What Weak Men Are Capable Of

The strong man wants to defend others or help them better themselves, while the weak man attempts to control the behavior of others.

Top: How a weak man thinks. Bottom: How a strong man thinks. Credit: Mad Men, Lionsgate Television

There’s a saying that’s been on my mind a lot lately. It’s by Dr. Jordan Peterson from his best-selling book 12 Rules for Life and it’s pregnant with meaning. It goes:

If you think strong men are dangerous, wait until you see what weak men are capable of.

What did Dr. Peterson mean by this? Peterson isn’t just talking about physical strength, but mental strength as well. He’s talking about those who have both the will and the ability to do something and how our society has come to regard such people as dangerous because, well, they are. Those who can do, will do, and vice versa.

Weak men, comparatively, lack mental strength, even if they possess physical strength. As such, they tend to be motivated by negative emotions like envy and hatred. At worst, they’ll resort to violence to indulge those emotions. Even when they don’t, their behavior can still be destructive - instead of trying to solve the problem, they either focus on trivial matters or do nothing at all, often creating a bigger mess someone else needs to clean up, causing harm to others in the process.

Weak men tend to also regard themselves as victims, making everything, including the problems they create, someone else’s fault and someone else’s mess to clean up, so they go about living their lives carelessly and by their own dictates, thinking it’s up to the collective to make life livable and the world safe for them.

Peterson’s quote again came to mind when I came across a thread written by Brandon Friedman, who appears to be a businessman and a member of the Dallas Community Police Oversight Board. This is how the thread begins:

Let me start off by pointing out that both those for and against gun ownership misunderstand what’s actually being said by “An armed society is a polite society.” It has its origins in the novel Beyond This Horizon, authored by Robert Heinlein (better-known for Starship Troopers). Here’s the passage from where the quote emerges and provides much-needed context often lost when quoted by advocates and detractors [bold mine]:

“Well, in the first place an armed society is a polite society. Manners are good when one may have to back up his acts with his life. For me, politeness is a sine qua non of civilization. That’s a personal evaluation only. But gunfighting has a strong biological use. We do not have enough things to kill off the weak and the stupid these days. But to stay alive as an armed citizen a man has to be either quick with his wits or with his hands, preferably both. It’s a good thing.”

The lesson is that people are more likely to behave themselves when they understand they need to be able to answer for what they do and say, possibly with violence. The quote is often regarded as advocating an armed populace on the basis of deterring would-be bad actors, but it’s more about an armed populace restraining itself and behaving judiciously because failing to do so would likely necessitate the use of force.

There’s a lot of wishful thinking involved, since the quote presupposes a prudent, responsible populace to start. But I think it’s undoubtedly true that people generally behave themselves when they understand there are consequences to handling a social encounter poorly and those consequences can be deadly. Humans respond to incentives and, sometimes, those incentives need to be negative.

In that sense, Brandon Friedman has a point - guns do enable the worst of us. The problem is that Friedman attempts to have it both ways: while acknowledging there are bad people out there, he seems to believe that not only does disarming the populace make everyone less violent, it’s incumbent upon the bad people to make the world safe for us.

Look at what he says here:

Let’s dig deeper into that story he cites, shall we?

Paola Nunez Linares, 37, was shot in the head around 9:20 p.m. on Monday, July 10, in the 1400 block of West Hurst Boulevard, according to the Hurst Police Department.

She was riding in the passenger seat as her husband, Zane Jones, was driving.

Jones told NBC DFW he was passing a car and another car came up behind them going 90 mph.

“[The car] was like on my bumper. So I completed the pass, moved over to the right lane and the other car sped up to me and almost like crashed into my car, got very close and then backed away. And I flipped them off,” Jones told NBC DFW.

“She always told me not to flip people off because you never know,” Zane said of his wife.

He told reporters he thought the person in the other car was flipping him off, too, but realized after the shooting that it was actually a gun.

What was I saying a few weeks ago about not flipping people off? Or about the lethal stupidity of road rage? Homicide, whether by gunfire or vehicular assault, is never a justifiable response to a crude gesture, but you don’t have a constitutionally-protected right to insult anyone, either. More importantly, once you provoke a confrontation, you longer have control of the situation. It’s up to the other party to respond in kind, escalate, or de-escalate. Either way, your only way out is now in the hands of a complete stranger, someone you have no clue what they’re capable of.

It’s irresponsible to think you have a right to “register frustration” (I’d say flipping someone off is much more than that, but we’ll let that go for now) and the world must make it possible for you to do so safely. I get it, we’re human and we should be able to rage and blow off steam without paying a steep price for it. But here’s the rub: we have no control over the behavior of others, only our own. Even in a higher-trust society where people are more predictable, it works only because people check their own behavior at least as much as they check that of others. One cannot insist on personal autonomy while outsourcing personal responsibility to others.

Someone who chooses to outsource responsibility for their safety to others shouldn’t bother worrying about whether someone else owns guns or not. Guns make people dangerous, but they don’t make them violent. Consider: if we remove the gun from the road rage story, what does Friedman think would’ve happened instead? Sure, it’s possible the would-be shooter could’ve driven off and that would’ve been the end of it. But is someone who’s willing to shoot someone over a crude gesture a reasonable person who felt empowered to murder because they possessed a firearm?

Or, more likely, are they a violent person to begin with who’s likely decided in advance there’s nothing wrong with killing someone in response to being disrespected? This is nowhere close to a “chicken or the egg” question as it seems: violent people behave violently. As retired Army lieutenant colonel Dave Grossman once said:

We may well be in the most violent times in history, but violence is still remarkably rare. This is because most citizens are kind, decent people who are not capable of hurting each other, except by accident or under extreme provocation. They are sheep.

I’ve emphasized time and again: outside an intentionally criminal context, violence is primarily the result of out-of-control emotions. There are some people, however, who have lower levels of impulse control than others or for whom violence is a primary means of communication. Don’t expect these people to let you “register frustration” with them, whether they have a gun or not.

Here’s a perfect example. Yes, there’s a gun involved, but the lesson here is that there are certain people who exercise violent habitually and these people are dangerous whether they have a gun or not (WARNING: EXPLICIT CONTENT):

https://twitter.com/AmiriKing/status/1693050721019556227

Do you really think the shooter was a total wimp until the day he got a gun? Or, like most of the habitually violent, he broke down his personal inhibitions towards violence over time, gradually building himself up to becoming a confrontational, murderous thug? Again, to bring Dave Grossman’s quote back into the fold, most of us aren’t like this and we only become violent by mistake or upon strong provocation. Still, sane, sober, moral, prudent (to quote Active Self-Protection’s John Correia) people don’t lose self-control like that and lash out violently, even when strongly provoked. The physical act of killing someone might be easy, but making the mental decision to do so is hard.

Which begs the question: are there just too many guns out there or are there too many violent people out there? You’re not going to get much of an argument from me on the first point, but again, it doesn’t mean anything without people who are willing to pull the trigger.

Let’s look at another example Friedman cites:

Once more, let’s dig into the story:

According to police, the man pulled into the service station and saw a group of younger men standing outside. He exited his vehicle and started speaking to the group about the disrespect they had given the elders in the neighborhood and how they should be more respectful.

The suspect in the group got angry and showed a gun before shooting the man in the shoulder once, police said.

The injured victim then got into his vehicle and drove to his home, where his family called 911. HFD arrived at the home and took the victim to the hospital.

The suspect is said to be in his late teens to early 20s. Police said that there were witnesses and they have an idea of who the suspect is.

So we have young men allegedly giving the elderly a hard time and then getting angry and shooting someone who confronted them over it. Nobody likes being confronted in public, but how many of you would resort to any kind of violence over this? There’s always more to the story, but generally, someone who escalates the situation to a lethal level of violence is, by definition, not a sane, sober, moral, prudent person and is most definitely not someone who just had a bad day. This is someone who literally speaks violence as their first language. They shouldn’t be armed, yet taking away their guns might make them less deadly, but no less violent. When reading between the lines, it’s quite obvious these are hardly reasonable people we’re talking about.

Friedman continues:

Saying the same thing over and over again doesn’t make it true. An armed society can only be rude and anti-social if it were so to begin with. Guns make people dangerous, but it doesn’t make them murderous and violent. A society that cannot resolve interpersonal disputes peacefully will have difficulty doing so whether they’re armed or not. Some of you live in areas where gun ownership isn’t quite as prevalent as in Texas - are people any friendlier in your area?

The fact is, if you want your society to be less rude, less anti-social, and more trusting in each other, you need a strong culture and strong values. These are what serves as bulwarks against violence - you’re less likely to kill someone you hold a strong sense of in-group identity with and a strong culture will hold you accountable for your actions. Americans love the politeness of East Asians, but where does that come from? Do we really think East Asian parents give their children free reign to do and say whatever they want without consequence and that’s why they grow up to be so well-mannered? Or, more likely, is it the result of harsh, often overbearing, parenting, and a culture of strict accountability?

People like Friedman blame guns because its easy. A gun cannot speak for itself and, ironically, cannot fire back without someone pulling the trigger. More importantly, they have to blame guns because to blame people means their whole leftist worldview unravels. When you blame people, you need to acknowledge that no, we’re not all the same and certain cultures produce different outcomes. This is how the world actually is, but it’s totally incompatible with the pseudo-religious belief that not only are we all equal, but that we ought to force the issue to make it so, to the point of telling lies and refusing to notice very obvious facts about our world.

Of course, the reality of the matter is a bit more complicated and the Brandon Friedmans of the world do believe on some intrinsic levels that culture and values do matter. Specifically, theirs. But what values are those? Mind yo’ own business. Speech is violence. Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion above all, at all costs. Don’t be a “Karen.” Don’t defend your property. Protecting yourself through violence is unnecessary. The list goes on and on. Ironically, it amounts to an anti-culture, because the whole purpose of a culture is to be able manage conflict through the establishment of norms and rules everyone instinctively knows need to be followed. The values of Friedman seem to boil down to “Shut up, keep your hands to yourself, look straight ahead.”

This is something you tell children, prisoners, and military recruits. Is that really the society they want to cultivate?

Friedman spends a lot of time talking about bullying, but this strikes as disingenuous: since when do we take bullying seriously, anyway? We teach our kids the proper response to a bully is to not defend yourself, instead run off an tell an authority figure, who does… what, exactly? The same thing happens when we grow up. We tell our adult citizens to comply with criminals, not to fight back under any circumstances short of imminent death (when the whole point of self-defense is to never get to such a point), and “let the professionals handle it.” What has that wrought, exactly?

America isn’t a tranquil place - I think I’ve proven that time and again - but like Dave Grossman said, we’re not a hellscape, either:

Remember, the murder rate is six per 100,000 per year, and the aggravated assault rate is four per 1,000 per year. What this means is that the vast majority of Americans are not inclined to hurt one another. Some estimates say that two million Americans are victims of violent crimes every year, a tragic, staggering number, perhaps an all-time record rate of violent crime. But there are almost 300 million Americans, which means that the odds of being a victim of violent crime is considerably less than one in a hundred on any given year. Furthermore, since many violent crimes are committed by repeat offenders, the actual number of violent citizens is considerably less than two million.

The figures used by Grossman may be from another place and time, but I still think his overall point stands. The problem is that when violence does occur, we’re not allowed to do anything about it. Meanwhile, the state has increasingly no answer for violent criminals who seem more than willing, in deed if not word, to pay a steep price for their actions. When you get right down to it, law and order is less about punishment and more about dealing with a problem when it happens. The authorities can seldom deal with a problem when it happens because they’re often not there when it does. That leaves it up to the citizenry to handle it, yet the state, from afar, attempts to control our behavior through laws that place unreasonable constraints on our ability to use force to assure our safety. We have to know exactly how many punches and how many rounds of ammo we can deliver against the attacker before it crosses the line from self-defense to assault. Meanwhile, the criminal is under no such restriction!

The reason why Peterson’s quote came to mind again upon reading Friedman’s thread is because his whole rant amounts to weak-man thinking. A weak man never addresses a problem (in this case, bad people) directly, instead blaming others or inanimate objects like guns. A weak man thinks they should be able to make crude gestures and say whatever they want to others without any response from the offended party. A weak man worries more about what others are doing and less about their own actions. As I said at the outset, strong men are dangerous because they’re capable of doing what they say they’re going to do, but weak men cannot, so they compensate by lashing out at the world, attacking the vulnerable, or creating problems they then blame others for and expect them to fix. Weak men are driven not by a sense of duty or even a sense of genuine righteousness. They’re driven by jealousy and resentment towards others for having what they cannot.

With regards to personal safety, a strong man asks, “How do I protect others or help others protect themselves?” A weak man asks, “How do I keep people from hurting each other?” Both sound perfectly innocent, but notice where the emphasis lies for each. The strong man wants to defend others or help them better themselves, while the weak man attempts to control the behavior of others. There’s an irony there, in that the strong man understands his limits better than the weak man, who despite his weakness, thinks he can dictate what others do.

It’s when weak men gain power that they become most dangerous and it’s primarily within this context Peterson is speaking. A weak man with power can use others to do what he cannot do himself. Instead of his using his power responsibly, he abuses it - to “get back” at those who do better than him, to correct perceived injustices, whether they exist or not, or just to know what it feels like to be powerful. They cannot fathom anyone doing better than them or having something they don’t have. Whereas a strong man might say, “You may not want a gun, but if you do, here’s what you should do,” a weak man says, “I don’t want a gun, so why do you need one?” He’s threatened by the thought someone dares possess the means of violence and might actually wield it effectively.

It might all make sense in context, but the weak man is also intimidated by the truly violent, like criminals. Why? Because criminals will kill without a second thought. If weak men resent strong men for having guts, weak men are utterly petrified of genuinely violent men, which is why they ignore them altogether or, perversely, give comfort to them. After all, criminals are useful for fighting strong men.

Hence, they have nothing to say about crime and are instead obsessed with sticking it to scary right-wing militias, who might make people uncomfortable, but seldom kill anyone:

Source

I realize I’m ranting at this point, so I’ll cap this by saying that the biggest danger posed by weak men is that they get other people killed through both action and inaction. Strong men and even criminals put skin in the game, but given their obsession with what others are doing, weak men always force someone else to put skin in the game, while harshly judging the manner in which they do it.

If “good times create weak men” and “weak men create hard times,” we’re living in a moment where weak men are now running the world. There’s also a lot of women in the picture, we can’t forget, but the point is that our current system is helmed by people who can’t make tough choices, will lie or ignore obvious truths about our world, and when they do do something, it completely misses the target or hits something that was never part of the problem in the first place. Meanwhile, the real problem goes unaddressed, getting worse and worse until our social fabric comes undone.

No wonder they create hard times.

Max Remington writes about armed conflict and prepping. Follow him on Twitter at @AgentMax90.

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