Andrew Tate Versus Greta Thunberg

What the latest Internet kerfuffle reveals about the tragedy of our age

flashing the nip

The current zeitgeist moment pits hyper-misogynist, musclebound Kickboxing champ and master scam-artist Andrew Tate against teenaged ecological-emergency-doomsayer Greta Thunberg. As many of you probably know by now, Tate brag-tweeted to Thunberg about his 33 cars, including two Ferraris and a Bugatti, and asked for her email address “so I can send a complete list of my car collection and their respective enormous emissions.” Thunberg tweeted back her email as “smalldickenergy@getalife.com”. The Internet went berserk. 

I haven’t followed the rise of Andrew Tate very closely, but find him a predictable archetype. He carries the banner of pick-up artist (PUA) culture plus Jordan Peterson’s politics of resentment mixed with Fight Club bravado, a surefire recipe for success. Tate runs Hustler University, where he teaches cryptocurrency trading and gives life advice, advocating men keep women in their place. He indoctrinates his followers to push his content and uses outrage to build his following: “What you ideally want is a mix of 60-70% fans and 40-30% haters. You want arguments, you want war.” Tate has found outrage easiest to stir up by advocating Far Right politics and anti-Feminism, seeking to “own the libs.” 

Richard Reeves writes in Unherd: 

Videos of Andrew Tate have been viewed more than 12 billion times on TikTok, and more than 100,000 people have signed up to his £39-per-month online academy ‘Hustler’s University’. His videos contain a mix of extreme misogyny, with women referred to as “bitches” and “property”; irresponsible mental health messaging, including that depression “isn’t real”; along with some sound basic advice, such as the need to do the hard things in life even when you don’t feel like it.

Tate himself says: “I am simply saying things that many men think, believe and feel.” I’m not sure that this is true. It’s unlikely that most of his viewers are so passionately anti-feminist. But simply dismissing Tate as a misogynist or an opportunist is not good enough, even though he is both. His appeal should instead be seen as a leading indicator of some of the genuine disorientation being felt by millions of boys and men.

Thunberg has millions of supporters but she also galvanizes a lot of hate. The arguments against Thunberg attack her for being a tool of the New World Order, Agenda 23, the WEF / globalist conspiracy. These evil forces, the haters believe, intend to restrict human freedom by placing strict controls over fossil fuel use, while they enforce policies leading to technocratic surveillance and depopulation. Most of them believe that global warming is a hoax. Tate has also shared his views that climate change is nothing but a means for the government to control the people. This view,  also held by Peterson, is very popular across the Far Right. 

As much as I appreciate Thunberg’s retort, my concern is that environmental progressives and macho primitivists will continue to talk past each other as our world burns. That may be our tragic fate, in fact, but let’s at least explore some other options. 

A major problem, as Reeves explores in his article, is that contemporary Western society has lost a positive ideal of masculinity. When you ask teenage boys what adjectives they associate with the word, about all they know is “toxic.” That is where opportunists like Peterson and Tate rush in to fill the void. One of the thinkers I find most valuable on this subject is Warren Farrell, author of The Myth of Male Power and The Boy Crisis. Of course, I often reflect on my own painful experiences as an adolescent and young man, which were both unique and universal. 

Farrell argues against the belief that we live in a patriarchy which innately benefits men over women. He makes a number of important points to support his contrarian view. He believes that our current social structures were based on accommodations that men and women made, together, over many centuries, to enhance their likelihood of survival in a harsh world. This required a division of labor and function which is no longer needed as much now, yet still carries over. 

Even now, men die, on average, considerably earlier than women. The reasons for this include stress and overwork — men also do most of the physically demanding jobs, such as working in mines or as soldiers. Men are also much more likely to commit suicide. 

In some ways, Farrell argues, women from middle class and upper class backgrounds have gained more freedom and flexibility than men, on average, over the last decades. He notes that, if a relatively upscale woman has a child, she often has the choice to be a full-time mother, return to work full-time, or work part-time. Men, generally, must continue to work full-time, with more financial demands placed on them. Farrell also explores the extensive legal advantages women possess in custody battles. He thinks that modern society is organized, in some ways, to protect women more than it does men. 

Men are taught from an early age that they are not supposed to express their feelings – or even have feelings. This leads to what Robert Johnson, in The Fisher King and the Handless Maiden, calls “the wounded feeling function” in men. Writing on his high school experience, Farrell recalls seeing the desirable cheerleaders in their pleated miniskirts, with the implication that if you wanted to gain sexual access to them you had to succeed as a football player, often receiving brain injuries and other long-term physical damage as a result. 

Generally, young men get the message that if they want to secure attractive, high-status mates, they have to “suck it up,” and do whatever is required to attain financial success. In practice, this often means giving up yearnings to be an artist, teacher, or caregiver to become a financial analyst, software engineer, or lawyer (among other high-earning professions), with greater potential for economic gain. 

When Tate tells his male clientele, “The most beautiful and terrifying thing about being a man is you are born without value. Society doesn’t care about you. You’re only going to be cared about based on how useful you are,” he is not entirely wrong. When he Tweets, “Men go through so much pain that they will never talk about it because they know that nobody cares,” there is some truth to this also. There is also some truth to what integral philosopher Ken Wilber wrote in A Brief History of Everything: “Studies on testosterone … all point to a simple conclusion. I don't mean to be crude, but it appears that testosterone basically has two, and only two, major drives: fuck it or kill it.”

If young men find themselves unable to reach the benchmarks that society sets for them, they can easily be consumed with negative feelings such as envy, insecurity, and rage. In the Incel movement, young male fury often culminates in mass shootings, acts of stochastic terrorism often targeting women, who Incels identify as their oppressors. While it may seem that young, white, middle class men lack sensible reasons for such inconsolable feelings of impotence and anger (after all, they are not being sent to a warzone or enslaved), this doesn’t make the subjective power of the emotions any less real for them. It doesn’t change the consequences for society at large. 

The point I am trying to make — the reason for this essay — is that we need to address the authentic reality of male psychology if we want to have any chance of confronting the ecological emergency as a civilization or as a species.

This means, also, that men need to be able to express the full gamut of their feelings without fearing social censure, demonization, or attack. This is something that Farrell also explores: Women have spoken up about their mistreatment by men. But it is still very rare for men to publicly share their feelings and experiences, which is why the Depp / Heard trial was such an important cultural moment.

Like many men raised in feminist households, I grew up with an unexamined belief that women were morally superior to men. I still tend to think that women, innately, possess a bit more emotional depth and complexity than men, but society exacerbates this difference. Women also tend to have a conservative instinct, which makes evolutionary sense: They need a stable and secure environment, and good long-term prospects, to reproduce and raise children. Under the regime of Capitalist exploitation, some women can behave just as amorally as some men.

I suspect that reprogramming / re-patterning the masculine hunter/killer drive is the only we can possibly “save” civilization. My sense is that women would have to support this, in a more conscious, co-creative and intentional way than they have until now. Is it possible to both deepen and expand the powerful self-care instinct — or the self-and-family-care instinct — so that it becomes a world-caring instinct? Somehow, that is what we need to accomplish.

In The Testicular Age, Charles Eisenstein proposes, paradoxically, that “feminine Yang” and “masculine Yin” provide the basis for humanity’s future unfolding: 

The vast womb of mother nature and mother culture has long nourished our growth, but now we are growing up against its limits. Whether in a body or on a planet, this is what triggers birth. We are rapidly entering a state of emergency. It is here that the feminine Yang takes over, bearing down and pushing us forward according to a spontaneous and irresistible rhythm into a new world. We can no more imagine what this world will be like than a fetus can imagine the world outside the womb.

Just as the feminine Yin has complemented the male Yang for the last few millennia, when the female Yang qualities come to the fore in coming centuries, it will be the masculine Yin that supports and sustains them. Already we begin to perceive the necessity of these testicular qualities of conservation, regeneration, patience, forbearance, and steadfastness.

I notice a key here for re-envisioning masculinity, graduating from the Phallic ideals of warrior domination and power-projection, to create something truly new. But this would require a new level of authenticity between the genders, and a much deeper level of conscious collaboration, as well as a new approach to sexual intimacy.

All of us develop in response to our childhood social conditioning. We use the tools and concepts available to us to seek love, sex, comfort, and validation. The ecologically viable alternative to Andrew Tate and Jordan Peterson must propose a path for young men to attain all of these things without needing a fleet of sports cars or other expensive status symbols that require massive expulsions of CO2. Otherwise, many men will remain in an adolescent state of rebellious regression as the Earth expires.

I believe that many men (women also) have an innate capacity for heroic self-sacrifice for a just cause – or even for an abstract ideal of justice itself. We see this now in Ukraine, where thousands of young people give up their lives to fight against dictatorship and secure a decent future for that country. 

Let;s not forget the stark reality: We are confronting – as Thunberg warns us – an ecological mega-crisis. Many men, Andrew Tate among them, are entrained to see the world as a competitive power struggle they win through Alpha Male dominance strategies. This makes short-term sense on an individual level, but it is self-evidently leading to abject failure for humanity as a whole.

If we want our descendants to inherit any kind of livable planet, we will have to massively reduce CO2 emissions while addressing other planetary boundaries. And Peterson and Tate are correct: There is no way we do this without imposing severe restrictions on what we can consume individually. In other words, a mature response to climate change will limit personal freedoms that we now consider to be non-negotiable in deeply uncomfortable ways.

Therefore, we need to repackage austerity and asceticism as a new initiatory discipline, particularly for men. Collectively, we need to envision and idealize a new set of warrior qualities — such as “conservation, regeneration, patience, forbearance, and steadfastness” — and invest them with libidinal magnetism, changing the standards of what society finds attractive and smart.

Is this possible? Probably not. But let me know your thoughts.