One-Line Review:
Buy this book. If you want a greater understanding of our current world situation and would like a way out of it, this is a good place to start.
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In-Depth Review
Why Did I Buy This Book?
Becoming a Barbarian is the sequel to The Way of Men, which I enjoyed immensely. The Way of Men is a good, yet short read about the psychological nature of men. Becoming a Barbarian was probably just more of the same and I’m 100% down for it.
Donovan’s writing centers around the idea that men are at their best when in groups that hold each member accountable, and that men aren’t meant to live docile lives without any honor or glory.
Should You Buy This Book?
I would recommend this book to anyone who thinks the current world is an absolute dumpster fire, that men’s souls are crushed by design, and that think that it could & should be better. If you feel the same way, be sure to check out The Way of Men and its sequels (including this one).
Who Wrote This Book?
Jack Donovan is not a scientific researcher or an anthropologist. Donovan is more of a student of human nature. I consider him to be a modern day philosopher, but I don’t know if that would be useful to most audiences. Wikipedia describes Mr Donovan as a “far-right activist and masculinist“. I’m not entirely sure what a masculinist is, but it sounds like it would aggravate the kind of people I don’t like, so I’ll go with it.
As you can probably tell, Mr Donovan is not out there promoting unity or togetherness or anything like that. Donovan is a proponent of the idea that competition is how men reach their pinnacle, and that a man without challenge is a man without honor or glory. These ideals are directly at odds with our world’s “everyone love everyone” and “tolerate absolutely everything, always” mindsets, and that alone is usually enough for me to give someone a chance.
What is Becoming a Barbarian About?
Becoming a Barbarian is about doing just that, becoming an outsider. Not just like moving to a mountain and living off the grid, nothing so simple or implausible. Donovan means becoming a moral barbarian. Just as the Romans described everyone who lived outside the empire as being a barbarians, so should we strive to live outside the artificial moral system designed by the Empire of Nothing to turn us into docile, domesticated, porn watching, and fast-food eating consumers. There is obviously much more to it than working out, eating better, and having meaningful relationships with actual people in meat space, but I’ll let you read the book for yourselves.
What is Becoming a Barbarian Not About?
Becoming a Barbarian is not a how-to book. This is not self-help, it is not a list of things to check off and consider yourself sufficiently uncivilized. This book reads (to me) like a work of philosophy, helping the reader to understand what our goals and ideals should be so that we may adapt the concepts to ourselves in our own lives.
Conclusion
Becoming a Barbarian is a very short read, at only 126 pages, but those pages are full of philosophy and new ideas to consider. Well, new to us, but not necessarily new to ancient tribal man. That’s what Donovan is trying to communicate: That there is a way we came up as a species, that we have diverged from that way in an incredibly pathological manner, and he offers ideas about how we can course-correct in our modern world.
There are two aspects of Donovan’s work that really puts it over the top for me:
The first is that on every page I’d read a line that I wanted to stop, take a pic of, and put on my Instagram because it was so quote-worthy. Then the sentence after would be just as good and expand the idea further. The third the same., and so one. Paragraph after paragraph, page after page, chapter by chapter. The whole book is so well written that I want everyone to see all of it, but I can’t just upload a man’s entire book as a pdf! Sometimes this would manifest as overly-flowery language, but most of the time I thought it was very well done.
The second thing is how accurate Donovan’s writings are. Becoming a Barbarian was published in 2016, but the way he saw and described the beginnings of the out-of-control aspects of life we see in 2023 is scary. He definitely saw the world for what it was and what it was becoming. To call it thought-provoking is an understatement.
Stay dangerous, and we’ll see you next Friday.
-S_S
Pro-Gun Millennial 