What Would A Man Do?

So inured have we become to our upside-down world, in which unfettered greed is the only moral law, and lust for material power and popular admiration the only understandable motives, that it has seemingly become difficult for many people even to recognize, let alone to appreciate the value of, actual manhood.

Here, then, is a primer in how a man would think, if such beings were still among us — if they were still permitted to be among us.

A man would stand alone and hated in defeat, rather than align himself with anything compromising and contradictory merely for the sake of winning.

A man would welcome rejection, anxiety, isolation, and many great losses material and personal, before he would bow to fear of losing his “angle,” his “connections,” his “platform.”

A man would say, with Aristotle, “We must love our friends, but we must love truth more” — and live by that maxim when such a conflict arose.

A man would sacrifice anything — any opportunity, any advantage, any comfort — to avoid seeing in himself the very thing he despised in others.

A man would resist the temptation to rationalize compromising his principles on grounds of “necessary evil” or situational pragmatism.

A man would not need any good of this Earth so badly that he could give up his rational soul, his true friends, or his vision of the divine, merely to gain (or keep) that good.

A man would not need to shout his pride and independence from the rooftops, for he would see the contradiction — the weak and immature craving for the approval of an audience — in such a need.