Andrew Tate and the Limits of Civility

Civilizational HIV Enables the Thug Life

Andrew Tate is perhaps the most successful influencer in history, becoming, in 2022, the most Googled man on the planet. Deploying a motte-and-bailey rhetorical strategy, he mixes shock-jock provocations on gender relations with often sound advice and commentary for the young men who admire him. Any young man has almost certainly heard of him, and one of my daughters asked me to write a commentary explaining what I think is going on with his vast influence. So this column marks a bit of a departure for me in approaching a spicier topic with my own voice rather than reporting the thinking of someone else I find interesting.

Tate’s Background

Tate’s biographical details are hazy at best, and I think he’s best understood as an uncommonly intelligent, gifted expositor of underclass life and morality in a late, decadent civilization. His full name is Emory Andrew Tate III, and his father, Emory Andrew Tate II, was an Air Force linguist, a chess grandmaster, and from a solid middle-class family.

Tate’s grandfather, Emory Andrew Tate Sr., was an attorney and his paternal grandmother was a successful business owner. Tate Jr., however, diverged from this pattern and at some point divorced Andrew’s mother, an English woman, and abandoned the family. She moved back to the UK with Andrew and his brother in 1997 where the family struggled in poverty while taking advantage of the country’s more generous welfare system.

Tate’s father left him with a unique legacy: an extremely high IQ and the typical underclass pattern of low paternal investment and abandonment. Tate, like many in his situation, idolizes his father and makes apologies for his behavior, using his undeniable verbal acuity to rationalize his and his father’s lifestyle. He believes fathers can parent from afar, defending his father’s absence. His father inculcated attitudes in Tate consistent with underclass morality, including the specific advice that women are best controlled through physical violence, but that smart men are careful not to leave a mark when hitting them.

For those of us who grew up without the insecurity of extreme poverty, it can be difficult to understand Tate’s motivations in life. In the underclass culture, and increasingly in the mainstream culture, wealth and power are the sole universal goods for a man to possess. Desperate and humiliated by poverty, Tate was determined to escape it by any means necessary. From such a perspective, morality is nothing more than the rich man’s hypocrisy to keep an ambitious poor man down.

Tate applied his skill, intelligence, and determination first to kickboxing. I think he likely figured out that being kicked in the head is not a reliable long-term way to achieve wealth, and retired from the sport, after solidifying his reputation as a tough guy and elite athlete. He then turns to pornography, recruiting young women to do webcam shows while living at his house. He learns that the real money is in having the girls bilk the clients with sob stories and promises of meeting them that never materialize. Tate mocks the pathetic men who sent him, he claims, up to hundreds of thousands of dollars in the delusional hope of having some sort of relationship with his models.

Leaving aside his treatment of the women, which is somewhat disputed, Tate glosses over this fraud. In underclass culture, fraud is seen as not even a crime, for the mark deserves what he gets, and a man paying to chat with a webcam model is hardly sympathetic. But the sums of money here reveal a scheme that is deeply evil, affecting people beyond the mark. If some of these men have families, his fraud means ruined lives: homes repossessed, educations foregone, retirement funds depleted.

At some point, Tate realizes that he has talents beyond background hustling and begins promoting a self-improvement course purporting to help men become rich and seduce women, using his “Top G” persona as a lead generation magnet. Through the A/B message testing available through social media metrics, he further figures out that shocking anti-feminist content is most appealing, broadening his status as an influencer into right-wing Twitter.

He later claims to convert to Christianity and that he tithed $20,000 per month or so to the Romanian Orthodox Church, followed by a second conversion to Islam. His commentary now seems to have a more mature, conservative tone than his earlier amoral, nihilistic attitudes. Whether this is genuine or just another grift is impossible to say. I think he’s continually discovered his talents are broader than he thought, beyond recruiting porn girls and selling get-rich-quick schemes; his reform may be genuine or self-interested, or both, and he may not know himself.

The Incest Economy

Since I’ve been in the Internet marketing game for 20+ years, I recognize Tate’s type. He’s part of what I call the “incest economy,” people who promote self-improvement and get-rich-quick schemes whose only real claims to success are promoting get-rich-quick type content. They exploit a niche market of “wannapreneurs” who flit from guru to guru almost as a form of entertainment. This type of “entrepreneurship” is radically different from that of serving real customers with real products.

Those who enroll in Tate’s courses are quickly told their best bet to get rich is to repackage Tate’s social media content to promote Tate’s courses as an affiliate. The whole game is exploiting people’s hopes and fears to sell promotional content in an infinite loop, all spun up by a charismatic person with unique talents that aren’t replicable by his customer base. Given Tate’s admissions of exploiting men through the webcam business, it’s likely he knows exactly what he’s doing.

Tate’s Opportunity

Tate’s opening for his commentary is the general societal taboo on offering young men useful advice. The church is busy telling young men that godliness is sexy, and Tate is telling them (in his more reasonable content) to work out, work hard, and be successful, so they can actually be respected by the young women they hope to attract. Unlike women, men’s value is conditional. He speaks truth when he tells young men to expect no compassion or handouts from anyone, that they will only be respected when they accomplish something, and being nice little boys gets them nothing, since our society no longer honors responsible male behavior.

Tate’s more aggressive content, however, can mislead young men from good families. Ghetto gender dynamics are very different from those of the largely monogamous, shrinking middle class. The underclass follows a distinct pattern of low paternal investment and abandonment, which rewards men for being hyper-aggressive and creates women who are attracted to the same. I have no doubt that much of Tate’s shocking behavior towards these women was indeed consensual, at least in arrears, as he and some of his purported victims claim.

As the reformed player Tucker Max once said, much of the whole “pick-up artist” scene is just the consequence of broken homes: men with mommy issues interacting with women with daddy issues. Unfortunately, this type of advice can be over-the-top for young men who wish to follow the monogamous pattern successfully. The type of women who are the best bets for marriage typically have good relationships with their fathers. Yes, young men should be strong and be accomplished, but going around acting like a thug is not attractive to a woman with a functional paternal relationship.

Prole Culture

This is confusing for young men because of the general prole flavor of our society. There’s no longer a virtuous upper class, for example, limiting the influence of street culture and its aesthetic of braggadocio, crass displays of wealth and criminal associations, rhythmic melodic minimalism, and infantile behavior (including literal baby talk such as going around calling oneself ridiculous names like “Lil Baby” or “Juice WRLD”, intentionally using bad grammar, and dressing in oversized clothes like a toddler). It is, however, an unapologetically aggressive caricature of manhood. In a generally feminized society, it’s about the only masculine cultural product that’s tolerated.

The aesthetic itself, not just the specific content, promotes high time preference and irresponsible behavior. These are not cultural values that, in the long term, lead to a prosperous, advanced society. It’s confusing to young people because a very small subset of this culture becomes extremely famous and wealthy, even if its median member lives in poverty despite taking severe criminal risks. Individuals that used to be dismissed as “trashy” or “slimy” — adjectives that would apply to Tate and most of the celebrity universe — are tolerated because middle class people know that “intolerance of intolerance is the only intolerance tolerated.” Many self-censor even in the privacy of their homes.

Conservatives in particular are pathetic in their attempts to be validated by this culture. Any degenerate who puts on a MAGA hat is promoted as an exemplar for the cause. Boys then see who we admire and promote as a culture, and that means more than what we say about our values.

Because we tolerate this influence on pop culture, an unseemly person like Tate, promoting his “Pimpin’ Hoes Degree,” is simply tapping into pre-existing underclass language and values that have saturated much of our society.

Boys Buy What Tate Is Selling

Boys are smarter than we think, and quickly figure out the reality of being a man, which is that the worst thing you can be is weak. While the church is busy moralizing and often watering down boys’ God-given drive for dominion, Tate provides a strong masculine role model. But Tate’s primitive, polygamous tribal masculinity is itself weak, historically speaking.

The entire history of Western Civilization is of highly religious, monogamous men forming themselves into more deadly, organized, and cohesive economic and military units that easily defeat more primitive and flamboyant warrior cultures, taking their underutilized land and resources. The Western ideal of manhood is not a ridiculous peacock like Tate, but rather the strong, silent type who shows rather than tells his competence in a band of brothers mightier as a unit than as attention-seeking individuals. But our men are no longer allowed to take pride in the legitimate strength of their civilization but must feel guilty for it and pay taxes to subsidize the dysfunctional cultures they once conquered.

Tate also calls out the hypocrisy of our society in demanding young men behave according to the old standards while punishing them when they do so. According to Tate, young men who work hard in school, get a job, and become a “wagie” are really “brokies” who today often can’t afford homes or the basic necessities of life, thanks to elites who print money and use the Cantillion effect to prop up debt bubbles and steal from future generations.

When young men complain, complacent old guys who could afford a used car and college tuition with summer jobs mock them as whiners. Those who marry and have children can have those children and their livelihoods taken from them through no-fault divorce, alimony, and child support laws that heavily favor women.

Tate tells men the marriage marketplace is broken, so why take the bait? Everyone’s expectations of a partner are shot to the moon due to the panopticon of social media. The hot girls are crazy, and the cute ones think 80% of men are “below average” in attractiveness. In the secular world and value system, Tate’s advice to young men to get swole, get rich, or die trying, and avoid commitment, is not entirely wrong.

Tate’s Marketing Genius

Young men would do well to remember that Tate is first and foremost a skilled marketer and manipulator. Every piece of content is just part of the funnel to manipulate users into parting with cash. As someone who’s spent millions on online marketing profitably, let me explain how this works. A marketing funnel operates according to a sequence called AIDA - attention, interest, desire, and action. Tate says a variety of provocative and often directionally true things to generate attention. Some people see this and become interested in seeing more of his content.

There is, however, a huge chasm between a prospect who is merely interested in something and one who will take action by giving the marketer money. The whole operation turns on desire, which is maximally effective when the marketer irritates the psyche of the prospect by exaggerating both the scope of the problem the product solves and the benefits the product will provide. Many who imbibe his message end up giving in to despair and nihilism, to the point of general hostility towards women, including the remnant, largely found in the church, who are still capable of forming stable, monogamous relationships in today’s cultural environment. To get the audience to part with money, Tate must take prospects beyond general truths to where his products provide the only solution.

Tate’s whole schtick with the mansion and exotic cars is part of this. He owns (or rents) that stuff because they are promotional expenses for him. It’s not unlike people involved in pyramid schemes, who are told to spend a substantial part of their earnings on the visual trappings of wealth to attract more people into the scheme.

I once knew a guy like this, in a network marketing company, who had a ski lake and Dodge Viper to “advertise” the lifestyle while living in a 2,000 square foot, three bedroom house. The living area and kitchen were finished out in grand style with high ceilings and an indoor playground for kids, for use while selling prospects, but the rest of the house was a builder-grade starter home.

In Tate’s case, given his incentives, he’s almost certainly not as successful as he portrays himself to be. One investigative report revealed:

Go around the side and you realise Tate’s home is less Hollywood hideaway and more like a rundown meat factory. Faux brickwork, dripping gutters, dark windows. There’s a pile of rubble where you’d expect the garden to be, and a broken Ikea lamp. Given the billionaire hype, and his regular postings about his private jets, ocean-going yachts, and his fleet of supercars, Tate’s residence is somewhat underwhelming.

There are plenty of exclusive neighbourhoods in Bucharest, crammed with beautiful villas. They’re equipped with tennis courts and pool houses and staff quarters, and they cost millions. If Tate really has the wealth he says he does, why doesn’t he live in Primaverii (Ceaușescu’s former neighbourhood), Kiselev, or Dorobanti? His followers say he needs to be “in hiding” in his weird lair to keep a low profile. But there are plenty of mafiosi in Bucharest who live in smart neighbourhoods and keep a low profile by not blurting out their every move on the internet or acting like “gangsters”.

A nice personal residence is perhaps the highest use of wealth since it’s where you spend most of your time. If Tate does not live in the poshest neighborhoods of relatively impoverished Romania, that says a lot.

Thus, Tate exaggerates both the problem and the results of his solution to sell products. But his approach isn’t scalable or particularly effective for most people.

If you’re willing to live outside of the major metros, a much more reliable way to become a “Top G” is to enter a licensed profession. An established dentist in a mid-size city can pull $300,000 a year working three and half days a week. That’s plenty of time and money to work out and drive an exotic car, without the lottery-ticket-type payoffs and hassle of Internet fame.

Dentists and other professionals do well because they control the accreditation and licensing boards, protecting the public, but also limiting competition and protecting their margins. If anyone outside of their “cartel” tries to compete with them, the state will send men with guns to arrest their unlicensed competitor. The upper middle class is much more gangsta than an Internet clown like Tate when you think about it.

The Societal Ecology of Andrew Tate

Many morally sensitive people are sickened by the rise of Andrew Tate. How did he gain his influence? The answer is complex and multifactorial but boils down to the fact that Western culture today has a form of civilizational HIV that makes it unable to defend itself from interlopers.

Tate and his father are what biologists called “r-strategists” in reproduction (Tate, unmarried, admits to having several children by different mothers). An r-strategist biologically seeks to have as much sex as possible as early as possible, producing many offspring who are largely left to fend for themselves. K-strategists, who build advanced civilizations, have later sexual development, bear children in stable marriages, and invest more in them. R-strategies arise in mild ecologies where the primary threat is unpredictable sexual and physical competition from other males. K-strategies arise in predictably harsh ecologies where nature is the primary limitation to survival.

In ancient Finland, for example, a male who fathered and abandoned a bunch of children would be literally fruitless, as all of those children would starve in the winters without his provision of meat from hunting or stored calories from intensive agriculture. Over time, the genes that predispose and cultural practices that lead to short-term mating behavior would be eliminated. This, and the cultural influence of Christianity, led to vast increases in male self-control, the type of men who would initiate the Industrial Revolution.

Ironically, the Industrial Revolution created the excess of resources that supports the vast welfare states that then enabled the parasitic behaviors and proliferation of underclass males like Tate.

Monogamy Is Fragile

I rank sexual economies not by morality (which mostly applies to individuals, not societies) but by civilizational strength*, in ascending order:

1. Disorganized polygamy

2. Organized polygamy

3. Organized monogamy

* That this ranking corresponds to morality is not an accident, given the Reformed principle that God gives us laws that are normatively for our good, not as arbitrary rules of holiness.

Tate now claims to be a different man, but the values he expressed earlier were most certainly disorganized polygamy. And unless we believe the man is celibate, as he remains unmarried, he is still personally a disorganized polygamist.

As we ascend in strength, we also ascend in complexity and thus fragility. An assault rifle is both more powerful and more fragile than a sword, for example. This fragility demands control mechanisms to ensure the proper working order of the overall system.

Western, monogamous societies once had but have now lost these control mechanisms. Monogamy exists as a sort of cartel. More men get wives and families, which makes society more cohesive and stronger than when only a few men horde all the women. Since individual men and women will have incentives to cheat the cartel, monogamous societies must sanction those who break from the arrangement.

Historically, Western societies have managed organized polygamists by strong taboos against illegitimate children (hence the term “bastard”), strictly policing access to the opposite sex among respectable families (e.g. chaperones), and restricting marital rights and inheritance to only legal wives and legitimate children. This was at best partially successful throughout history, but it usually limited sexually incontinent men of means to a wife and a mistress.

This is demonstrated by the outliers in our history, such as King Henry VIII. Unlike a Chinese emperor or Islamic sultan, who could marry as many women as they wished, Henry had to initiate a political and religious revolution just to divorce his first wife!

Sexual Regulation

America, for better or worse, has always been a religiously tolerant country, allowing the proliferation of all sorts of kooky sects. The singular instance of major, organized religious violence in American history was the persecution of the early Mormons, who in their attempt to introduce organized polygamy were forced to emigrate to the Utah territory.

Something in our then-functional civilizational immune system was triggered, for we knew if the Mormons won their battle to be legally tolerated as polygamists, the wheels would come off our society as more and more men would be tempted to add a wife or two, and more women would be tempted to be a powerful man’s second wife than “settle” for her monogamous equal. We would have devolved into a less complex and weaker sexual economy.

But the strongest reactions historically have been to underclass manifestations of disorganized polygamy. The “shotgun wedding” was no joke, but a very real thing. Even in strait-laced Puritan New England in the 1700s, demographers examined marriage and birth records and determined that as many as 20% of brides were pregnant at their weddings, given how many couples delivered perfectly healthy babies 7-8 months after marriage. Monogamy had always been fragile and enforced on wayward men by a woman’s male relatives, and there was tolerance if marriage happened before a child’s birth. No harm, no foul, and everyone moved on, but marriage was the bottom line.

We see this depicted in Pride and Prejudice. Foolish Lydia had run off with Wickham, thinking she would elope, but ended up shacking up with him in London. Now what was expected here is that Mr. Bennett would threaten Wickham with his life to marry her to protect his family’s reputation, as his other four daughters would no longer be able to marry respectably if their sister was unchaste. Mr. Bennett, however, with his old age and entailed estate, could or would not do this, and so Mr. Darcy stepped in to bribe Wickham to do the right thing and save Elizabeth’s honor, and his ability to marry her as well.

I believe that implied in this was Darcy’s willingness to kill Wickham if he didn’t comply (esp. given their history), and no jury of Mr. Darcy’s peers would have seen anything wrong with it. Thus a strong monogamous society in its organic, pre-modern form a) considered any deviation from this norm to require a total ostracizing of the offending family from respectable society, and b) expected that a family of honor would use extralegal violence to protect their moral reputation.

In the 1800s, the post-Great-Awakening theologians made very strong arguments that this blood-honor culture was un-Christian and that no personal offense against a family justified violence outside the legal system. I’m not sure they were correct. Sex is such a powerful force that its regulation may be so fundamental that it pre-exists the organized law, which itself is only truly possible in a monogamous society that depends on extralegal violence for its maintenance.

Men of the time felt very strongly that any sexual offense was of such a nature that to endure the humiliation of due process for the offender was to emasculate oneself, even if that meant risking imprisonment or death. Such offenses demanded immediate and violent retribution, as the rogue males who committed them were considered animals without rights.

Such practices kept monogamy from becoming overly domesticated, and dare I say, boring and unattractive. Women want to know that their man is capable of violence, that there are situations where he might kill outside the formal bounds of the law. When monogamous men are perfectly domesticated, thugs, rakes, and rogues become relatively more attractive. Only active and situationally aggressive Darcys, not passive Mr. Bennets, can suppress the Wickhams.

Some of this honor culture survived to within living memory. When I was a child in Louisiana, Gary Plauche’ famously killed his son’s abuser on live television at the Baton Rouge airport. He was considered a folk hero; local elected prosecutors knew they would inflame the public and possibly lose a court case, so he was let off with 5 years’ probation.

The problem with Christian moralists is that they want people to act virtuously in an environment where the necessary incentives and punishments for organized monogamy have largely disappeared. If any of the fathers or brothers of women Tate manipulated* and/or abused had followed Gary Plauche’s example, we wouldn’t be talking about him.

* Tate insists that his activities were consensual. This wouldn’t have mattered to the old patriarchy. Lydia Bennet’s “consent” in running off with Wickham was simply immaterial to what was necessary to be done.

Most of Tate’s earlier activities occurred in the UK, where the population has become so domesticated that Muslim grooming gangs’ abuse of middle school girls was ignored and covered up by the authorities. Had a different incentive structure existed, Tate likely would have been smart enough to choose a different field for his entrepreneurial impulses.

Tate, like a lot of fatherless young men, was looking for society’s real boundaries. He found they didn’t exist, and behaved accordingly. His conversion to Islam, he has said, was largely driven by the observed weakness of Christians, who tolerate open blasphemy of their faith while Muslims demand respect upon pain of violence for their prophet. Weakness invites contempt.

Pick Your Patriarchy

Feminism in the West created a cultural vacuum. Just as there is no such thing as an irreligious society, there is no such thing as a non-patriarchal society, because not all men can be tamed. If you demand liberation from Fitzwilliam Darcy, you’re going to get Andrew Tate.

I would remind young Western men that the current system is unstable and will not continue indefinitely. Ultimately, strength wins, and those who can maintain structured monogamy will eventually rule over those who do not, and many of the old ways, no doubt in different forms, will come back to place our civilization on a sustainable path.

The truth is that despite what the Tates of the world claim, it is possible to have a successful marriage, support your family in comfort, and send forth progeny into a future they will inherit by simply showing up. And since fixing our civilization is a multi-generational project, there is no alternative. To abandon the field because it’s difficult is, from a multi-generational perspective, cowardice equivalent to suicide.

Be a man with a mission to make a mark on the world. Yes, lead with kindness, but lead. You should probably take some of Tate’s more useful advice to discipline yourself, lift weights, and be the sort of man people will naturally respect. But avoid the nihilism, don’t center your life philosophy around manipulators on social media, and get about God’s work of multiplying and taking dominion over this glorious creation He’s given us.