The Plight Of The Western Man

While researching the Westernization of the world, I stumbled on a very interesting article called “Jihad vs. McWorld” [1]. It was written back in 1992, right after the fall of Soviet Union. It talks about the rise of two opposing forces which are shaping the modern world. The first force is the rise of a borderless and multi-cultural world. It’s a world devoid of any traditional religions or beliefs. This world is also known as the Western world.

The second force is the response to the first one. It’s a world based on tribalism and fundamentalism. It’s a world that’s divided along nationalistic, religious or ethnic lines. It’s a world based on traditional beliefs that value things like family, personal relationships, etc.

For an article that was written more than 20 years ago, it couldn’t be more prescient for the issues that we’re facing today.

There’s an English guy who is currently living in the rebel-held Eastern Ukraine. He’s pretty famous all over Russian and Ukrainian media. He calls himself a war correspondent. He goes around different cities and records all kinds of videos. Some of them are videos of damaged buildings as a result of shelling. Others are interviews with various people. I admire his bravery for going to an actual war-zone. It’s definitely a unique endeavor that few other men would do.

The thing about my country, Ukraine, is that it isn’t a pretty country. The bigger cities such as Kiev and Odessa can be considered grandiose and even charming. The Western part (Lviv) is picturesque, owing in part to its history as part of the Austro-Hungarian empire. The Eastern part is very industrialized and also very ugly. So, generally speaking, a foreigner needs a really good reason to go Eastern Ukraine. That’s like a Russian guy who goes to Temecula, California; Schenectady, New York; or Boise, Idaho. Or an American guy who goes to Banbury, England; Daugavpils, Latvia; or Murmansk, Russia.

Now, I completely understand a guy who goes to Ukraine, Romania, Nicaragua or Burma for a two-week vacation. I also understand when a guy leaves his comfortable Western country to work for six months, a year or more in some place like Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan or some undeveloped place in Africa where a lot of money can be made by extracting natural resources from the ground.

But we’re not talking about a temporary vacation or going somewhere to make money. We’re talking about a whole generation of men buying one-way tickets, leaving their comfortable Western countries and going somewhere without a concrete reason or plans. They’re moving to places that might not have hot or running water for weeks at a time. They’re moving to ugly cities where you can walk around all day and not to be inspired enough to pull your iPhone out of your pocket to snap a picture. They’re moving to places where they don’t even speak the local language and will never learn one unless they live there for many years. They’re moving to places with terrible weather and even more terrible customer service. In many ways, they are moving to some no man’s land, or, to be more precise, the “no Western man’s land.”

Now, if you’re a Western man, you might think that what’s happening is completely rational. I understand. Because I also happened to be a Western man. I understand why a Western man would want to leave the West. How could he not? Yes, the West is fucked up. Yes, there are no defined gender roles. Let’s also not forget about the “masculine” women. I’m not even speaking as someone who gets all of his information from behind the Internet; I spent over 20 years of my life—my entire precious youth—in the most liberal places in America or even the world (New York and San Francisco). That’s why I completely empathize with every single Western man out there.

Most of these guys who leave their comfortable Western abodes and move abroad don’t remain anonymous. They start blogs where they chronicle their adventures. Some focus exclusively on travel. The single men may also write about meeting the local women (it’s an amazing coincidence that it’s also easier to meet women outside the West). Still others, like the English guy above, are running around with their iPhones and recording everything in sight so they can upload to their YouTube channel shortly after.

They create elaborate names for themselves: renegades, mavericks, nomads, road junkies and love tourists. I know what I’m talking about: I’ve been this “Maverick” for the past seven years.

It’s not fucking normal

But I’m not only a Western man; I’m also an “Eastern” man. I can look at things from a different perspective. I can look at things from an Eastern European viewpoint, which usually strongly deviates from its Western counterpart. And when I remove my “Western-tinted glasses” and put on my “Eastern European-tinted glasses,” I see something else entirely.

What I do see is a real strange and upside-down world, a world that defies all rational logic. Because what the Englishman and other guys like him are doing does defy all rational logic. What would prompt such a person to abandon his country—one of the most developed and wealthiest in the world, a country that most Russians and Ukrainians and other Eastern Europeans would die to immigrate to—and move to one of the poorest countries and regions on the planet?

It’s not normal. It’s not fucking normal to leave your a comfortable Western country like America, England, Denmark or Australia—where you have everything under the sun handed to you on a silver platter, where you can walk around at all hours of the day with your laptop and not worry about getting jumped, where you can walk into a supermarket and buy everything you need, including even the most obscure accessories, where you can get a job and earn money in a hard currency that doesn’t slowly depreciate over time or one day collapses altogether, where you can actually make something of yourself—and go live somewhere in some underdeveloped and corrupt, not to mention dangerous, third world country.

I don’t care how you try to rationalize your motivation for doing all this: you’re doing “dating research,” you’re living a “location-independent” life, you’re a “nomad,” a “renegade,” or whatever the fuck else you want to call yourself. Unless you’re moving for real work—and, no, “teaching English” doesn’t count—or you’re originally from the country and might have family there, it’s just not normal. It’s not fucking normal.

It’s not normal for an entire generation of men to turn into an army of location-independent philosophers. The real explorers like Columbus or Vasco da Gama didn’t just sail into the unknown because they were lost and confused; they had a substantial financial motive for doing so.

People always immigrate from a poor country to a wealthy one. My family didn’t immigrate from the Soviet Union to America because our lives were boring and empty or because we were looking for new adventures in another country. We immigrated because our country was literally coming apart at the seams (we left two years before the Soviet Union collapsed), and because America would provide us with many more opportunities to actually make something of ourselves. This turned out to be the case.

The bottom line is that you don’t just uproot yourself, give up everything you have to your name, and move somewhere because you’re “bored” or feel “empty,” or because you think that “the West is dying.” If I swallowed the Soviet propaganda and actually thought that the West was dying, I would’ve been dead myself from starvation or rampant crime when the Soviet Union was breaking up. Many people suffered this exact fate.

The Great Exodus

Nevertheless, it’s really hard to ignore the obvious—The Great Exodus is in full swing. Some of these men are leaving the West and taking their Western beliefs like liberalism and feminism with them. They’re like the missionaries of the 16th century who were spreading various religious teachings.

But the majority is not. These men don’t want anything to do with the West. They feel marginalized and even rejected by the West. They want to forget all about the West and find a place where they can feel human again. They’re searching for some kind of meaning. They’re searching for some kind of a cause. They are obviously searching for something that the West lacks.

Now, I know what you’re thinking. You’re still thinking that I was born ten minutes ago. You’re thinking that I completely forgot about all the problems in America. Or that I completely forgot about how FeminismIsDestroyingMasculinity. Or that I forgot about the WarOnMen. Or that I forgot that we’re talking about TheDecadentWest here. Or that I’m clueless about the ErosionOfGenderValues. Or that everything that you’ve ever read on this site actually wasn’t written by me.

I can assure that I didn’t forget any of that. But I want you to put all of those big, capitalized terms aside for a moment. I want you to pretend that you were born ten minutes ago. I want you to look at what’s happening without automatically rationalizing the causes and explanations.

The dilemma of the Western man

When I returned to Kiev, Ukraine couple of years ago, I stayed with a single mother and her teenage daughter. The mother was warm and affectionate. She made me breakfast in the morning and invited me to a family dinner in the evening. She had this inexplicable warmth that was reminiscent of my own Ukrainian mother. Even though I’ve been to over 70 countries, there’s truly no place like home.

She told me about some of the other guests who stayed with her. Some were from the ex-Soviet Union: Russia, Belarus, and Baltic countries. These people automatically fit in because they speak the language and understand the culture. I don’t even consider them foreigners.

The overwhelming majority of her guests were Western men, including many Americans and Canadians. Her most vivid recollection was when she hosted a 55-year-old Canadian man. The way she described the whole encounter made it seem like she was a psychologist who was treating a patient. She told me he had recently become divorced but they were still living together for financial reasons. His ex-wife had mental issues and refused to talk to him. He had no friends and no one to connect with. (What’s interesting is that in the West, he would need to pay for these psychological services, but in Eastern Europe, this is just part of normal person to person communication.)

I believed her. Otherwise why would a complete stranger spill his whole life story within an hour of meeting someone new? I don’t tell my whole life story to some person who’s renting me a room. You don’t have to be a Ph.D. in psychology to see that he was starved for a human connection. He was lost and confused—and didn’t have a yellow Ferrari to accompany his midlife crisis. There was no one waiting for him back home. There were also other men like him—both younger and older—men who were trying to escape some void and emptiness of their lives back in the West.

That explains why almost all of these guys start blogs and ruminate about the state of their existence and “decadence of the West.” It’s because they have nothing else to do. One of my friends lives a life where he alternates between working five weeks on an oil rig in Saudi Arabia and five weeks at home. I’m sure many people would be interested to hear his experiences living in Saudi Arabia. I know I would. Do you know why he’s not blogging about it? Because he’s too busy working 12- or 16-hour-days on some oil rig to tell you what he thinks about “Saudi Arabia’s Role In Modern Society.”

Unlike someone who goes to Eastern Ukraine without a concrete reason or plans, he actually has a reason to be in Saudi Arabia. If you were working 12- or 16-hour-days on some oil platform in Saudi Arabia or Siberia, you also wouldn’t have time to philosophize about existentialism and metaphysics of life.

This Great Exodus of men from the West is the greatest epidemic of our time. And unlike the immigration to the West, where people are looking for real, tangible things that will improve their lives: better salary, security, stability (all completely rational and understandable needs), it’s completely irrational. These men don’t know what they’re looking for. All they know is that they’re escaping their comfortable homelands. All they know is that they must get out at all cost.

The uninhabitable world

One explanation for this epidemic is that the man feels marginalized or even rejected by the West. That’s a completely justifiable argument. But just like how every story has multiple sides, there’s also another, a more sinister explanation: the West no longer needs the man. The men are leaving because they’re no longer needed, and no one is waiting for them to come back.

I was thinking of the right adjective to use when describing the current state of the Western man in the West. My friend suggested the word “inhospitable.” I thought about it for a moment and then realized that the adjective is not strong enough. For the man, the West has become much more than merely inhospitable—it has become outright uninhabitable.

Yes, I think we’re seeing The Great Exodus because the West can no longer be inhabited by actual humans. I know it’s a radical thing to say, but I just can’t see it any other way. The West is becoming increasingly suitable for two types of “entities”: multinational corporations and mass consumers. And you’re shit out of luck if you don’t fit in one of the above categories. The West is becoming—or has already more or less become—a scorched earth that’s no man’s land for the sovereigns and the individuals.

The triumph of the McWorld

As the article correctly predicted more than 20 years ago, the first world—the McWorld—is winning. The world is really becoming smaller and more interconnected. The borders—whether they’re national (European Union), economic (NAFTA and other Free Trade Agreements), religious or ethnic—are being dismantled at an alarming pace.

Welcome to The Brand New McWorld. It’s a world that’s no longer designed to be inhabited by individuals with their unique thoughts and ideas, and is, instead, designed to be inhabited by mass consumers who all think and act alike. It’s not a world for people who are looking for a cause; it’s a world for people whose only cause is shopping. It’s not a world for people who’re looking for a meaning; it’s a world where meaning is something that can be purchased at your local Walmart on Black Friday.

The eradication of man from the West will continue unabated. There will be new generations of men leaving their “stable” and “secure” homelands to pursue the unknown. They will continue to search for any meaning, reason and cause that attempts to reconcile their extreme ambition with the sanitized reality.

And, in the history of our universe, I really fail to see a more difficult and perilous time to be a man.

[1] http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1992/03/jihad-vs-mcworld/303882/

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James Maverick

James is a writer and traveler. In his former life he worked as a software engineer in Silicon Valley. He's now a permanent traveler who's been to over 75 countries and lived in 15. His mission is to help all men embrace the location independent lifestyle and live life on their own terms. Learn more.

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