The demonic charisma of Andrew Tate
Plus links and recommendations
‘I look up, admiringly, at Trump Tower, tall, proudly gleaming in the late afternoon sunlight.’ - Patrick Bateman, American Psycho.
The BBC has done a sit-down interview with Andrew Tate in the latter’s bunker in Romania where he is under house arrest. I think the interview was a mistake on the part of the corporation. The journalist, Lucy Williamson, holds her ground well enough in the face of Tate’s characteristic bombast and bluster. However, as is frequently the case in such contests, it isn’t the side with facts and logic in its corner that necessarily prevails. Instead, many viewers will come away unconsciously accepting the presuppositions of whoever sounds the most certain in what they are saying. Which is Tate. It’s nearly always Tate.
Conviction is a force multiplier. As is charisma, which can be difficult to distinguish from narcissism. These characteristics can easily fool a person into believing there must be a brilliance behind the absolute certainty, that the luminosity must derive from something virtuous. Tate is fighting on this terrain, while his critics continue to operate in the realm of facts and logic⟨™⟩.
Donald Trump is a master at this form of verbal combat: watch how the former - and perhaps future? - president doesn’t miss a beat when it comes to holding his frame - i.e., having his presuppositions accepted by the audience, no matter how vulgar the content.
A lot of the ‘red pill’ manosphere guys walk around trying to impose their will on reality like this, but their contrived and cartoonish ‘alpha male’ personas wind up turning them into objects of mirth. Few are as unintentionally funny as those who are determined to take themselves dead seriously.
Tate doesn’t need to ham it up because he knows instinctively how to impose his frame on others. What he says is frequently ridiculous - but his young fans are less interested in the sounds coming from his mouth than in the status cues on display.
After brushing up against fame for nearly a decade, Andrew Tate worked out that in order to really blow up he would need to feed the outrage machine. The YouTube prophet Jordan Peterson blazed a trail like this back in 2018, birthing dozens of ‘how dare he say that!’-style op-eds in middlebrow newspapers after holding his ground with Cathy Newman. Moral panics confer notoriety which is a form of status, and status is everything - just as long as you hold your frame, which Peterson did skilfully in that notorious interview.
Today it is Tate who is gifted a large media platform from which to launch his countercultural tirades, which is what he wanted all along. Now, on the BBC, he proclaims his own genius, having become “the most important man in the world” off the back of liberal outrage. The BBC continues to indulge Tate’s desire for notoriety, sitting the influencer in front of a large audience for a one-note interrogation by yet another scandalised member of the liberal establishment (i.e. the Matrix).
The purpose of Tate’s lifestyle is to mine the world for validation. The Bugattis, the women and the houses serve his happiness only indirectly, as a way of provoking jealousy in other men. (Women’s admiration is worth less, because women are assumed to be worth less). Most men aren’t all that either. In common with the Nietzschean self-help culture he sits adjacent to, Tate has little time for men who aren’t willing to become supermen through sheer will. Life needs struggle and heroism; but the system needs slaves, baby! Young men seem particularly susceptible to this variant of supercilious elitism (delivered with demonic charisma) which takes pleasure in having ‘power over’ another.
Tate says countless implausible things to the BBC during his interview with the corporation. But then, in the eyes of his devotees, these are - relatively speaking - little lies compared to the big untruths churned out by the Matrix and the ‘legacy media’. Such cynicism is easily mistaken for cleverness. And as Hannah Arendt wrote somewhere in her enormous treatise on totalitarianism, people do not particularly object to being deceived - if they hold every statement to be a lie anyhow.
Other Links and Recommendations
The Allure of Inceldom: Why incels resist ascension. William Costello, Aporia.
State of American Men 2023: From Crisis and Confusion to Hope. Equimundo: Center for Masculinities and Social Justice.
The report found that fewer than half of Generation Z men believe feminism has made America a better place.
The Gamification of Romance. Commonweal Magazine. Matt McManus.
Podcasts
Conspiracies: The Secret Knowledge. BBC Radio 4.
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