The Cure for Male Depression Is to Start Playing High Status
On Status Play, Frontstage Personas, and Bodily Transformation
If men aren’t doing well mentally, it’s because of learned helplessness. The cage is no longer there, but you are still hiding in it. Life feels lived by others telling you what to do. Talking about your feelings won’t cure the depression. Transforming your body in order to behave differently will. The solution lies in self-empowerment, in putting yourself back in charge.
Cleaning your room to please your mom or spouse won’t heal your depression. However, the road to salvation lies in adopting high-status behaviors, combined with the frontstage persona of a man in charge, while simultaneously improving your backstage skills and competencies.
Overcoming Feminist Society
But first, we must equate modern Western ‘feminist’ societies to a narcissistic household that intentionally scapegoats boys and men. Feminists like to scapegoat men in order to diminish male power. They target boys, because boys don’t yet have the proper psychological defenses. Much of progressive society functions to prevent boys from developing into high-status men.
Self-empowerment thus starts by identifying your real self, not the role you were taught to play. It means beginning your proper self-differentiation, which means seeing yourself as separate and different from your society as a whole. As a man of power, you were never meant to be a member of the human herd, but rather a shepherd. You’re not turning your back on humanity, but you will lead the herd.
Healing male depression requires you to increase your self-worth. No one but you can do this. To achieve it, think of the IKEA effect. When people put together their Billy bookcase, they have mixed some of their time and creative effort into the end result. Now imagine supporting yourself in a similar manner. By putting some time and creative effort into sculpting your body, your skills and your personality, you are going to understand that you have value.
Invest in yourself to increase your sense of worth. Personally, I increased my sense of worth by acquiring all sorts of skills: practicing ice skating, playing the trombone, learning how to draw, boxing, pimping my mountainbike, going to the gym regularly, managing to do one-leg squats, and so on. These are small improvements requiring basic effort, but putting them all together improved my self-confidence. I learned that I can just do things.
The escape from women’s society also requires that you learn to live more selfishly. Women’s society has a tendency to employ males as servants. My old-time neighbor was quite a domineering old woman. She got several guys down our street to help fix her front yard for her—free of charge. Guys who don’t learn to say no to a bossy woman will invariably end up being her unpaid slave.
In fact, I overheard one wealthy woman call such helpful men “dogs”. She called them dogs because they help her business out for free. Why should she respect them? The lesson learned is that you shouldn’t want to be a dog to women who don’t care about you. To earn society’s respect, you’re going to have to offer some healthy opposition to it.
A man who beats women goes to jail, but a man who occasionally yells at a woman gets laid. Opposition is necessary and healthy, and productive, whereas willing servitude is counterproductive.
The Fisherman and His Wife
Christine Lawson wrote a book called Understanding the Borderline Mother. In it, she describes the sort of devouring mother who has become a witch. In particular, I believe the story of Western civilization is comparable to the story of the Fisherman and His Wife. Lawson retells the story (originally by the Brothers Grimm) as follows:
A poor fisherman catches an enchanted flounder (a prince) and releases it out of kindness. His wife forces him to summon the flounder repeatedly with escalating demands: first a cottage, then a castle, then to become king, emperor, and finally pope. Each wish is granted, but the wife’s greed peaks when she demands to rule over the sun, moon, and heavens like God. The flounder responds that she already has what she deserves, and the couple is returned to their original miserable hovel, symbolizing the destructive consequences of boundless entitlement and the enabling compliance of those around her.
Western women, in my view, are like the fisherman’s wife. Their material greed knows no boundaries. No matter how much White men conquered for her, it’s never enough. Even when White men had mastered most of the world and transferred most of the world’s wealth to the West (the USA), White women could not be satisfied. When the flow of wealth started slowing down, White women immediately dismissed White men as being ‘no longer good enough for them’.
This has left White men deeply scarred with a sense of inferiority, though totally unjustifiably so. It is important that White men learn to distance and separate themselves from women’s greed. We must recognize that their dissatisfaction is not a reflection of our worth. Not only have we been the most successful males in human history, we have suffered the greatest rejection for it nonetheless. It is time to guard ourselves against this emotional transference. Women’s dissatisfaction with their civilization is not our problem.
High Status and Dominance
Acclaimed improvisation theatre director Keith Johnstone was no right-wing reactionary, perhaps more of a Marxist, but his famous work on status play, in the book Impro, offers us insight into the behavior, mannerisms, and mindset of “high-status” people.
Johnstone was just shy of calling “high-status” people dominant, for dominance is what is supposed to be a man’s foundation. A dominant man is not an aggressive man, nor a flying monkey. In fact, the monkeys in the jungle that enjoy flying from one branch to the next have the lowest rank and the lowest testosterone. A dominant person doesn’t need to show off, for his position is already secure.
Dominant people display effortless self-control, and have a low fear of social evaluation. They don’t care too much what people think of them. They have a willingness to bear some social risk, and they don’t mind making people feel slightly uncomfortable around them. They know that most people respond to such discomfort with submissive or pleasing behavior.
To be dominant means to have low stress, low cortisol levels, and a high baseline testosterone, likely from proper exercise and ample rest. Indeed, high-status people get to have good sleep, for they don’t need to fear attacks. Their status naturally protects them (you’d have to be insane to attack a high-status person in their sleep).
Most importantly, the dominant person is in charge of time and space. They believe they deserve attention and access to scarce resources, and they will fight for these resources when necessary. Low-status people are much more likely to concede resources to others. In the grand scheme of things, White colonial men have indeed been the dominant ones taking others’ resources. There’s just nothing wrong with that.
The dominant has a sense of entitlement, and breaks the rules when it suits him.
In terms of speech, dominant people speak slowly and pause often. They lower volume and pitch to draw attention, or to emphasize what they’re saying. They speak in full sentences, but delay responses by 1-2 seconds. They’re not eager to give answers because they’re not trying to prove how smart they are. Most peculiarly, dominant people speak with a falling intonation at the end of sentences. They also use up to 40% fewer words than the person they’re talking to.
Johnstone listed a large number of physical mannerisms that accompany high-status individuals. So no, money is not where it starts, though the high-status person may end up acquiring a lot of money. It turns out that the most dominant person in any room is the one who moves his head the least. This person almost never nods or shakes his head rapidly. He rarely smiles, and when he does, he does it slowly. His hands don’t touch his face, neck, or crotch. He keeps his hands comfortably by his sides, or on the table when seated.
In terms of behaviors, dominant people rarely feel the need to explain themselves. They don’t argue with the trolls. They tease people or put them down with light insults. They respond calmly to challenges, avoid hurry, and don’t ask for permission. They make others wait, and they walk toward the center of a room after entering. They touch other people’s stuff to move it out of the way.
You may wonder whether adopting such behaviors is really the “trick” to become high-status. Indeed, Johnstone taught his improv students precisely to do these things and the effect was a total transformation of a low-status person into a high-status one. It can begin with mimicry. And by adopting the behaviors of a high-status person, you may end up believing it.
Frontstage and Backstage Persona
Erving Goffman was a sociologist famous for writing the book The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. I found it to be a bit of a technical read, but the gist of it is that we all play a role during the day.
Goffman separates our lives into backstage and frontstage settings, as with a theatre. Backstage, we can relax and be among friends and family. We don’t need to watch our words here. We can be a bit more radical and unpredictable, for we know our friends will tolerate it.
It is backstage, however, where we also develop and train our skills. Here we practice how to be when the show starts and we need to know our lines before a live audience. This carries over into psychology. At home, in our bedrooms, we can practice what it’s like to be confident outside. We can close our eyes and make our bodies big and tall, and gently experience the feelings we would have if we were confident.
Myself, I like the comparison to learning how to swim. We teach children swimming on land first. On dry land, lying on our bellies, perhaps on a bench, we stretched our arms out and tried mimicking the teacher, who showed us how to cup our hands and turn our arms, and how to kick our feet and bend our legs. Once we mastered the correct motions, we tried it in water.
This, too, is how dominance and confidence are learned: by practicing in your bedroom how to move dominantly and confidently. Women may have an advantage here, as they can practice “walking like a model”, which is essentially performing a confident walk. For men, we walk differently, more slowly, with less sway from left to right, but with relaxed arms and hands swinging by our sides.
Walking outside, I noticed that I kept my arms too tightly by my sides, and I wasn’t swinging them casually with the rhythms of gravity. It gave me a somewhat restricted overall appearance, as though I were afraid of bumping into someone due to my wide frame. By practicing “the walk” at home, I was able to pinpoint this flaw in my walking. I taught myself to feel more relaxed when walking, now with loose arms.
Not only did my walk become more energy efficient, my sense of confidence outside rose along with it. In fact, I started walking with such confidence that people coming my way started lowering their heads or moving out of my way. When, in the past, I had to let people pass an obstacle first, now they were letting me pass first. Not only that, some began apologizing for the obstacle.
Becoming a dominant man of action is a self-reinforcing attitude. The more you succeed in being confident, dominant, and in charge, the more people will allow you to be.
Felt Transformation
There is, of course, more to being a dominant person than just mimicking dominant people’s mannerisms. I already alluded to the necessary fundamental transformation, namely to start seeing yourself as more valuable. People who wake up feeling valuable are naturally more dominant, as they are much less likely to take flak from others. A valuable person won’t allow others to diminish them.
True transformation comes down to a physical transformation. You have to change the way you feel about yourself. If you feel diminished or small, you’re going to have to create the necessary bodily changes that make you feel big and large. This can be done through physical exercise such as weightlifting, but even more so through a review of your fundamental bodily feelings.
In the book Focusing, the author Eugene Gendlin explains that most psychotherapy doesn’t work, and most therapists are paid friends who’ll milk the relationship with their patient for as long as possible. Change is not achieved analytically or rationally. “Talking about your feelings” in the way of a researcher presenting a paper will never help you heal from depression.
Real healing, however, is possible, as some patients do change. Gendlin explains: The patients who heal successfully (from depression or mental illness) are the ones who become aware of the corresponding bodily feeling that is the source of their problem. By focusing on this “felt sense” in the body, they are then able to change it.
Personally, I wasn’t feeling too well for a long time. With Gendlin’s approach, I realized that I don’t feel in charge. I have a strong desire for autonomy and for being in charge. Absent this, I was living in retreat, always backing away from situations where I could have taken charge, because I didn’t think I was worthy.
Once I understood this, I instantly felt a change in my mind, body, and heart—like an epiphany—because the solution to all my problems now lay within reach: I began looking forward to putting myself in charge.
A man who puts himself in charge is a dominant man. And such a man does not suffer from depression any longer. He has cured himself.