you. Act too quickly for them to realize what you are doing. Be fast, bold, and courageous, and do not engage with the world more than necessary.

Do not ever overestimate the strength of a positive influence. The positive influence is almost always weaker than the negative one. Do not count on your own strength of will to allow you to resist temptation or influence others. Be realistic about your own strength and only engage in skirmishes you know you can win.

Avoid evil and act like men.

Restrain Your Sons

1 Samuel tells us that Eli did not restrain his sons. They would abuse their position as priests and take what did not belong to them. They would take meat from the sacrifices of the people. Then they would have sex with women in the temple itself.

God would later tell Eli that his sons would die on the same day because of their wickedness. And God specifically let Eli know this would happen because he did not retrain them.

The responsibility of a father is to remove wild behavior from his sons. We all grow up wild and uncivilized. Especially as boys, we are violent and cunning. These talents should be out to productive uses rather than be abused.

We learn from our fathers about how to interact with other people, especially other men. They teach us manners and the proper way to behave. At every turn, if you have a present and good father, he is correcting your behavior somehow. He does not have to do this forever, only until you can manage yourself with a reasonable level of efficiency.

What is the result when fathers do not restrain their sons? You likely see the result every Sunday at your church services. you will see children who obviously have no father in the home.

And make no mistake, just because there is a male in the house does not mean there is a father in the home.

There are many kids who just run wild. They have no discipline, they have no father restraining their behavior. It is obvious that they do whatever they want whenever they want. There is no discipline. For most of us, behaving like most kids today would result in the beating of a lifetime. And the cumulative result of those beatings is that we are decent men.

Eli did not restrain his sons.

They ran wild. They did whatever they wanted. Eli had no problem rebuking Hannah for drinking alcohol in chapter 1 of 1 Samuel (a false accusation for which he also had no proof). Yet for whatever reason, he was not willing to restrain his own sons. Later in the book we see that Eli confronts his sons for their behavior, but by then it is too late.

The roots of their behavior had already grown into the tree of their character. there was no going back to repair who they had become. They were men of the world, the hypocrites that are deplored by religious and non-religious alike.

We have a responsibility to restrain our sons as well as to restrain ourselves. If you want to raise a son who is well-behaved as an adult, you have to guide and restrain him while he is young. It is impossible to make up for lost time with regard to discipline. Once the young men grow up, they are who they are. Whatever they are is what you have made them into. If you do not want them to be atrocious little minions, discipline them.

One of the 12 rules in Jordan Peterson’s first book is to not let your children do anything that would make you dislike them.

Because if you dislike them, the rest of the world will certainly dislike them as well. If you dislike your children, you will take out your frustration on them. This will lead to you treating them worse and them becoming estranged from you.

There are not many kids I like. too many people in my generation have opted to not discipline their children. They have decided to “talk about decisions”, or discuss the various wrong with their kids. Because that is highly effective.

What never fails is a simple stimulus-response equation for correcting behavioral difficulties. Kids will quickly learn that certain behaviors (stimuli) lead to a swift strike on the behind (response).

I have often jokingly suggested that there should be a deacon in the church in charge of spanking kids. He can conceal carry a nice wooden spoon in his suit and whip it out whenever there is bad behavior being displayed by kids. Everyone knows those kids who need it. At my church, an old woman was knocked to the ground by a bunch of rampaging children. She broke her femur, and the kids still run around every week.

Free-market spanking is one of the things the Presbyterians get right.

Though having a deacon over child discipline is funny to think about (and somewhat strange), it could never be enough to correct the behavior of children. they need their father. Those kids would just learn to be well-behaved for an hour or so and then they would go right back to being little devils.

If you have sons, restrain them. If you were not restrained as a child, now is your time to correct your behaviors and become a man. There is far more at risk when it comes to raising sons than we realize at first glance.

Progression – Why Improvement is Vital to Men

“Practice these things, immerse yourself in them, so that all may see your progress.”
1 Timothy 4:15

“And though your beginning was small, your latter days will be very great.”
Job 8:7

“Examine yourselves, to see whether you are in the faith. Test yourselves. Or do you not realize this about yourselves, that Jesus Christ is in you?—unless indeed you fail to meet the test! I hope you will find out that we have not failed the test. But we pray to God that you may not do wrong—not that we may appear to have met the test, but that you may do what is right, though we may seem to have failed.”
2 Corinthians 13:5-7

“Let the wise hear and increase in learning, and the one who understands obtain guidance”
Proverbs 1:5

When God initially created man, He placed him in a garden. I believe that this is God’s favorite place in His creation. God loves things that grow, which means He loves when His people grow.

Progression is important for a man. Without it, he will become depressed.

Look at any older person who has given up on life or who is stuck in their routines and not improving as an individual. They are depressed, sad, and constantly thinking about death. Now contrast that with an older person you know who lives life to the fullest despite their age and grows and improves their ability and character constantly. They are rare, but they do exist, and they are our examples.

To remain the same is to die. However, the majority of men get off track by having overly ambitious expectations for themselves. They attempt too much growth at once, and as a result, they do not grow at all. The example of living, growing trees is useful because it outlines the fact that growth is not expected to happen overnight. There are multiple recorded instances of faith being compared to some kind of tree, as in the parable of the mustard seed (Matthew 13:31-32; Mark 4:30-32).

We make the mistake of focusing on the facts of the story: that the mustard tree was first just a seed, and then a giant tree. We forget all the intermediate steps that got the tree to that point of being massive. That tree first is a seed, then tiny shoots of green leaves start to appear. Then it becomes a sapling followed by an adolescent. After a few more years it becomes very tall and finally massive. It reaches these milestones through slow progression, one inch at a time and over a very long period of time. You are to grow as well. Either improve or die.

Affirmation

I Improve, or I Die.

Application

Mindsets – Do not expect your growth to be overnight. Be aware of the fact that you will need long periods of time to make substantial progress on your currently puny character. Do not abandon growth when you have weeks or months where you do not improve at all. Do not abandon growth just because you do not see progress. Just because a tree did not gain visible height does not mean it did not grow. Sometimes there is no growth in height that we can see, only a deepening of the roots.

A key to growth is to take the simplest yet most practical step towards improvement and to do so in a way that is measurable. This includes checking your ego and taking microscopically small steps.

So many people try to take up reading their Bibles each day. They find one of those “Read your Bible in a year” plans and get excited, not realizing they will have to cover at least 4 chapters a day to read the Bible in one year. They are attempting to go from not reading Scripture at all to reading hundreds of verses per day. This would be like never exercising your body then saying, “I think I’ll start a professional bodybuilding workout program where I train twice a day for three hours”.

Maybe they maintain motivation for a few weeks, at least until they get to Leviticus, then they quit.

I would be shocked if those people even made it that far. They failed to check their ego, took on more than their frail constitutions could handle, and burned themselves out. Now they are right back where they were: sitting on the couch, doing nothing, and making no spiritual progress.

The real goal should be sustained long term progress. The only real improvement comes from consistent, steady progression. So instead of trying to read the Bible in a year, the goal should be to read the Bible every day. The amount of Bible you read will not matter if you quit in 12 days. Check your ego and be willing to read one chapter per day, or half of a chapter, or ten verses, or even five verses until you become the person who reads the Bible every day. That is the true goal, not to read the Bible in the year, but to become the type of person who reads the Bible every day without fail.

You might think, “Five verses each day is not a lot of reading”, well it is five more verses than you are reading currently, and five more verses than the majority of so-called “Christians” are reading each day.

Commit to extremely small-scale changes that are sustainable. Do not try to build the Sistine Chapel of habits in a single week. Save yourself the burnout and commit to progress.

Commit to being the type of person who is improving every day. Do not worry your mind about what others are doing (or rather, what they are claiming to do) or how fast you are improving. Focus on your personal progress and be able to measure it. You will never know if you have grown if you do not know where you are or what you are trying to improve. Keep a habit journal or get a paper calendar and check off each day that you read your Bible, even if it is only for five minutes. Doing this will give you visual feedback on your progress, and that will be the positive reinforcement that helps you maintain the habit.

Harden your mind through practice and continual progression.

Do not give in to weakness like the boys around you.

Be strong and powerful and improve yourself.

Conduct yourselves like Men.

Make Everything an Exercise

I – You have the choice to complain about each situation or make it into an exercise. What you choose will determine your strength of character.

Everything tests you in some way. Learn how to develop skills from it. From the small, petty annoyances of life to the massive, earth-shattering crises, everything in life gives you the opportunity to become more of a man. A man is able to demonstrate strength by resisting the force of outside events and people. He gives no foothold to any adversary.

But many instances offer you the chance to not only resist but learn to use their power against them. By making every life situation an exercise of some virtue, you can rapidly improve yourself. And you go on the offensive. You are hitting life instead of letting it hit you, and that offensive mentality gives you the strength of mind. Strength of minds leads to willpower and the ability to handle greater life responsibility.

Learn to use the power of life against it by making everything into an exercise. This simple shift in attitude will revolutionize your personal development.

II – Make it an exercise.

The first step is to simply decide to make your situation into an exercise. It sounds overly simple, but to simply decide to improve yourself creates the level of concentration necessary to actually make improvements. Sometimes decision alone is enough to create change. It may not create the level of change that you want, but it will give you some degree of results instantly. Let’s look at the overview of how you will make your life situations into exercises, then we will look at some basic examples.

Reframe It.
Be grateful for it.
Endure the discomfort of it.
Improve resilience.
Make it a Habit.
Reinvest the dividends

Reframe It

First, you need to shift from thinking negative to thinking positive. If you are mentally framing a situation negatively, it will continue to be an annoyance to you forever. You will never be able to improve your ability to tolerate it and you will not increase the strength of your character. You must first shift your mental thinking so that it promotes growth and improvement rather than stagnation or degradation.

Short circuit your thinking. The instant you catch yourself complaining about something, reframe it. Instead of thinking “I hate when this happens, this is the worst!”, think “This is an opportunity for me to train my patience”. Whatever bit of your character you are trying to train at the moment, reframing the situation in your mind will improve it. This shift in attitude is foundational. It will provide you with at least 50% of the improvement that you will get. The key to making something into an exercise is to think of it positively. People can sometimes exercise with a negative mindset, but they will never get the results they truly wanted. They will always be substandard, mediocre, instead of making incremental progress towards the desirable character they want.

Be Grateful for It

learn to be thankful for every situation in life. Every instance you encounter is an opportunity to train some ability. Whether it be patience, strategy, or general emotional control, you have the opportunity to improve. Gratitude will also help to tone down unproductive negative emotions. As you know, I am all about harnessing the power of negative emotions. But if we are not harnessing that power and actually channeling towards some goal, then those emotions are wasteful. And the negative nature of those emotions will cause us more harm than good. So, learn how to tone down those emotions until you can take action and simply be grateful for the opportunity to train your character.

Endure the Discomfort

Regardless of gratitude and reframing, you are still going to have to manage a certain degree of discomfort. We understand this perfectly in physical exercise. If you want to make progress, you have to endure a certain amount of pain. But by understanding that the discomfort leads to growth, we can actually not only endure the discomfort but learn to enjoy it.

Marinade in the discomfort of certain situations. Enjoy the exercise of your will and mind. You are building an unbeatable character. Exercising your willpower this way will positively impact many other areas of your life. This conscious practice will produce non-conscious results in your normal life. If you practice patience and emotional control consciously, you will reap the benefits in later situations without even thinking about it.

Improve Resilience

Just as with physical exercise the tolerance for certain weights, reps or pain is increased. So also, your mental pain threshold is increased with training. This allows you to tolerate more discomfort and recover even faster. This resilience will be encouraging and will push you to develop even more strength o character and will. It is a never-ending positive cycle of personal development.

Make it a Habit

This exercise cannot work if you only do it once. You need to make mental exercising a habit. You cannot go to the gym once and make progress, you need a degree of consistency. So, you need to increase the odds that you will remember to make everything into an exercise so you can actually reap the benefits of it.

Put a notecard in your car or in a place you will see it regularly. On that notecard write “Everything is an Exercise”. Read that card whenever you are about to go into a situation that involves people. It can be work, school, going to the store, dealing with your kids, or taking out the trash. Any and every situation has the opportunity to be a character-building exercise if you have the openness of mind and willingness of attitude to make it happen.

Reinvest the Dividends

You will likely want the results you gain in the exercises to spill over into the rest of your life without even thinking about it. That is the whole point of this exercise. That is the passive income of the mind. By following the above steps, you will find that this one comes automatically. By intentionally training your patience, you become a more patient man. And by concentrating on increasing your emotional control, you become a more stoic man. Every exercise builds the mental muscle that will be usable in other situations. All you have to do is front-load the work. And is that not the best type of work? The kind where you can invest time and energy upfront and reap the benefits for the rest of your life? All you have to do is make everything into an exercise and invest a small amount of energy into maintaining the character you build.

III – Examples

Kids crying in the church.
Waiting in line
Dealing with people

Kids crying in the church

This is something that annoys me more than anything else. It angers me beyond belief. Not that a baby would cry, but that the parents of the child are so stupid that they cannot realize their child is literally drowning out the speaker. And they just sit there and let the baby scream for years.

This has been an annoyance for me for many years, but recently I have been able to turn even crying babies into exercises of patience and emotional control.

First, I become aware of my normal response when this situation would unfold. I noticed that when a baby started screaming and the parent did not take it out, my head instantly become hot and my heart rate increased. I realized I wanted to limit these physical reactions and I could do so by controlling my mind. So now each Sunday I walk into the church and remember that there will likely be a screaming baby somewhere in the church today. By simply being aware and preparing in advance for this situation I know angers me, I give myself the advantage. Now all I have to do is control my response.

So, whenever the baby inevitably begins to fill the church with high frequency wailing, I take deep, diaphragmatic breaths, center my thoughts on peace and slowly turn my attention away from the situation. This took some serious practice and still takes a lot of work, as it is very difficult to ignore something that literally causes ear pain. And I do not always succeed with this exercise, I am still learning how to control my anger at parents who possess no self-awareness whatsoever. But I have turned this annoyance into an exercise, a chance to build character and improve myself, and that makes it valuable.

Waiting in line

Another typical annoyance for many people. You have the option to pull out your phone or get angry, or you can turn this into a patience exercise. Center your thoughts on the present moment. Control your emotions and breathe deeply to slow your heart rate and lower your blood pressure. Once calm, sit back and just do some people watching. See how other human beings behave and interact instead of being absorbed in your own world.

If you are waiting in line at the grocery store and are holding groceries by hand, use this as an opportunity to build some mental toughness. See how long you can hold your groceries without switching hands. Everyone who has stood in line with a gallon of milk knows it gets heavy after a few minutes. Build the strength of mind by refusing to let go of the milk. Seems silly, but you create a small win for the mentally tough person you are one day going to become.

Dealing with people

Nowhere in the world is there a better exercise than this one. And you have the opportunity to perform this exercise nearly every day. Go into every social situation with the preparation of the mind. Expect people to behave poorly and plan to react intelligently. Human beings are always going to act like human beings, so you need to prepare yourself for this.

I stopped getting angry at the behavior of others by adopting this simple mantra: “I do not get angry at people for acting stupid. I get angry at myself for being stupid enough to expect people to act intelligently”.

By simply lowering your expectations of the behavior of others, you will increase your mental control exponentially. Let go of always trying to control people. You will make yourself miserable anytime you attempt to worry about things outside of your control. Control everything you can and worry about nothing else.

Observe people as if they were plants or animals. You do not get mad at a cactus for being a cactus or an armadillo for being an armadillo. Those things simply are, and nothing can be done about it. Instead, learn how to maneuver around people. Work the social setting to your favor by detaching from yourself and then interacting with others with an elevated mind. There is no need to stoop to their emotional level. Maintain your calm and collected nature – this is a strength of men.

Watch people, learn their mannerisms and behaviors.

Figure out how you can manage them better or interact with them in a way that is productive and beneficial to all parties. Never get angry at people for being people. Use everything as an exercise to strengthen your own will and power.

There is no limit to what can be turned into an exercise of the mind if you are willing to change your attitude about it. This is how you make every negative into a positive. By doing this you ensure that you can turn any situation into an opportunity to improve yourself. If you do this for even one-tenth of your life situations, you will be ten times ahead of the average person. Apply this technique today and improve yourself.

Split From the Pack

High-value men do not run in packs. In a pack of wolves, there is one alpha who has access to all the females and calls all the shots. Only the alpha has the right to reproduce. The beta wolf is the second in command and takes the place of the alpha once he dies. Below the beta wolf are subordinates. These are the middle-class wolves who are one step above the lowest ranks. And lastly, there is the omega wolf, the lowest rank, often dominated by the others. This wolf tries to solve conflict through non-violent means. He can fight to gain rank but tends to stay in his position because all the other wolves bully him.

In a wolf pack, being the beta is not bad.

It means you are the second in command, soon to be the alpha. It does not carry the same connotation that the term “beta male” carries today. If groups of men were packs of wolves, most of them would fall into the subordinate class; the class that spends time fighting amongst itself to maintain or gain rank. They simply spend their lives bickering and warring with one another, trying to gain ranks. They do this even though they will likely never be the alpha wolf.

Human beings act the same way. They engage in social warfare and try to climb the status ladder. The problem is that they spend the majority of their time on petty matters instead of important matters.

I am encouraging you to split from the pack and work alone until you can find a pack with high aspirations. There is no point in limiting yourself to a weak group of men. If you cannot spend time around excellent men, do not spend time around any men.

Their lethargy and laziness will pull you down to their level.

Even if you were the alpha of the pack, what value would it be? What value is there to be the leader of low-value, low-performance men? Unless you can demonstrate that the pack is improving under your leadership, you are sacrificing your own potential in order to be one of the gang.

A pack of wolves can work together and take down an elk. But if most men today were wolves, they would not be able to take down a rabbit. If you sit down and think about it, is there any reason you want to spend time with these low-value men?

What tends to happen is that young men feel a strong need to fit in and to be part of a pack. This is natural and should be encouraged, but only if the pack is noble. Many young men will compromise their values or aspirations just to “be one of the gang”. This man will soon find himself behind the 8-ball of life just because he chose to associate with losers.

You become who you spend the most time with, so do not spend too much time with low-performance men if it can be helped.

The time you spend with others should lift you up and push you to be better. This is only possible if you are around men of high aspiration and work ethic.

You may ask yourself, “Why would a high-performance man take time with me? I am not high-performance currently; I am not successful or at the level I want to be at. Why would this man waste his valuable time with me”? I will tell you why. If you demonstrate work ethic and high aspiration, you set yourself apart from the rest of the men in this world. You split from the pack.

8 out of every 10 young men you hang out with in college will lack work ethic and goals for their future. Make goals, have high aspiration, and work ethic then demonstrate to a high-performance man that you have these traits, and he will take you under his wing.

He will be so encouraged that he is not the last of his breed that he will gladly spend time with you, though he will not tell you this directly. You can then take advantage of his influence and work ethic and excel in your field. You will experience exponential growth that places you so far above your peers that it will blow your mind.

I – Split from the Pack – Preparing to leave

If you have spent a lot of time in a pack, you have probably grown attached to them. You first need to mentally prepare to detach from them before you physically detach from them. Start by visualizing yourself leaving. Picture yourself being happy to leave and not bothered at all to be alone.

II – Splitting Off

Each time I split from the pack in my life, I did so silently. Call it what you will, but it is the method that works for me. I simply split rapidly without explanation or apology. There is no need to explain yourself, no need to apologize. I did not waste time preparing any explanation or apology for this, I simply split from them. One moment I was one of the gang, the next I stopped “hanging out” with them.

I did not feel the need to remain part of the pack, in fact, I felt liberated from their negative influence. If you have self-awareness and can see how being part of a low-performance group is affecting you, you will have a much easier time separating yourself from them. Why would you want to spend time around a group that brings you down and keeps you from reaching success? Is the urge to fit in that strong for you?

A masculine man has no need to fit in until he is around a group of high-performance, masculine men.

The only time you should feel pressured to be part of a group is if they are collectively better than you. Do not feel pressured to waste time with a pack of losers. There is no honor in this.

Many of you may feel bad after you split from a pack. You will feel regret because you may have hurt the feelings of others. Hurting feelings is a part of life. You cannot tailor your every action just to accommodate every low-performance male who wears his heart on his sleeve. If you do this, you will always limit your performance. All the energy you could be directing towards pursuing excellence is now directed into making sure no one has their precious little feelings hurt. You need to lose this mentality as fast as possible; it will keep you from success 9 times out of 10.

III – Handling the Protests

If the pack enjoyed having you as a part of it, they will likely be sad to see you go and try to persuade you to stay or come back. Especially if you gradually back out from the group. You will have to choose between giving them an excuse and giving them the truth. You could always tell them you are too busy; you have a lot going on at work or school and simply cannot take the time that you could in the past. That is not the noble path, but it is an option you have. The other is to simply explain what you are doing. You are removing yourself from the limiting influence of low-performance men to pursue excellence in your life.

Like crabs in a bucket, they will try to pull you back in, but you need to resist this. Get over the need to be a part of a group. Start viewing groups as supplemental to your life, not the main focus of it. You need to be able to be alone until you can find a suitable tribe to be a part of. One that prioritizes masculine virtue and seeks excellence in every pursuit. It could take years to find a pack like this, and you need to be content with that period of waiting.

I went without a pack for three years of college.

After I discovered during the first semester that no one wanted to work hard, discipline themselves or be more than their current self, I saw no reason to continue spending time with them. What purpose would there have been to that? Why sacrifice myself for men who accomplish nothing and then boasted about it?

The people I saw in college did very little beyond complain about professors, laugh about their 2.5 GPA as a psychology major and stay up all night playing intermural sports. Do they sound like good influences? Does it seem like they are the kind of people who would push each other to become their best selves and achieve in life? No. They boast about being low-performance men and then complain or gossip when high-performance men reach success.

When people protested or asked me to waste time with them, I simply had to refuse. I know that sounds conceited, arrogant, and a selfish way to spend time, but it was absolutely necessary. I am not encouraging you to be an arrogant man who turns his nose up at others below him. Rather, I am encouraging you to avoid spending time with people who are going to tear you down and be a negative influence on you.

IV – Enjoy the Winter

We will call the period of time between splitting from the old pack and finding a new one “The Winter”. Not because it is difficult, cold, and deadly, but because winter is a solitary season. Many animals are spending time alone hibernating. They are spending time with no other animals unless they are a herd animal. It is a season of calm and quiet, a good time for reflection. So this is how you spend your time.

Spend time alone training and improving yourself. Train your body and your mind. Learn everything you can from audiobooks or other online materials. If you spend time working on yourself and your weaknesses, you will qualify for higher-level packs.

Do not rush this period, it is critical for you to parse out who you are, what you want to become, and the type of men you want to spend time around. Write out the characteristics of the ideal man on paper and work every day to become that man. Then write out the characteristics of the pack you want to spend time with and identify what you would need to become to fit in with that pack.

V – Enter the New Pack or Start Your Own

You can either find an already existing pack or create your own. You may find it difficult to find these packs as they are rare, and even more so in the religious world. There are plenty of biker gangs, but very few religious packs.

Religion finds a way to demonize anything it does not like even if it cannot support that attitude through scripture. Be sure to bring up this fact if anyone should protest too much about your desire to create or join a pack. Ignore every person who cannot support their position with logic or scripture. If they cannot support their position, you have identified a person who will never be allowed to enter your pack until he cures his mental disease.

I would encourage you to start a new pack. It does not have to be formal, though it can help. Just look around for the manliest men you can find and invite them to do manly things. Shoot guns, throw axes, kill and eat animals, do martial arts, and discuss philosophy over the campfire. It is as simple as that. The difficult part is keeping the other, weaker men out.

Every group has entrance standards including the church.

Therefore, men should be able to understand that if they do not meet the masculinity requirements then they are not allowed to participate.

Though this is not meant to attack them personally, it is a statement that addresses their fundamental lack of character. There is nothing wrong with refusing to spend time with low-value men. If you spend time in a leper camp, you might contract leprosy; if you spend time with low-performance losers, you might contract their diseases of the mind.

By keeping low-value men out and keeping high-value men in, you create a circle of influence, unlike anything you have ever experienced. Instead of being pushed towards low-value actions, you are pushed towards being more of a man and exhibiting strength and power. This is only possible because you have multiple men pursuing the same goal of strength and masculinity. Positive influence can only work if you are surrounded by many men who are on the same path. It is your responsibility to find, recruit and learn from them. This is how you become a man.

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