Author Archives: Matt Forney

One of the joys of reading and learning about the past is discovering that many of the problems we’re dealing with today have been around for longer than we thought, and learning how our forerunners dealt with them. Enter Ernest Mann, a writer who is completely unknown to the manosphere (and the world at large), but deserves to be more widely read. Mann saw the problems of expanding government, environmental degradation and wage slavery and proposed the Priceless Economic System as a way of ending them. The PES was simple; eliminate currency and have everyone work for free, only at jobs they enjoyed doing, and live more simply, without television, pop music or the other myriad shiny things the elite use to keep us poor, dumb and content.

Unlike the leftists though, Mann didn’t call for wealth redistribution from the safety of his Gulfstream Five; he lived by example.

In 1969, at the age of 42, Ernest Mann decided he’d had enough of the rat race and checked out. He sold most of his worldly possessions and spent the rest of his life advocating for the PES, living in unfinished basements and rustic wood cabins in his native Minnesota. To push his radical ideas, Mann created the Little Free Press newsletter, which he intermittently published until his grandson murdered him in 1996. Nearly two decades later, my friend and Mann pen pal Trevor Blake has brought his work back into print with I Was Robot, a compilation of the best of the Little Free Press.

If you have any interest in minimalism and breaking free of the corporate consumerist hamster wheel, you need to pick this one up.

Ernest Mann saw the thin red line that connected all ideologies—communism, libertarianism, anarchism—and why it made them all ineffective when it came to solving the problems of humanity: they were all obsessed with money. That’s all ideology is, really: determining which group of thugs gets to own all the money, whether it’s the plutocrats, the royal family, the church, the government, the poor. Mann had a simple counterpoint: the problem was money itself, and the idea of working for it and buying useless shit with it. He sums up his life philosophy in one iconic catchphrase:

If you take pay, you must obey!

That’s the truth of it right there: if you work for a paycheck, you are somebody’s bitch. When your boss tells you to jump, you ask him how high. When the HR ditz demands your Facebook password, you fork it over so she can rifle through your private photos. If she decides she doesn’t like something you’ve said online, regardless of how effective an employee you are or how qualified you are for the job, she can and will show you the door. You learn that the only way to make a middle-class living is to put your brain on a leash and be as bland and compliant as you possibly can.

Meanwhile, you waste the 14-16 hours of your day that aren’t spent making some dick-clitted bittergrrl rich on meaningless diversions. Everything from pop music to video games to our high fructose corn syrup-laden food is deliberately designed to get you hooked on them like crack, to program you into buying more, more, MORE! And how do you afford to keep buying the latest installment of Assassin’s Creed or shoving sugary bon-bons into your mouth?

You work!

You slave away even more so you can have the newest, shiniest iTurd or replace the $50 espresso machine that was deliberately designed to break a year after you bought it. And yet, no matter how long or hard you work, it’s never enough. There’s never a point where you can kick back, stop angling for a promotion and just enjoy your life; you’ve got to keep working until the house is paid off and the kids move out, and maybe not even then. You’re not allowed to take your foot off the pedal until you’re 65 or so, when your brain is lapsing into senility and your body is frail and weak; in other words, when the system no longer has any use for you.

Ernest Mann saw all this nearly half a century ago and decided to fuck that noise:

I was an enlistee in WW II, but I protested the Korean War and when the Vietnam War came along and threatened to take my two sons, that made me blow my cork. I quit the real estate business. I sold my 13 rental properties to my tenants for one to a hundred dollars down and payments less than their rent. I even sold the duplex we lived in.

My wife and I took off in an old used pick-up truck with a camper. Our youngest kid was 16. We told her she could come with us, stay with a relative and finish school or go on her own. She has been on her own for 10 years now. She learned more about living than her friends did who finished school. My wife and I traveled the U.S.A. for a year just getting unwound.

I Was Robot reads like a mashup of Max Stirner and Jerry Rubin, as filtered through the voice of a revivalist preacher. Mann was an individualist above all else, who spurned politics and activism as wastes of time. He advocated for the Priceless Economic System in a manner as simple as how he lived, by fixing himself before he sought to heal the world:

Freedom started in my own mind. When I discovered the fact that I was an individual and that I could be in control of myself if I chose to be, I found ways to reject the control that society had conditioned into me. I started making my own decisions based on what is best for the individual. I now attempt to make my own individual self happy.

Where do you start? Stop loading your biocomputer (brain) with the mental junk food dispensed by the TV and the radio. Stop eating sugary food and medicating with cheap cigarettes and booze. Stop wasting your money on “labor-saving devices” that mysteriously require you to work longer hours than your “backwards” ancestors to afford and replace them. And when you’ve adopted the PES, tell two friends about it, then have them each tell two of their friends, going on and on:

There are a little over 4 1/2 billion people on this planet. How could we reach all of them? Sound impossible? Too big a job? You and I don’t need to inform them all. All I need to do is to inform and convince just 2 people so thoroughly that they EACH inform 2 more people to do the same. That is simple enough isn’t it? The People’s Grapevine, i.e., the geometric progression of numbers then takes over (see diagram in “Changes” chapter). Would you believe that 31 doublings would reach the whole world population? Try it! It’s like a chain letter, only with no money to send. Just one hell of a lot of work to convince 2 people so well that they carry on and do the same.

Calling Mann a pioneer would be an understatement: he was actually the first person to refer to the elite as the “1%.” Unlike the hipsters at Zuccotti Park who ripped him off two decades later though, Mann came up with that number via mathematics: calculating that 98.6% of Americans made less than $50,000 a year. And also unlike those hipsters, Mann didn’t “occupy” anything beyond his own mind. To him, protests were just another way that the elite (which he humorously personifies as the “Warbucks family” in a series of satirical essays midway through the book) drained our energy and distracted us from the real issues. If you really want to strike a blow against the 1%, you don’t camp out in a park and chant hackneyed slogans.

You live life for yourself and your loved ones, without wasting your time and effort on things that don’t benefit you or make you happy.

The biggest problem with I Was Robot is that it feels somewhat haphazard and repetitive. As Trevor points out in his introduction, the articles are not organized in chronological order, but arranged so that the book “comment[s] on itself as it grows.” Mann rehashes many of the same points over and over, and his relentlessly cheerful attitude wore on me after a while.

That said, like that other relentlessly cheerful minimalist from Minnesota, Ernest Mann’s work has great potential to convince people of the glories of simple living and the PES. Mann feared that if our absurd, money-centric modern economy wasn’t dismantled, World War III would turn the planet into an uninhabitable wasteland. According to him, war, pollution and the other ills of the human condition were caused by the desire for profit.

No profit, no motivation to wreck our little spaceship called Earth.

Whether you agree with Mann or not, or you’re just interested in the philosophy of minimalism and anti-consumerism, I Was Robot is a must-read.

Click here to buy I Was Robot.

Read Next: OVO 20: Juven(a/i)lia by Trevor Blake

NOTE: This article was originally published at In Mala Fide on November 16, 2011. I’m re-posting it here as the site is now defunct.

This is a best-of collection of articles and artwork from OVO, a zine founded and edited by friend of the blog Trevor Blake, “a public record of [his] interests and inquiries.” It’s interesting, it’s weird, and I don’t entirely know what to make of it. I guess it’s because I’m too young to appreciate it: I was barely out of diapers when Trevor was printing up the early editions of OVO on his pal’s company’s copiers in the eighties. To someone of the Internet Era, where narcissistic self-expression is just a couple of mouse clicks away, the effort and dedication involved in compiling an entire magazine, from writing and gathering the material to binding the physical copies and mailing them out, is difficult to relate to.

Still, this is a great little collection of oddities, ranging from poetry to short stories to investigative journalism on offbeat subjects. They include “Holding Games for Ransom,” about how one tabletop game creator found a way to keep online piracy from cutting into his profits; “A Pit Stop Along the Inward Journey,” a stream-of-consciousness tale beginning with white guilt and ending with madness; and “23 Sperm Stories 23,” the longest article in the book, on just about every aspect of sperm, from its discovery, its function, and its future. Of particular interest to us in the manosphere are “Warbucks Intra-Family Communique” and “Becoming More Free” by Ernest Mann. The former is a satirical article on the emptiness and mindlessness of American consumerism; the latter is on how Mann unplugged himself from the Matrix of American culture:

I am wasting less of my time (LIFE) watching, listening to and reading THOUGHT LEADERS, ie, TV, movies, radio, music, newspapers, magazines and novels. These are like spectator sports. They cause me to live life vicariously, ie, second-hand, not real, only in fantasy. These mind conditioners are subtly designed to create not only fear and anger emotions but also create feelings of guilt and inadequacy. These feeling stifle growth and keep one securely in one’s rut. And of course the more visible purpose of the media is to create the desire to acquire (BUY! BUY! BUY!) and keep up with the Joneses. ‘Buying’ uses up my savings. I spent 22 years of my TIME (life) working as a Wage Slave. I helped perpetuate the status quo, ie a world of 98.6% Slaves and less than 1% Elite (Billionaires). I don’t wish to do that any more.

But the real prize is Trevor’s own writings, comprising the second half of the book. They include book reviews (including an exhaustive review of one of my favorites, L.A. Rollins’ Myth of Natural Rights), interviews with such diverse individuals as a bulimia sufferer and an expert on out-of-body experiences/bilocation, and my favorite, “Trajectory Through Anarchism,” in which Trevor tracks the evolution of his political beliefs:

1996: Feeling free of anarchism and a little burned by what I now see was my own hooded thinking, I call up the imp of the perverse to see what other forbidden ideas might be out there. Ayn Rand is suggested, and I read her works. Having already shed one hood I’m less inclined to put another one on, and I do not become an Objectivist.  But moving through Objectivism brings libertarian thinking to my attention. It’s something about the sovereignty of the individual… but I’ve walked down that path already and don’t sign on as a libertarian either.

Like The eXile, OVO 20 comes in a 8 1/2 by 11 inch size, to fit artwork and cartoons on the pages: I was particularly amused by “Attack of the Giant Killer Sperm.” One minor issue I have with the design is that all paragraphs in OVO 20 are punctuated with bullet points. I suppose they’re there to make the book look distinctive, but I found them mildly distracting, fooling my eyes into thinking I was reading a series of lists instead of articles.

Still, if you want to take an excursion into the bizarre and come back a little more enlightened, OVO 20 is a fun and informative read. If you’re still not convinced, Trevor maintains a free online archive of all OVO articles here. He also has some words of wisdom for aspiring writers and publishers:

…First and most important, get busy. Your time is already diminished by work and mortality, and neither of those situations is going to improve. Keep a printed copy of what you make and write down the date of when you made it. Large bodies of work and the pleasure they bring are made a few small pieces at a time. Learn about the history of what interests you. Novelty is rare and not always of value for being novel. Your friends are not being documented right now and you are the one who can do a good job with that. Read with regularity outside your area of interests. Nothing will point out your own ignorance and error better than attentiveness to those who disagree with you, nothing makes what you know make sense like learning something unrelated to what you know. Take as many chances as you are willing to take the lumps for.

But most of all, get busy.

Click here to buy OVO 20: Juven(a/i)lia.

Read Next: Why You Should Purchase a NexxtLevelUp Membership

NOTE: This article was originally published at In Mala Fide on February 29, 2012. I’m re-posting it here as the site is now defunct.

God, what an unreadable pile of shit.

I recall stumbling across a used copy of City of Glass when I was a kid and liking it for some inexplicable reason. I never bothered reading the two following installments in the trilogy, so when I saw them all bundled together in a single Kindle volume, I jumped for joy. That was an Amazon gift card well-spent.

As soon as I laid eyes on Luc Sante’s introduction, I knew I was in trouble:

Paul Auster has the key to the city. He has not, as far as I know, been presented with the literal object, traditionally an oversized five-pound gold-plated item, dispensed to visiting benefactors and favored natives on a dais in front of City Hall by a functionary in top hat and claw hammer coat, but I doubt he needs one of those. Auster’s key is like the key to dreams or the key to the highway. It is an alchemical passe-partout that allows him to see through walls and around corners, that permits him entry to corridors and substrata and sealed houses nobody else notices, as well as to a field of variegated phenomena once considered discrete, but whose coherence Auster has established. This territory is a realm within New York City, a current that runs along its streets, within its office buildings and apartment houses and helter-skelter through its parks—a force field charged by synchronicity and overlap, perhaps invisible but inarguably there, although it was never identified as such before Auster planted his flag.

Recognize this? It’s the overwrought diction of every “real” literary novel published in the past quarter-century. You’ve got the run-on sentences, the padding, and the highfalutin vocabulary. I mean, “passe-partout?” Do you even know what that means? I didn’t, so I looked it up; it’s French for “master key.” Now that’s how “real” writers write: using obscure terms to remind us all how smart they are and what dumbfucks we are in comparison. If a student handed this in to me for a grade, I’d strike out half of it with a red pen: “Too much filler. Needless repetition. Drop the David Fuckster Wallace act and write like a normal human being.” And this is only the first paragraph!

Since this is a trilogy, I’ll review each book on its own.

City of Glass

The lengthiest book in the series, it’s also the only one worth reading. The plot concerns Daniel Quinn, a hermit mystery novel author who gets embroiled in an actual detective case after being mistaken for Paul Auster. Oh yes, Auster is a character in his own novel. I smell postmodern hijinks!

The following night, Quinn was caught off guard. He had thought the incident was over and was not expecting the stranger to call again. As it happened, he was sitting on the toilet, in the act of expelling a turd, when the telephone rang. It was somewhat later than the previous night, perhaps ten or twelve minutes before one. Quinn had just reached the chapter that tells of Marco Polo’s journey from Peking to Amoy, and the book was open on his lap as he went about his business in the tiny bathroom. The ringing of the telephone came as a distinct irritation. To answer it promptly would mean getting up without wiping himself, and he was loath to walk across the apartment in that state. On the other hand, if he finished what he was doing at his normal speed, he would not make it to the phone in time. In spite of this, Quinn found himself reluctant to move. The telephone was not his favorite object, and more than once he had considered getting rid of his. What he disliked most of all was its tyranny. Not only did it have the power to interrupt him against his will, but inevitably he would give in to its command. This time, he decided to resist. By the third ring, his bowels were empty. By the fourth ring, he had succeeded in wiping himself. By the fifth ring, he had pulled up his pants, left the bathroom, and was walking calmly across the apartment. He answered the phone on the sixth ring, but there was no one at the other end. The caller had hung up.

You can pretty much guess how the rest of the book reads from this one paragraph; lots of exposition, adjective abuse, and page-long paragraphs. Still, unlike the following two books, City of Glass is interesting because it at least tries to conform to the structure of a narrative, with a discernible plot, dialogue and a character arc, detailing Quinn involving himself in the case to the point where he descends into gibbering insanity. At the very least, I was motivated to keep reading. You can spout all kinds of babble about how City of Glass is about breaking down the boundaries between truth and fiction and questioning the relationship between author and reader, but none of it matters. If you want a good, vaguely Coen-esque mystery story, City of Glass is a decent read.

Ghosts

I was plodding my way through this godawful novella (the shortest installment of the trilogy) trying not to fall asleep, when I came across this paragraph:

One night, therefore, Blue finally turns to his copy of Walden. The time has come, he says to himself, and if he doesn’t make an effort now, he knows that he never will. But the book is not a simple business. As Blue begins to read, he feels as though he is entering an alien world. Trudging through swamps and brambles, hoisting himself up gloomy screes and treacherous cliffs, he feels like a prisoner on a forced march, and his only thought is to escape. He is bored by Thoreau’s words and finds it difficult to concentrate. Whole chapters go by, and when he comes to the end of them he realizes that he has not retained a thing. Why would anyone want to go off and live alone in the woods? What’s all this about planting beans and not drinking coffee or eating meat? Why all these interminable descriptions of birds? Blue thought that he was going to get a story, or at least something like a story, but this is no more than blather, an endless harangue about nothing at all.

There’s nothing like a book that insults you for even bothering to read it. I almost think Auster threw this in to make fun of the lit-crit hacks who gush over him: “Ha ha, you idiots are actually READING this? I farted this crap out between watching reruns of Happy Days!” As for me, I just jabbed my Kindle’s next page button until I was at the end.

The plot of Ghosts is nearly identical to City of Glass: a private detective is assigned to tail some guy and eventually spirals into madness in the process. The main difference is that with Ghosts, Auster decided to dispense with such irrelevant distractions as “action” and “dialogue,” instead burying us in a nonstop monologue of the protagonist’s thoughts, which naturally wander all over the place and have nothing to do with the story. Even better, all of the characters are named after colors (e.g. Blue, Black, White, Gold), which combined with Auster’s squid-ink prose means you’ll need a flow chart to keep track of everything.

More often than not, however, Blue will bypass the bar and go to the movie theater several blocks away. With summer coming on now and the heat beginning to hover uncomfortably in his little room, it’s refreshing to be able to sit in the cool theater and watch the feature show. Blue is fond of the movies, not only for the stories they tell and the beautiful women he can see in them, but for the darkness of the theater itself, the way the pictures on the screen are somehow like the thoughts inside his head whenever he closes his eyes. He is more or less indifferent to the kinds of movies he sees, whether comedies or dramas, for example, or whether the film is shot in black and white or in color, but he has a particular weakness for movies about detectives, since there is a natural connection, and he is always gripped by these stories more than by others. During this period he sees a number of such movies and enjoys them all: Lady in the Lake, Fallen Angel, Dark Passage, Body and Soul, Ride the Pink Horse, Desperate, and so on. But for Blue there is one that stands out from the rest, and he likes it so much that he actually goes back the next night to see it again.

These individual paragraphs may not seem so bad, but imagine reading a hundred straight pages of this drivel.

The few short segments of Ghosts that aren’t Blue’s inane exposition are like oases in a desert, but even then Auster can’t resist the urge to fuck things up. Take this segment where Blue is confronted by his fiance (just about the only character who isn’t given a color for a name, but incessantly referred to as “the future Mrs. Blue”), who has understandably gotten sick of his undercover games and found another man:

You! she says to him. You!

No quotation marks. Who do you think you are, Cormac McCarthy? And of course, that’s the only dialogue in that section; “the ex-future Mrs. Blue’s” physical assault on Blue is written in more fucking exposition! Skip this.

The Locked Room

I made it all of two chapters into this before giving up. The Locked Room is written in the exact same dialogue-free expository style as Ghosts, and I was so burnt out from trying to make it through that one that I couldn’t take it anymore. The plot is at least different; it concerns an unnamed narrator’s search for his childhood friend Fanshawe.

Fanshawe had never had any regular work, she said, nothing that could be called a real job. Money didn’t mean much to him, and he tried to think about it as little as possible. In the years before he met Sophie, he had done all kinds of things—the stint in the merchant marine, working in a warehouse, tutoring, ghost writing, waiting on tables, painting apartments, hauling furniture for a moving company—but each job was temporary, and once he had earned enough to keep himself going for a few months, he would quit. When he and Sophie began living together, Fanshawe did not work at all. She had a job teaching music in a private school, and her salary could support them both. They had to be careful, of course, but there was always food on the table, and neither of them had any complaints.

Perhaps I’m just being unfair. Perhaps The Locked Room is actually a really good read and I was just so put off by Ghosts that all of Paul Auster’s writing is forever ruined for me. But I seriously fucking doubt it.

The New York Trilogy is a encapsulation of everything I hate about modern literature. It’s turgid, condescending, obtuse, and pointless. But the sad thing is that Luc Sante got it right in his intro: Paul Auster is the poet laureate of New York City, though not for the reasons he thinks. The New York Trilogy is the perfect book for the New York of Rudy Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg, a stultifying police state run by over-educated SWPLs who think All Things Considered is really deep and get the vapors whenever anyone says anything vaguely controversial. It’s perfect for the New York of the hipsters, pencil-necked dweebs from Seattle or Milwaukee thinking they’re going to be the next Thurston Moore or Lydia Lunch while they snack on artisan bread courtesy of their trust funds. It’s perfect for a New York defanged, declawed and stripped of everything that made it interesting and unique, made safe for underemployed Midwestern brats and bored Australian tourists. The New York everyone romanticizes—the New York of danger, intrigue and passion—is dead and buried.

And this neutered New York has produced a literati that spends all day sniffing its own farts. Jonathan Safran Foer, Colson Whitehead, Nicole Krauss, Gary Shteyngart, Jhumpa Lahiri, David Foster Wallace (actually wait, he’s dead; I’ve never derived so much joy from a suicide in my life), and all the rest: worthless hacks devoid of curiosity, humanity or talent. There’s more merit in a single Roosh Tweet than in the entire American literary establishment.

Sorry, but I went through four years of this horror, and I’ve got the diploma to prove it. I’d rather gargle battery acid than write another ten page paper analyzing Melville’s “Bartleby the Scrivener,” and I’d never read any of this garbage in my free time. I would love nothing more than to see the mainstream publishing world collapse, along with the toxic, insular culture that gave birth to it. This is why I’m such a huge booster of self-made writers like Roosh, Frost and English Teacher X; for all their flaws, they understand what makes good writing, and they don’t water down their books to make some soccer mom-fearing suit happy. I refuse to support a world where pretentious puff words and navel-gazing is considered the stuff of great literature.

As for The New York Trilogy? The only reason I can see to buy this flaming turd is if you’re an adjunct English professor looking for new ways to torture your students. Alternately, give it to them as an example of how not to write. If there was a version of City of Glass available on its own on Kindle, I’d recommend you buy that instead.

And here’s the final joke. When I sat down to write this review, I was suddenly struck with a thought: “Is Paul Auster related to Lawr—. No, he can’t be. That would just be too convenient.” Ten seconds of research and my suspicions were confirmed:

Paul is the older cousin of conservative columnist Lawrence Auster.

It pains me to say this, but Paul should have taken some writing tips from his little cousin. Larry Auster is a senile old dork, but he can at least write. He’s not great, but he can make his points clearly and concisely, without feverishly masturbating all over the page.

Click here to buy The New York Trilogy.

Read Next: Paul Elam Argues Like a Girl

NOTE: This article was originally published at In Mala Fide on February 21, 2012. I’m re-posting it here as the site is now defunct.

I was thumbing my way through this nifty little pamphlet, the latest release from Jack Donovan’s Dissonant Hum, at a diner (yes, I’m one of those people who takes a book to read when eating out) a couple of days ago when I came across this in Jack’s intro:

In the past decade, there has been increased interest in human biodiversity and using evolutionary psychology make sense of the “war between the sexes.” First Published in 1998, All About Women was ahead of its time. Its punchy essays would be at home in the “manosphere” alongside those of popular “game,” anti-feminist and PUA bloggers like Heartiste, Roosh V, and Ferdinand Bardamu. If the chapters and charts in All About Women were blog posts, I have no doubt that they’d be wildly popular, well-linked and quoted often online.

My ego massaged by being name-checked in a “real” book, I cracked a wide grin. The waitress probably thought I was nuts.

My narcissism aside, All About Women is an important book and one you must own, if not for its content, then for the circumstances surrounding its publication. Simon Sheppard is a victim of the tyranny of political correctness, a man who has been dogged and persecuted by the British government for over a decade for “hate speech,” saying things that run counter to the prevailing multicult orthodoxy:

In 1999, Sheppard was arrested with David Hannam for publishing and distributing 1,500 copies of a double-sided anti-immigration leaflet titled, “Our Politicians Are Traitor Criminals.” After being charged with “Publishing or Distributing Racially Inflammatory Material,” and “Possession of Racially Inflammatory Material,” Sheppard was sentenced to nine months in prison.

After his release, he continued writing what he believed to be the truth.

In 2005 and 2006, the British police raided his flat several times, and Sheppard was forced to attend several hearings. He and his co-publisher Stephen Whittle were tried, and Sheppard was convicted of eleven counts of “race hate.”

In 2008, the two fled to the United States to seek political asylum. In their absence, they were retried in England. Their appeals for asylum in the US were denied by a female judge who had previously granted asylum to an IRA member who had been convicted of murdering two policemen.

All About Women was originally published in 1998 and pioneered many concepts and ideas that we in the manosphere take for granted. It’s only available on Kindle, but Jack has gone to great lengths to preserve the original text and its images and various lengthy quotes. Sheppard’s prose reads like Schopenhauer without the pretension, laying into the second sex with savagery and bluntness:

A hundred years ago the inferiority of women was obvious to all. Two hundred years before that scolding caps were used and chastity belts employed so that a man knew for certain that a woman was his alone. Whole families slept in one bed, and because of the higher population density they were probably more riddled with parasites and disease than during prehistoric times. Beating women was considered necessary, civilization being fragile enough as it was, and this was accepted provided the rod was no wider than a man’s thumb, so that no bones were broken.

All About Women is brief but comprehensive, touching on evolutionary biology, women’s suffrage, the nature of women themselves (with delightfully-titled chapters like “Women Are Inferior” and “Women Are Liars”), and the totalitarian nature of feminism (which Sheppard dubs “Big Sister”). In one short section, he confronts, much to my delight, an old pet peeve of mine; the Valerie Solanas Theory of Female Subjugation:

This example is highly relevant to the claim of feminism, because that claim is precisely an example of The Old Reverse. Feminists allege that the reason for the paucity of female inventors, notable scientists, outstanding artists and musicians and females’ mediocre showing in practically every other sphere is because they have been cruelly subjugated by men. Here is a confusion of cause and effect: firstly women have allowed themselves to be subjugated and secondly they have been because they are mediocre and if they are not then mediocrity will dominate, which is precisely what is happening in contemporary society.

It’s not all gloom and doom, though; Sheppard has a sense of humor, as shown by his “Female Stereotypes” chapter (I laughed at “Able Woman” and “Thug Woman”). His DSoD theory is pure genius, though his application of game theory (John Nash game theory, not PUA game theory) to sexual relations is a bit nutty. Still, for a brief and entertaining exploration of relations between the sexes, pick up All About Women today.

Click here to buy All About Women.

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Aaron Clarey is cooler than you.

He’s an economist. He explores caves. He teaches salsa dancing. He rides a motorcycle. He collects fossils. He’s not married. He doesn’t have any kids. He’s self-employed and doesn’t answer to a boss. He lives life the way he wants to, not the way anyone else expects him to.

He’s living the dream, and with his latest book, Enjoy the Decline, he wants you to live the dream too.

Enjoy the Decline is not another hucksterish crapware title on how to make money running a network of plagiarism-laden affiliate marketing sites. It does have practical advice for living your life, but it’s philosophical at its core. Savvy Captain Capitalism readers will recognize “enjoy the decline” as Aaron’s catchphrase, which he uses to sign off many of his blog posts (at one point during In Mala Fide’s existence, I was using the French version, “Profitez de la baisse!”, as an homage to him), and this new book is an encapsulation of his life philosophy:

America is fucked, so you might as well have fun on the way down.

Aaron starts off Enjoy the Decline by stating why: the election last year pretty much confirmed that the country is irreversibly in decline. The American people took a president who has been a failure by every objective measure—running up the deficit with reckless spending while embroiling the military in more pointless wars and doing nothing to improve the economy—and gave him a second term in office. Not that a President Romney would have improved things, as the demolition of the land of the free and home of the brave has been an ongoing bipartisan project:

For instance, as the government grows larger and larger, it will crowd out more and more of the private sector. With higher taxation and more government regulation this will result in less economic opportunity for entrepreneurs, innovators, inventors, dreamers and just plain hard workers. Being one of these industrious sorts you may have dreams of starting a company, enriching yourself, or just having a successful career. But with taxation so high, regulations too restrictive, and capital so scarce, your dreams of starting a motorcycle company or inventing a new medical device is nearly impossible. The error you will make (especially men) is blaming yourself for failing to realize your dreams, when in reality it was outside of your control. It was doomed from the beginning. You do yourself no service misplacing the blame on yourself.

Enjoy the Decline takes square aim at the glut of Napoleon complex-afflicted wannabe rebels in this part of the blogosphere, regardless of their political affiliation—alt-right, MRAs, nationalists etc.—who still believe that America/the white race/men can be saved or that they’re even worth saving. With data and verve, Clarey shows that the trajectory of the past thirty years has been inexorably towards higher taxes,  less freedom, crappier jobs and bigger government entitlements. What’s the point of agitating for social reform when everyone else who’s tried it has failed? What’s the point of working hard or trying to build a career when you can be fired because some HR ditz is PMSing or when more than half of your income will be confiscated to pay for LaQuisha the Teenage Mother’s WIC check?

Face it people: the American Dream is dead, and no amount of defibrillation will bring it back.

From there, Aaron bounces into the practical advice segment of Enjoy the Decline. His philosophy of life is about working as little as possible, which serves the dual purpose of giving you more free time to have fun and kick back while simultaneously starving the government of money. To this effect, he gives you a crash course in minimalism—the art of living a middle-class lifestyle on a lower-class salary—as well as coaching you on how to grab as many government freebies as possible and prepare for a SHTF scenario. Aaron also argues against saving for retirement, both because traditional retirement is basically impossible for anyone born after the year 1965 and because following his advice will effectively allow you to retire right now:

In contributing to a retirement program, essentially what you are doing is trading away your youth for old age. The problem in doing so is that when you are older you cannot enjoy life as much as you could when you were young. And since you only get one life, you have to make sure it counts, making such a transaction foolish. Making it worse though is you can really diminish, if not just outright cripple your youth as you try to save for your old age. I know many young 20-somethings who just don’t have the disposable income to afford saving for retirement. However, they feel so guilty for not contributing to a retirement program, they end up contributing anyway even though it impoverishes them today.

Much like Aaron’s previous book Worthless, Enjoy the Decline is written in a blunt yet sympathetic style, meaning it has great potential to convert the skeptical or wary. I have yet to meet Aaron in real life, but I can only assume that he is one cheery motherfucker. His prose, if not particularly flashy, conveys his arguments with a relentless, infectious sunniness that will almost make you want to quit your job right on the spot. For example, Clarey is the only guy I know who can write about euthanasia and make it seem like a real fun time.

There are people who will object to the central thesis of Enjoy the Decline. They’re the people who think that they’re still somehow obligated to serve a society that has rejected them. That slaving away at some cubicle job so they can feed a fat wife and 2.5 screaming kids is somehow noble or manly. That somehow, if we can get enough people to sign on what happens to be the Great Political Cause du jour, we can turn this country around. We call these people “losers.”

“What would happen if everyone followed your advice? The country would collapse!”

And I’m supposed to care because…? Like a battered wife crawling back to her abusive husband again and again, right-wingers maintain a misguided sense of loyalty to a country that has done nothing but screw them over. If you’re an American born after the year 1965, there is absolutely no reason for you to view this country as anything other than a convenient way to get rich. The banks are picking your pockets. The politicians are flooding your cities with illiterate third world labor and sending your sons to die in pointless wars. The media does nothing but shove anti-male, anti-white propaganda in your face 24/7. Your own parents have stolen your birthright so they can get their hemorrhoids removed for free in their old age while you sling pumpkin spice lattes for minimum wage so you can pay off the degree they told you would keep you from having to sling lattes for a living to begin with!

Why should you give a fuck whether these venal degenerates who have done nothing but lie to, cheat and steal from you your entire life live or die?

Despite what some say, Aaron isn’t advocating that you move back in your parents and spend the rest of your days playing Call of Duty and feverishly masturbating to YouPorn clips. He’s advocating that you stop expending mental energy on things that you have no control over. He’s advocating that instead of sublimating your dreams or aspirations to chase the fading likelihood of a high-paid career path and a white picket fence life in the suburbs, you pursue those aspirations now. Indeed, he devotes an entire chapter of the book on how you can become the best man you can be, in part by working out, developing a cool lifestyle and not knocking up any hood rats:

This means you have to develop a skill or a trade. This means you have to develop hobbies and interests that are not common, but still unique and interesting to you. This means you have to consider others and how you interact with them. It also means you must polish yourself, your actions, and your demeanor. You need to become well-read, well-informed and knowledgeable. And hardest of all you must develop charm and a devastating sense of humor that will turn your future wife’s knees to rubber. When you walk into the room you want to be the most interesting man in the joint, not to make all the other women insanely jealous of your wife, but your wife insanely proud of you.

There are two major problems with Enjoy the Decline. The first is the slipshod copyediting. While it’s not as bad as some of the books I’ve reviewed, Clarey’s title has more typos than it really ought to. Honestly, he should stop being a cheapass and hire a professional editor one of these days; you can get good rates on Elance. This same miserliness extends to Enjoy the Decline‘s hideously incongruent cover. What exactly does a random picture of a tree-covered cliffside have to do with enjoying the decline?

My other problem is that Clarey is a little too absolutist when it comes to the meaninglessness of careers. Sure, for most people, work is pointless, but tradesmen and small business owners, if they don’t enjoy their work, at least feel that they’re accomplishing something with it. Dr. Illusion already mentioned this in his review, but men who feel like they’re going nowhere in their current career should consider the trades. Aaron doesn’t ignore the trades entirely in Enjoy the Decline, but he glosses them over.

Still, Enjoy the Decline is a great book that, with some better editing and a more topical cover, could easily become one of the cornerstone titles of the manosphere. Just remember that the operative word is “enjoy.” Moping about the end of the world is for pansies and crybabies. In the words of George Grant:

When a man truly despairs, he does not write; he commits suicide.

Men who despair probably don’t blog either.

Click here to buy Enjoy the Decline.

Read Next: Worthless: The Young Person’s Indispensable Guide to Choosing the Right Major by Aaron Clarey

Would it be hyperbole to claim that I feel a little raped by this novel?

But in all seriousness, Heart Killer is probably the most gripping work of fiction published in the past year. Beyond being an evolution in Andy Nowicki’s storytelling, Heart Killer is absolutely required reading for manospherians for its psychological insight into male and female sexuality. Just be forewarned: even if you’ve read Nowicki’s previous books, Heart Killer takes things to another level of sickness.

The story concerns FBI profiler Frances Lazarus, who is dispatched to Atlanta in 1987 to investigate a potential serial killer at the prestigious Cordelia Academy high school, after a wave of young girls are found dead from being shot through the heart. While there, she meets Johann Salvadorus, a bizarre, dorky student who she suspects to be the “Cordelia Heart-Killer.” Reading through his personal journal, she discovers that he is a middle-aged man in a teenager’s body, inexplicably sent back in time after spending his life becoming a ruthless player and Casanova:

In front of me, as expected, stood Frieda, done up like a fantasy prom date, in a skimpy red minidress. She didn’t apologize for showing up unannounced; that would have been too much like her mousy old “nice girl” self. I had ceased to be her friend and confidant, and had instead become a pawn, a means of obtaining comeuppance against her faithless husband. Standing in an alluring pose, the hint of a smile animating her painted face, she asked if she could come in. I opened the door, and asked how she’d found my apartment. She said she had her ways, and I replied that I didn’t doubt it. Her smile widened, almost imperceptibly, at that. Then I asked if I could do anything for her, which prompted her to get right to the point.

“You can fuck me, good and long,” she said softly.

The novel oscillates between four different perspectives: Lazarus’ own, Johann’s (via his journal), and two unnamed third-person narrators who describe the aftermath of their encounter. This is easily one of Heart Killer’s most effective conceits, as it forces you to stare down the depravity—and the redemption—of our lead characters. Given some of Nowicki’s writing in the past in regards to game and sexuality, a basic reading of Heart Killer’s plot makes it seem like a slightly more erudite version of those MRA/MGTOW losers who claim that game is “supplication” and “degenerate” and the path to “real” manliness consists of being yourself, even if you’re an antisocial freakazoid who enjoys eating paste straight from the jar.

You would be wrong. Oh, you would be so wrong.

Andy Nowicki excels as a writer precisely because despite his ideological biases, he can step outside of his own life and imagine what the world looks like from the perspective of people completely unlike himself. Additionally, Nowicki realizes that even in the most evil person imaginable, there is a flicker of goodness, a chance of regaining God’s grace. It is this hope of salvation, no matter how tiny and remote, that gives his fiction pathos and makes his characters believable.

Nowicki’s books are Christian in the sense that Anthony Burgess’ novels were Christian; implicitly rather than explicitly.

For example, the first part of Heart Killer, written from Lazarus’ perspective, details the sordid and morbid reason she chose to become a criminal profiler: she secretly desires to be ridden hard and put up wet by the serial murderers and psychopaths she pursues. During one gripping segment, Lazarus develops an infatuation with her sister’s boyfriend, a classic “dark triad” sociopath who gets his jollies from abusing women, who naturally keep coming back for more:

“Whore! Don’t tell me you’re a virgin! I just took that from you, whore! So what are you, now? What are you? (loud smack) I said, what are you? Answer me! (sobbing and sniveling) Stop crying… just tell me: what are you?”

Then I heard the girl, whimpering, “I’m — I’m a whore…”

“A whore!” he shouted, triumphantly. “I just made you a whore. And you let me do it! Aw, you bled all over my bed, whore. What am I gonna do with you?” The poor girl whispered something in response, to which he shouted, “Speak up!”

“I don’t know,” she repeated, between sobs.

“Oh, you know,” he insisted. “You know, all right. You’re going to have to die.”

In the hands of a manospambot or an MRA/MGTOW/Orthosphere-type, this would have devolved into a limp, hackneyed morality play, either of the Heartiste variety (“Women are amoral, hamster-headed tingle-led demonspawn!”) or the conservative variety (“This modern world is sick, that it would drive women to such depravity!”). In Nowicki’s hands, it makes us care about what happens to Lazarus, even if on a certain level we despise her. Yes, she’s fucked in the head, but she’s not a monster. The same goes for Johann, the “Heart-Killer” himself; even as he descends into the pits of a metaphorical hell, he is given humanity.

It’s this humanity—this one burning candle in the dark cave—that makes the book’s ending, where Johann and Lazarus receive deliverance of a sort, so wrenching. I won’t spoil more beyond what I’ve written in this review, only to say that Nowicki knows how to stab you in the heart and twist it in deep. I haven’t felt this shaken by a work of fiction since when I saw Barton Fink for the first time.

The biggest flaws I see in the book come in its middle and end. Per Nowicki’s usual M.O., Johann Salvadorus is a self-immolating, world-weary and depressive Catholic (in spirit if not officially) loser, though fortunately he’s far less of a cardboard cutout than the protagonists of his previous novels. Additionally, the book’s finale, which spirals into the realm of alternative history, is too fantastical to believe, even as the novel’s characters are utterly, disturbingly believable. Again, I won’t spoil it, other than to say that it’s the most absurd variety of alt-right wish fulfillment you’ll ever read.

But honestly, alt-right, manosphere or whatever your ideological poison is, Heart Killer is easily one of the best novels of the 2010’s. I can say that with confidence even though we’re not even halfway through the 10’s; it’s that good. It’s a novel that disgusts you, yet lifts you up, gives you a bit of hope. If you read nothing else Nowicki has written, read Heart Killer.

Click here to buy Heart Killer.

Read Next: Considering Suicide by Andy Nowicki

Nowicki’s fourth novella, Under the Nihil is a more difficult work to tear into than his previous outings, because it’s considerably less hamfisted with its themes and motifs. Nihil concerns an unnamed protagonist who, after being expelled from seminary school for being suspected of being a child molester, accepts an assignment from a “Mr. X” to test out an experimental new drug known as “nihil”:

“I can’t tell you how or why it works, to the extent that it does work,” you said. “And I’m not at liberty even to say what nihil is composed of, chemically speaking.” You pronounced nihil the same way one does the river in Egypt, on which Death stalked the dwellers of the cruise ship in that famous Agatha Christie novel. The nihil was so named, you said, because it had been designed to dissolve one’s fear and apprehension in the heat of battle, to render one’s natural inhibitors ineffective; in essence, its function was to reverse God’s miraculous creative gifts, and render nothing out of something, rather than vice versa.

One of Nihil’s most interesting aspects is that it’s written in the second-person, under the guise of the protagonist’s letters to Mr. X. It’s a surprisingly effective conceit that plunges you deep into the story, from the protagonist’s shacking up with a past-her-prime single mother to his final act of rebellion. The book’s plot twist is one of the finest I’ve read in a modern work of fiction; it’s both predictable yet unpredictable, and a striking commentary on the modern conception of “nihilism.”

“You cruel little cock tease,” I spat. “How many dorky little boys have you taken in with your so-called ‘charms’? How many times have you flashed your thighs in class, while sitting innocently at your desk, or bent over to pick up a pencil, putting your cleavage on display? You love it, don’t you? You love toying with them, laughing at their torment. You get off on it, don’t you?

Overall, Under the Nihil is a brilliant, if somewhat obtuse, read.

Click here to buy Under the Nihil.

Read Next: Considering Suicide by Andy Nowicki

English Teacher X’s fourth book, it’s a crash course on how not to get killed, scammed, raped or otherwise smacked around when you move abroad. A dream of many in the manosphere, living abroad can easily fuck you up if you aren’t prepared. ETX has lived abroad for the better part of twenty years in half-a-dozen different countries, making him more than qualified to espouse on expatriation:

Now – the exchange rates of the world, like the value of stocks and shares, have gone all over the place in recent years. But there’s been such inflation in the cost of living in third world countries, that the exchange rate is just as likely to hammer the dollar or euro as to help it.

(There was a lovely black market in currency exchange all around the world, especially in Eastern Europe, during the ‘90s, in which charming men in leather jackets with really bloodshot eyes would offer to buy your dollars, and perhaps drug you and fuck you up the ass. Now it’s the big banks that do all the fucking.)

How to Survive Living Abroad covers everything you could possibly want to know about the subject, from making money to visas to sex, drugs and disease. It’s leavened with ETX’s typical bleak humor, making reading it an absolute joy; I was cracking up after every other paragraph. The most valuable chapter is the one dealing with personal security, as ETX comprehensively guides you on how to protect yourself from thieves, pickpockets, and other criminals.

So try to find a hiding place for your valuables that can’t be scanned quickly. If you have a bunch of boxes and bags and bottles under your sink, or in your closet, maybe choosing one to hide stuff in would be a good idea; it would take a burglar a long time to go through all of them, and generally speaking, burglars don’t want to linger, especially since they might well have already spent quite a bit of time taking a dump on your floor and smelling your underwear and jerking off on your picture and so forth.

While more sensitive types might be off-put by ETX’s cynicism and writing style, How to Survive Living Abroad is easily one of the best resources out there for budding expats.

Click here to buy How to Survive Living Abroad.

Read Next: Guide to Teaching English Abroad by English Teacher X

This is a collection of three short stories revolving around Nowicki’s usual themes of alienation, loserdom and Catholicism. The eponymous tale is notable as it features Nowicki’s first (and to date only) woman protagonist. Dr. Carol Golden is a terminally depressed widower with a crush on one of her patients, the tortured and handsome Fenton Balonsky:

The doctor groaned and writhed violently as her body gushed crystalline treasure all over her sheets, in such copious quantity that it frightened her. She wondered if she might die, here in her plush bed, surrounded by all her worldly possessions, alone; expiring in terrible ecstasy as her sticky, fluidic essence spurted out, leaving behind a lifeless shell, a pretty, middle-aged corpse lying in a thick puddle of spent pleasure.

“The Doctor and the Heretic” is riveting, thanks to Nowicki’s attention to detail and ability to convincingly portray a female character, but the real star of the show is the story immediately following it. “Tears of the Damned” is an alternate history tale showing what might have happened had Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris had become upstanding citizens rather than committing the Columbine attacks. It covers similar territory as The Columbine Pilgrim, but from a new and unexpected angle:

After the initial shock of the news wore off, Dylan found himself feeling emotions that were harder to comprehend. He felt somehow guilty, like he’d let his friend down. He felt that he ought to have been by Eric’s side when he died, and he felt that he too should be dead, but that he’d gotten off easy. Once again, Dylan couldn’t help thinking that he’d been cheated out of something that was rightfully his. Eric and he had belonged together in life, as well as in death. But what could it mean, this bizarre thought? Dylan shook it off. After a period of mourning, he fell back into the intricacies of his collegiate life: the weekday classes, the weekend parties, the daily, weekly, and monthly routine.

The final story, “Autobiography of a Violent Soul,” is a Considering Suicide-esque narrative about a morose, self-immolating loser. It’s the weakest of the bunch, but still quite funny. If you enjoy Nowicki’s works, The Doctor and the Heretic and Other Stories is a worthy addition to your library.

Click here to buy The Doctor and the Heretic and Other Stories.

Read Next: The Columbine Pilgrim by Andy Nowicki

English Teacher X’s third book is more of a niche title than his other releases, aimed squarely at those who are already teaching English abroad. As the title suggests, it’s a book dedicated to speaking activities, the laborious process of getting your students to actually speak the language you’re teaching them. Despite the dry subject matter, ETX still manages to work in some of his trademark humor, such as with these “personal development” questions:

1) Think of the five main reasons that you suck as an English teacher.

2) Why do you speak so much in class, you dumbass?

3) Why are your lessons so boring and stupid? Try to think of at least five reasons.

Speaking Activities is brief and has little application if you’re not an English teacher, but if you enjoy English Teacher X’s writing, it’s still worth the buy considering its low price.

Click here to buy Speaking Activities That Don’t Suck.

Read Next: Guide to Teaching English Abroad by English Teacher X