[National Review] If I’ve noticed the "warrior monk" archetype emerging in society, that’s because I’ve noticed it emerging in myself. Yet nothing is quite so disillusioning as vowing to drop out of society only to find that it is actually a trend, and thus simply another aspect of society. After all, as the Victorian novelist George Moore put it, "No man is greater than the age he lives in."
Gender roles have been in a state of confusion for some time, and we’ve been down this primordial path before. During the ’90s drum-beating, group-hugging "men’s movement," Jungian analyst Robert Moore and mythologist Douglas Gillette published a still-widely-admired tome called King, Warrior, Magician, Lover: Rediscovering The Archetypes Of The Mature Masculine. In the bearded duo’s chapter on the warrior, they write how channeling this archetype makes personal relationships assume secondary importance to a man’s spiritual path. "The psyche of the man who is adequately accessing the Warrior is organized around his central commitment," they write. "This commitment eliminates a great deal of human pettiness. Living in the light of lofty ideals and spiritual realities such as God . . . so alters the focus of a man’s life that petty squabbling and personal Ego concerns no longer matter much."
With healthy diets, strong bodies, and vital energy retained via abstention from pornography, as well as higher consciousness honed through meditation, ritual, and perhaps even old-fashioned Christianity, what might be the character arc of these manly social dropouts?