Be a Good Dad, Join a Fight Club

How Nietzsche can help us rediscover the vitality to save the West.

In 2016, my daughter was born with Down Syndrome and Hirschsprung's disease. She barely survived her first days of life. It was a traumatic and disorientating few months holed up in the Seattle Children's Hospital. Afterward, collapsed by a sense of loss over whoever I was before that experience, I turned to my spouse, fitness, and Jiu-Jitsu for strength and renewal. 

Joining an MMA gym was transformational. It set me on a journey of reflection on American culture, popular views about masculinity, and my new identity as a dad to a kid with special needs. Looking back on that time, I see myself stitching together a new identity from the darker sides of myself, and incorporating emotion and trauma into a disciplined physical practice that brought me closer to understanding an unconscious need.

My story is a small part of a much larger story happening right now in the West. 

Western culture today shows a decline in energy, vitality, and spirit, going far beyond our well-documented institutional decline. This is most evident in the decreased risk tolerance and “safety-ism” infecting our schools, business, free speech culture, and public health policies—all symptoms of a deeper civilizational sickness: a lack of masculine virtue and vitality. 

Yes. Masculine virtue and vitality. We need more of it. 

Creating the Water in Which We Swim

Dads looking for something to read should consider Nietzsche and Jung, something that can cut through the impotence and timidity that define culture today. 

Nietzsche, like Hegel before him, observed that moral boundaries evolve over time, shaping the Volksgeist, or spirit of the people. Think of this as the spontaneous order of individual values and moral justification, aggregating into a general cultural sentiment that we all buy into collectively. Similar to what Carl Jung called the “collective unconscious.” 

It’s like water to a fish, or humans breathing air before we had words for it. 

Jung and Nietzsche both noticed that the moral justifications of collectives would change the definitions of good and evil over time. For the Roman Gods, it was good for the strong to rule and natural for the weak to bear what they must—something Nietzche would call “master morality”. In Christianity, virtue is found in self-sacrifice, where the innocent willingly suffer for others—this he termed “slave morality”. 

There’s a deep contrast here that would determine how a society defines virtue. 

A Brief Look at the Etymology 

Wi-ro, the Indo-European word for man, evolved into the Latin vir, meaning man or hero. It then evolved into the Latin virtus, meaning courage. From this word, we get the word virtue, meaning moral strength of all kinds. 

Virtutem, meaning both bravery and manliness, eventually evolved into vertu and then later became virtue, referring to all moral behavior. Somewhere in the evolution of these words, we lost the emphasis on the unique role of courage and manliness in virtue. 

Nietzche lamented this loss, as should we.

The Man and the Pug

Consider the psychology of a deer. It can moralize a wolf by calling it “bad” or thinking of it as evil, but the wolf thinks of the deer as food. Deer may feel resentment and even design a social order where wolves are restrained by rules and norms that prevent them from being food. Given enough time, that wolf might devolve into a pug.

And that’s how Niezche thought of the “last man,” a pug to a wolf, a neutered man incapable of justifying his existence. But we aren’t deer and we aren’t thoughtless prey animals. Millions of years of evolution have designed us to be the greatest hunters on the planet. We all know this deep down. 

Like the pug who dreams of being a wolf, we too dream of a higher plane of existence. That’s what our works of fiction capture, especially action movies.

John Wick, for example, is a story of a man taking vengeance over the death of… his puppy. Robert Howard's Conan the Barbarian and later film adaptations refer to Conan as an animal-man, wolf-like and lion-like. These are stories about ascendency—physical, mental, and societal. Star Wars is the tale of farm boy who becomes a Jedi Knight, the last vestige of an ancient order of warrior monks with whose knowledge Luke Skywalker saves the galaxy. 

We look to these characters and are faced with what we could be, but are not yet. They teach us that there’s more to virtue than merely being a nice guy. No, you need far more than “niceness” to make a difference in the world. You will need hope, faith, justice, prudence, temperance, and courage. This is an inheritance of not just Christian history, but of secular philosophical traditions found in Athens and Rome. You can rely on these things more than any newfangled trend snaking through popular culture. 

Join a Fight Club 

I’ve taken you on a somewhat heady journey here, so let’s bring it home. 

Join a fight club. Learn to fight and make a discipline out of doing dangerous and difficult things. It can help you embody the virtues you’re going to need out there in the world. 

You have to fail hard and experience danger (like real physical danger!!) in life to have a true sense of what it is you’re living for. 

Today I do MMA together with my ten-year-old son and I help with the kids' class, in addition to training three-to-five times a week. In this “fight club” I’ve found something deep within myself that only physical discomfort can unearth.

Even better, your local MMA gym will almost certainly be filled with a bunch of men who are on a similar journey. Make friends, build a tribe, and be present in each other's lives as a source of accountability. Iron sharpens iron. Men need this, deeply. 

Something within men today lacks wholeness. I don’t think we were meant for remote-work in a home office, Costco shopping sprees, and Amazon deliveries on-demand. These are helpful innovations, but we know in our core that they have a very real, hard-to-discern cost. 

Don’t despair—wholeness is within your grasp, but you must drop your phone, get off the couch, walk away from the desk, and put into practice something that affirms the fact that you’re alive. 

I recommend joining a fight club.

David Rand is a Young Voices alum, featured in the American Thinker and the Mises Institute, a podcast philosopher at Human [Re]Action, and a media and political consultant. Find him at David-Rand.net and HumanReactionPod.com.