Why the New Counter-Culture Should Make Strength Central to Its Identity

If Rippetoe is right, then a good way to push back is by making more big, strong men. Let’s talk about what we could achieve by making physical strength part of the counterculture’s core identity.

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Strong Body, Dangerous Mind

To a certain extent, what I’m suggesting is a natural fit—men’s upper body strength even correlates with more conservative views against government-enforced redistribution. Evolutionary psychology aside, lifting changes one’s mindset because it demonstrates that, with persistent effort, greater things are possible:

If I can control and affect something as gradual as my body, I can exert more influence over every aspect of my life. I’ve never really identified as a victim of anything, but my patience for those who do has decreased drastically as I’ve learned more and more how to developed a central locus of control.

The blogger being quoted above did not mean to be political, yet his statement has political implications. Having less patience for excuses contrasts starkly to a prevailing culture in which almost any degeneracy will be celebrated, or at least excused. If you are able to transform yourself (borrowing from Chuck Palahniuk) from cookie dough into something more like carved wood, why should the inane fat-acceptance movement get any respect from you? For that matter, why should other self-pitying grievance identities? starting-strength_1

This can be a dangerous lesson to the current order in other ways. In speaking about founding a business, the late magazine mogul Felix Dennis advised entrepreneurs to think big but act small. Strength training is a biological example of this truism—individual hours in the gym eventually aggregating into a stronger man. What if a bunch of men, having seen that “think big, act small” principle demonstrated in strength training, applied it to other areas of life? What businesses or products could they begin taking small action towards creating? Their politics trending more conservative, would their efforts tend to support the current order, or disrupt it?

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Human Billboards

We own strength, they are weakness. Each side should embrace the aesthetic that flows naturally from their respective values. We already see this on the Left. Pajama Boy from the infamous 2013 Obamacare ad masterfully captures the male SJW’s hypertrophied self-righteousness and atrophied physique.

Stand a guy that’s done a few months of strength training next to any general in the Left’s man-child army. Which example would other men aspire to? Which example would women (worth knowing) want their sons to grow up into? By stressing physical strength, the counterculture’s members themselves become a means to attract others to the cause.

It’s worth noting that our focus should remain on a strength that serves a purpose. The aesthetics of a man that has built himself into something that can build and fight are markedly different from the one whose only goal is to just be a decoration. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lTlHPiZtGaw

Question Authority

Hard though it is to believe now, a third of all Americans weren’t always obese monsters shambling through the local Wal-Mart. What happened? The government helped birth our current corpulent apocalypse by setting out new dietary guidelines in order to improve our health. Naturally, they turned out to be wrong, and one is left to wonder how many lives were shortened because people followed officialdom’s idiot decrees.

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Not taking the set narrative as a given, searching for information oneself, and applying it with a sense of experimentation is a worthy trait the new counterculture should value. It’s also one that strength training—or more precisely, its learning curve—naturally hones. Because a lot of the information out there can be bad, you can’t just take things on blind faith. Of course, this applies to more than just fitness. And this inquisitive, questioning spirit stands in stark contrast to the current culture’s gullibility for any lie that conforms to their preferred narrative.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cGHEHjaSYro

Own the Space

What if Trayvon Martin had seen George Zimmerman on that rainy night in 2012, and thought, “Damn, that guy looks kind of strong”? Facing what appeared to be a fair fight, Martin would have thought better of jumping Zimmerman. The latter wouldn’t have had cause to pull his legally owned, concealed carry pistol. Trayvon Martin wouldn’t have died that night.

Not advertising itself, a concealed carry piece doesn’t do anything to discourage someone who is otherwise intent on attacking you. Yet the culture has made clear that certain self-defense shootings will become media pogroms. Even if you survive a thug’s assault, your life will still be destroyed. Unfair, but what can you do?

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Get strong.

Looking gelatinous as a typical leftoid commentator invites attacks. Looking strong tends to dissuade them. Strength in such cases not only protects the counterculture’s own. It also has the beneficial effect of making those prone to hurting others think twice, sparing them criminal charges, and perhaps even their lives.

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