Laconia, Indiana holds about fifty people. It sits on a bend of the Ohio River, in country that had lost its reasons to exist about the time Aaron Renn (b. October 1969) was born there. A boy raised in such a place learns young that settlements are not permanent. The store closes. The young leave. The church that filled on Sunday seats nine. You can stand in the road and see the river in one direction and, in the other, the houses fewer and fewer people keep up.
This is the first thing to know about Aaron Renn. Before the balance sheets, before Accenture, before the newsletter and the book, he came from a place that emptied out, and he watched it empty with the eye of a boy who wanted to know why.
He spent his working life on that question. He co-wrote an early social network in 1991 because he wanted to know how coordination scales. He rose to partner at Accenture because he could walk into a firm, read its position, name the gap between the strategy it inherited and the world it now faced, and tell it where to stand. Then he turned to cities, the largest things men build to outlast themselves, and asked which ones last and why. He wrote about the Midwest, about places that lost the industries that fed them, about the geography of decline. The eye never changed. He looks at an institution and asks one question before all others. Can it survive?
Ernest Becker (1924-1974) gives us the reason that question runs so deep. Man is the animal that knows he will die. He carries two terrors. The first is the body, the rot, the certain end of the flesh. The second is worse and quieter: the suspicion that none of it counts, that he will pass and leave no mark in any scheme larger than his eighty years. Cultures answer the terror with hero systems. A hero system is a scheme of value that lets a man earn the sense that he will outlast his flesh, that he counts, that he stands inside something that does not die. The Denial of Death calls this the urge to cosmic heroism. We build cathedrals and corporations and bloodlines and books, and each does the same work. We want to last.
So consider what Renn does. He spends a career studying which built things last. Then he turns the instrument on the immortality project that promised to defeat death outright and has stood two thousand years, and he asks of it the question he asks of a railroad town or a software firm. Is it viable? Has the brand lost its market? Where can it still win?
He presents the answer as realism. He strips the sentiment, names the environment, and calls what remains the facts. Before 1994, a Positive World, where Christian identity paid. From 1994 to 2014, a Neutral World, where it cost nothing and gained nothing. After 2014, a Negative World, where the old confession carries a price in the credentialed precincts. He laid this out in First Things in 2022 and at length in Life in the Negative World. He packages hard structural observation into a vocabulary a frightened class can carry around.
Notice the move under the realism. A hero system always arrives dressed as the absence of one. It presents as the bare truth left when illusion burns off, the cold reading any honest man would reach. But survival is not a fact. Survival is a value, and a high one, and to make it the supreme test is to choose a god. Renn chose the god of viability long before he applied it to the church, in Laconia, watching the road.
Now the heart of the thing. The faith has a word for what Renn measures. The word is survival, or endurance, or to last. The same word means a different thing in every hero system that uses it, so that men say the word to one another and hear different gods.
Walk it.
A Carthusian in the Grande Chartreuse rises at midnight for the Office and keeps a silence older than France. Ask him what survives and he does not point to himself. The self thins out by design. What survives is the Rule, the form, the chant unbroken across nine hundred years. “We do not grow and we do not shrink,” the prior says. “We continue.” His survival erases the man so the form can go on.
A founder in a glass office south of Market in San Francisco means something else by the word. He has eighteen months of cash and a board that wants growth. Survival is runway. “We’re not dead,” he tells the engineers at the standup. “We just have to reach the next round.” His immortality is the exit, the company outliving his own burnout, the line on the cap table that says he built a thing that kept going after he left it.
A father in Crown Heights ties his sons’ shoes and walks them to cheder. Ask him and he points down a line. His grandfather came off the boat with the hat on his head. He wears the hat. His sons will wear the hat. What survives is the chain, the mesorah handed down unbroken from Sinai, and the institution serves the chain, not the chain the institution. “They tried in every century,” he says. “We are still here.” His survival is transmission, father to son, with the body of the people as the vessel.
A trauma surgeon at two in the morning means the most literal thing of all. Survival is the next sixty seconds, the bleed found and clamped, the pressure climbing back. He does not think about two thousand years. He thinks about the chest under his hands. To him every other use of the word is a figure of speech, and he has no time for figures of speech.
A rancher in the Texas panhandle, whose grandfather ran the first cattle on that ground in 1882, means the land and the name and the brand burned into the hide. Survival is the deed held, the fence kept up, the boy who will take it when he goes. He would no more reposition the ranch than cut off his hand. The ground is the point.
Set Renn’s sense of the word beside these. For him survival is repositioning. The firm has lost share in the elite market. The old mass strategy fails, so you build niche, raise parallel institutions, schools and legal shops and media and professional networks, and you teach the faithful professional a disciplined approach to disclosure, which names the practice of keeping the confession off the email signature where it might cost a promotion. The church survives the way a firm survives a hostile market, by falling back to ground it can hold and waiting out the weather. Same word. The monk’s survival kills the self. The founder’s survival cashes the self out. The Hasid’s survival runs the self down a line. Renn’s survival holds the firm’s position. Each man would nod at the word and mean his own god.
Another hero system stands at the edge of his map, and it hears the word differently again. Call it the tribal one, the national, the old loyalty to a people across time. In it survival means the people endure. The faith is the faith of a people, bound to blood and ground and the long company of the dead and the unborn. A man in this scheme does not hold a position in a market. He holds a place in a line of descent that runs back past memory and forward past his grandchildren, and he owes the dead his fidelity and the unborn their inheritance. From inside this hero system Renn’s frame can look thin, because it treats the believer as a professional managing reputational risk in a credentialed workplace, when the tribesman sees a son of a nation under a duty he did not choose. The tribesman does not reposition. He holds the ground or falls on it, because the ground and the dead in it are the thing he means to save. Renn would tell him the ground is lost and the smart move is to fall back and build. The tribesman would answer that a people who fall back to save themselves have already lost what made them a people. Both men love something real. They do not love the same god, and the word survival hides the difference.
Becker leaves the hard question for last. Does the hero know his heroism is a system, or does he take it for the truth? Renn knows more than most. He sees the class gradient under his own map. He knows the Negative World bites hardest in the coastal metropolis and the credentialed trade and barely touches a churchgoing family in the part of Indiana he came from. He knows he describes a class and calls it an age. That is a high degree of sight.
A tool built to ask whether a thing survives cannot ask whether survival is the right test. It can only score the surviving. A church that lasts by becoming a network of careful professionals who keep the faith off the signature line has survived in the way a firm survives a bad decade. Whether that is the survival the faith promised, the martyr’s kind, the kind that runs straight through death instead of around it, the instrument has no reading for. The martyr is the man who refuses to reposition. His hero system charges the terror head on and counts the loss of the body as the win. Renn’s runs around the terror with care, building shelters along the way, and the shelters are good and the care is real, and the instrument still cannot tell him whether a faith that survives by sheltering has saved the thing it set out to save.
Renn took the emptying town of his boyhood and gave his life to the question of why some things last and others go under, and he carried the question into the one institution that claims to have beaten the thing every town on the Ohio River loses to. He does not lie to the patient. He does not promise a revival he cannot see. He stands at the bedside and works the chart and keeps the patient breathing, and he tells the family the truth about the odds.
He stands between Rod Dreher (b. 1967), who would have the faithful withdraw into thick communities and tend the fire, and Sohrab Ahmari (b. 1985), who would seize the levers and fight for the commanding ground, and David French (b. 1969), who trusts the old rules to protect the believer so long as the believer keeps faith with them. He stands closer to the bedside than any of them, nearer the mid-level professional with the mortgage and the friction at work than the theologian or the warrior. And he stands, at the last, where he has stood since the road in Laconia, between the man who measures what survives and the man who must decide what he will not trade to survive. He gave his life to the first question. The second one waits for him, as it waits for everyone who loves a thing that might not last.
Masculinity
A young man at a big suburban evangelical church wants to know how to be a man. He asks the men around him, and the answers do not line up. The youth pastor in the untucked flannel tells him to serve, to be tender, to wash feet. The marriage seminar tells him to lead his home, to take the spiritual initiative, to be the head. The men’s retreat hands him an axe and a slab of brisket and tells him manhood smells of woodsmoke. The dating books tell him to wait, to pursue with intention, to honor her. He drives home holding four answers that do not fit together, and he suspects, without the words for it, that none of the men who gave them is sure either.
Aaron Renn built a following by naming that suspicion. He started The Masculinist in 2016 to tell Christian men the church had handed them a script that does not run. The church, he argued, takes its picture of the good man from the secular culture of about thirty years back, sands off the parts that have since gone out of fashion, and sells the result as timeless truth. A man who follows it loses. He is nice, and he is passed over. He serves, and he is not respected. Renn read the manosphere with the eye he once read a failing firm, kept the parts that described the field as it is, threw out the nihilism and the cruelty, and told men to see the world as it is and act in it with competence. Be able. Provide. Lead in fact and not in slogan. Stop believing a thing because it is pleasant to believe.
Ernest Becker shows why the question carries such heat. Manhood is the one human status that a man achieves rather than receives. A girl becomes a woman by the calendar and the body. A boy becomes a man by passing a test his people set for him, and in nearly every culture there is a test, an ordeal, a thing he must do before the men will count him one of their own. The reason runs to the root of Becker’s argument. Man carries two terrors, the death of the body and the dread that he does not count, and the male animal answers both at once by earning a place among the men, a name that will be spoken, deeds that will be remembered, sons who will carry him past his own death. Masculinity is not a trait. It is a hero system, maybe the oldest one, the local answer to a single question. What must a man do before he is counted?
Every culture answers, the answers do not agree, and so the word masculine, like the word survival, hides a crowd of gods.
In a kollel in Lakewood a young man sits over a folio of Talmud sixteen hours a day. His body softens. His eyes go bad. He has never thrown a punch and never built a fence and could not change a tire. In his world this makes him a man of the first rank, because the man his people honor above all is the one who masters the text, who holds a hundred arguments in his head and cuts to the law. “Show me his learning,” the rosh yeshiva says of a man courting his daughter, and he means show me his manhood. The masculine here is the mind bent to the holy text until it breaks open.
Carry the word to a fight gym in Albuquerque. A welterweight drills the same takedown four hundred times. His knuckles are scarred and one ear sits swollen and hard from the mat. He has read no folios. His masculine lives in the body, in the willingness to be hit and choked and to tap and come back tomorrow, in the calm a man finds only after he has been hurt enough times to stop fearing it. “You find out who you are on the mat,” the coach says. The scholar and the fighter both say man and point opposite ways, the one inward to the text, the other down into the flesh.
Carry it to a village in the Pashtun belt. An old man sits with the elders, and the word that governs his life is honor, nang. A man keeps his word. He feeds the stranger at his gate though it ruins him. He guards the women of his house. He answers an insult to his blood with blood. To fail any of these is to stop being a man in the eyes of every man he knows, and the shame runs worse than death, which is why men there will take death before it. His masculine is honor held in front of the whole watching village.
Carry it to a trading floor in lower Manhattan. A man runs a book and lives by the number on the screen. His masculine is the appetite for risk and the nerve to hold a losing position or cut it, the will to eat what he kills and feed the desk. “He carries the floor,” they say of the big producer, and the young men study how he stands and how he swears and how he spends. His proof prints out every afternoon in dollars.
Carry it to a working parish. A priest has taken no wife and sired no son and owns nothing, and the men of the parish call him Father and mean it. His masculine is authority spent as service, fatherhood without seed, the strength to govern souls by laying his own will down. He has renounced every proof the trader and the fighter live by, and his people count him among the greatest of men for the renouncing.
Five men. One word. Five gods. The mind, the body, honor, the number, the sacrifice.
Set the competitors in the Christian and conservative argument beside these, because they quarrel over which of these gods the word should name. Jordan Peterson (b. 1962) tells the young man his manhood is responsibility, the voluntary taking up of a burden, order carried into chaos, the dragon faced because someone must face it. John Piper (b. 1946) and the complementarians tell him his manhood is headship, a tender authority over wife and home modeled on Christ, and Renn’s whole complaint is that this picture names a sentiment and not a practice, that it raises soft men who lead in title. The red pill writers tell him his manhood is dominance and frame, that he must never supplicate, that the field rewards the man who needs the woman least. The vitalists on the new right, reading old books about beautiful and violent men, tell him his manhood is strength and beauty and the will to rule, and they sneer at the therapeutic age for breeding weak sons. Andrew Tate (b. 1986) sells the cartoon of it to teenage boys by the million.
Renn stands among these as the consultant stands among warring department heads. He does not pick the body or honor or dominance. He picks competence and realism. The masculine, for him, is the man who sees the field as it is, refuses the comforting account, and acts to win within it, providing and leading and building, declining to believe a thing because the pulpit finds it sweet. It is the manhood of a man who has read the org chart and will not be flattered.
An older answer sits just past the edge of his frame. In the tribal and national hero system the masculine is the defender, the man who stands between his people and what would destroy them, who fathers sons to hold the line after him, bound to the dead and the unborn by a duty no one asked him to accept. His proof is the wall. When the thing comes for his people, he stands at it. From inside this scheme Renn’s competent provider can look like a man working a position when he should man a post, and the red pill’s frame games can look like a boy preening while the gate stands open. The tribesman would tell them both that a man is known by what he will die in front of. Renn would tell the tribesman that the wall is already breached, and the smart move is to raise sons who can hold a job and a faith in the city the enemy now owns. Both speak of manhood. Neither hears the same god in the word.
Becker’s hard question. Does the man know his answer is one hero system among many, a choice of god and not a reading of the facts? Renn knows the church’s answer is a system, and he is fierce about it, and that is the source of his power. He saw that the servant leader script was a borrowed costume and said so when saying so cost him. The blind spot is the one the instrument always carries. Competence cannot ask whether competence is the test. It can only score the competent. And there are men his frame cannot see. The holy fool who gives away what he should keep and is more a man for it. The martyr who loses on purpose and wins a thing the org chart has no column for. The broke and passed over father, a failure by every measure Renn respects, who stood at the wall when it counted and whom his people will call a man at his grave. The consultant’s manhood has no reading for the man who throws the position away for something he will not name as strategy.
Renn told men a hard truth their shepherds dressed up and would not say, that the world does not reward the man who believes the pretty version, and he told it because he respected them too much to flatter them. That is a kind of love, the love a good coach has, who will not lie to a fighter about his weak left hand. He took the manosphere’s accurate cruelties and the church’s kind lies and tried to build for men a third thing that was true and decent at once. A man can do worse with a newsletter than that.
Place him. He stands between the pulpit, which tells the young man to be tender and to lead by serving, and the red pill, which tells him to dominate and to need her least, and he trusts neither, holding to a competence that takes the realism of the second and leaves its contempt. He stands nearer the working man with a family to feed than the theologian with a doctrine of headship or the influencer with a course to sell. And he stands, as he stood on the question of survival, between the man who reads the field and asks how to win it and the man who asks what he will not become to win. He gave his life to the first question. The young man at the suburban church, holding his four answers that do not fit, waits still on the second.
