Learn How to Resist the Egalitarian Evil, and Act as a Great Man

4 Books Every Young Man Ought Read

Sep 30, 2025

Welcome back, everyone, and thank you for reading! Today’s article is a bit different than normal, as the past few weeks have been filled with somewhat bleak news and articles. Particularly, I think my recent articles on the South Africanization of our cities and Civil War were relevant and useful, but somewhat depressing. So, I wanted to do a bit of a positive interlude, as it’s important to remember that despair is a sin for a reason. Further, I am extremely excited about the podcast guest for tomorrow, as he is one of my favorite history podcasters of all time, and as this article’s topic is a question he has asked and commented on before, I think it will be very relevant and well worth reading. So, all that’s to say, today’s article will hopefully be less draining than the past half-dozen or so have been, but be equally informative and useful as you and your loved ones develop your worldview.

Ours is a relatively bleak world.

The new architecture is tremendously ugly and dispiriting, as is the general slovenliness of most around us. The chances for adventure, particularly of the novel, “How I Found Livingstone” or White Rajahs of Sarawak kind, are seemingly slim. The Apollo missions were shut down to create global Zimbabwe. Meanwhile, centers of human excellence like Rhodesia were largely crushed and replaced by decay in the name of human equality, the cursed byword of our blighted era.

Then, of course, there are the more mundane matters. The Rust Belt is a travesty, the crime-ridden state of our neighborhoods disastrous, the DEI regime is stultifying, and even houses are wildly unaffordable for most, thanks largely to the depradations of our fiat system.

Born too late to explore the Earth, born too early to explore the stars, born just in time to get yelled at by a DEI commissar.

Once long-term crises and problems like the collapse of Total Fertility Rate (TFR), the massive growth of the now AI-enabled surveillance state, and our present world’s similarity to the pre-Civil War era are recognized and factored in as well, it’s easy to see why depression—and the all to common and even more disastrous sense of listlessness amongst the youth—is growing.

There are good things too, of course. SpaceX is a monumental leap forward, Erik Prince is making colonization via pacification great again,1 and the McKinleyesque nature of Trump’s tariffs might bring back American manufacturing. At the very least, some things are headed back in the right direction, though perhaps too slowly. Still, it’s a start.

But what is needed more than anything is a reinvigoration of our nation’s spirit. Of the Occident’s spirit. We need to recognize what led to our present disaster (largely state-enforced egalitarianism), while also noting that greatness can still be obtained.

Yes, obtaining a middling life of the sort parodied in Office Space is somewhat more difficult now than it used to be. However, that doesn’t mean that one can’t still leave their mark, that all is for nought, or that sliding into the abyss of Hikikomori2 is all one can do. Nor should a life of ease via credentials necessarily be what is striven towards: is accomplishment and self-reliance not better than a life of serfdom? That spark can and should still be lit, particularly for young men.

Why? Well, the future belongs to those who show up, and our young men ought to show up with the right ideas in mind. They are the ones who will accomplish most of whatever happens, and are the demographic that can stand up to the somewhat bleak future of which we’re staring down the barrel.

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So, how ought they be influenced? Fortunately, physical activity, from hiking and shooting to weightlifting and the fighting sports, is back in vogue. Not with everyone, of course. But with the sort of people who are the vanguard of the future. Similarly, there is a concerted movement tackling the matter of dressing better, producing beautiful art, and the like. It’s still in the early stages, but I’m hopeful; we’ve crossed the nadir of that matter of monstrosities, and can now start to recover what was lost. And young men are far more right-wing, politically, than most generations before them. Politically, the right mindset is there, though it needs to be channeled.

That leaves the matter of spiritedness. Of thumos.3 Of escaping the present trend of slouching toward nothingness because of the false but self-reinforcing belief that nothing can be accomplished and thus it shouldn’t be attempted in the first place. That attitude must be overridden, and I think the best way to do so is with biographies of great men.

This is something many of America’s great men recognized. Washington and Hamilton read Plutarch’s Lives voraciously as young men, knowing the lessons within it would propel them onward and be the keys to their future success. Ben Franklin poured what resources he could, while still a penurious young man, into developing a proper library with the great biographies in it. Sir James Brooke would have been nothing other than a drunken squire without his reading about Stamford Raffles…but with that knowledge in hand, he accomplished what no other European ever did. Andrew Carnegie and James Hill spent what meager resources they had as impoverished young men to read the biographies of great men, whether of ages past or their times.

On and on the examples could go. Whether it was Caesar studying Alexander and weeping about his relative paucity of accomplishment or Washington building himself into the embodiment of stern Roman republicanism in the mold of men whose lives about which he had read so many times, inspiration from the great lives of others inspired those whose accomplishments we now hold in awe.

Much else was necessary, of course, from developing charisma to developing the spirit that enables the taking of great steps, but the spark was lit by knowing that other men had done great things and their footsteps could be followed. But reading about the lives of the greats—an act which requires knowing about which greats one should read—that was often the spark that turned talent, however large or small, into something greater.

What books then, ought a young man of our era read? To keep it limited, what four volumes would be the best place to start? Such is what I’ll discuss below, giving both my recommendations and my explanation of why it is relevant.

Washington by Douglas Southall Freeman

The greatest historian of the antebellum South is Douglas Southall Freeman.4 One of the Old Dominion’s last sons of greatness, he memorialized the lives of George Washington, Robert E Lee, and Lee’s greatest subordinates in the Army of Northern Virginia. His prose is suberb, his telling of oft-repeated stories delightful, and the spirit of his books invigorating even when the endings are tragic.

Of the one-volume abridgements of his works (his full biography of Washington is seven volumes, that of Lee is four, and Lee’s Lieutenants is three), by far the best—and most relevant, in our age—is Washington, a condensed telling of that republican titan’s life.

What makes Freeman’s telling so delightful and important is that he doesn’t just articulate Washington’s exploits, but rather shows how Washington got there.

Starting with the origins of the Washington family in the New World, he describes step by step how the family built its wealth and became one of importance and prominence. Similarly, he describes in warm detail how George Washington built himself into a man of particular note, learning skills, manners, forms of dress, and how to profitably farm and trade as a great planter of Virginia.

In so doing, Freeman shows how Washington was a man always at the forefront who developed his personal strengths so that he could use them to build the life he wanted.

He learned to be a surveyor, which meant he not only knew the best real estate opportunities on the frontier (and profitted handsomely from them, building up his fortune) but knew what Indian tribes existed in it, what natural conditions would make military movement difficult, what areas were conducive to defendable settlement, and so on. Similarly, he grasped sooner than others that the cash crops of the past were no longer profitable for the great planters thanks to changing economic arrangements and conditions…so he studied his property deeply, leapt into scientific agriculture, and focused on the crops that gave him local trade power and an ability to profit. This meant he had the resources to serve in a dignified, rather than dishonorable and money-grubbing, way once he entered the service stage of life.

He cultivated himself like he cultivated his plantations, and so was a young man that the local men of greater wealth and power, particularly the Fairfaxes, were happy to tutor and promote. Through that personal cultivation, he developed the relationships with tenants and yeomen that made him politically powerful, the relationships with the gentry that made him politically effective, and the general aura that made him a military leader to whom first the British and later the Congress turned despite his many failures as a commander. He could lead better than any other, even if he was no astounding genius as a general.

Similarly, his early investments in his personal character are what helped him guide the republic to success. Had he behaved like a self-interested rascal in the manner of Aaron Burr, or even an honorable but overly passionate politician like Alexander Hamilton, America would be a very different place. It might not even have survived. But Washington was the man of the hour, and had developed himself to the point that even George III called him the greatest man in the world.5 Washington staved off egalitarian radicalism during and after the Revolution, ensured the republican political form survived, and built our country into something no other man could. He really was a man of the Classical Age brought to life in the moment when such a man was most needed.

Freeman shows all of that better than any other author. He combines painstaking research and deep levels of detail with clever and well-crafted storytelling that makes the book a pleasure to read, and through it shows how Washington built himself into the greatest man our country has seen.

All of that is most useful at this juncture. Like Washington’s beloved Virginia in the 1760s and 70s, we are marching toward a new world, and need to learn to balance the loyalties and benefits of past systems with the exigencies of the present and great need for reform. Further, to manage that at all well, we need men like Washington—those who have cultivated themselves and their character, and can be trusted to conduct themselves honorably, seriously, and thoughtfully rather than emotionally or ideologically—and who have the political power (local and otherwise) bestowed upon them by durable wealth, relationships, and resources to make their opinions count.

That is a specific type of person, and it is one we must build as we struggle to demolish the rottenness of the old world while keeping the best parts of it. Socialism, oligarchy, and mob rule are all awful and must be avoided, the needle of societal reform threaded with considerable skill. Washington shows how to do that, and reading about his life is reading about how such things can be done and how the men who do them can be built. That makes it invaluable, and Freeman’s delightful telling of it is all the better.

From Third World to First by Lee Kuan Yew

It is no secret that our world is slipping from First World to Third. The roads are pothole-ridden, the cities and schools war zones, the government corrupt, and the citizenry generally unvirtuous. Whereas we were once defined by magnificent accomplishments that brought lasting benefits and much honor—whether the Transcontinental or Apollo, the Panama Canal or the Hoover Dam—now we struggle to even build train tracks in California,6 much less make it back to the stars.

But that needn’t be the case. All of those problems can be fixed. They can even be fixed reasonably easily.

Such is what the imitable Lee Kuan Yew (LKY) shows in his fabulous From Third World to First, a telling of how he made Singapore into the incredibly prosperous haven of old Western values in Southeast Asia that it is. What it took was pragmatism and honesty, the opposites of ideological posturing.

When LKY took over, Singapore was a swampy slum of a city-state that faced the predations of its neighbors as the British pushed away what remained of their once-great empire. Shantytown-style housing dominated, the river was a viscous mess filled with foul-smelling pollution, pigs roamed in what streets there were, and few jobs of any sort existed. Crime was rife, communism ascendant, juries unreliable, and unions a major stumbling block in the way of any sort of achievement.

LKY was neither dismayed nor despondent. After examining the issues critically and deciding on what must be done, he dealt with each issue. The corrupt jury system was done away with and replaced by a fair, uncorrupted judiciary. The unions and communists were crushed. The streets were swept clean, new infrastructure built, and the behaviors that had made the city filthy—from public urination to letting farm animals prowl—outlawed, with the bans upon them strictly enforced. He courted British investment and American companies, built low-value local industries and stimulated high-tech advancements in any way he could. Shipyards were built, oiling stations constructed, entire industries—from industrial chemicals and breweries to semiconductors and modern, Western-style banking—built from the ground up, in just a few years.

Thanks to LKY Singapore went from being a muddy backwater to one of the most important countries in Asia, with a commensurately valuable economy and real estate sector, in just a generation. In every sense of the term, it went from being a third-world hellhole to a first-world (relative) paradise.

This is the tale of how he did it, and it is immensely inspiring. Our cities needn’t be the way they are, dominated by welfare-addicted leeches and rampant criminality. Our industrial sector needn’t be decaying, our unions needn’t be destroying great companies or leeching off the public, and communism can just be crushed.

That’s not to say solving those problems is necessarily easy—obliterating the teachers’ unions, enforcing laws against communist agitation, and demanding companies invest domestically while blocking unions from hamstringing them would take immense amounts of willpower and political capital. But it can be done. Petty criminals can just be beaten with canes, and serious ones hanged. When the problems are viewed for what they are, when the issues are honestly reckoned with, they can just be solved. Doing so requires only will, not complex solutions or exotic planning.

So, while the bleakness of present conditions can be depressing, the cure to that depression is the sort of attitude and plan outlined by LKY in From Third World to First: they just need to be taken seriously, and the obvious solutions to them, however harsh, must be engaged in. The decline isn’t necessarily inexorable or permanent, and that is a wonderful and tremendously inspiring thing to learn.

Most of our present problems, from the issue of crime-ridden cities to the predicament of Social Security’s trust fund looking increasingly rocky, could be fixed, if only we develop the will to deal with them. LKY had that will, as did Washington. But glimpsing the fact that those issues and all the others like them can be corrected with only will and prudence, that is the first step, and knowing it exists is quite important and powerful.

The Great Betrayal by Ian Douglas Smith

Longtime readers of this publication know I love The Great Betrayal, as it gets to the heart of what I often write about: egalitarianism and its discontents, namely the way it is inflicted upon us.

The simple fact is that Rhodesia was destroyed on the basis of a lie. That lie, one deeply believed by most in the “free” world and professed by the leadership of the communist world, is that an arrangement is only moral if equality is its basis. In the eyes of such people, it is not outcomes that matter. It is not that excellence is what one ought strive toward. It is not even that a certain “oppressed” class must be benefited.

It is, rather, that equality is the most moral thing, and must be forced upon any alternative system that does not profess it to be the ultimate good.

Hence why Rhodesia was destroyed. Before the Western and Communist worlds united to inflict Mugabe and his egalitarian race communism upon the country, Rhodesia was a prosperous place. Its agriculture was internationally renowned. Living conditions were some of the best on the continent for whites and certainly the best on the continent for blacks. Its people were largely happy, healthy, and committed to the difficult but vitally important business of settling a nearly virgin land. The average Rhodesian was comparatively well-educated, spent a great deal of time in the great outdoors, and had the opportunity for tremendous continued prosperity. It was, in short, a land of excellence, and that excellence made it the Breadbasket of Africa.

Then came Mugabe, and his backers in East and West alike. Jimmy Carter, Andy Young, Harold Wilson, the Communist Chinese, and the North Koreans all united to force Mugabe upon the country because Rhodesia’s system of voting—one that essentially allowed only property owners to vote in national elections—was deemed unfair and unequal. Rhodesia needed “equality” and “democracy,” and so it got Mugabe. He genocided the (Soviet-backed) Ndebele tribe, ethnically cleansed the whites from the country, stole their once-incredibly productive farmland, and turned the former Breadbasket of Africa into a starving hellhole.

Ian Smith shows exactly how that happened. He describes how the dishonorable British strung him along to help the communists, how the South Africans betrayed Rhodesia in its hour of need because of American pressure, how the communist terrorists inflicted horrible suffering upon the white and black Rhodesian population, and how the Mugabe government turned into a dictatorship that was aided and abetted by the British as it broke every promise it ever made.

What’s more, Smith tells that tale from his own eyes, as the Prime Minister of the Republic of Rhodesia. That is incredibly important, as he is the closest the modern world has come to a man of George Washington’s stature. He was a Spitfire pilot war hero renowned for his bravery, a great Rhodesian tobacco planter and cattle rancher, and a man who was recognized by all who met him as an impeccably perfect gentleman in the old school; his character, dignity, and bearing were unvarnished and peerless.

That is the man who represented a country that was similarly characterized by its gentlemanly way of life, its excellence, and its remaining “more British than the British” in a world gone mad. And yet both he and it were betrayed by all—other than Portuguese Prime Minister António de Oliveira Salazar—on whom they tried to rely or with whom they tried to negotiate. The world’s quest for equality was, apparently, an end that justified any means, and so Rhodesia was destroyed and replaced by a hellhole.

Such is what makes The Great Betrayal unbearably heart-rending to read, but also quite important.

It is the book that perfectly shows and characterizes who our enemies are and what their goals are. If you wish to live in a civilized society instead of the Stone Age, to build with an eye toward excellence rather than equality, to achieve great things rather than rot in the fetid swamp of equity, the roadblock in your way is the same one that destroyed Rhodesia.

It is the belief that all men ought turn out equal, and if they do not do so naturally, as they never will, then the state must viciously and forcefully level them to make them so. That attitude and all who hold it must be destroyed, as any honest reading of The Great Betrayal will teach, for the alternative is Global Zimbabwe.7

Further, Ian Smith is the model of how one can act as a man of honor and dignity in modernity, how the model of Washington can be brought to life. Like Washington, he was always impeccably (though not vainly) attired, perfectly courteous, of unbending moral fiber, and brave without being foolhardy. He was, in short, patrician in all the best ways.

Such are the many lessons to be learnt from The Great Betrayal, the most important of which are the nature of our enemies, and applying the lessons of Washington to the modern day.

1913 by Charles Emmerson

Finally, it must be remembered for what we fight. Is the point of resisting the egalitarian blob mere fighting? No. It is for a better world, one that existed in the recent past and is one to which we could return.

Remember, barely a century ago, our world was one in which the art, architecture, and statuary were beautiful rather than physical manifestations of cosmic horrors. America had neither income tax nor death tax, and the government was funded by the same mechanism that developed our industry to the point of being the best in the world—the tariff. If you wanted to start a company, invent a new product or process, or build a new structure on your land, you could, largely without impediment. Innovation and industry thrived as beauty was cherished.

The same was true of Europe. While we today think of it as a land of stultifying bureaucratic tyranny, extortionate levels of taxation, Muslim rape gangs, and sloth-inducing welfare systems, it was once a land of not just high culture, but industrial and military preeminence. Stunningly beautiful buildings covered their cityscapes, peaceful streets full of well-dressed people were the rule rather than the exception, and all the exciting opportunities of empire radiated out from the great metropoles. Herbert Hoover made his fortune in Burma, Australia, and China thanks to a firm in London and education in California, for example,8 and he was far from unique.

And those colonies were exquisite in their own way. Africa was poor, but a land of increasingly excellent infrastructure and boundless economic opportunity, not to mention magnificent natural beauty and incredible game hunting opportunities; and, once the native armies like the Zulus had been defeated, it was relatively safe. South America too was a land of opportunity—Argentina was more prosperous, on a per capita basis, than America or Britain—and its cities were relatively safe, clean, and beautiful. The same applied in the Orient, whether in post-Meiji Japan, the developing Sarawak of the Brookes, opened China, or the Raj.

That’s not to say that world was perfect. It wasn’t; Barbara Tuchman covers as much quite well in The Proud Tower. But it did have its advantages, particularly to men with any sense of agency. If you hungered to make a fortune and were willing to use your talents, the opportunities to do so were boundless and often quite exciting. Plus, the cities were—unless you sought out crime—largely beautiful, safe, and clean. Disorder wasn’t tolerated, and the blight of modern art was still decades off.

Such was life during the Belle Époque and it must not be forgotten. An alternative to the slovenliness and squalor, indolence and bureaucratic tyranny, by which our age is defined does exist. In fact, it exists in the modern past, in the world that existed before the Great War. It shows, as my friend Black Horse put it, how “shabby and pathetic” our supposed wealth really is.

Such is what Emmerson covers in depth in his fabulous 1913: In Search of the World Before the Great War. He darts around the Old World, from London to Argentina, Paris to Winnipeg, showing what life was like before the tyranny, disorder, and careless shabiness of postmodernity descended upon us. Further, he does so while showing what the advantages of such a world are, both to those who just want to live a normal life free of ideological delusions and disorder, and for those who want something more exciting, adventurous, and noble.

Admittedly, it is not a book about a great man, in the manner of the others. But it is a book about a great world, the one that such men built. It shows what the point of the struggle is, why rejecting the lies of the egalitarians and instead living lives of rectitude and excellence is so important.

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Notable Mention: Plutarch’s Lives

Yes, yes, I said I’d limit this to four. And I have. But there’s one thing that should be noted, which is that pretty much every man of note you will read about read, when he was a young man, Plutarch’s Lives. That has gotten less true in the post-World War II era, as the quality of education has plummeted tremendously and fewer people are exposed to the classics, much less to multi-volume works like Plutarch.

But there is a reason that every Westerner who was notable before 1939 read Plutarch repeatedly as a young man: in covering all the great men of Classical Antiquity, from the titans of near-pre-history to Caesar, Plutarch provides a handbook for greatness. The importance of character, how one ought lead as a politician or general, how to be persuasive and influential…all of it is covered by Plutarch. He shows how those whose names we still remember thousands of years later lived, and what it was about their character and actions that made them immortal. Further, as the short biographies within his volumes cover kings and republicans, populists and patricians, there’s something in there for every situation.

There’s very little that’s similar between Tiberius Gracchus and Coriolanus, for example, yet both biographies are important in that they speak to what sort of character traits are called for when the spirit of the times has leaned too far in the populist or elitist direction, and what those who succeeded or failed did to combat it. It really is the master key for those who would be kings, or at least men of note. Hence why all the Founders read it repeatedly.

So Yes, You Really Need to Read These Books

Our civilization is certainly in a bad place, and much must be done to restore it. Our cities are becoming unliveable, our currency becoming valueless, our industrial sector hollowed out, and our politics ever more dire and existential.

But our ancestors faced such problems, and triumphed in the face of them. Charlotte might be in a bad way, but is it worse than the Indians Washington fought on the frontier? Not really. Our political scene is bad, but is it worse than the communist threat LKY faced? No. Our architecture and other forms of civilizational vitality are decayed…but the old forms remain, the remnants of the Belle Époque stand proud and can remind us of what we must recover.

Most of all, we must recover the spirt that let our ancestors to triumph in the face of what adversities they faced. Even when the situation was dire, they understood that they could act, and so long as the proper amount of will and talent was applied, could win.

Such is still true. Just look at SpaceX: Elon’s will, resources, and willingness to break the rules along the way put him in a position where he now controls America’s access to space and has untold leverage as a result. Unfortunately, that same amount of will wasn’t applied to the problem of government spending after a few months—but were it to be, the problem could be solved. All that is needed is the will to act and continue acting in the face of howling from those who profit from the disorder.

That spirit—along with a proper understanding of the manner in which it ought be applied—is what I hope reading these books helps accomplish. Yes, the world is full of buffoonish and cartoonishly evil DEI commissars who want to impede you from acting so that these problems metastisize into a terminal societal cancer. The anarchotyranny regime they have created makes resistance all the harder.

But the blight can be fought and defeated. LKY defeated it. Washington made a nation in his image. Ian Smith was defeated, in the end, but today remains a symbol of proud defiance of the race communist apparatchiks in the name of excellence. The world of 1913 was the result of centuries of intentional investment, effort, and building with the visions of great men and ancient lineages culminating in an incredible blossoming of Occidental civilization.

What that takes is not just vision and knowledge, but action. Let these works and the stories told within inspire you to follow in their footsteps, and act in a way that helps get us out of the present predicament.

Featured image credit: John Dillenbeck, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons

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