Philosophy in Real Life
Welcome to the "Philosophy in Real Life" podcast with your host Carlos Santos Aguirre (a philosophy Ph.D. candidate), where we analyze difficult topics in order to discover truth.
Philosophy in Real Life
Episode 7: ANDREW TATE and THE DECLINE OF MASCULINITY || Part 1
In this episode, I talk about the controversial public figure: Andrew Tate. This is the first part of a two-part podcast episode on Andrew Tate and the decline of masculinity.
In this episode, I have an intellectual battle with Andrew Tate and his conception of masculinity. There will be three “rounds” where I will analyze and criticize in each round one main philosophical idea that makes up his notion of masculinity.
To make it more digestible, I will have the first two rounds in this podcast episode. And Round 3 will be the main point of discussion of the second part that will be posted in two weeks from this first episode.
🗣️ PART 1 🗣️
🥊 Round 1 – Warrior Ethic: Performance over feelings (“a man fulfills his duty despite how he feels”).
🥊 Round 2 – Meritocracy: You get the life you work for.
🗣️ PART 2 🗣️ (next podcast episode)
🥊 Round 3 – A blend of ideas from the Red Pill online community (high man value, stoicism, courage, and traditionalism.)
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📖 REFERENCES 📖
👉🏼 Links about Andrew Tate used in chronological order:
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/snKBWtTim-8
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/n4u0Z9287tk
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/QTNbP-JVQAY
👉🏼 Alasdair McIntyre, Short History of Ethics, pg. 6.
👉🏼 Antonio Escohotado – “La realidad es más compleja que la fantasía”/ “Reality is always more complex tan fantasy”.
👉🏼 Hannah Arendt – The Banality of Evil
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Hola a todos Hello everybody welcome to the Philosophy in Real Life podcast where we strive to live in the most truthful way possible while unmasking wrong interpretations of the world I am your host Carlos Santos Aguirre a philosophy PhD student from Spain today is the day everybody I'm going to have an intellectual battle with Andrew Tate lucky for me this won't be a kickboxing match that would not go well I want to state clearly that I'm not going to speak about the house arrest the human trafficking and rape charges because I'm not a legal expert so when I was considering doing the episode about Andrew Tate and his conception of masculinity the question I kept thinking about when considering doing this episode was why are people saying complete opposite things about Andrew Tate some people love him some people hate him and I think this polarization about Tate's influence on society is due to two kinds of phenomena the first type of phenomenon is"naive mythologization" this happens namely when we elevate a person to an almost divine status where no fault can be found against such person and they are uncritically defended at all cost the second type of phenomenon that I see is"malicious dehumanization" this happens when an individual is presented as if they were the personification of evil when in fact in every human being there is both goodness and evil and so when we fall into this mistake we become uncapable of contemplating anything positive in the person we disagree with well I flatly reject these two extremes because they seem to me to be two forms of dogmatic ideology that only lead to fantasy so there is a Spanish philosopher Antonio Escohotado that once said that"reality is always more complex than fantasy" so with this quotation Antonios Escohotado was trying to refer to the fact that reality is not so easily diagnosed is not so easily analyzed we need to be able to live in many tensions to be able to see the truth to separate the wheat from the chaff basically so both Tate fans and Tate haters can't stop watching if all they want is a confirmation of their ideas I'm not here to confirm anybody's ideas or defend anybody's camp I'm going to try to analyze this from a critical perspective so that we can rescue some things from Andrew Tate and criticize and eliminate some of these false ideas from our lives so today we are going to have several rounds as if it were a boxing or kickboxing match and so in these rounds I'm going to focus on different features or characteristics about Andrew Tate's conception of masculinity in order to analyze them critically so more specifically we will look at three main philosophical ideas Andrew Tate swears by#1 performance over feelings a man fulfills his duty despite how he feels#2 meritocracy you get the life you work for and#3 a blend of ideas from the Red Pill online community where we see ideas like high value men stoicism courage and traditionalism regarding men and women so this will help us see what we should reject but also what we should rescue and keep as something legitimate or at least worthy of consideration remember people are equal yes, even Tate but ideas are not that is why I will ponder his ideas about masculinity and together we will try to separate as I said before the wheat from the chaff in order to do this to make it more digestible and more accessible for everybody I'm going to tackle the first two main philosophical ideas that Tate swears by which is performance over feelings and meritocracy in this episode and the blend of ideas from the Red Pill online community that he also adopts as part of his conception of masculinity will be addressed in the second part of this podcast so today we're going to just address the first two points and in the next podcast episode I'm going to address this blend of ideas from the Red Pill community but before we enter the rounds where I'm going to criticize these specific ideas I would like to answer the question of why Andrew Tate has been able to captivate the collective consciousness of many young men I think criticizing his view without first saying something about his rise to popularity would leave incomplete this long episode so I'm going to do that let's try to answer then
the following question:why did Andrew Tate rise to popularity? in my opinion Andrew Tate rose to popularity for two main reasons and both of them have to do with the social atmosphere surrounding men(1) on the one hand in our culture there has been a forceful criticism towards the canon of masculinity that was interested in cars, women, work while at the same time when home behaved as a quiet, reserve, absent, and mysterious individual on the other hand there are some groups within the feminist movement that is sending a well-intended but negative message to young men telling them that they are mainly potential rapist harassers capricious violent and immature as I share in the Barbie movie I consider myself a "classical feminist" as it were I defend equality of opportunities between men and women and eliminating the assymmetry of power that men have over women but I talked for example of some lesbian feminists who think women should have no part in men's life or in any men's life and so obviously I oppose to that because it's not creating bridges of harmony dialogue and love but the complete opposite I'ts fostering or promoting this battle or war between the sexes and so that is something I flatly reject I don't think that is a path forward and so with this we have a social environment in which boys grow up without a traditional Don Draper-like reference of masculinity you can see the show Mad Men in which Donald Draper so to speak embodies this kind of masculinity that has been heavily criticized by the feminist movement and thank God you know it wasn't a good model of masculinity but now what happens is that many men do not find anything better to replace it with either and so they basically hear negative messages about what they shouldn't be and nothing about what they should be and that was* until Andrew Tate came along but I want to make clear that the reason why Andrew take rose to popularity was not just his own doing this would be too narrow of an analysis if we were to say something like that what I'm claiming here in this episode is that the social climate of what I want to call"the prodigal man" a man with no clear path was already there in this in the in the environment in the climate the social climate Tate Andrew Tate only offered a narrative of progress by defining and modeling what he thinks as the canonical man as "the man" everybody should be but without this environment of men having no clear ideal or archetype to follow and that's why I'm calling this type of man"the prodigal man" the man that is wandering trying to find his own identity because of this crisis of identity because of this emptiness so to speak of progress of a narrative that defines progress that is the very reason why Andrew Tate's message was really gripping was really resonating with a lot of young men and yes I know the problem with Tate is that for every one right thing he says he tells us very several wrong things and in this respect I would say here resembles Nietzsche so Nietzsche really thought that Christian values originated in resentment towards the powerful among other reasons because as someone is a weak individual in the face of a stronger person the weak person presents his weakness and deficiency as something more desirable and puts on a medal of moral superiority for it Nietzsche however was right in identifying the hypocrisy of the weak so Nietzsche was able to criticize the hypocrisy behind them it's not that you are virtuous it is that you lack the vital force to actually counter-attack or fight back and now you are congratulating yourself for how virtuous, and patient ,and loving you are and forgiving just to disguise your weakness that you cannot do anything about your current situation of powerlessness and so Nietzsche was really insightful in seeing the hypocrisy of the fake adoption of Christian moral values in people's lives Tate in the face of the decline of masculinity of this type of archetype of man that I'm calling "the prodigal man" the man with no clear path speaking to this reality of this group of men and Tate in the face of this decline of masculinity tells us to be the Superman to be strong to be tough to not spend time with the weak and having told the truth about one thing he lied about the rest he confused the part with the whole and why am I saying that? the reason why I'm saying that is because warrior fortitude is necessary in this life as is well-reflected in the saying"it is better to be a warrior in a garden""than to be a gardener in a war" to confront evil people one has to be just as aggressive or even more but in order to protect others and Carl Jung disciple of Freud even though he went against Freud's ideas Carl Jung spoke of this reality with the term of "the shadow" and obviously Jordan Peterson has popularized Carl Jung's ideas so everyone has a shadow that one must really come to know a potentially dark and monstrous side that one must integrate with the Benevolent part when this is achieved one is able to have one's power under control therefore the opposite of violent men are not pacifist in colorful clothes the opposite of the evil man is the man who has integrated that aggressiveness for the service of the common good in contrast weak men are unable to channel that aggression for the common good and so with this example of Nietzsche's critique of Christianity of the true virtuous person and also Carl Jung's notion of "the shadow" we can see how Tate is somehow speaking about these realities in his own way he's talking about the same ideas in a more popular way appealing to the desire of people and speaking about the desires people have of wanting a luxurious lifestyle being wealthy feeling strong being strong and so he's tapping into these ideas of this vital force of this strength and he is calling out so to speak this weakness or gentleness that is actually true weakness not true virtue and so you see how these messages are resonating with a lot of men who have been so to speak wandering without a clear path and Tate is saying no no no you have something in you that you need to develop and become tough and become strong and you are able to do so do not believe that you have to be weak or tame or gentle because that is useless that is actually fake people who abide by those ideas are actually powerless and they are part of the matrix according to this a lot of young men prefer this vision of masculinity or version of masculinity that Tate promotes rather than "the deconstructed man" and so with this you can see why Andrew Tate rose to popularity I think some people just refer to his misogynistic ideas and the fact that we are part of a patriarchy or that we live in a patriarchal society that might be partly true but again that doesn't explain why one among many misogynistic men have risen to this level of popularity such in the case of Andrew Tate this is very unusual and again I think because he's offering so to speak an archetype of this warrior of this man who doesn't apologize is strong is forceful and say what he thinks and not only that but he also models that type of masculinity that's why his message what he says and what he does is, as it were, aligned together and so that makes his message even more powerful more gripping more convincing more moving among the male consciousness of society however it is true that there are some harmful and false ideas in his conception of masculinity that I would like to speak about so let's move on to the rounds the fighting rounds where we are going to analyze specific philosophical ideas that make up his concept of masculinity ROUND 1 a man fulfills his duty despite how he feels and this would be performance over feelings now in this round 1 I would like to discuss the following things and I'm summarizing it so that it is easier to follow this progression of ideas#1 I'm going to speak about the warrior ethic of the ancient societies and its similarities to Andrew Tate's ethics#2 I'm going to speak about how this warrior ethic becomes evident and his take on depression and mental health and#3 I'm going to put forth my first criticism of his position about duty and I'm going to show why duty is a context dependent-word you can be dutiful when doing bad things another criticism that I'm going to do is this idea of the duty-driven ethic in my opinion that could also be a lie of the matrix and lastly #5 I would like to answer the question when is duty or a duty driven ethic good? okay so let's start with the warrior ethic of the ancient societies and its similarities to Andrew Tate's ethics Andrew Tate starts saying a man does what he must do despite how he feels the ancient warrior societies had a similar idea about true honor true dignity and true masculinity this was called"the warrior ethic of honor and glory" Andrew Tate embodies the virtue of a warrior many of us when we hear the word "virtue" we immediately think of moral-ethical ideals of behavior such as patience justice mercy and so on however in warrior societies such as those recounted by Homer"Virtue" or "Areté" in Greek refers to being fit for something in an established social order with clear roles a rough translation would be our English word "excellence" in this sense the virtue or excellence of a warrior was to fight and win in battle similarly the virtue of a blacksmith was to make good swords an agile athlete manifests or expresses the areté or virtue or excellence of his feet when running you can see this in the "Iliad" so the acceptance in the community that you were a part of depended on fulfilling your role even the way warrior societies used the word "good" the equivalent in Greek was"agathos" so"good" or "agatos" so in the warrior societies the way they used the word "good" or "agathos" was in relation to your performing well your social role it did not matter how you felt about it the question was whether you will do what is required the philosopher Alasdair McIntyre in his book"A Short History of ethics" explains it really well so listen to this carefully it says so with this we see that a man of honor is defined by his performance not by trying to win but by winning and if you try but did not win in the battle you do not deserve to be called"good" or "agathos" and this is really shocking to our contemporary understanding of effort we generally think that if someone has done their best but failed you cannot blame that person but according to the warrior-ethic logic your intentions do not justify your loss you are a winner or you are a loser so for Andrew Tate that is one of the aspects of what it means to be a man this conviction is translated in his idea that men should risk their lives to protect their wives and children or that the action you take modifies the odds of your outcome and that that is capable of making you different the evidence of your action is what will make you feel better the character of someone is expressed through what they do not what they feel this is clearly a warrior ethic that is embodied in many boxing schools in many contexts of fighting of MMA and things similar to those sports you can see this mindset that you are at war and you have to do what is required even if that means losing your own life for instance this philosophical ideal was manifested in his controversial take on depression where he basically claimed he does not believe in depression as something real and and my point is that a lot of people who are clinically depressed are suffering with something in their life and if you fix the problem in their life perhaps they won't feel depressed anymore no that's not a disease yeah but Andrew that's situational Andrew you're simply wrong if that's what you believe Pierce that's what I believe I don't believe in things that take power away there is not an eminent doctor in the world Pierce would agree with this I think you know more than doctors I can't become clinically depressed why do you know because I don't believe it I can't be haunted by a ghost if I don't believe in ghosts I'm never gonna die cause I don't believe in it it's ridiculous and let's be careful here because he has a point psychology there are roughly speaking two ways of looking at the causal relationship between emotional illnesses and external reality let's look at the first type of take or framework to understand emotional illnesses the first type of paradigm of understanding is that the problem is internal whether these are chemical imbalances or some physiological problems there is some root-level something in your body in your mind that is making you feel that way also it could be a paradigm or set of ideas about the world that are not proportionate or they do not reflect the reality that you are part of and also you could speak about body-based trauma there has been more research that traumatic experiences are stored in the body in the amygdala and these things might come up in the future or certainly will come up in the future if not dealt with the other way of understanding a mental health and mental illnesses is that the problem is external that is another paradigm your life is horrible no money no friends bad health boring job no wonder you are depressed anybody would be depressed the solution is not a pill but rather the solution is taking action to change your external reality so that's why Andrew Tate in one of the videos said that you don't have depression but rather you feel depressed and is so to speak natural that you feel depressed if your reality sucks if your reality is horrible anybody would feel depressed in your situation and of course this division of mental illnesses as the problem is internal the problem is external you could even say that the problem can be both external and internal and most certainly that is the case in most people but the point I'm trying to make here is that it is extremely easy and socially acceptable to justify inappropriate behavior bad health bad financial situation by using the diagnosis of depression or any other diagnosis and it can be even more dangerous and a slippery slope when people make depression a part of their identity or even glorify the fact that they have depression as if having depression were a batch of honor or how much of a victim they are for such mental illnesses and so this is something that I've seen it I've gone to therapy and all of that but I know and I've seen how people use this label or this diagnosis as a way of justifying their horrible existence rather than doing something about it and the point of therapy is to acknowledge your starting point so that you can make progress and hopefully be able to live with that or to even stop experiencing depression and have a better life a life that is more meaningful that is not full of cracks so to speak and of course the other extreme is to disregard the person's starting point and moralize or label them as lazy or weak because they have mental illnesses that is the ignorance of a lot of people who do not understand mental health diagnosis depression can be caused by multiple things the purpose of a diagnosis is to seek for solution not to remain stuck so that is why what Andrew Tate says is not far-fetched even there isn't a universal way of psychological therapy because it is a technique to help people feel and live better it is not a perfect nor predictable human science because pinpointing what is causing an emotional state it can be extremely difficult if one considers that each person and their body is extremely unique and many times it is not one factor but numerous factors internal external that can play a huge role I think this is one of the reason we need to avoid this mental health snobbery of taking some approaches at face value as if psychological treatment is this one thing universally acceptable and not disputed at at all which you know that is not the case if you actually study more books about it you will realize that there are different psychological treatments and at times they are at odds with each other and for deeper approaches and theories of psychological treatment you can search for these terms to start getting familiar there are four kinds of psychotherapy#1 "Psychodynamic therapy"#2 "Cognitive behavioral therapy" that is kinda like the most common#3 "Humanistic psychotherapy" and #4 "Systemic psychotherapy" I'm going to stop talking about this because this is not the purpose of this episode I'm just mentioning these different approaches to psychology and the controversy around Andrew Tate's take on depression I think it was useful to play devil's advocate because as crazy as Tate might sound on some issues on others he's not far from the truth I have some criticism though with this idea of performance-over-feelings definition of "masculinity" okay so the first thing that I would like to speak about with this whole concept of "duty" he mentions that a man does what he must do not what he feels and he is appealing to this ideal of a duty-driven ethic which is part of this "warrior ethic" of just doing what is required not what you feel or not what you don't feel just do what is required because what matters is what you do not what you feel so what's the problem with this? well the problem is that "duty" is like the word "here" it has no intrinsic semantic content beyond its function of referring to a place for example the content of "here" depending on where I am will vary if I say "here" being in Spain then "here" will take the semantic content of "Spain" as a place the same thing happens with duty when many Nazi officials were brought to trial
the typical excuse was:"I just obeyed orders" an equivalent of that could easily be"I fulfilled my duty" with this example we can see that the "duty" of someone might be something completely reprehensible completely bad and so a discussion about what we understand by "duty" is extremely important here here we need to be less pragmatic and more theoretical something similar happens just to give you an example with the ideal of "community" when people say"individualism" is bad community-based approaches are better that is not necessarily true since there can be communities who perpetuate evil things or we can be "communitarians" for doing evil things and as I am Latino I can say this without getting canceled many of the ethnicities such as the Incas in Peru or the Aztecs in Mexico before being conquered by the Spaniards were communitarians in many things but the Incas for example performed systematic infanticides and the Aztecs were extremely bloody with their rituals of human sacrifice to the gods and their ways of torturing the enemies what I'm trying to say here is that we were not saints we were very communitarians in doing evil things with these examples of community-based ethnicities I am trying to show the same characteristic as with the word "duty" it depends on their context so going back to the idea of "duty" Tate claims he is against the matrix or against popular thinking but understanding "duty" as securing financial prosperity and reproduction or having descendants in your bloodline is nothing different from the bourgeois ethics in which their biggest ideals or its biggest ideals were "economy" and "family" or"financial prosperity" and "reproduction" and that's why I'm saying this is nothing "revolutionary" my second criticism about this duty-driven ethic is that a duty-driven ethic can be easily a part of the matrix or a lie of the matrix because this duty-driven ethic can be subject to the monetary and selfish interest of the very few this duty-driven ethic may serve a tyrannical power structure the lie of the tyrannical and powerful corporations is to tell the story that it's about the individual and seeing your "hard work" as something "heroic" when in fact this is also benefiting the elitist circles that benefits from your believing that about "duty" now the question remains"when is duty good?" Well duty-driven ethic can be valid and instrumental when serving a higher good serving the right thing this "duty-driven ethic" is just instrumental is something is a character trait this discipline of doing what is required it can be a great thing when this is serving the right thing that's why I'm saying we need to make sure that we are applying "duty" or we are following this duty-driven ethic in the right context and just to give you an example of when this is done wrongly you can read Hannah Arendt a philosopher"The Banality of Evil" in which she was witnessing and she went specifically to this trial of a Nazi soldier or captain I don't remember exactly and she realized that these people were just mediocre that their ideas were completely low and they were justifying their actions and they didn't feel guilty because they were just fulfilling their "duty" they were just part of this huge machinery that was the Nazi regime and that is why also personally I feel uncomfortable with the military and I know this is really controversial to say especially to those patriots and people who listen to Jocko Willink I really admire Jocko Willink' ethics and hard work but I would be lying to you if I say that I don't feel uncomfortable with this whole idea of being part of the military and serving your country because as we know based on past events"serving your country" at least in the context of the United States but many other countries this is disguised by this duty-driven ethic yes this duty-driven ethic is instrumental it is enabling soldiers to bring about what the government or what the higher circles decide to do that is definitely the case so it's not something bad but the problem is that many times soldiers have been told lies that they were "serving" their countries and destroying "the enemies" when in fact these soldiers were just being "dutiful" and they were, in fact, serving these tyrannical purposes or these hidden motives of financial gain through making excuses just to enter war with other countries that were in disadvantage now let's move on to the round #2 Meritocracy you get the life you work for this is the second idea that makes up the concept of masculinity of Andrew Tate I just want to say that we will dedicate an entire podcast episode to the concept of meritocracy and we're going to read many excerpts of the book The Tyranny of Merit by Michael Sandel but for this episode we will just focus on how Tate understands this concept of meritocracy and we will look at two criticisms to this idea Criticism #1"the myth of meritocracy" and the criticism #2 will be the whole concept of "high value men" as the materialistic womanizer with some self-serving traditional values so we will see that what it means"high value man" for Andrew Tate in the context of meritocracy now according to Tate's meritocratic notion if your environment is lacking something then it is your responsibility to do something about it and this sounds right doesn't it? complaining without taking actions is despicable from this point of view why would someone deserve the same thing when I have been working longer hours saying "no" to free time and saving every penny to invest in my company or in learning new skills to get a better job the harsh reality is that people do not make the same effort and people do not sacrifice to the same degree immediate gratification for a future reward and that is why Tate understands that if your life is miserable and horrible it's because you most likely deserve it and only people who work hard deserve any compassion and he stresses wealth physical fitness and social capital and social capital understood as loved by women and respected by men so he stresses wealth physical fitness and social capital as symbols of "the good life" of a life worth living of the life we as "men" should be striving for now some of you might be thinking there is nothing wrong with that I mean "yes"; we need to make effort yes! you are in control of your reality and yes! you can modify your reality he has a point here so let's move on with my criticism so let's move on with my criticism #1 to this conception of meritocracy now I would like to make the point that meritocracy is a myth in the way it is explained or defended by a lot of people and most certainly the way it is defended by Tate we already mentioned the fact that not everyone makes the same amount of effort and this can be due to so many reasons but the fact remains true we see in society that not everybody makes the same amount of effort and in fact a lot of people are mediocre they just don't do much they just do the minimum Andrew Tate usually mentions wealth physical fitness and social capital as the expressions of a disciplined and successful life and a lot of people online are quick to criticize that these things are superficial but let us pause here let us analyze this carefully any person who has tried to invest in a business save money and not spend their money on dumb things that person knows how hard it can be to oversee your financial situation it requires sacrifice planning and long-term thinking it takes a lot of desirable character traits to create wealth and remain wealthy now obviously the darker side of wealth is that greed and love of money can be a driving force behind these character traits and many wealthy people prioritize profit over good working conditions and no I'm not referring to small entrepreneurs I'm referring to massive companies who could easily pay better and consider more factors than just profit same goes for physical fitness I have for example in my case I have trained almost all my life and I have a problem of keeping a healthy weight because I have a huge appetite I have a huge hunger and I would be probably clinically obese if it weren't for my semi-consistent efforts to become healthier also during my teen years I was into boxing I competed and again it takes guts in facing your fears to keep going when everything in you tells you to run in the opposite direction it takes so much discipline and mental fortitude to show up and train your body so becoming a reliable person despite the circumstances is a great character trait you cannot be physically fit or a decent athlete without showing up regularly to work out and train so being physically fit that shows something about the person's character and having social capital is also a great indicator of your character it shows you can respect agreements you know how to negotiate you know how to speak up and be assertive and you know how to be resourceful and so on so let us not disregard these realities these expressions or symbols of success they are telling us something about the individual but it's not telling us the whole story now the problem with this paradigm though is that it does not account for the fact that not everyone has the same starting point the same talent the same temperament and let me say this the same passports the same languages the same background the same family origins and these variables play a huge role into how far your efforts can take you we're not even speaking of systemic inequalities generational trauma and so on I mean again there has been more research about how trauma is stored in the amygdala and how even in how your genetic expression that you inherited from your parents can also have many consequences from past generational trauma in your family lineage and so that's why metocracy is a myth because it does not take into account that everybody doesn't have the same starting point talents temperament passport languages and so on that is why metocracy is a myth yes! not everybody makes the same effort people do not make the same effort but at the same time we need to take into account not everybody has the same starting point we need to keep this tension again reality is more complex than fantasy that is why these are difficult conversations let's move on to my criticism #2 to this metocratic idea that makes up the conception of masculinity in Andrew Tate's thinking my criticism #2 has to do with the conception of the "high value man" I feel like "high value man" when Andrew Tate speaks is referring to a materialistic womanizer with some self-serving traditional values so what I want to criticize here is what is considered"high value" as an adjective to "men" the symbols of what most people value as "success" can be symptomatic of the spiritual and moral poverty in people's lives or people chase the next flashy thing and the lust for more also there is this obsession with external goods being the validation of our internal worth to some degree fair enough external validation can be a great insight but then telling us that the ideal "masculine man" is a man that is a materialistic womanizer with some self-serving traditional values is not a great path I'm not impressed by that so again I see here with with this conception I see that Andrew Tate is just a so to speak"a son of his time" he's not revolutionary at all it's actually quite I'm not impressed this is actually really basic type of ideal of being a man"oh a womanizer""oh a materialistic person""oh self-serving traditional values" I mean people have done that all the time in the last centuries and so that is not a great path that is not a path for a better man for somebody outside of the matrix but rather just a person that lives inside of the matrix but in a parallel reality that doesn't abide by the some of the societal norms that Tate doesn't like that is just the only difference really I see Andrew Tate lacking this ancient spirituality where contentment is not achieved through more accumulation of goods or through more pleasure but rather a willing sacrifice for the rest of humanity or a path where the change is achieved internally not needing anything externally but yeah I think in short in summary I think that this "high value man" as a materialistic womanizer with some self-serving traditional values is not a great path it's not something revolutionary it's not gonna take you anywhere because your heart will desire more things and it will never be enough the path to true human fulfillment is not the path of more wealth of more material goods of more accumulation I know that's the vision of the good life that Andrew Tate embodies and teaches but that is not actually the path to true human fulfillment