Forgotten Male Archetypes, or The John Carter Problem

One of the valuable things from reading older literature is that it allows a person to briefly step outside of the cultural milieu—rot—of the modern West. And when you reach for those older perspectives, it brings to stark contrast all the narratives you were taught growing up. Not just about democracy or what you learned in AP Government class, but even more fundamental lessons. You can interact with the most primal aspects of human nature, parts of humanity that have been deliberately obscured in our backwards present day.

Reading John Carter, then, was like a splash of cold water after spending so long parched in a cultural desert. The character of John Carter is unlike any male protagonist you’ll find made in modern media. Firstly, he’s a confederate soldier portrayed in a supremely sympathetic light. That’s already a unicorn in today’s world.

But what’s important about the character is not his political incorrectness. It’s his particular brand of masculinity that has been all but forgotten in today’s discourse. To illustrate my point, here are a few choice quotes from Edgar Rice Burroughs’ A Princess of Mars:

“Fear is a relative term and so I can only measure my feelings at that time by what I had experienced in previous positions of danger and by those that I have passed through since; but I can say without shame that if the sensations I endured during the next few minutes were fear, then may God help the coward, for cowardice is of a surety its own punishment.”

“I have ever been prone to seek adventure and to investigate and experiment where wiser men would have left well enough alone.”

“I do not believe that I am made of the stuff which constitutes heroes, because, in all of the hundreds of instances that my voluntary acts have placed me face to face with death, I cannot recall a single one where any alternative step to that I took occurred to me until many hours later.”

John Carter is a chivalric ideal, a man who embodies all the masculine virtues in their perfect Aristotelian mean—or at least comes close to it. He embodies duty but not weakness. He embodies strength but not cruelty. He embodies adventure but not recklessness. To put it bluntly, John Carter is a masculine hero in the truest sense of those words.

He’s a man who knows what he wants and takes after it with every ounce of his being. He does not shirk from battle; in fact, he’s a fighting man. Battle is in his blood, and he’s called to it as his vocation. He’s a leader of men, at all times honorable and fair. He’s the kind of man who can snatch victory from the jaws of defeat. You’d rather have no one else by your side and rather anyone else against you. John Carter embodies the archetype of the king, which I would argue is completely lost on the world today.

When was the last time you saw a man portrayed so favorably on television? When was the last time you saw a man like John Carter?

Because I can tell you this, it certainly wasn’t in the John Carter movie.

Now I don’t want to rag too harshly on this movie as he does still become the hero. But it does illustrate the trend media took over the 20th century. Our culture swung from strong men being strong men, to weak men becoming strong men, and finally to weak men being weak men. You can see this everywhere, even in Peter Jackson’s acclaimed LoTR movies. Aragorn is not a reluctant hero in the books. He doesn’t second guess himself. But for some reason, such a thing was incomprehensible to audiences (or rather Hollywood writers) in 2001. And it has only gotten far worse from there.

You can visibly detect how masculinity has been increasingly portrayed more tragically as time goes on. When men are not outright evil, they’re to be demeaned as the fundamentally lesser of the two sexes. It is always the man who is less capable, less aware, less actualized. If the man is loving, he must also be bumbling and weak. If he’s ambitious, he must also be cruel and tyrannical. And if he is genuinely well-meaning, he must be tragically removed and replaced by his superior feminine clone.

Gone are the days when fathers raised sons. Now they must raise their daughters as sons, and everyone is left unhappier as a result.

I think it’s too easy to forget that not all stories end in tragedy. Even disregarding the bleak situation of current year, we’re surrounded by media that exists to amplify the worst aspects of ourselves. Has anyone noticed that the only good stories Hollywood has left to tell are tragedies? On the rare occasion when they tone down the diversity and anal sex, they always go on to create some of the most cynical, hopeless, and demoralizing media available to human imagination.

We are so inundated with failure and heartbreak that it’s too easy to forget that other things exist outside of this. We don’t have to have male protagonists who are left biting their nails until adventure takes them anyway. We don’t have to have incompetent fathers drinking themselves to an early grave. And we certainly don’t have to have eunuchs for sons, who roll over on their bellies and wait for the girlboss to arrive.

Dissident literature, if it is to stand against Leftwing art, it must be uplifting to the soul—and especially to this masculine spirit. The heroic must awaken in men again. And while this does not mean all men are called to be warriors, all men are called to be as virtuous as John Carter, and as a man, to live life with that same vitality in whichever vocation he is called to.

While I do have a few tiny quibbles, @LastThings4 is fundamentally correct in his assertation that what the Dissident Right needs is not a Dostoevsky-esque eight hundred page manuscript of depression and nihilism. If anyone wants that, they can just go read Dostoevsky.

What the Dissident Right desperately needs is to cultivate in itself is a spirit of joy and a zest for life. It is this energy that can bring about true change, not the moping and whining you see so often on Twitter. It is only in celebration of the good things—no matter how small they are—that you will find men willing to fight. It is only in cultivating a spirit of hope that you will find young men who are willing to take a stand for it. No one fights for a nihilistic cause that can offer only varying degrees of defeat.

In the Old Testament, the Ark of Covenant was stolen by the Philistines, and they made a mockery of it, placing it before their own heathen god in victory over Israel. All seemed lost, but at the last possible moment, God overthrew the pagan idol, and the Ark was returned safely to Jerusalem. Upon the Ark’s arrival, King David was so overcome with joy that he began leaping and dancing in the procession, going so far as to make a fool of himself with his outburst.

It is with that same overflowing joy that men must begin to live again—if they are to live at all.