Scott from American Dad solicited feedback on Dalrock’s website on his post, https://americandadweb.wordpress.com/2018/01/17/how-do-you-organize-your-goals/ . I don’t have anything to say on Scott’s blog; once you pay your dollar and make your choice from the vending machine of life, discussing alternative choices becomes pointless. Me advocating Christ & Country to a guy who rejected Protestantism to build a copy of Orthodox Serbia in the rural Midwest would be like telling this confirmed-bachelor MGTOW that you married a unicorn. I’m happy for you but we just can’t talk about it. Our paths are too divergent, our life choices mutually exclusive.
Nevertheless, he raised a point worth its own discussion. Urban life has gotten an undeservedly terrible reputation in the Manosphere. We kick things off with this quote from Scott:
Two things happened this week that caused a small epiphany for me. The first was this comment from Elspeth in response to yet another one of my rants extolling the virtues of rural versus urban or suburban living:
Not everyone is prepared or equipped to live a rural lifestyle.
Some men have careers which feed their families and are yes, largely dependent on living in larger population centers. It doesn’t make them bad people, bad fathers, or bad Christians.
I don’t wonder that this was an epiphany for him. Many Christians associate family with religion to the point of believing that evangelism and breeding are synonyms. (As if evil was only a genetic condition!) It’s hard to raise kids in the city because of the lack of space so these people naturally assume that willing city-dwellers are bad people.
But if a man does not have a family then living rural is asking for mental illness and loss of purpose.
Humans are social creatures. It’s one thing to move rural with your wife & kids in tow, it’s another to live rural by yourself with no neighbors worth mentioning. You’ll end up either schizoid or a Net addict. Urban life facilitates friendship and social hobbies simply by having many people in proximity and is therefore the better choice for MGTOW.
Urban life is valuable for Christians. More evangelism opportunities, more clashes between good & evil. We are called to be the salt of the Earth. Salt is a preservative, impeding rot. It gets consumed when it fights rot but does no good at all when left in storage. Christians who raise kids in isolation are not doing anything for God but headcount… which per God is not a sin, but neither is it the example Christ set. We Christian MGTOWs can and should pick up the slack here. Having no little hostages to protect allows us to dwell even in modern Sodoms with minimal risk from the Powers That Be.
There’s a second reason urban life is unpopular in the Manosphere. Men are becoming control freaks as the social fabric unravels. Uncertainty has always been a part of life but never as much as today, us being struck between perverted anarcho-tyrants and technological upheaval. The simplest way to ensure nobody bosses you around anymore is to position yourself so that nobody at all is around, and if somebody bosses you anyway then there’s plenty of space to hide a body. A poor attitude to reboot civilization with but one simple enough to occupy a midwit’s attention span.
It won’t work, prepper survivalists. The Russian tyrants had no trouble hunting down the kulaks.
Part of the control freakness is imputing city dwellers with the immoral acts of city leaders. I get this a lot. “How can you justify living in the Gay Area?” “We should build a wall around you.” “People who live in urban areas deserve to die when SHTF.” “California should just secede already!” Yes, because a roomful of pedophiles in Sacramento is a perfect representation of 50 million people and a quarter of the national economy… these are obviously outbursts of insecurity rather than considered beliefs.
Urban life is economically antifragile. If you lose a job for whatever reason, there are many more jobs to find nearby. Getting around is convenient, especially if one structures his life to use a bicycle for daily purposes rather than a car. There’s money to be made with so many markets around. You won’t own much property but if you’re MGTOW then your greatest investment will always be YOU. Cities have the best medicine and skill training to keep you at your best. Life should be enjoyed where possible and cities do much to make it possible.
Urban life is politically antifragile, too, because the neighboring local government is a short distance to relocate to. Or it used to be antifragile; today, every layer of every government is becoming homogeneous to the point that I can no longer believe I’m looking at reality. Still, the option for defensive relocation is available and affordable.
In closing, urban life helps men develop the friends & acquaintances that make life worth living while also presenting opportunities to build wealth and worship God that cannot exist in geographic isolation. Rural life is for men who can’t be happy without a family. Unfortunately, such men are predisposed to believe the worst about the city he left behind in order to justify his chosen lifestyle.
For some reason wordpress doesn’t always alert to pingbacks from other blogs.
Good read, and many points I agree with about the urban/rural thing.
Pingbacks might be a setting I need to turn on, too. I’m still uncomfortable with the Internet.
Just to be clear, I wasn’t calling you a prepper survivalist in case you were thinking that. You don’t dress exclusively in camo, don’t point guns at the camera, your dream house is aboveground and you’ve never talked as though the Zombie Apocalypse is going to be a real thing. I find preppers both funny and sad for using over-the-top disaster preparation as a security blanket. It’s a trend one wouldn’t expect to see in Commiefornia but it’s here.
Lots of people are trying lots of things to cope with civilization’s unraveling. My own coping mechanism is minimalism–having nothing to lose, gathering experiences instead of resources. Also, this blog.
The problem I have with preppers is not that preparing for disasters is a bad idea. I have a stockpile of the usual stuff (weapons, ammo, food, water, power, etc).
But most of them come across as crazy because they are preparing for a specific even that they cannot predict.
“We are preparing for the New Madrid fault line to blow and break the continent in half in late 2037.”
Prepardness for any garden variety disaster is good. But that kind of specificity is loony.
When I was still living in California, I had moved to the Acton/Agua Dulce area of north LA county when the 1994 Northridge quake hit. At the time, I was sitting on probably 30 gallons of fuel and another 40 gallons of water. I had some food stored up. We were some of the last people to receive help, and Santa Clarita (my home town) was land locked in between. The roads were out, but my 4×4 was capable. I delivered water and gas to my mom and dad so they could drive their cars and cook for a few days.
Doesn’t make me a hero/prepper or anything, but it was good that I was ready.