Exclusive Extract from My New Book

I'm currently writing the sequel to The Eggs Benedict Option

One of the many things I’m currently in the process of doing is writing a follow-up to my 2022 book The Eggs Benedict Option. My new book will be called The Last Men: Liberalism and the Death of Masculinity, and it will explore some of the central themes of the Tucker Carlson documentary, The End of Men, of which I was one of the main stars. That means testosterone decline, masculinity, endocrine disruptors, seed oils and processed food, plant-based diets and much more. I’m framing the book in philosophical terms as a kind of continuation of Francis Fukuyama’s argument in The End of History and the Last Man: liberalism is the death of thymos—especially megalothymia, man’s competitive desire to distinguish himself from his peers—and thymos, as I will argue, is testosterone.

Fukuyama’s book is often presented as a triumphalist account of liberalism’s progress and defeat of all rival political systems and ways of life, but I actually think it’s a deeply pessimistic book. And when you consider the biological aspects of its victory, it becomes even more pessimistic. Fukuyama didn’t even know the half of it.

Of course, I won’t just be diagnosing the problem. I’ll also be suggesting solutions; although some of the potential solutions to the civilisational decline in masculine vigour may be unpalatable, to say the least.

I’ve already written about 20,000 words of the book, which is due to come out early next year with Passage Press. The extract below is from one of the later chapters entitled “The Community of Pigs: Our Plant-Based Future,” and in it I look in detail at why the transition to plant-based diets, heralded by governments, NGOs and the scientific and liberal elite as being necessary to save the planet from climate change and feed 10 billion people, will actually only intensify masculine decline if it is allowed to take place. If you want to function optimally as a man, you need high-quality animal products. It’s that simple.

As always, let me know what you think in the comments section at the end.

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Food and social control go together like peas and carrots, and they always have done. That was the foundational message of my book, The Eggs Benedict Option, which opened with a discussion of an under-appreciated section of Book II of Plato’s Republic. Vegetarianism has been understood for thousands of years to be an effective means of individual and social control, a means of quieting and keeping at bay man’s aggressive, competitive urges, and Plato—or rather, Plato’s Socrates—states this fact for the first time in written history, at least as far as we know. There’s a reason why for centuries only Buddhist monks regularly ate unfermented soy, a food rich in phytoestrogenic compounds like isoflavones, and it had everything to do with quelling their wayward desires and returning their minds and bodies to the task of total physical self-effacement. Nirvana.

Today’s social planners, the inheritors of Plato’s philosophy, wish to make real the vision of an harmonious society made so through a drastic change in people’s diet and temperament. While a global plant-based diet might “save the planet” from climate change, reducing agricultural emissions of greenhouse gases, and while it might feed a world of 10 billion people, it will be a disaster for human health, especially men’s health, as well as severely reducing our freedom of choice and action. (Note the mights there: there are very strong reasons to doubt all of the claims made by advocates of plant-based diets, not just the health claims but also the claims about the environmental and humanitarian impact of abandoning animal agricultural as we know it. I won’t go into the environmental or humanitarian claims in detail in this chapter, but I will make sure you realise these claims are the principal justifications for abandoning meat and dairy.)

The adoption of uniform vegetarianism or even veganism will be the culmination of a long process of abandoning traditional whole foods, and especially animal foods, that has taken place over the last 150 years and seen control of the food supply transferred into the hands of a smaller and smaller number of mega corporations. With the creation of novel ingredients like seed and vegetable oils and the class of industrially produced food known as “processed” or “ultra-processed” food, we were promised renewed health as well as convenience. Instead, we have been sapped of our vitality like never before, and made subject to new forms of domination by big food, big pharma and big government. For the social planners, however, a further decline in thymos and our individual and collective scope for political action may be no bad thing—far from it.

First, let’s talk about Plato. At the beginning of Book II of the Republic, Socrates and his companions Glaucon and Adeimantus pose an important question: How does justice arise in a community? After the two young men have had their chance to speak at length, Socrates asks them to consider the answer through a metaphor, of the development of a city as a kind of allegory for the individual’s moral development. The three discuss how a division of labour emerges; how food, shelter and clothing are provided by different kinds of worker; how the functions of each type of worker complement one another; and how goods are exchanged and sold.

Now the conversation turns to the lifestyle of this imagined community and the kind of foods they should eat. Socrates says the following:

So let us consider first how our citizens, so equipped, will live. They will produce corn, wine, clothes, and shoes, and will build themselves houses. In the summer they will for the most part work unclothed and unshod, in the winter they will be clothed and shod suitably. For food they will prepare wheat-meal or barley-meal for baking or kneading. They will serve splendid cakes and loaves on rushes or fruit leaves, and will sit down to feast with their children on couches of myrtle and bryony; and they will have wine to drink too, and pray to the gods with garlands on their heads, and enjoy each other’s company. And fear of poverty and war will make them keep the numbers of their families within their means.[1]

Glaucon objects: “This is pretty plain fare for a feast!” Socrates concedes that the ordinary people should be allowed “a few luxuries,” which consist of:

Salt, of course, and olive oil and cheese, and different kinds of vegetables to make various country dishes. And we must give them some dessert, figs and peas and beans, and myrtle-berries and acorns to roast at the fire as they sip their wine. So they will lead a peaceful and healthy life, and probably die at a ripe old age, bequeathing a similar way of life to their children.

But Glaucon still isn’t satisfied. “That’s just the fodder you would provide if you were founding a community of pigs!” he says. The people must be allowed to recline on couches, eat off tables, and they should “have the sort of food we have today,” by which he means, of course, the meat and fish Socrates would deny them.

Socrates concedes again. Allowing these things might even prove useful for the discussion, he says, but we must remember one thing. While the vegetarian society he had been describing was “the true one, like a man in health,” this new society, in which people are allowed to eat the flesh of animals, is “one in a fever.” This social fever will require more than mere “necessaries” to keep in check, and society will become notably more complex as a result. There will have to be new occupations, to produce the new goods the people will want. There will also have to be new territory, to provide more land for farming as the population increases. And finally, if the neighbouring states are also “in a fever,” then there will be war, which means a military—a class of “guardians”—is needed.

Here we leave Socrates and his young friends to continue their discussion. What matters so crucially in this brief segment of the Republic is what Socrates says, and implies, in his discussion about the most primitive, harmonious form of society. Such a society, just by foregoing meat, is able to keep man’s expansionary and self-assertive desires at bay. A society of vegetarians doesn’t want more stuff or more land. The inhabitants are content simply to work, to eat and reproduce. Their attitude towards life is a mix of gratitude and also fear, especially towards the gods but also the terrible possibility of conflict and war.

Of course, this is ancient Greece, so what Socrates really means is thymos. A vegetarian diet is as effective at suppressing thymos as any police force. In fact, it’s so effective, one isn’t even needed. Thymos, for our purposes, means testosterone, and in that regard Socrates was certainly right, as we’ll see.

It’s worth considering the relationship between food and social control in a little more depth before we look at today’s plant-based agenda and why the world may resemble the Republic’s “community of pigs” very soon indeed if we’re not careful.