How to Patriarch

(This audio version of this article is also on Spotify, Apple, and most other podcast apps.)

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I’m getting high on oolong at 5:40am.

Before dawn, tea > coffee.

I got these leaves on a motorcycle trip through northern Thailand. Green rolling hills. Silken mist. Rumbling engine between my thighs.

My buddies and I found a weird little town on the Burmese border. The signs were in Mandarin. Street art with Taiwanese flags commemorated the good fight against the CCP.

Apparently in 1949, when the Kuomintang retreated to Taiwan, a band of guerrillas hung back in Burma. They ran independent ops against Mao until the Burmese government told them to get lost. Some took the flight to Taiwan. Other crossed the border to Thailand and settled down, creating a little anti-communist bastion in the mountains. The CIA indirectly supported their opium trade to fund the war against Communism.

Unleash Chiang.

The excursion was kind of a Dadchelor party with my friends. My daughter’s birth was 3 months away. Another guy on the trip was also expecting his first.

We were both frustrated at the lack of useful fatherhood advice.

Every subculture/ideology champions a certain stock character.

All the ones I found for fatherhood sucked:

Progressive Bumbling Manchild

Most new dad advice is coded for this trope—Incompetent dude with a backwards baseball hat and a baby strapped to his chest, whining about how “Being a grownup is hard” and “Us men are inherently idiots, but we try.”

I could feel my testosterone plummeting just from reading some of the book and podcast titles, so I turned to the opposite.

RedPill “Alpha” Senex

Authoritarian and bearded. Demands obedience without empathy. Often angry at the system.

This one appealed to my androgen receptors. But gaming it out I could see this approach was a great way to ensure my daughter would end up on OnlyFans.

Next.

New Age “Father-Brother”

Goes into the woods to pray to ancestors but freaks out of basic life responsibilities.

These guys appealed to my spirituality and belief in natural law. But as most new age stuff, it was all show. I even joined a new “Conscious Fathers” group. They spoke for two hours about the importance of keeping commitments. Then no one showed to the second meeting.

Next.

Blue Collar Martyr

The “good ole daddy” celebrated in country music. Keeps the wolves away and his nose on the grindstone. Puts himself last. Resigns to misery¹ so his kids could live a better life.

The one appealed the most. Got me into country music too.

But I realized that as noble as this trope seems, it actually reinforces a slave morality identity that I 1) don’t want to live, 2) don’t want to pass on to my son.

Sacrificing my soul for my kids survival, while better than the converse, actually does more for my ego than their ultimate well-being.

Fathers provide more than just materially. We provide a “spiritual” template for adult manhood.

Kids will hate the deadbeat dad who walked out. But they resent the weak unfulfilled father, no matter how much he sacrificed.

Kids are animals. They are closer to their nature, their true feelings.

Nature only cares about survival.

Animals feel contempt for incompetent males because they can’t protect the herd. The weak silverback must be replaced by a stronger one.

Kids instinctively feel contempt for a withering dad because their animal instincts know they can’t count him for security—physical or emotional.

(This has nothing to do with how much they love their father or consciously appreciate his sacrifice. If anything they will feel guilty about the contempt which contributes to teenage rebellion.)

Your kids deserve a father who is thriving. One who shows them that it’s possible to fulfill his responsibilities while loving life in the process. That’s what you really provide your children.

If I don’t want it for my son, I shouldn’t want it for me either.

Next.

With no role modelz in modernity, I turned to history…

Fatherhood = Nationbuilding

This happened to be the year I did nothing but read history books.²

I found more useful fatherhood advice in war memoirs than dadslop.

A family is a micronation. Therefore, a father is a nationbuilder.

Aristotle, Confucius, Arius Didymus, and countless other thinkers analogized society to family.

Abstract social roles are extensions of concrete biological ones.

Hence it’s natural to have paternal feelings towards a leader, teacher, sports coach, chief, or king. “Founding Fathers” needs no explanation.

It can seem like a LARP to reverse the metaphor, per the quote above.

But in a era where men are so disconnected from their natures, this framing actually aligns us with our instinctive virtues:

Every man wants to conquer, win, accumulate resources, explore, expand, teach, guide, and build something that will outlast them.

What better reason than to do it for your family?

Over the years I’ve kept a running doc of fatherhood lessons from history.

More recently, I’ve noted the patterns highly successful families—

Success of family = How much members gain by being born into them.

It’s not just about tangible wealth or power (although that’s part of it). But also the intangible qualities they were born into.

I’ve focused on three families in particular that happened to have at least one member write a book covering their family’s ethos.

1. The Habsburgs (representing the historical)
2. The Kennedys (of American politics)
3. The Gracies (of modern martial arts)

Each book is obviously subjective and self-aggrandizing—Habsburg wrote his 7 Rules as a “love letter to his family”.

But because of the subjectivity, we can actually draw more practical fatherhood lessons from them.

What make Eduard Habsburg, RFK Jr., and Rickson Gracie, love their families so much, they had to write a book on what made them great?

Few of us will create literal empires, but all of us can use the dynasty concept as a true north for doing the best we can for our children.

As the cliched quote above the entrance of my middle school read,

If you can build a family structure using the same principles that allowed intergenerational success and well-being, then you probably were a pretty good dad.

I combed through these families find 5 common principles:

1. Found Family (National) Identity
2. Establish a House (Estate)
3. Unify Morality
4. Instill Traits and Skills
5. Expand the Empire

Here’s Principle #1.

It’s the foundation for everything.

And the most discarded in modern day.

I. Found Family (National) Identity

I once met a photographer and mom who said, “It’s important to have family photos up because it gives your kids a sense of belonging.”

“Of course someone who sells photos would say that,” I thought.

But then I thought about Mao. (Funny how he keeps coming up today.)

From 1966-76, the CCP mandated every household have a least one portrait of Mao Zedong in their household.

Obvious propaganda. Forced hero worship.³

But even if done begrudgingly, when you celebrate a person or person’s image, you turn them into a symbol of identity—a representation of your reference group.

When we identify with a symbol, we’re also identify with all other people who do the same.

You tell your subconscious, “these are my people.”

Marxists understood this. That’s why they had to devalue the family construct.

Hang a picture of Mao/Xi, and you identify with all other CCP.

Hang a picture of Jesus,⁴ and you identify with all other Christians.

Hang a picture of your favorite athlete, anime hero, or Teddy Roosevelt, and you identify with everyone else who does the same.

As intelligent social mammals, we use symbols to identify our herd

Benedict Anderson called nations Imagined Communities because they large groups not based on any real concrete ties, but imagined abstractions—ideas, symbols, labels.

Families are not imagined communities. They are real—based on shared genes, or at least shared upbringing.

You have objective ties to your family. All other identities (national, religious, political, etc.) are fictions.

But for most, family identity is pretty low in the identity stack.

Beyond sharing a last name, most people don’t consider family to be a functional identity at all. Many identify with their political allegiance or their employer over those with whom they share blood.

I’m not arguing we completely devolve into nepotism. (Even I would cringe if my child were to say, “I’m a Meepagala first, Libertarian second…”)

But if you want your kids to really benefit from being born into your family, the family as a identity should mean something beyond asking you for money.

Most don’t derive any value from their family identity.

But powerful families do…

An Identity is as strong as it’s Narrative

One thing about reading the books by Eduard Habsburg, RFK Jr, and Rickson Gracie is that they each love their families.

Gracie and Kennedy spent the first chapters of their books all about their family history.

In other words, telling the story of the family through multiple generations.

A story only makes sense if there’s a consistent protagonist. Without a consistent identity it’s just random events.

By having a narrative of a family, the family itself becomes like a character. It has an identity which is bigger and beyond any one individual.

Being left-handed is a meaningless identity because there’s no narrative utility other than sharing baseball gloves.

Whereas Democrat, Paleoconservative, Muslim, American, Vegan, Bitcoin Maximalist, Homeschooler, Anti-vaxx, Pro-vaxx, Flat-Earther, Swifty, CrossFitter, Tradwife, Feminist, Hustle Bro, Straight Edge, and Gluten-free are all meaningful because they promise a useful narrative.

Each of these labels comes with an explanation of past events— “See, this is why that happened.”

Which in theory helps its constituents prepare for the future— “Therefore do this.”

In other words, a mythology.

Mythologies define a group & its abilities

A group’s mythology is a type of map.

It’s a narrative of the past which can be used to guide a desired future.

The better it makes meaning of the past, the better people will believe it prepares them for the future.

Judaism, for example, has a particularly strong mythology. It’s helped the its tribe persevere through various hardship over millennia.

Once upon a time, family was everyone’s primary identity.

Your blood kin were the only people you could count on to have your back.

So your family’s story was the only one that mattered.

Long before hero worship was a thing, people only employed ancestor worship.

Like breeding dogs or horses, everyone assumed you inherited the traits and virtues of your ancestors.

So it paid to know and craft a good family mythology. The more heroic ancestors you had, the better your children could expect to be.

This alone gave a family’s members a strength they could draw on.

Create a Narrative of your past.

It might seem easy for a Habsburg or Rockefeller to celebrate their family mythos.

But every family mythology started somewhere.

The Kennedy’s don’t have much of a history before patriarch, Joseph. But he reinforced “what it means to be a Kennedy” to his children and grandchildren who’ve gone on to shape American politics.

The Gracie’s had an interesting family event in learning jiu-jitsu from Mitsuyo Maeda. But is was Carlos Gracie Sr. who actively turned that event into the origin story of the future Gracie Jiu Jitsu dynasty, and enrolled the rest of his family in this vision.

A good story doesn’t require everyone to be awesome. The best stories show a journey. Transformation. Think of your family as a hero in the Monomyth.

Even if your parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents objectively sucked, you still can tell the story of “Look how far we’ve come as a family.”

But as a general rule, it’s better to honor the past.

Tell stories of your own childhood.

Don’t complain about your parents or family if you can help it. Otherwise you’re teaching your kids to complain about you.

Let your kids believe they come from something great. Reverse cultural hero worship, and find ancestors worth worshipping, if only in their struggles if successes can’t be found.

Define family culture in the present

Today’s news is tomorrow’s mythology.

The more unique identifiers of a culture, the more defined it is.

That doesn’t mean make your family weird for the sake of it.

But anything that is “our thing” gives unique meaning to the identity today.

As mentioned earlier, artifacts like family photos a huge social signal to the limbic brain. They are the closest us peasants can have to a coat of arms.

Unique family rituals define the family culture in action—

The Kennedys had various domestic rituals such as summers at the Joseph’s estate, dinnertime debates, and obviously politics as the family business.

The Gracies has jiu-jitsu, but also the Gracie diet, various internal philosophies.

Any repeated event that is useful or fun (fun is a type of utility), will define family identity.

It clarifies the perimeter between Us and the external Them.

This isn’t about pushing away others. It’s about letting your kids feel that there is a strong a safe perimeter they can count on if ever necessary.

Be a Respectable Protagonist Yourself

In Monomyth terms, as a father you’re in the role of Mentor. Your kids are the Heroes. You’re here to guide them on their Journey.

But the best mentors are heroes who are just further on in the journey.

You may never be as objectively cool as their cultural heroes. And if you have a son in particular, he will have to go out and seek Secondary Father figures in order to complete his psychological journey.

But how you respond to life day to day will ultimately set the foundation from which they will spring.

Especially if/when your family’s culture conflicts with the external culture, how much your children maintain family identity will depend on how much their respect the closest representative—you.

All the Kennedy’s revere Joseph, JFK, RFK Sr.. All the Gracie’s revere Carlos, Helio, and others who carried on the family name.

The best thing you can do for your kids is thrive yourself. That will give them the template for their own journey that beats pure sacrifice or senex-plaining advice.

Think Intergenerationally

A good mythology makes sense of the past, give belonging in the present, with a vision for the future.

Envisioning the future is it’s own beast and will be covered in depth in Part 4.

But understand that as Head of a Household, you determine where the family is headed. You move the collective hero on it’s journey.

Carlos Gracie famously imagined creating an “army” of martial artists with his brother Helio. This led to the spread of Gracie/Brazilian Jiu Jitsu and modern MMA.

Joseph Kennedy set up the family estate such that his children could become leaders of the free world. (More on estates in Part 2 of this series.)

There’s a fine balance between ensuring a plan for the future vs. giving them freedom to become who they are. But all powerful families have an a vision of where they are going as a family.

Ultimately that’s what family mythology and family identity is about.

Modernity has devalued the meaning of family.

Nations have replaced clans.

Ideologies have replaced spirituality.

That’s why most fatherhood advice sucks.

Succeeding as a father means your kids benefitted from being born your family versus not.

That has to start with the family actually meaning something.