In light of last week’s planned post, a hefty essay about the decline of the United States into authoritarianism and LGBTQ rights taking much longer to hammer into satisfactory shape than I planned, I am going to take a minute to spotlight one of the parts of my childhood that is not a single defining moment but a continuous thread: I was supposed to be a superior being who would save the world.
Much of this is owed to Stewart’s extreme narcissism, naturally his genetics and parenting are so highly superior that his offspring would be world-changing geniuses and prominent in any chosen field from martial arts to politics and music. It is also, however, something endemic to the homeschooling movement and its various overlapping fellows like Holistic Parenting.
It seems odd to devote a post to homeschooling trauma/’gifted kid’ burnout amid a million, million articles on these exact subjects by a million other survivors of these same dysfunctional systems, but amid all the rest of the paranoia and delusion these persisted and interwove with the whole.
So, in no particular order, I believe we will start with Stewart and his belief in the divinity of his own sperm.
Like many men on the right, Stewart is somewhat obsessed with his own virility and status as an alpha male; This trend recently brought us the amazing spectacle of Tucker Carslon promoting a natural medicine guru who advocates passionately for roasting one’s balls in infrared light, dramatically posed on a pile of rocks in front of his inner space heater like testosterone Moses experiencing testicle revelation on Redpill Mount Sinai.
Not even Kidd Rock could take it seriously.
The overall tendency that gave us that gift, however, is very old and I think baked into the conservative mindset, its insecurity, and its need for a rigid power hierarchy to exist in. The hierarchy is of course a thing to be mastered, a summit that one aspires to climb, but underlying the struggle is the basic assumption that a very strict tierlist of Quality of Men exists as an objective reality and frame of reference. The system might be an antagonist holding you back, but the underlying structure that created it provides a degree of certainty in your goals and position in life. The shape of the world is assumed to be by default meritocratic and eugenic: Winners rise to the top, acquiring resources and women and respect and offspring and legacy until they become the Old Guard who have lost the capitalist Mandate of Heaven and are replaced.
It is not inaccurate to call this structure ‘Patriarchy,’ right wingers like the Proud Boys certainly revel in the title.
Problems can exist in this structure, but surmounting and mastering those is part of the experience of being a man and therefore more a feature than a bug. Self-actualization, in the conservative mindset, is the realization that the system is only flawed because the wrong people are in charge and above you. Your natural place is to look down on everyone from a lofty Byronic height and embrace the universal truth of a social order that tells everyone their role and place in life, promoting those who prove themselves most worthy. Cheating the system in some way to advance yourself is only another arena to prove your worthiness. You can subvert and break systems, but the structure is sacred.
Navigating as a man without this structure is to travel in a dark landscape of uncertainty, fear, and doubt. There is no road, there are no levels, no one can sell you a subscription or a class that will allow you to lifehack your way ahead of the game. In short, turning your back on Patriarchy requires you to shed the entire system and self actualize. Many cannot see Patriarchy and power hierarchy in general as a system created by people, and instead an objective fact of life. This means that opponents attacking it must really be trying to invert the system and put some other class on top: Women, ethnic minorities, another religion, a secret society, all of the above. These must be the wrong people to be the capstone on the pyramid because they’re not already in charge, and if you happen to identify with one or more definitions of ‘the people in charge’ currently then that means a personal attack on you.
The alternative is to believe that the ‘woke’ are actually legitimately attacking the basic foundations of your worldview, intending to destroy it and leave you unmoored in the dark. The warm glow of a strange hilltop grifter toasting his nuts on an electric plinth would seem fairly comforting in that black night of Anarchy. Particularly, being told that your feelings of being lost and adrift, with the ladder climbing you’re supposed to be achieving seemingly out of reach, is the fault of the Woke Mob for trying to destroy your position in the grand scheme and overturn its rightful masters, (namely you) is deeply appealing as a simplification. Certainly your alienation and the decay of quality of life and social mobility are not the result of the structure working as intended.
Certainly you’re not fighting to preserve a structure that serves only the elite at your expense.
Clinging to the certainty that is available becomes very important to people in crisis, and modern American men are in crisis. That is not to say that Stewart is capable of a personal turmoil in any real sense, I think that Stewart is more of a grifting, predatory Philosophical Zombie than a neo-fascist in deep personal turmoil of the kind you see in some pop culture. Stewart’s evident personality may be little more than a devouring of the American male cultural zeitgeist, and pieces of successful figures in it, to adapt and survive, mapping his inherent belief in his own superiority onto the Alpha Male archetype and his gaping narcissist insecurity onto more generalized Conservative cultural insecurity. That said, Stewart’s absorption of the modern American right worldview is so unthinking and lacking in self reflection that studying Stewart may serve as a decent abstraction for the whole: The pure cultural currents, isolated from any independent sense of humanity. An insect that mimics the shape of a leaf for camouflage still accurately represents the leaf. The fact that Conservative culture is so suited to wrapping around malignant narcissists and predators is probably notable in itself, but that’s better left to people with higher qualifications than part time classes at the Community College.
Assimilating the Alpha male struggle-for-primacy mindset and seeking power and recognition with a kind of relentless and unthinking amoeba hunger, Stewart naturally sorted himself into the top of the heirarchy. All that remained was to prove it, and assert that dominance.
The thing about people with massive delusions of grandiosity is that they don’t really hold themselves to task when they fail. Stewart could go months without doing any actual work and fall hugely behind on current events without being bothered at all by the lost opportunity or lack of progress. I, not actually being a part of Stewart, was not given this kind of total leeway when it came to success. I would bear the weight that he could or would not in justifying his position of social and sexual dominion over the world of men.
He considered his virility very important to that, frequently bragging about his “SEAL Team Sperm” that defeated contraception and how I and my siblings were going to save the world by breeding an army of geniuses to correct the Idiocarcy-style decline of intelligence ourselves. This was a big hit with homeschooling parents, who similarly saw their children as genius mavericks who were destined to shake up everything and very likely biologically superior to the other kids who ‘belonged’ in public school.
Thus, a major factor in proving the superiority of Stewart was proving the superiority of his bloodline, and that fell for the most part onto his eldest son. That meant living up to the Athenian Ideal and exemplifying all that it meant to be the perfect American, but it ovewhelmingly meant that I had to bone down enough to reflect well on my father.
Most of our weird, stilted father-son talks revolved around how I would go about drowning myself in a sea of ass. Stewart once got laid just because he was standing with super confident posture in the middle of a crowded bar, so I should always pose like John Wayne on a movie poster, I should make sure that I sit like a Samurai in public, I have to always make the exact right amount of eye contact with other men to let them know that I perceive them and demonstrate confidence to any women watching. Many of my early memories of Stewart involve him developing elaborate fantasies about my future success at fighting and fucking, for instance on telling me I should learn to play the guitar:
“Man, you’ll do so great with women in college, you’ll know how to fight and be smart and play the guitar. Some guy could mess with you and he’d end up going ‘Oh he was talking about Socrates and shit in class so I thought he was a nerd, but then he threw me through a window. The nerd kicked my ass!’ Women will love that, you’ll be just safe enough to be approachable and still be cool a bad boy.”
Of course, this was before The Coming End moved up as Stewart’s primary concern and loomed nearer in the timeline, meaning that I would most likely the be embroiled in a devestating civil war or utterly lawless struggle for survival instead of enrolled in college. The expectations then shifted from having to be a classically educated martial artist musician to having to be a wilderness survival expert and self-taught scout sniper.
The assumption that I would be getting laid left and right did not shift with the shift in outlook from campus stud muffin to teenage resistance fighter, even after we moved to the remote woods specifically to escape civilization.
You see, at my big age Stewart had already been a fully developed sexual tyrannosaurus, and had dated a 21 year old college student when he was 16 (an eerily similar claim to one made by Alex Jones years later), which meant that I should have long since been picking up drunk Canadian women at local bars with a fake ID. Nevermind our isolation 30 minutes off the highway, weather depending, and the limitation of our one constantly breaking family suburban. He had no idea why I wasn’t having my overworked, stressed, and overwhelmed mother drive me to the city 70 miles away to go on dates with… Someone. Presumably a person I’d met.
I was frequently mocked for not expressing overt stereotypical male sexuality, commenting on a dog walking in front of our car at a crosswalk caught me flak because I hadn’t commented on the visibly preteen girl walking it (in a car with my entire family) instead, but the focus dwindled over time into a sort of theatrical disappointment at my failure to exhibit game. By the end, Stewart almost infantilized me in a weird way and kept making offhand comments about how I just wasn’t thinking about girls yet, including “Is he dating anyone? Well, he’s probably not old enough to be worrying about that yet” during a visitation phone call with my younger siblings in 2019. Maybe to provoke some kind of reaction out of me, or out of a comforting delusion that I wasn’t like him yet because I was just severely lagging in finishing puberty.
I was shamed more for not crediting Stewart’s seed by being a young Lothario than I ever was for being a failure as a survivalist, strange priorities with the apocalypse permanently looming around 18 months away, and as much as the over-acted dejected sighing and lamenting of lost potential hurt, I was relieved when he finally gave up.
The pressure to be a genius, however, never let up.