If you’ll recall, a few weeks ago I wrote an article on how pulp fiction should be taught in schools as a method of getting young boys to read—and more importantly, teaching them that literature doesn’t have to only be about cutting their balls off with a lukewarm scalpel of guilt and shame. That much certainly is true, but more than just being ripping good yarns, pulp fiction can provide much wisdom for the young man, as well as the not-so-young man.

To what am I referring to, might you ask?

For starters, those following the dissident right may be aware of the recent controversy over David Reich’s book Who We Are And How We Got Here, and how recent research seems to validate the idea of Indo-European (or “Aryan” to use the antiquated term) volkerwanderung, conquest, and rapine in ancient days of barbarism, in marked contrast to the “pots not people” theories of primitive-yet-international trade and gentility that have been “goodthink” ever since the end of World War 2.

What makes this interesting (and what ties into the pulps) is that Robert Howard’s murky dreams of “The Sons of Aryas” conquering, striving and slaying, while obviously fantastical and in many ways inaccurate, are in some ways more accurate then the politically correct orthodoxy. And seeing as Mr. Howard based his writings off of what little was known in the 1920s and 1930s, it can be said that the anthropologists of those decades were closer to the mark than their modern, purple haired forebears—and they were more accurate in a time when the theory of continental drift was still controversial.

Some of the passages from Howard’s James Allison stories (one of his more obscure characters, but one I’ve always had some affection for will illustrate this):

While I lay at the doors of death there was a secession from the tribe. It was a peaceful secession, such as continually occurred and contributed greatly to the peopling of the world by yellow-haired tribes. Forty-five of the young men took themselves mates simultaneously and wandered off to found a clan of their own. There was no revolt; it was a racial custom which bore fruit in all the later ages, when tribes sprung from the same roots met, after centuries of separation, and cut one another’s throats with joyous abandon. The tendency of the Aryan and the pre-Aryan was always towards disunity, clans splitting off the main stem, and scattering.

It is highly simplified, but that seems vaguely similar to the anthropological idea of the spread of Indo-European language, and the oft brutal conflict between different nations that are genetically very similar to each other, yes?

That is not to say that all was savagery back then, either in the anthropological record or in the pages of pulp magazines—intermixing of tribes undoubtedly occurred just as much as bloodshed between them:

Yet there was occasionally a touch of individual mercy, and so it was in this fight. I had been occupied with a duel with an especially valiant enemy… A vagrant whim caused me to check the blow. I had enjoyed the fight, and I admired the adamantine quality of his skull. Our ferocity had awed them, and our sparing of Grom further impressed them. They could not understand leniency; evidently we valued them too cheaply to bother about killing one when he was in our power.

So peace was made with much pow-wow, and sworn to with many strange oaths and rituals. We swore only by Ymir, and an Æsir never broke that vow. But they swore by the elements, by the idol which sat in the fetish-hut where fires burned for ever and a withered crone slapped a leather-covered drum all night long, and by another being too terrible to be named.

Then we all sat around the fires and gnawed meat-bones, and drank a fiery concoction they brewed from wild grain, and the wonder is that the feast did not end in a general massacre; for that liquor had devils in it and made maggots writhe in our brains. But no harm came of our vast drunkenness, and thereafter we dwelled at peace with our .neighbours

Long periods of brutal violence, a whim of mercy, and a crude peace to be made. Seems a bit more realistic than the hippy-dippy stuff to me! But then again, unlike your average anthropologist, I’ve actually seen human nature at its best and worst.

Since we’re talking about my man Robert Howard, it’s worth pointing out another font of his wisdom. Namely that…for a suicidal weirdo with mommy issues, he had a pretty solid grasp of what attracts women to men:

“Look at me, Conan!” She threw wide her arms. “I am Belît, queen of the black coast. Oh, tiger of the North, you are cold as the snowy mountains which bred you. Take me and crush me with your fierce love! Go with me to the ends of the earth and the ends of the sea! I am a queen by fire and steel and slaughter–be thou my king!”

And what sort of man is Conan in the original stories?

“Well, last night in a tavern, a captain in the king’s guard offered violence to the sweetheart of a young soldier, who naturally ran him through. But it seems there is some cursed law against killing guardsmen, and the boy and his girl fled away. It was bruited about that I was seen with them, and so today I was haled into court, and a judge asked me where the lad had gone. I replied that since he was a friend of mine, I could not betray him. Then the court waxed wroth, and the judge talked a great deal about my duty to the state, and society, and other things I did not understand, and bade me tell where my friend had flown. By this time I was becoming wrathful myself, for I had explained my position.

“But I choked my ire and held my peace, and the judge squalled that I had shown contempt for the court, and that I should be hurled into a dungeon to rot until I betrayed my friend. So then, seeing they were all mad, I drew my sword and cleft the judge’s skull; then I cut my way out of the court, and seeing the high constable’s stallion tied near by, I rode for the wharfs, where I thought to find a ship bound for foreign parts.”

Seems to me to be an untamed, yet honorable and intelligent “bad boy”, the exact sort that women, whether in “an age undreamed of” or in 2018 can’t resist, and the sort of man that I like to think of myself as being and hope that all my readers aspire to be.

Robert Howard appears to be a legitimately more accurate anthropologist than most working in the field today (and that’ll certainly be a topic for a manthropology video sometime in the future). But he wasn’t the only one who gave such wisdom—leaning more towards the “honorable” side rather than the untamed side, Edgar Rice Burroughs’ John Carter certainly had his way with the ladies as well. And how could he not, if he could say shit like this and be able to back it up?

If I sometimes seem to take too great pride in my fighting ability, it must be remembered that fighting is my vocation. If your vocation be shoeing horses, or painting pictures, and you can do one or the other better than your fellows, then you are a fool if you are not proud of your ability. And so I am very proud that upon two planets no greater fighter has ever lived than John Carter, Prince of Helium.

Leaving behind the wisdom contained within the muscular virility of Howard and Burroughs, the always dour HP Lovecraft can give some extremely tough love (or should that be harsh truths) about the way the world works. Indeed, many on the dissident right seem to rally behind both his beautiful prose and his overarching theme of a harsh and unforgiving universe that ultimately doesn’t give a damn about humanity—and humanity being a species that can very easily slip back into a state of savagery:

The time would be easy to know, for then mankind would have become as the Great Old Ones; free and wild and beyond good and evil, with laws and morals thrown aside and all men shouting and killing and revelling in joy. Then the liberated Old Ones would teach them new ways to shout and kill and revel and enjoy themselves, and all the earth would flame with a holocaust of ecstasy and freedom. Meanwhile the cult, by appropriate rites, must keep alive the memory of those ancient ways and shadow forth the prophecy of their return.

I think that what I have given you here is a brief smattering of the wisdom of pulp, but I encourage you to learn much more, from all the great writers of the day, not just the famous ones—I cannot state enough that any of these stories chosen at random will be so much better than any fiction our “societal betters” approve of.

Just take note that the topic of Lovecraft and the lessons that can be learned from his writings is undoubtedly that will have to be come back to repeatedly. As I am one of those weirdos who will fight tooth and nail to defend his merits as a man and a writer (I occasionally refer to myself as a Lovecraft scholar because, hey, it’s not like there are actual academics that study him), perhaps I share a love of doomed, yet noble, dreams, a love that Mr. Lovecraft himself seemed to share:

And in the twilight, as the stars came out one by one and the moon cast on the marsh a radiance like that which a child sees quivering on the floor as he is rocked to sleep at evening, there walked into the lethal quicksands a very old man in tattered purple, crowned with whithered vine-leaves and gazing ahead as if upon the golden domes of a fair city where dreams are understood. That night something of youth and beauty died in the elder world.