Divide and conquer.
That’s the primary strategy being used to destroy us.
We used to live in tight-knit communities with defined roles and responsibilities.
But now?
The vast majority of men are atomised and adrift.
They live alone, work from home, and only have a relationship with their phone.
A key reason why young men have become so obsessed with their smartphones is because online ideological echo chambers are one of the last places they can find any sense of community.
But these forums are a weak substitute for the real thing.
The future belongs to the people who can transition these online communities into the real world, or better yet, build new networks of high performance men directly in their local environment.
One chap who has already begun this process is my friend from twitter, Cimmerian Pervert.
A few years ago he started a book club in his town, and since then, it’s flourished into an elite network of intelligent men.
A Gentlemen’s club if you will.
It’s a pleasure to welcome him to the blog to share the story of his success.
How To Start A Gentlemen’s Club – An Interview With Cimmerian Pervert
The Great British Bloke: What inspired you to start a book club?
Cimmerian Pervert: I wanted to see people, but I was tired of wasting my weekends. You know the deal, burn an entire Saturday drinking beer and watching sports. I got fed up – my wife and I were at a friends’ house, and the ‘men’ there started playing with remote control cars. I was not interested in playing with kids’ toys, so we left. After this, I started thinking – how can I get men together to do something significant. This was also in the face of 2020, where all you heard was ‘don’t gather.’ I wanted to spit in the face of that. I’ve also been reading the classics all my life and I was at a point where I also wanted to revitalise them.
It is important to note here that this is not a book club (I believe ‘book club’ has certain connotations) – I want to use the texts and the ideas therein to improve the character of the men in the group. The aim is to develop magnitude animi…greatness of spirit. I did not want a stuffy academic exercise. There will be no Hegel or Kant here.
What I am doing is not original. There are book clubs everywhere, including online discussion groups. We are trying to better ourselves using classical literature as a springboard to high quality fellowship above the fray of modern cultural junk.
The Great British Bloke: How did you choose people to invite to the gentlemen’s club?
Cimmerian Pervert: To be succinct, no man-children. I did not expect perfection, but I wanted to create an elevated atmosphere. The people I was seeking had to have the capacity to take something seriously. The people I ended up inviting were not my closest friends, or even people I knew well at all. My ideal candidate was someone who was not overly political and have picked up a book at least once in the previous year.
I probably spent two weeks thinking about everyone I have crossed paths with at gyms, the office, or events. I wrote all these names down, then I did some research to confirm using social media. If I saw a lot of mainstream political posting, I scratched them out. I live in a liberal hellscape so this was a difficult process. In the end, the final list was not what I would have expected compared to, say, if I were just throwing a party.
The Great British Bloke: How did you go about inviting them?
Cimmerian Pervert: I wrote a letter. I printed it on the highest quality paper I could find. Something that felt weighty in your hand (I posted this letter on my rarely used Substack). My vision was to create something of a clarion call – imagine if you will, the Olifant from the Song of Roland. Something that could not be denied. How often does one receive a letter in the mail these days?
The Great British Bloke: What was the response like?
Cimmerian Pervert: I only had two rejections, so an acceptance rate of maybe 90%. I had planned on doing this in phases if I did not get the critical mass I wanted, but also did not want to be too large as the format of small group discussion can get chaotic above a certain size. I did not end up having to do any follow-up invitations. Those who rejected were who I expected to do so (Evangelical types).
The Great British Bloke: Where do you meet?
Cimmerian Pervert: Most of the meetings are at my house, on a weekday evening that is unlikely to interfere in personal lives. I have done a few meetings outside at a park a few times when the weather is nice. Anywhere that has minimal distractions is the best. I want to avoid bar/coffee shop/restaurant for this sort of group. You will see a common theme in when I talk about my group – everything is oriented towards the importance of the works we are reading and the magnitude of what we are trying to accomplish in ourselves.
The Great British Bloke: How do you prepare for the meeting?
Cimmerian Pervert: I finish the book a week in advance and write notes and various talking points to guide the discussion. I will also bring in outside references to incorporate into the meeting (for example, I will talk about St. Paul on the Areopagus in Acts 17 when we talk about Orestes’ trial in The Eumenides for a historical parallel).
The goal of the group is to practice logic, grammar, and rhetoric, so I want to be able to facilitate that, especially in the first few meetings where people were more reserved.
I also come up with what specific ideas I want to launder through the meeting using the works that we have read (for example, Nietzsche using McCarthy’s Blood Meridian). This is a good opportunity to think about bringing in examples from British poetry where the format is not optimal to reading large selections of poetry – I have read Tennyson’s Light Brigade or Kipling’s If aloud to add some flavour to the discussions.
The Great British Bloke: What is the structure of the evening?
Cimmerian Pervert: I originally had a 2-hour cap on the evening which has disappeared as time went on. The first 20-30 minutes is generally ‘fellowship time’ where we have a few drinks and catch up – for a lot of these people it is the only time they see each other that month. I believe it is important to relax a bit before getting into the serious stuff.
We will then discuss the texts for the rest of the time, leaving 15 minutes or so to introduce the next months’ reading. I like to do this for certain types of works, such as plays or poetry – some background on “how to read” is important for enjoyment and understanding.
Historical context is important, for example, on the Peloponnesian War, before reading Aristophanes’ comedies. I like to give a brief introduction because I do not want the group poisoned by some pseudo-intellectual’s “Introduction” section. Men of principle do not read introduction sections. Then I set the next date and we all part ways.
The Great British Bloke: What are the rules for discussion?
Cimmerian Pervert: My rules are simple. You can say whatever you want, but you need to make every effort to support your claim with examples from the current month’s text or relate it back to earlier works. I ended up initially with quite a diverse group of ideologies so what helped here was a requirement to not use living political figures in discussion by name or allusion. What this does is forces people to think about actual ideas instead of degenerating into political arguments that you can find everywhere.
The Great British Bloke: How do you decide what to read?
Cimmerian Pervert: First, I want to mention that this group is not a democracy. There is no voting on what to read, no rotation on who chooses the books. Most everything we read is geared towards the heroic, the virtuous, the rich in spirit. I lean very heavily on what one would expect, “Western Canon”-type lists, but also on Twitter anons for recommendations on works that may be left off such lists for one reason or another. If the conversation on certain subjects is very lively, I will slot in related works in subsequent months, so on occasion I am “reading the room,” as well.
The Great British Bloke: What are the books you’ve read as a gentlemen’s club so far?
Cimmerian Pervert:
Iliad
Odyssey
Aeschylus, Oresteia (Agamemnon, Libation Bearers, Eumenides)
Sophocles, Antigone
Plato, “The Last Days of Socrates” (Apology, Crito, Phaedo)
Xenophon, Expedition of Cyrus
Livy, History of Rome (selections)
Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
Cicero, On Duties
Virgil, Aeneid
Al-Masudi, “From the Meadows of Gold”
Selections from The Thousand and One Nights
The Song of Roland
Leonardo da Vinci, Notebooks
Shakespeare, Coriolanus
Dante – Divine Comedy
Erasmus – Handbook of a Christian Knight
Thomas Paine – Common Sense, The American Crisis
Thoreau – Civil Disobedience
Cormac McCarthy – Blood Meridian
Rachel Carson – Silent Spring
Dostoevsky – Notes from Underground
Pyotr Wrangel – Always With Honour
Tolstoy – Death of Ivan Ilych, other selections
Albert Camus – The Stranger
Aristophanes – Birds, Knights, Assemblywomen, Wealth
The Great British Bloke: Which books stimulated the most discussion?
Cimmerian Pervert: Cicero’s “on Duties” – by far. It’s a dense work as far as the breadth of ideas for personal conduct. “How one ought to act” is a primary theme in our discussions. It’s laid out very well to facilitate referencing during discussion, as well as open-ended enough to allow for some debate.
Runner-up is probably Blood Meridian. The book is just wild and was easy to relate to previous works within the group. It is also the perfect vessel to introduce thinkers like Nietzsche without explicitly reading him. In general, novels tend to fall flat for discussion. They tend to be “one dimensional” and feels very “book club.” There are exceptions, but novels are risky picks. Plays, ancient writings on philosophy, and political theory (within reason) tend to be more interesting. Honourable mention to Paine’s Common Sense and Wrangel’s Always With Honour – these opened a lot of eyes to “maybe history didn’t exactly happen the way it was taught to us in school” concept.
Plato says something like this, and I am summarising, it is more effective if you lead a child to the correct answer and they think they discovered themselves.
The Great British Bloke: What’s next?
Cimmerian Pervert: This month, we will be reading Apollonius Rhodius’ version of Jason and the Argonauts as a kind of “breather” after a long string of denser works. This summer I want to bring in more Shakespeare – specifically how he deals with honour, Benvenuto Cellini’s autobiography, and some Arthurian tales. I am also constantly scanning the timeline for good recommendations from my mutuals on Twitter.
The Great British Bloke: How long have you been doing this for and what has the outcome been?
Cimmerian Pervert: We have been meeting for over two years, 28 months or so…the outcome has been fantastic. I have managed to cobble together a group of men that can count on each other when someone is need. We have expanded outside the monthly meeting to other activities, such as lifting, shooting trips, vacations. A few of the guys are back in the church after many years absence.
I have seen marriages improved and the works we read incorporated into peoples’ careers. The women are elevated by this as well, some of them get together on the same night we meet and do their own thing. People see you working on something greater and are inspired themselves. We’ve become so tight knit that we don’t necessarily know how to handle growing the group, since any newcomers won’t have the literary background as the rest of us. My approach to that is have the men try to start their own groups, to varying degrees of success.
The Great British Bloke: Men thrive in team settings. Battalions, clubs, gangs, packs & mafias. It’s our natural milieu. It’s a tragedy that so few men have experienced the close bond of brotherhood over the last few decades. What main benefits have you noticed now you have started your own gentlemen’s club?
Cimmerian Pervert: There are the tangible benefits of having a group of people you can rely on, of course, for the fellowship aspects or lending a hand to someone in need, and these are great. What I think is most meaningful to me that I have built a group of men that are working on something together. I have noticed in these guys a certain growth, you can tell they are rising far above the wreckage of society and the stifling atmosphere of modernity. The return on investment for 20-30 minutes a night of reading, and a short meeting once a month is immense.
The Great British Bloke: I’ve noticed that a lot of men are cutting their nose off despite their face. They’re burning bridges with family members & old friends because they don’t fully ‘get it’. This seems shortsighted, but begs the question – To what degree is ideological alignment a necessity for friendship?
Cimmerian Pervert: There was an anon that had a great analogy that used vector addition as a model for friendship. When you add two vectors together the overall result gets longer the more parallel the individuals are. The sum gets shorter if they are anti-parallel. Using this, I don’t need 100% ideological alignment, I just need to not be opposite on a few key things, and then forge people over time into what you think is right. A few of the guys in my group started out as what we would call “bugmen” but they are not anymore. I think we need to come to realisation that we really do need to make the men we want around instead of passively trying to find them. I think this drives a lot of very good “starting material” into online manosphere type clubs.
The Great British Bloke: Why do you think the book club was so successful at bringing men together and laying the foundation for a gentlemen’s club?
Cimmerian Pervert: I think my format strikes a good balance between the activity and fellowship. When I consider my other communities, for example, the gym, the activity seems to me the focus of all conversation is on the actual activity. While these are productive in improving physically and to some degree spiritually, they do not get the result that I am aiming for: “what one ought to do.” I absolutely refuse to engage in any sort of online community, for obvious reasons, but especially because face to face communication is more effective in person and ultimately victory comes through actions in the real world.
The Great British Bloke: We’re witnessing the death of the lone wolf fallacy. For a long time, hyper-individualism was considered a viable alternative to modern insanity. Many good men isolated themselves as method of avoiding the dogma de jour. However, it’s becoming crystal clear that Edmund Burke was right. The only thing necessary for evil to triumph, is for good men to do nothing. Community is the opposition to tyranny.
Are there other methods of community building that you recommend?
Cimmerian Pervert: I will say that I have struck a fine balance. We have an activity that we are working on together, independently (reading the books), then assembling to talk about them while sharpening our rhetorical skills. The discussion, however, can range far and wide while still relating to the works. In a way, the activity is not predominated over the fellowship, and I think this is the linchpin in my approach. Take for example a gun group, or a lifting club, what do you think is mainly discussed there?
These are all fine things to do with people, but they should be accessories to building a community of men which I think is best done by simply talking over ideas – only exposure to absolute Truth can defeat this modern evil. It absolutely, without exception, must be done in person, devoid of electronic devices. No online stuff. I believe these online groups are a vent to dissipate vital energy that should be channeled into making your community better.
Hyper-individualism, or a perversion of the “rugged individualism” ideal of America (which to me was totally contrived to begin with), I believe is promoted by certain interests to prevent men from getting together in unmonitored places. Think, if you will, of the coffeehouses of Europe, or the taverns of colonial America before the Revolution. What was discussed there? What formed from them? This is what the powers that be want to stop. I don’t necessarily think there will ever be another Caesar, but a spontaneous uprising of small groups that are largely ideologically aligned, seemingly formed out of nowhere, that will right the ship. A Nemesis, if you will.
The Great British Bloke: Have you had any success meeting high quality people outside of the gentlemen’s club?
Cimmerian Pervert: To some degree, yes. Word has spread about what I am doing. There is a lot of interest around town, and I have put the Great Books in many people’s hands, but my main objective is to spread into churches and revitalise the faith. This is very much an ongoing process and has proven extremely difficult (but that wont stop us from trying).