The concept of thumos, a central component of ancient Greek philosophy and literature, is often translated into English as "spiritedness." While this does capture an important aspect of it, the definition remains incomplete; there is no single word in English which does it justice. Thumos has received a revival of interest in certain corners of the internet in the past decade, and with good reason―modern men, in particular, are in dire need of understanding and cultivating it, as much of their confusion and misery stems from its absence or misuse.
So what is thumos? It takes many forms in the Greek usage, though most all of them suggest something like passionate thought that engenders forceful and self-assured action. It manifests variously as willfulness, courage, love of honor, amibition, the desire for a legacy, the willingness to fight, anger, the capacity to lead and inspire others, sexual ardor, indomitable persistence, the desire to combat injustice, and in the mastery of difficult skills. It is said to emanate from the heart and is distinct from our rational faculties. It is a defining feature of the ancient Greek understanding of manliness. (As we shall see later, this does not imply that women do not possess or need thumos, only that men are, by nature, especially equipped for it and depend more upon it for making their way in the world.)
Thumos figures prominently in one of Plato's famous allegories, wherein the human soul is likened to a chariot pulled by two winged horses; one dark, malformed and unruly, representing our base appetites, the other white, noble and spirited, representing our thumos. The charioteer who holds the reins is our reason, our rational nature. The whole chariot represents our soul. The noblest character and the best life, Plato argues, consists in harnessing the full power of both our appetites and our thumos, the dark and light horses, using our rational nature to harmonize our soul and steer the chariot onwards and upwards, to behold ever greater measures of truth, beauty and goodness. In this ideal case our reason and thumos work together to keep our appetitive nature in line with high ideals and noble aspirations. We can then profit from the strength and drive of our appetites without being led astray by them.
Yet there are many ways this can go awry, and most fall short of attaining the ideal case. Consider those most relevant to our current predicament:
I.) We can neglect to even hitch our thumos to the chariot, and thus never enjoy all the power and wisdom it can provide us, living a life centered around comfort, shirking responsibility and chasing hollow, easily obtained pleasures. This is extremely common in the modern world and is the bane of many men who grew up in the West.
II.) We may allow the appetites to run rampant, letting the dark horse pull the chariot about on a whim, ignoring the commands of our reason as it drags the nobler steed along with it, sacrificing the best that is in us by aimlessly wallowing in the fleeting thrills of food, drink, drugs and crude sex. This is also common.
III.) Our thumos may be hitched to the chariot but only display its true vitality in fits and bursts, opening the floodgates to passionate and noble ideation in a temporary and disorganized fashion, allowing us to briefly revel in its power before sinking back into a state of lethargy. We may enjoy moments of intense motivation, the elation of clear-eyed insight and the rapture of perceiving exalted possibilities, but that explosive energy will lack focus and quickly diffuse. It will fail to manifest itself in productive action, it will not be sustained nor concentrated with enough consistency to bring about a meaningful change in our life or character. This is less common (though probably more common than it has ever been before) and tends to affect those of an artistic or creative bent.
IV.) It's possible for our thumos to become too dominant and unconstrained, for our passions to become so terrific and overbearing that reason and our sense of honor can no longer restrain them. This difficulty was immortalized in the story of Achilles. This is far less common nowadays, owing to the generally eunochoid state of manhood, but remains a very real danger for anyone with a vigorous and passionate nature.
V.) Our reason may itself become twisted and tyrannical, brutally lashing, tyrannizing over and enfeebling our thumos out of a misplaced suspicion of all that smacks of animality and primal vigor. This is the quintessentially Puritan perversion of reason and spirituality, which rejects the natural order as a great mistake, a foul temptation which must be begrudgingly endured on our way to a more bloodless and exalted state of being in the afterlife. This mentality is still quite common, though in a largely subconscious form which attempts to rebrand a lack of confidence and vitality as moral superiority, which cunningly spins a botched and subnormal integration of the bodily aspect as spiritual advancement. Weak, timid people who are highly intelligent are especially prone to this.
Let's consider each in turn as they relate to present circumstances.
I. Dormant or Depleted Thumos
To be divorced from our thumos almost entirely is now the typical condition of Western men. From almost every angle of culture core masculine qualities are derided as primitive, outdated, brutish, crude, stupid and vulgar. The general sense one gets is that most if not all of the evil and injustice in the world can be traced back to the fact that men exist and are inclined to be masculine. Boys are chided and shamed when they display the boisterous, adventurous, competitive, taunting mentality that naturally arises during healthy development. They're taught to sit down and sit still, to abide by stifling codes of conduct and rebuke all sense of personal agency. They're taught to believe what they're told instead of investigating for themselves, to never do anything that might make someone else uncomfortable, that playing to win and reveling in competition are signs of an unenlightened and backwards mentality, that noticing and pointing out the inherent and unmistakable differences between boys and girls, men and women, is a heinous sin.
The situation worsens as boys grow into adolescents and young men. By now most have been poisoned against their wholesome passions and proclivities in a general sense, so the focus becomes more surgical: ensuring that they become deeply conflicted about their sexuality. The general tone of a man's sex education is something like this: We're all cast as "potential rapists," told that we're crude, slobbish, insufferable creatures that women, bless their noble hearts, somehow still deign to associate with merely from a superabundance of compassion. We're taught to abruptly and repeatedly stop the primal dance which conjures up a tensely polarized passion to "make sure it's okay," to mistrust every sexual instinct we have and rely instead on pallid, almost bureaucratic assurances that things are unfolding according to the expressly stated desires of both parties at all points in the interaction. It's like teaching a man who wants to learn how to dance that he must abruptly cease moving and explicitly request the woman's permission before sweeping her off her feet, making sure that there is no ambiguity in her reply before gingerly proceeding. A surer means of murdering a woman's enthusiasm is difficult to fathom.
Somehow this botched mentality is presented as the high road to sexual mastery and satisfaction, to ethical intimacy. I half expect them to begin teaching young men to have their partners fill out government sanctioned waivers before engaging in intercourse, wherein she specifies precisely which positions she is comfortable with, how long she can endure to be in them, what cadence of thrusting she prefers, and so on. Perhaps a state auditor could be present to ensure the proceedings go according to specifications, as we wouldn't want to risk anything untoward.
It's as if we had suddenly decided to dismantle all cars, trucks, planes and trains because we awoke one day and collectively realized that they do, in fact, occasionally kill people and cause great suffering. Or if we decided to ban the use of fire, as so many have been wounded and killed by it. The absurdity of trying to chip away at and ultimately excise the thumos entirely from a man's chest is even more palpable, the consequences even more catastrophic. Yet we collectively seem incapable of taking the problem seriously, or even of admitting that there is a problem.
Divorce a man from his inmost nature, turn him against himself and his instincts from a young age, drill all manner of paranoid, delusional falsifications of sexuality into his head (garbed in the vestments of morality), then set him loose upon the world: What occurs? He feels adrift and rudderless, as he lacks the independent agency, ability to judge and sense of purpose he would have developed in a healthy culture. He is severely handicapped when trying to assert himself or stake any non-trivial claim, as the pangs of his indoctrinated conscience sound alarm bells as soon as he considers doing so. He approaches women, who he now believes are immeasurably far above him on the scale of morality merely for being female, with a kind of reverent awe and timidity, a deep sense of unworthiness (no matter how abominable the woman's character), and is thus easily manipulated. He fails to garner any woman's genuine desire for the same reason.
Worst of all, he gradually awakens to the crushing realization that the culturally approved good-boy sexuality he internalized is, in many ways, the exact opposite of that which rouses female passion, awe and desire. He will notice that the small percentage of men who seem to do precisely the opposite, the proverbial "jerk" or "asshole," succeed in ways he could scarcely dream of. In the bedroom he will be halting and unsure of himself, and will see that the women he does manage to lay with are at best lukewarm about the possibility of experiencing his embrace again. He "respects women" but they do not respect him. They yearn for something that he either never possessed or which has been whipped out of him, which the "jerk" has in far greater measure: They want to feel his power, his unapologetic desire, his animal intensity, the pulsing heat of his thumos and the overwhelming strength of his body―but this is precisely what he cannot, in his present condition, give them. Could you respect a lion even half as much if it never roared, if it cowered and slunk away at the first sign of resistance?
Lest you think these are trifling concerns, remember: These sexual relations are an integral part of the very foundations of civilization, and as the foundation rots everything built upon it lurches toward disorganization and collapse. A huge swath of our culture and way of life, the zeitgeist of our time, is downstream of the intimate relations of man and woman, the primordial dance of generation. C.S. Lewis described the larger problem memorably:
“In a sort of ghastly simplicity we remove the organ and demand the function. We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.”
As bad as it may have been in his day, it is now immeasurably worse. We are in the midst of an epidemic of loneliness, escapism, hollow hedonism, nervous irritability and flagging vitality unrivaled in all of history. There are two chief causes: First, the psychological and cultural machinations just mentioned (and many more that weren't). Second, though no less important, the bodily and metabolic degeneration that have occurred owing to a lack of proper nourishment, the near omnipresence of toxic compounds in our food, water and air, the want of a healthy light environment, the loss of a proper circadian rhythm, tedious and meaningless work, the biomechanically ruinous misuse of the body in most or all of our daily activites, and so on. (This well runs far too deep to be addressed fully here, but it cannot be overstated how important bodily health is for the cultivation of decisive, powerful thought and action, for a vigorously functioning thumos.) For the many men who feel utterly incapable of manifesting and effectively channeling their primal virility, the problem must be approached from both angles. To let it slip away, to pretend that we have somehow outgrown or transcended the need for it, is the frankest nonsense. No civilization can long endure maudlin stupidity run amok, a spineless sentimentality and turning away from the harshness of reality, or widespread physical debility. Consider the words of Teddy Roosevelt:
“Over-sentimentality, over-softness, in fact washiness and mushiness are the great dangers of this age and of this people. Unless we keep the barbarian virtues, gaining the civilized ones will be of little avail.”
We would do well to heed his warning.
II. Thumos Led Astray
Yet even if our thumos retains some notable measure of strength we are not, on that account alone, in the clear. The dark horse may still assert itself, may lead our nobler passions astray. As I'm sure you're aware, the Western world has devised a truly staggering array of tactics and stratagems for inflaming and stimulating every appetite we have to a gross and unnatural degree. Whether food, sex, drink or the desire for social status, millions upon millions of man-hours have been invested in convincing us to never be satisfied, to always lust for whatever odious brand of novelty and intense stimulation has been freshly devised.
If our thumos survives the onslaught of guilt and falsification, then, a second gauntlet awaits us: We must now contend with it being misdirected. The young are especially vulnerable to this. Vulgar extravagance is enshrined in our deeply sick culture as the most desirable lifestyle. Many people honestly believe that the best possible life consists in being able to quickly and powerfully gratify every base impulse that arises within them. They adore, idolize and envy the rich and famous who seem to live in this fashion. This is, of course, a churlish and insipid understanding of life and happiness which, if ever attainted to, invariably turns to ashes in one's mouth. Our appetites are not inherently problematic, but they must be enfolded harmoniously with the guiding wisdom of our reason and thumos. We cannot allow them to go unbridled and drag us about haphazardly. We must not sacrifice the lofty and profound parts of our nature to the lowly and primeval. When balanced alongside our nobler pursuits and indulged in wholesome ways they are a tremendous boon, a great source of joy, inspiration and power.
III. Fickle Thumos
Suppose we've avoided the worst of these first two pitfalls, our appetites are in measure and our thumos is intact, but we find that it only surges with a truly compelling power spasmodically, in irregular fits, as if we were trying to make our way through the nighttime wilderness with an erratically flickering flashlight. This volatility can be immensely frustrating and confounding to deal with. The very drive, determination and zeal which propels us toward our aims with great speed and certainty, and which render the journey far more enjoyable, only appear at rare intervals. As with many regrettable bodily and spiritual conditions we have, in the modern world, lazily determined that it's "normal" and there's nothing to do be done for it. Many creative people endure this inconstancy their entire lives, thinking they can do little or nothing save engage in prolonged and uninspired drudgery, in a bid to wrest inspiration from a prudish muse. They sacrifice, thereby, the greater part of their potential. There are four primary factors which cause this trouble:
- Inadequate care, utilization and nourishment of the body
- A lack or misconstrual of discipline
- Lack of clarity as to one's purpose and values
- Excessively narrow interests and tastes
The first, as already mentioned, is too complex to discuss here, but it's of fundamental importance and will impact every facet of your life, especially your ability to live with energy, tenacity and valor. Visit the Physical Culture section of this website to see how I approach it.
A lack of discipline, the inability to do what needs to be done despite how irksome or difficult it will likely be, also diminishes the reliability of our thumos. Many artistic types who know only fleeting bouts of vitality mistakenly believe that they're powerless to change their frequency or intensity, as if they could only come about by the will of a capricious deity or dumb luck. We must be able to do tedious, frightening or grueling things, precisely when we least want to do them, if we want to become masterful and bold. Suffusing one's daily life with a good measure of disciplined action can go a long way towards making inspired action a consolidated habit. We are far more likely to find inspiration when we are reliably engaging in the activities we're passionate about, and have a well-ordered life in general.
This can, however, be taken too far. The ascetic perversion of discipline which can see virtue only in prolonged and thankless suffering is far more likely to subvert and weaken our thumos than enhance it. There is a higher form of discipline than the sort we normally think of, a form born of a harmonious mentality, a healthy body and clear-eyed aspiration. I discussed this more thoroughly in Two Types of Discipline.
A lack of constancy may also result from a want of clarity and certitude regarding our aims and values. Vital energy can be squandered like any other form of energy. Combustion engines only work because they tightly channel the explosive force that drives the pistons, turns the crankshaft, and ultimately rotates the wheels. If that same quantity of force were dispersed in open air it would accomplish far less. The more expertly energy is channeled the less we require to attain a desired result. This is just as true on the mental plane as it is on the physical. When we have a sharply defined vector along which we repeatedly expend our energy, we will advance in that direction and build momentum much more quickly than if we whimsically switch between a dozen of them. As we build that momentum we require less exertion to maintain our velocity and acquire an effortless resistance to diversion and distraction.
Finally, we must be wary of an overly narrow mentality and approach to life. As powerful as the focus we just mentioned is, as crucial as it is for acting with powerful efficiency, we mustn't be too rigid. If we persist too long in a limited number of activities we start to lose the dynamism and plasticity that allows us to seize fresh opportunities and approach the world in a creative spirit. Think of it like the training of the body: There are specific movements that, when practiced consistently and soundly, will improve our condition immensely. To focus on them over long stretches of time is wise. Yet if we only ever do these, and largely cease using our bodies in a more freeform fashion, then we will inevitably develop limitations in our mobility and compromise our structure. We will become increasingly fragile, more prone to injury both inside and outside of our narrow band of activity, more and more incapable of moving fluidly and responding intelligently to novel conditions.
Even a great musician's performance would quickly become tedious if he were limited to playing one or two notes. The richness and beauty of life slowly fades into obscurity when we cease stretching our boundaries and evolving. No matter what amibitions we may possess we all have need of the subliminal alchemy which begets creative insight―and broad-mindedness, along with the inclination to occasionally range outside of our habitual routines, is necessary to keep those occulted processes fruitfully churning.
If we can manage to strengthen and nourish our body, cultivate a wholesome and productive discipline, clarify our desires and values, and broaden the range of our intellectual and aesthetic faculties, then, we can be assured of a dependable and productive vitality.
IV. Rebellious Thumos
Despite its many wondrous qualities our thumos may still prove problematic in and of itself. It is the seat and source of anger, willful self-determination and the desire to fight, after all. Achilles is the consummate example of a man whose thumos was so tempestuous and terrifically potent that it led him to disaster. When Agamemnon, king of Mycenae and leader of the Greek host which assaulted Troy, takes away Achilles's concubine Briseis his wounded sense of honor leads him to stubbornly refuse fighting. Without the masterful skill of Achilles and his Myrmidons bolstering the Greek forces, the tide of the war begins to turn in favor of the Trojans. Agamemnon, realizing this, offers to return Briseis to Achilles along with a great trove of treasure, swearing that he has not touched her. Yet Achilles still refuses, his sense of wounded pride overwhelming him.
This is what ultimately leads to the death of his dear friend Patroclus, who is slain by Hector while wearing Achilles's armor. The death of Patroclus sends Achilles into a savage and inconsolable rage, which culminates in his fighting and killing Hector, prince of Troy, whom he ruthlessly refuses the honor of a proper burial. He ties Hector's corpse to his chariot and shamefully drags his brutalized body around the walls of Troy. The Greek hero Ajax comments that Achilles's thumos has led him to dishonor, and even the god Hermes declares that the thumos of the great warrior has become arrogant. Achilles, as we all know, is ultimately killed by an arrow penetrating his heel, the one place he was vulnerable.
What can we learn from his example? In short, that thumos is a fine servant but a poor master. It is the wellspring of passion and the action which springs from it, and can thus overwhelm us, can blind us to our failings and lack of wisdom. A white-hot and intemperate thumos will always make for an interesting tale, but some tales are better listened to than directly experienced. In rousing and channeling the tremendous energy we can find in thumos we must remain vigilant and high-minded. If we allow it to overtake our reason and usurp wisdom then it's but a matter of time before we bring ourselves and those we love to ruin.
V. Mistrust of Thumos
At last we turn to the most pernicious and misguided approach to thumos that has blighted the modern world: The pseudo-intellectual or moralizing mistrust of it, even the hatred of it. As mentioned in passing earlier, contempt for the body―for animal vitality and all things carnal―reached its noxious zenith with the Puritan brand of Christianity. Vestiges of this mentality still remain to this day, and it often finds a refuge in the minds of timid intellectual types who constructed a large part of their self-image by sharply contrasting themselves with their heartier and more brazen peers―the jocks, bros and frat boys of the world.
You must have encountered someone like this in your life, especially if you've frequented the halls of a university: To them physical excellence and boldness can only suggest a kind of regressive stupidity, a simian and simplistic mentality that they, in their far-sightedness and brilliancy, have long since transcended. Anything which throbs too heartily or exudes an uncommon heat is inherently suspect. They reflexively snarl with contempt when confronted with anyone well-constituted and hale, their deep mistrust of unmolested vitality―to them an alien quality they can neither appreciate nor understand―has penetrated bone-deep after years of rebuking and castigating anything approximating bodily splendor and unabashed passion. They will latch onto and brood upon every conceivable misuse of these powers, stewing over the "irrationality" of all who appreciate and respect them.
Most galling of all to this type is the realization of just how moving and irresistible women―even the intellectually inclined ones they continually fail to impress on a primal level―find this thumotic radiance. Rather than recognize the manifest deficiency of this aspect of their being and work to improve upon it, most will instead spin up, ruminate upon and share with similarly disenchanted men a litany of rationalizations as to why their condition is in fact the superior one, the nobler one, the one that will ultimately triumph in the end. That most of these men are quite obsessed with vicariously living out a comical exaggeration of masculine valor through video games is, of course, lost on them. That they also often take a kind of farcical pride in their consumption of pornography―which largely consists in watching another, more virile man fuck a woman who would never look at them twice―ought to suggest the caliber of self-awareness in play.
Rejecting and mistrusting our thumos in this fashion is delusional and self-destructive, and I would hope that this is obvious to anyone not enmeshed in a spiderweb of impotent rage and envy. This is not to suggest that pensive, intellectually inclined, timid men are always in the wrong, nor that boisterous jocks, bros and frat boys are always in the right. (Anyone who has experienced the company of frat boys knows that to be an absurd proposition.) It is to suggest, however, that those timid men are missing something crucially important for their development as a man, for their flourishing as a human being, and that the men they are inclined to revile possess that quality in a much greater measure. In this sense they have much to learn from those they hold in contempt, and they are unlikely to learn it until they can dismantle and replace the injurious falsehoods that shakily buttress their worldview.
Thumos and Women
The Greeks clearly saw thumos as masculine in spirit, as a more integral part of manliness than femininity, but of course women possess it as well. After all, one of the most impressive and powerful manifestations of thumos is seen in a mother's fiery and fearless defense of her children. Even much larger, violent, powerful males can be routed by the sheer vehemence and spiritual intensity of a mother whose children are threatened. Women clearly have passionate thoughts which inspire action just as men do, though the type and subtleties of the passions are often different. While there's no denying that thumos is important for women, it is plainly more integral to a man's success in life than a woman's, for two primary reasons: First, because women respond powerfully to the presence of thumos in the opposite sex, whereas men do not. Second, when men judge one another thumos is weighted very heavily, and it is in exercising and reveling in thumos that men most often build comradery. There is simply far less need or incentive for women to develop and express their thumos the way men do, and this has its roots in the roles each sex played throughout our history.
So what is the role of thumos in sex and love? Speaking broadly, thumos is what makes a man attractive to a woman in a primal, visceral way. It is chiefly the magnitude of a man's thumos which allows a woman to feel truly feminine in his presence. A captivating abundance of strength and confidence, amibition and stamina, an unrepentant self-love and willfulness―these are the qualities which most reliably inspire her respect and allow her to drop her guard, let her be vulnerable, girly, playful and at ease. Wonder no more at the popularity that high-profile athletes, brazen musicians, or men in positions of great power enjoy with the ladies―they all possess an abnormally potent thumos. (This is also why so many women find criminals attractive.) Many modern men, especially those who wallow in self-pity and nihilism, never manage to grasp that it is the spiritual energy of thumos which is most attractive, not the bodily features that often accompany it. A marvelous physique and chiseled features are a great boon, but they're of secondary importance.
Our thumos is not always equally potent in all contexts, however. One difficulty that some otherwise confident and powerful men face is the seeming loss of their power and confidence when they are relating to women. They may be ruthless and masterful in the business world, or fiercely powerful and confident on the field, yet find themselves very much subdued around women they're attracted to. It's as if a noble steed, one renowned for running like the wind and plunging fearlessly into the chaos and carnage of battle, were to rear up in terror when confronted with a beautiful mare, its dauntless courage and masterful poise draining away in an instant. How bewildering and disappointing it must be for a woman, to expect all that pluck and virility displayed elsewhere and to be met, instead, with the clammy hands and awkward gestures of adolescent amateurism; to see and feel that captivating, radiant thumos from afar, to imagine the many wondrous ways it could gratify them, only to have it disappear like a mirage in the desert! Yet how mortifying it must be for a man, to feel all of his power and surety shrivel up when he needs them most dearly, to feel conflicted and confused precisely when things ought to be most natural and frictionless, to become incompetent precisely when incompetence is most fatal to his sense of manhood.
Understand that to have animality and vigor in general is not enough; we must have animality, intensity, and a fiery unabashed desire in relation to women. One of the more pernicious effects of teaching men from a young age that their natural desires and inclination to approach and pursue women is somehow predatory, perverse and immoral is that they develop a kind of split personality, where they can manifest and be their true masculine self in some facets of life but are then crippled by guilt and self-doubt in relation to women. Something is deeply amiss here, and both sexes suffer for it. Men are robbed of the joy and sense of manly virtue which comes from truly ravishing their woman, and women are deprived of the spirited, loving ravishment that they long for. (If you doubt that women actually long for this, casually peruse any romance section in a book store and crack open a few books, or read some erotica written by women online. There's really nothing to debate here.) A willful and passionate woman―a high thumos woman―has need of an even higher thumos man in this regard. It is only when she feels the overwhelming might of his thumos that her own becomes quiescent and allows her to let go, to relax, to be fully feminine and receptive.
The polarity of the masculine and feminine is inextricably interwoven into our very understanding and experience of reality. We may deny the reality of this polarity if we wish―it has certainly become fashionable to do so―but there will be consequences. We may assail the natural order with salvos of sophistry until the last of our strength has left us, but we manage only to wound ourselves in the process. Nature gazes back silently, halcyon and unperturbed as we stew and sicken in a toxic miasma of our own creation, as we insidiously subvert and destroy everything we professed to love. Some things cannot be willed out of existence, nor ignored save at great peril. Increasingly we live in a depolarized, androgynous and slothful culture that is obsessed with comfort, conformity, safety and predictability. This is the death knell of romance, passion, self-sovereignty, adventure and generativity of all kinds. We must regain the courage and warrior spirit that has been whipped out of us, we must stop choking back perfectly healthy instincts and desires out of fear and a misplaced sense of guilt. We must regain our assertiveness and animality.
This is not to say that we should become a mere beast. Some men discover the importance of animality and then aspire to become a callous and ravening wrecking ball―completely abandoning the higher virtues, sacrificing them on the altar of primeval ferocity. This is not the way, friend. Not in love, not in life generally. Yet we must reclaim our primal sense of worthiness, naturalness and intensity in our dealings with women in order to give them what they desire most. We must also reclaim it in order to truly understand what it means to be masculine, as the competence and confidence we possess with women radiates outward, coloring all other aspects of our life.
The Way Forward
We've come quite a ways, haven't we? There are many ways our thumos can be crippled, misguided or dangerously inflamed. Some of these the ancient Greeks did not even consider, as they were too hearty and sensible a people to heap scorn upon vitality and bold action as we have in the modern world. To write and speak of all this is well and good. Who could deny that there's something noble and courageous in hurling verbal thunderbolts from on high, in seeking, usually in vain, to rouse the masses from the spiritual stupefaction which has entranced them? Yet it is not enough. We must be as courageous in the use of our body as we are in the use of our intellect, as bold in our passions as we are in our analyses, as wise in the care of our corporeal aspect as we are in the choice of our words, as compelling in the flesh as we are in spirit.
Does this seem immeasurably far out of reach? Imagine you were staring down the object of your desire fearlessly, heart ablaze with a leonine pride, iron-lunged and indomitable, ferocious and masterful in your virtue, utterly certain of its attainment―can you see it? Can you believe that it's possible for you? Though your thumos may now lay dormant, or be ensared by delusion and guilt, so long as you live you may by degrees awaken, liberate and strengthen it. But it will not happen of its own accord. The more depleted and enfeebled it is, the more arduous and trying the journey to reclaim and empower it will be. Yet like all things that seem a curse there lies, deep within, a blessing in disguise. The greatest triumph is to go from the lowest depths to the most rapturous heights. Those who were gifted a great measure of this quality, who have had it all their lives with no effort, are robbed of this opportunity. The blessed possess many advantages in this life, but they cannot appreciate and understand the qualities they received half as well as one who had to toil for years and decades to attain them, who had to study, struggle and rework the whole of their life and character just to enjoy an appreciable measure of what was given to others for free.
We develop a terrific spiritual power in going from penury to riches on our own merit, and riches can take many forms: physiological, intellectual, financial, social, etc. The man who goes from rags to plenty is always in a position to recuperate and regain his wealth, even if he were to lose it all. He has done it before, he can do it again. Those who were given it by default, however, will often crumble in the same circumstances, for they do not know how to cultivate or build up what was given to them, they know only how to utilize what is already available. As men precious few of us will enjoy the tremendous native vigor of an Achilles, but most all of us, if we remain disciplined and high-minded long enough, could yet become as Hector, who possessed a great-hearted thumos and was, in some ways, a far better man than the demigod who slew him.
Are you worried that your friends, family or lover might think this quest ridiculous? Little more than a queer attempt to resurrect some long-dead animism which has no relevance in our more "enlightened" age? They might. In fact, it's likely that some of them will begin to chastise or resent you if you make a serious attempt. Do it anyway. Who are they to judge you? Are they living the sort of life you want to live? Do they truly have your best interests at heart, or do they merely wish to avoid their own discomfort in seeing you transcend what they're willing to wallow in indefinitely?
Are you worried that people you don't even know might mock you if you start to take these things seriously? That's also a very real possibility, especially if you participate in any sort of public forum. That an endless legion of goblinoid midwits are ready and willing to descend upon anyone of real integrity and far-sightedness has been amply demonstrated. Again―so what? Are there criticisms valid? Or are they merely spewing empty vitriol? Why let that bother you? After all, if the derisive laughter of any ne'er-do-well jackanapes is sufficient to undercut our aspirations and shatter our self-assuredness, there can be no doubt as to the pathetic condition of our thumos. Can you not see that your very reluctance to take these risks is a powerful argument that you should?
Further, the reclamation of thumos, or the failure to do so, affects far more than our own individual lives. Look around you. Have you seen the state of the world lately? Do you think this fear-mongering, demoralization and flimsy sophistry could ever have worked on a population brimming with thumos? Of course not. Yet it does work marvelously on a population concerned primarily with the appearance of a fashionable yet counterfeit virtue; a population so depleted and hypnotized by falsehood that willfully bringing about their own enslavement, while viciously castigating and defaming any who resist, is seen as noble. If this seems extreme to you then consider the ease with which the most basic freedoms we had were stripped away―a horrific infringment that was met with little resistance―and the monstrous proportions to which nanny states the world over were magnified in record time. (The rapidity with which a nanny state can morph into a police state always seems to elude naive people.)
Yet the state of the world, sorry as it is, is very far from hopeless. We must bear in mind that we are all nodes in a network which is vastly more complex and intricately interwoven than we can fathom. While the changes we make in our own life and character may seem tiny, their effects can be amplified tremendously. How we live and move through the world affects others in ways we are often totally unaware of. Do not allow yourself to sink into despondency or despair, or that pussy-footing fatalism which tries to pass for wisdom. As George Carlin once said: Take a fucking chance will you? This world is a wondrous and beautiful place in so many ways, and we have the power to make it many times more wondrous still. But we have to act consistently and with courage. Seek out kindred spirits, those who value things of real importance and are willing to do the arduous work that is necessary for their cultivation. Plant seeds in the minds of those you love, but don't waste your energy embroiled in argument and conflict. The best you can do is show them a better way by the example of your own life. Every day opportunities present themselves to lead you to a better and brighter future, and as your life improves you will always, to some extent, bring others onward and upward with you.
I hope it's now clear to you how important the concept of thumos is for our modern world. It is at the very basis of a flourishing and well-rounded human life, and ignoring or downplaying its central role will aid and abet the many varieties of cowardly vice that now run rampant . So what will it be? Will you reclaim your primeval fire? Will you nourish and build a valorous, harmoniously integrated, radiant thumos? Or will you surrender what little sovereignty you have left and sink into the sordid perdition of imbecilic credulity, spinelessness, buffoonery, and empty amusements?
Choose wisely.