Ruminations of a Low-Status Male, Volume 1: Status-Lust and Self-Loathing Kindle Edition

In this brief treatise Nowicki delves deep into the reality of the male status system. He takes on this subject despite it being perhaps one of the most important, but least analyzed, aspects of the modern masculine psyche.

However, Nowicki does not use academic studies in psychology or anthropology in order to break down the masculine status system and how it affects the individual. Instead, Nowicki looks inward and tries to discover how being a low-status male himself has formed his life and his habits of thought. The results of this self-analysis are painful, yet profound. They are also heart-breaking and in the best of literary tradition.

I mostly enjoyed Nowicki's comparison of himself to his father. It seems that Nowicki has seen in his father a type of male that will inevitably be high-status, and he has seen in himself the type of make that will inevitably be measured as low-status. Nowicki suggests that "status" is not written into the genetic code nor does it really depend ultimately on one's wealth, but it is a matter of personality and how others perceive you and then elevate or demote you based on that perception. Make status can also be measured in the real world by success with women.

Nowicki's "Ruminations" has forced me to reassess the strategies I have used in my own life to deal with and refute the reality of the male status system. Since I was young enough to sense that a male status hierarchy exists, I have lived with the idea that I am "X" person. I based this on Paul Fussell' book "Class" where he writes it is best to endeavor to be in the "X" class, or a social class that is indefinable to the outer world; that doesn't communicate its status at all. I even developed a revisionist history about my high school friends and our clique based on this idea, believing that we constituted sort of an "X" class ourselves as we weren't necessarily high status, but we were not low status either. Nowicki's Ruminations has forced me to reassess that history and makes me wonder how status is actually conferred on men.

Nowicki continues to be one of the only classic literary and artistic voices identified with the American Alternative Right. It may confuse some that he rarely writes about race, but he always has his eye focused on power and modernity; and like the best in western literature, he attempts to look deep into the abyss of all those petty little everyday tyrannies of human nature that utopia falsely promises to eliminate, but which continue to afflict our souls and darken our minds.

A helpful voice in a time of silence.