The Dangers of Weak Men in The Society of the Antichrist
But he said to me, ‘My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.’ Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ’s power may rest on me. That is why, for Christ’s sake, I delight in weaknesses, in insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in difficulties. For when I am weak, then I am strong.
- 2 Corinthians 12:9-10
Enter through the narrow gate. For wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it.
- Matthew 7:13-14
The Antichrist, Girard claims, is not necessarily an individual, but a social order where the scapegoat mechanism is inverted so that victimhood is granted the moral authority to justify violence, according it status, and consequently, power. Rather than escaping humanity’s historical cycles of violence and scapegoating, Girard sees the Antichrist as a social order in which victimhood is used to perpetuate those very cycles.
We have already seen this play out in the West. Deriving power from victimhood has become the norm across any and all identity groups. Invisible, diffuse systems of oppression, from White Supremacist Cis-Hetero Capitalist Patriarchy to The Deep State Apparatus / The Cathedral, are always active and ready to dispense victimisation. Indulgences too cheap to meter make for a most effective system.
The results are unambiguously disastrous, and though some limited sectors of society are increasingly aware of it, most are just happy to have their team win for a change. The violent spirals of reprisal and revenge that have been long suppressed in the West are in real danger of breaking out again. Those of you who are sincerely religious, particularly Christians, ought to pray. Those celebrating victory ought to consider Wile E. Coyote’s relationship with gravity.
While historical cycles of violence apply to nations and civilizations, the Antichrist’s order has deleterious effects on men especially and, as a consequence, on social relations at the individual level. Male weakness in a society grounded in strength, which all healthy societies must be, is largely harmless. Male weakness in the Antichrist’s society is very dangerous.
What does male weakness look like? While sexual dimorphism in humans does mean that men are on average, and in potential, physically stronger than women, physical strength does not guarantee masculine strength, and nor does physical frailty necessarily indicate masculine weakness. Instead, weakness in men is the embrace of victimhood as a core pillar of identity. Weak men work to preserve their own physical and psychological safety, above all else.
Self-victimization is the weak man’s default instrument for conflict resolution; whoever is most aggrieved is the ‘winner’. Weak men lack the inner confidence and strength of will to advocate for themselves. They seek instead to appeal to outside authority, particularly that of individuals or groups perceived to be of higher status, to resolve the conflict for them. In the Antichrist’s society, collective determination of victimhood is already the norm.
More pernicious even is the weak man’s need to avoid conflict at all costs. Weak men prefer the typically feminine arena of rumor and gossip (at scale, conspiracy) to direct confrontation, because it prevents them from putting themselves at risk and distances them from any consequences. Amplified by the uncritical acceptance of victim narratives by the Antichrist’s society, and coupled with the weak man’s urgency to diffuse responsibility for even his own victimhood, the rumor mill allows the weak man to turn conflict avoidance into power and status within his group.
It follows that a weak man will never put himself in a position of conflict within his group, nor will he allow himself to be perceived as victimized by it. He will instead mould his identity to what best allows him to be performatively victimized by an outgroup, while partaking of his ingroup’s regular, cyclical scapegoating rituals. A weak man therefore has no real loyalty and, therefore, no integrity. He is incapable of fulfilling the traditional masculine role of protecting others.
A weak man can be relied on only insofar as the obligations one might place on him do not put him in conflict with groups that provide him with reassurance of his victimhood status. To lose it is to lose what defines him entirely. But a weak man should not be weak in all respects; to be so would make him undesirable to any group whatsoever given that, in the Antichrist’s society, victimhood is only a means to attain power and not an end in itself. Weak men are often useful to their ingroups in some way, and are repaid with validation for their victimhood.
Though the epiphenomena of male weakness are many and varied, they ultimately stem from the same source. Weak men do not engage in conflict directly. Weak men are fairweather friends. Weak men will not stand up for individuals, especially not against their own social group. Weak men are unctuous in public and vicious backbiters in private. Weak men will not admit fault, but will embrace victimhood. They will not put themselves in harm’s way. Weak men are prone to mendacity and self-serving narratives, often crafted over a lifetime.
Weak men enable, or are themselves, sociopathic narcissists. As such, they are adept at social manipulation for their own gain, and even weak men without social power retain a role as useful instruments, propped up as vectors of victimhood. Weak men hollow out their own desires because to act on them truthfully would remove them from their identity as victims. To act on desire takes strength.
What are the consequences of male weakness in a society where victimhood is accorded power?
Even the most jaded gender scholar, or the most brain-rotten x-the-everything-app poster (these are the same) must admit there are specific social expectations placed on men, especially the drive to be accorded power and status. Historically, in societies where status is accorded through achievement and strength, these drives have been harnessed for the benefit of society.
In the Antichrist’s society, male power and status drives don’t disappear, they are simply made discreet to better operate the machinery of advancement that’s available to them. However, where strength requires material contact with reality to prove itself, victimhood is exclusively derived from social perceptions. Thus, a society governed by status-seeking weak men is quick to lose touch with material reality, turning inward and expending social-economic surplus on endless victimhood circlejerks at every scale.
The weak man’s avoidance of conflict at all costs subverts society’s truth-seeking organs, because the search for truth requires conflict. In healthier societies, different points of view are argued vigorously, and competition in the search for truth itself creates powerful rivalries that ultimately benefit all of society.
The avoidance of conflict, coupled with the socially constructed state of victimhood, weakens and ultimately subverts society’s ability to apprehend reality. This applies at all levels, whether in the sense of broader society, or in that of interpersonal relationships. The only ‘truth’ that matters to the weak man is that which flatters his ego, fuelling his narcissistic need to preserve his psychological safety, or to increase his status and power through victimhood.
The weak man is a vector of a type of social Gresham’s law; backstabbing is far cheaper and, by design, less risky than open conflict, reliability and loyalty. Those wishing to participate in the Antichrist’s society must adapt to these norms or be outcompeted by those who do. It is a classic prisoner’s dilemma, but the payoff matrix is considerably less legible since it is reflected primarily in social relationships.
Societies where defecting is the norm produce a spiral of decaying trust. Low-trust societies are in fact the global equilibrium; Western high-trust societies are historical outliers. The elevation of weak men to positions of power through the Antichrist’s subversion of victimhood erodes the foundational relationships of these societies. Thus, over time, weak men reorient society and the relationships around them toward clannish superstition.
Finally, the Antichrist’s elevation of victimhood to moral authority creates a perverse rejection of strength. Maintaining or rebuilding social trust and restoring healthy social order requires a measure of tolerance and well-kept forms of conflict and truth-seeking. In brief, it requires strength of character.
The strong man who is willing to risk and sacrifice himself for the good of his society, a traditionally and historically masculine role, is now a pariah. His strength itself is a threat to a social order predicated on weakness. His refusal of victimhood undermines the cornerstone of the Antichrist’s reign, which the weak man has internalized as a source of individual and group identity.
In many ways, the accession of weak men to positions of social authority has put Western society in a double bind. The elevation of victimhood to moral authority has created an inverted social order, and escaping it requires the development and propagation of masculine strength.
However, the historical cycles of mimetic violence identified by Girard were most destructive when the participants were at their strongest.
High-trust societies created institutions and social relations which acted to contain the worst of the violence which can accompany the exercise of masculine strength, channeling it to socially useful purposes. But the proliferation of weak men at every level of society has also meant the erosion of these institutions, and accordingly, their restraints.
The reaction to the excesses of the Antichrist’s social order have begun throughout the West. Though borne of this same social order, the character and eventual outcome of the reaction is yet to be fully determined. It may be more of the same, in different garb. It may be worse.
We are perhaps bearing witness to the synthesis of mimesis as a dialectic between violence and victimhood. If history can be divided into eras according to the mimetic character of violence, then we have passed through the first, in which mimetic desire and revenge created the scapegoating mechanism; the second, in which the scapegoat was inverted from victim to victor, and are now entering a third. What can we expect of it?
Two paths are possible. The first is a return to the first era, and a final rejection of the Christian relationship to sacrificial violence. This would be a regression to the mean, since the first era represents by far the longest span of human history, and is therefore perhaps the default outcome. Mimetic spirals, scapegoats, and sacrifice are the norm - it’s our world which is the exception.
On this path humanity will compete away all economic surplus in fruitless cycles of violence and revenge, but unlike the original first era of mimetic violence, having rejected redemption, there will be no possibility of salvation.
The second path takes us forward into a new, unknown social order. A return to the beginning of the second age of mimetic violence will only bring us to where we are now. Thus, the strong are faced with a paradox; how can a society break the cycles of mimetic violence without elevating victimhood to a position of moral, and therefore material, authority?
Girard’s perspective on Christianity holds that the revealed innocence of scapegoats, along with the positive mimesis of non-retaliation, are necessary conditions. The social order of the Antichrist has shown that they are not sufficient. Exiting the first age required miraculous intercession, propagated through positive mimesis, over bloody centuries of conflict. It is possible that, on this path, a miracle of the same magnitude is now required of us.