I watched a short video clip where Jordan Peterson answers a young woman’s question about “toxic masculinity”, and it turned out that she couldn’t even define the thing, at least when asked about the differences compared to toxic humanity or toxic femininity. Dr. Peterson then proceeded to make a statement that would have one believe that “toxic masculinity” is just one of those liberal leftist phrases that are poorly defined and are in fact meant to target positive traits by being over-generalized, for instances purporting to target “toxic” masculinity, and in fact targetting masculinity as such.

Without necessarily disagreeing with his thinking in regard to this, I immediately thought that I actually do perceive toxic masculinity, and I think I could cite enough examples to be able to come up with a generalised enough definition. So, let me cite examples.

I’ve seen men starting to act like fools when they are around other men. Acting dumber and speaking in a more coarse and simplified language, typical of the lower social classes, usually in deeper voice, and talking in ways that accentuate the assumed consensus with other males. Also, talking about generically “masculine” topics, such as football or other generally popular sports, about cars, construction equipment and building houses, and consuming alcohol in amounts significantly greater than they would consume normally. Furthermore, displaying an aggressive, overtly-masculine stance, where you need to look tough and get into fights. Women are discussed with a dismissive, detached attitude, where the goal is to fuck them and increase the counter, and a wife’s place is in the kitchen, and so on; such an individual will treat even his wife worse when he’s around his male friends. Basically, the point of having sex with a woman is to increase your social standing among men, and the ideal wife is a combination of a cook, a house maid and a whore. Seeing your wife as a friend and a partner, and someone you talk to about sophisticated ideas, would be ridiculed in those circles. Trying to appear less intellectual, simpler and more “down to earth”, because that’s how men are supposed to be. Frowning upon any display of vulnerability and gentleness. Constantly poking other men and trying to establish hierarchies by either bullying someone, or sucking up to the perceived leader by going along with his nasty shit. Trying to think in wolf-pack hierarchies of either being an “alpha” or a “beta”, and a “true man should be an alpha”.

I think we have enough of a pattern here to attempt a definition; toxic masculinity is appropriation of patterns of behaviour that are perceived as stereotypically masculine to the point of caricature, in order for an inherently insecure individual to find acceptance and belonging in male company, even when those patterns of behaviour go against his personal choices manifested in his private life.

So, it is quite obvious that I find this pattern of behaviour objectionable, and let me tell you why. I find it objectionable because it reeks of weakness. It is all about making a show of strength because you are weak and you don’t have the courage to calmly stand behind your personal choices and defend them even if they go against what “everybody else” believes. It’s about being afraid of the consequences of not fitting into a group, so you make compromises that go against your personal beliefs and choices to the point where you feel humiliated and worthless afterwards. It’s about appearance over substance. Also, it’s a reduction to a pattern typical for men of lower social standing, and this is not something one should aspire to. If you think you have to reduce yourself in order to fit somewhere, you are probably trying to fit into a wrong group.

It seems we have a robust definition of toxic masculinity, but it is so obviously an aberration that we must also define healthy masculinity in order to get a clearer picture.

Confidence. Competence. A man should be confident enough of himself to persist in his personal choices and behaviour regardless of the preferences and beliefs of a group. His confidence and composure will in fact make others want to follow and emulate him, rather than him having to conform to the beliefs and actions of others. If he doesn’t belong to some established social group or a pattern, he will shrug and leave, and it is very likely that a new group or a pattern will start to form around him, simply because he creates an aura of coherent stability around himself, and if this is based on competence, it has great persuasive power, because other competent people will always prefer the company based on competence and calm confidence, to some vacuous concept such as hanging out at a bar and talking about football and getting into fights when drunk. Such a man will see a woman as a valuable person and talk to her seriously and directly; if he thinks she is wrong, he will clearly state this and show her the errors in her thinking, instead of being either dismissive of her and acting as if trying to score points against her to impress other men, or being so entranced by her femaleness that he would swallow any kind of nonsense she spouts. His attitude towards a woman he likes is “I know the goal, and if you trust me, I will lead you there and take care of you”. He is confident enough to constantly learn, instead of trying to pretend to know it all; mistakes are immediately acknowledged and corrected. Weakness is not tolerated, but weakness is defined as insufficient moral and spiritual strength to adhere to the right goals, principles and ideas. If he needs to change the course, or persist on the current course, he will think about this from the position of higher values and higher good, make a choice and then implement it. He’s not scared of appearing indecisive, of changing course, or of persisting until death. He’s scared of not seeing what the right thing to do is, because that’s what a man is supposed to do – see what the right thing is, and then do it; also, cooperate with others who want to achieve worthy goals, and oppose those who are disruptive, who want to impose unworthy goals and ideas, and are of lowly character. Follow God and the right principles and ideas, and lead and protect your wife and children first, and, as an extension into a wider society, show such good example of virtue, proper spiritual orientation, kindness and strength, that others would want to follow your good example and cooperate with you in creating a wider society based on such virtuous principles. Be a barrier of force between good principles and good people who chose them, and predatory seducers and evil ones who want to lead them astray. Attempt to raise the level of every social interaction by demonstrating a good example of kind humour and intelligence. Ignore bad ideas and people of lowly character, and steer the direction of a conversation towards something of value. If your company shows resistance to goodness and virtue, leave. If you see something admirable, follow it.

So, there you go, it wasn’t that hard.

I know most people will read my previous article and think they can see a realistic scenario for surviving without electricity. Let me see:

1. Going completely pre-industrial. Have a farm, grow livestock, staples and vegetables, use animal waste and compost as fertiliser. Use wind or water to power a mill. Manage a forest as a sustainable source of fuel for the winter. Great plan, it would work, until hungry, desperate, violent and armed people from the cities come and take your farm. If you resist they kill you, if you don’t resist they make you their slave, and since there’s lots of them, the farm suddenly can’t produce enough to sustain all of them. Best case scenario, they repeat the dark ages feudalism scenario and occupy several farms on a territory, and take 10% of produce from each. This is long-term sustainable, but it would take lots of trial and error until they get there. Let’s say you were very “lucky” and you get to live as a serf.

2. Going sustainable high-tech. Have a solar power plant on your farm, produce biodiesel for your tractor, grow animals, staples and vegetables. Great plan, and it would work, until something breaks down and there are no spare parts; also, everything from 1. applies and you are eventually found by an armed gang and either killed or enslaved.

3. Let’s say you create/live in a sustainable enclave, or you are seriously lucky and your community can control a power plant (hydroelectric or nuclear) that can work sustainably for decades. You also have functional agriculture and limited industry. Good for you. Now you’re the prime target for everybody else in the world who wants what you have. You defend it, and the armed conflict destroys the assets and now nobody has them; everybody dies. Or you don’t defend them and somebody else takes over, and you are either enslaved, killed or exiled.

4. You have an underground shelter stocked with food, have access to a filtered water source or huge tanks of water, have some sort of a power generator that can go for decades (let’s say it’s hydroelectric, powered by a subterranean water flow). Nobody knows you’re there, and you don’t know what’s outside. You possibly use your underground facility as a base for conducting raids on the surface, to replenish your supplies. Congratulation, you became a Morlock.

5. Join an armed gang that robs, kills and enslaves people. The problem is, you turn into a predatory beast and sacrifice virtue for survival. Not the best tradeoff to make, in my opinion.

6. Form an alliance with farmers, where you protect them with weapons and they feed you. Alternatively, the farmers form a wider alliance and feed a protective paramilitary force that’s known and trusted. Joining such a community is a good option, if they will take you, but the problem is that they will most likely shoot outsiders on sight.

7. You have an unsustainable, but substantial cache of supplies. You wait for things to improve. They don’t. Your supplies either run out, or attract robbers.

8. You belong to some native community that traditionally survives off the land in some rainforest, desert or wasteland, where trained traditional people can live off the land, but the resources are so shitty nobody else would find it worthwhile to fight over. The problem is, if you don’t live like this now, it won’t happen.

So, this is my problem with preparing for apocalyptic scenarios: when I apply game theory to them, they all either turn into dead ends, or shitty life that’s not worth living. All the prepping scenarios where you can do something constructive are those that assume a local, contained disaster where the rest of the world is fine and help will eventually come, or a disaster that degrades the civilisation, but everything more-less manages to limp along afterwards, and improves after a while.

For the last week or so, the Ukrainians have been shelling the Zaporozhye nuclear power plant (that has been taken by the Russians at the very onset of the war and not part of any military action). The Russians have arrested two Ukrainian agents inside the plant, who have been providing the Ukrainian military with the coordinates guiding artillery fire.

The danger isn’t from them hitting the reactors; nothing short of a nuclear bomb could penetrate the reactor dome. The main problem is the interruption to the power supply to the water circulation pumps in the reactors, which is what triggered the Fukushima Daiichi incident, because this is the weak point of the solid fuel fission reactors; if you either cut the cooling, or the moderator rods get stuck on the outside position, you get a meltdown. You can guard against this by initiating a complete reactor shutdown. The second problem is the spent fuel rods pool, which is nowhere near as well protected as the reactors. However, in my opinion this can cause only a localized incident, since you need a reactor meltdown for shit to really hit the fan, because it is then that the superheated steam carries the vast amount of highly radioactive particles high into the atmosphere, from where they spread globally, which took place in Chernobyl. In my opinion, threat to the reactor coolant circulation pump power supply is the greatest danger in any solid fuel fission power plant.

The Western press has been spreading Ukrainian lies, such as this one:

KYIV, Aug 14 (Reuters) – Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy has warned Russian soldiers who shoot at Europe’s largest nuclear power station or use it as a base to shoot from that they will become a “special target” for Ukrainian forces. (Reuters)

Yeah, somehow the small Russian military contingent that basically guards the powerplant against potential Ukrainian attempts to blow it up (which showed amazing foresight by the Russians, by the way) are “threatening” the power plant and the poor Ukrainians simply have to defend themselves by trying to cause the next Chernobyl, and the Western press is just spreading this propagandistic lying garbage.

By the way, Ukrainian artillery fire is being guided by the Americans, to the point where the American specialists are both providing the Ukrainians with coordinates and entering those coordinates into the American weapons. Which makes one think which country meets the definition of a sponsor of international terrorism.

I’ve been talking about good and evil recently, and if this isn’t an obvious example of evil, then I don’t know what to say. Systematically shelling a nuclear power plant in attempt to cause a radiological incident that could spread across Europe, and brazenly lying about it to shift blame, that’s just evil. If that isn’t evil, then nothing is.

I wrote an article about the tiers of evil using the Witcher in-game universe as illustration, but when I wanted to write a similar article about the tiers of good, I encountered a problem. You see, the pool of good but powerful characters in Witcher is so shallow, I had nothing to write about. I’ll give it a try, just so that you see what I mean.

The first ther are good and helpful, but ordinary beings, such as Tomira the herbalist, Dudu the doppler, Dandelion, Roche, Zoltan, Crach an Craite and others. They basically mind their own business, but they try to help people and join good causes.

Next come the witchers; they go around the world and basically remove things that kill people, making it a better place. Sure, they charge money, but considering how they spend it all on gear, it turns out they actually don’t profit from their labor at all, and in fact do it out of pure altruism. They could, in fact, use their skills for evil and be much better paid as hired assassins or thugs (and some, in fact, do), but the vast majority of them don’t, which means it’s a choice for good, and it produces significant good consequences. Geralt is an outstanding example even in that company, because he makes very deliberate and calculated choices to improve the world by his actions, and is personally very powerful.

Then we have the good mages – Triss, Yennefer, Ermion and others – who are sometimes annoying and irritable, but powerful and helpful. They are powerful in different ways than the witchers – more magical power, but also more sensitivity to physical attack – which means they complement with the witchers most excellently; if a witcher defends the mage from physical attack while the mage does his thing, the result is more than the sum of its parts. Also, you can pretty much reduce a mage to an ordinary person with a dimeritium bomb, while a witcher will shrug it off and kill you with a sword.

The next level are the higher vampires, specifically Regis; they don’t use powerful magic, but they possess innate abilities that look like magic, and they are extremely powerful, and also extremely hard to kill. When such a powerful being makes a conscious choice for good, like Regis, the result is someone who is powerful, smart and helpful, and when he combines powers with someone like Geralt, they use detective work, alchemy, magic and brute force to great effect, and they are also fun to watch and they always have interesting opinions about human society and politics. Also, if you observe what a mess a higher vampire can make when he is ruled by rage or malice, it makes you appreciate the good ones even more, because you get to see it’s a willing choice, and not at all an easy one. They are prone to strong passions as a species, and a choice for good requires quite a bit of discipline and control for them.

And here we bump into my problem – there are no gods in the Witcher universe. There are no super-powerful angelic beings. The best I can think of is the Lady of the Lake, who tries to promote and enforce some basic principles, or Gaunter O’Dimm, who is not really good in any true definition of the term, but more of a predator who selectively destroys evil, arrogant and worthless beings. He is occasionally helpful to the good ones, but excessive help from him comes at a high price that is seldom worth it. However, if we see him as some kind of a super-devil that selectively plucks the evil people out of existence and thus shows that a choice for evil and callousness might not be worth it, I am forced to classify him as a phenomenon useful for enforcing positive moral principles. The “gods” of the Witcher universe, however, are all false and ridiculous. The “prophet” Lebioda is an obvious caricature of Jesus designed by atheists; other “gods” such as Freya or Melitele probably don’t even exist, which is what “allgod”, the lardass sylvan living in a basement of an elven ruin, actually points out: sure, he’s not a real deity, but unlike all other false gods he actually exists enough to talk and offer some advice to the peasants. Basically, all the religions in Witcher are exactly what atheists think of religions, and this is why the Witcher imagery is useless for describing the actual good that exceeds normal human metrics. Furthermore, this is the case with basically every other fictional universe imagined by humans: they apparently don’t know what powerful good beings feel like, to the point where they can’t even imagine them properly. Also, since the experience of darshan is apparently rare among writers, they can’t write from actual experience.

And so, if people aren’t even capable of writing fictional good characters due to their lack of experience with actual powerful good beings, what does this say about this world, about religions, and so on? It’s something to think about, in any case.