EXIT is a fraternity dedicated to building family empires. Learn more here:

This is a “director’s cut” of my speech at the Old Glory Club/Weaving event in Portland this weekend — a few added digressions and elaborations.

Skilos asked me to speak on organizing our guys.

Just to give you my resume, back in 2021 I started EXIT, which is a fraternity dedicated to building family empires.

Today, we have 270 active members.

We’ve raised over two million dollars for EXIT startups and projects. We’ve run business incubators, machine-learning boot camps, we crowdfunded a film, we sponsored Coronation Ball, and we organized Natal Conference two years running, which is a national conference on birth rate decline.

We have fifteen group calls a week: we talk about entrepreneurship, homeschooling, civic engagement, local intelligence, fitness, tech, real estate, investing — anything that serves the mission.

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We have monthly chapter meetups in Dallas, Austin, Houston, Salt Lake, Seattle, Nashville, Denver, DC, and New York.

We have just over 40 file leaders, who are responsible for a file of 7 or 8 other guys. They check in every month or so to assess needs, and let us know how things are going. In cities where we have critical mass, the file leaders organize the monthly meetup.

I vet every guy who comes into the group in a 30-minute phone call, but I don’t have any hard algorithm that I use to assess fit, except, “Could I explain to the group in one sentence why this guy belongs here?”

We have a chat, and the rule in the chat is, “Keep it Joe Rogan” — which means if you could say it on the Joe Rogan Experience, you can say it in the chat. I have this rule partly for everyone’s security, but also because it frustrates people with Aspergers. Just as a matter of taste, I don’t really want to hear everybody’s manifesto all the time.

And it works. EXIT guys are practical, successful, committed, and high-trust. They hire each other, they build together, they take care of each other. They don’t purity-spiral, they don’t blackpill, they don’t jerk off about whose fault everything is. It’s real in a sense that a lot of online right wing stuff just isn’t.

There isn’t any special sauce, organizationally — you could replicate the tech in a couple hours, for free.

What is unique is our mission, the kind of guy that that mission attracts, and the grounds on which we build relationships.

So I want to talk about why we’ve chosen this target of family empires, what it means, how we’re doing it, and why I think it works.

The hardest thing about organizing “our guys” is that phrase: it’s always “our guys”, “our side”, “our thing”. We don’t know what to call ourselves, because we don’t know what makes us “us”.

Everything about the present political moment in America, and across the liberal West, is just a failure to answer that question, in a dozen different forms.

Whether it’s H1Bs, or Mamdani, or dual citizens, or illegal immigration — the common thread is the collapse of the West’s immune system — our inability to distinguish friends from strangers. Try to think of an active conflict that isn’t, at bottom, about this.

As far as I can tell, what unites our guys, our thing, is not exactly agreement on where the boundaries should be, but just the conviction that there has to be a boundary somewhere.

So we have this very serious problem that we are, in a sense, up against entropy itself. It is always easier to tear down a boundary, and reap the rewards of defection, than it is to assert or defend a boundary — especially when you’ve got no agreement on where the boundary should be.

The psychology of Leftism is still utterly dominant, it’s utterly adaptive, and its only weakness, right now, is that some of us can see where it all leads — which is the extinction of ourselves, our culture, everything that we care about in the world.

It sterilizes everyone who adopts it, and it consumes every human institution that can’t resist it — which is, so far, 100% of them.

That’s what we have in common — “we” are just the set of people who can see that coming. But that isn’t an organizing principle, because we have no idea what to do about it, or what we’d build instead.

So this is going to be a kind of good-news, bad-news talk. I’ll give you the bad news first:

You do not have a people.

All of our arguments about who a “real American” is are pointless, because a people is a cooperative equilibrium.

You may believe, for example, that the most natural place to draw the line on “Real America” is the set of people whose ancestors fought in the Civil War, or who settled the frontier — and I would agree with you, that shared history matters, and it makes us distinct from immigrants who came to a settled and already-prosperous country.

The problem is that the people whose ancestors fought in the Civil War or who settled the frontier do not understand themselves as a people. They don’t defend that boundary, or cooperate within it. So maybe they should be a people, but they just aren’t.

In fact, the majority of those people have abandoned the habits of mind that make them capable of peoplehood as such. They think of having an in-group and an out-group as a moral failure — for many of them it’s the moral failure, the most serious thing a person can get wrong.

The only in-group they recognize is the set of people who don’t believe in having in-groups and out-groups. We can point out that this is circular and stupid, but it doesn’t matter, because Leftism is not an idea, or a hysteria, or a contingent product of propaganda that you can talk people out of.

Leftism is the culmination of a world-historical process millennia in the making.

It’s a problem that many writers, from Nietzsche, to Junger, to Ellul, to Burnham, to Uncle Ted, have recognized as lying at the very heart of human organization, and our relationship to technology as such. So if we want to resist it, that’s how fundamental our analysis has to be.

So if you’ll indulge me in a little theoryceling, Its going to take a minute to explain what has happened to our world, what we’ve decided to do about it, and my theory as to why our approach is working.

We have to talk through this because all modern theory of organizing was done by Leftists, and it assumes that you are on the side of that historical process — that your aim is to harness entropy, to consume human institutions and relationships as fuel to expand the machine.

If you ask virtually any mainstream political theorist about the origin of the state, of human hierarchy, they will point to what Mancur Olson calls “the stationary bandit”.

Olson says that the first states emerged from brigands making regular trips to farms to pillage and enslave — and eventually someone had the idea of just handing over the loot a few times a year as a tribute or a tax.

Once these brigands had “ownership” rights to the revenues from the land, they started to think about roads, irrigation, defensive fortifications and so forth to protect what they had rightfully stolen — and that’s why human beings organize in states.

By the way, I’m defining “mainstream” pretty broadly here — this is the theory of the state that you’ll generally get from a normie liberal or conservative academic, a communist, a libertarian, even a Nietzschean vitalist. (The vitalists would just say that enslaving Neolithic farmers is based actually.)

This is the frame within which our entire political discourse takes place.

But this model is conjectural, like most theories derived from prehistoric garbage heaps and shards of pottery — and it’s really based on a quasi-spiritual belief about what humans are.

You only craft a theory like this because it’s puzzling to you why anyone would ever leave the egalitarian primitive communism of the longhouse. Why would the weak give to the strong? Why would anyone elevate a ruler or a class above themselves?

Well, they just wouldn’t — so naturally we must assume that those leaders took what they wanted at the tip of a spear — and all the documentary evidence we have of a different relationship between rulers and ruled is just propaganda concocted after the fact.

You see how it sneaks in this philosophical assumption: that human hierarchy is, by definition, unnatural, adversarial, and oppressive.

But I’m going to argue that this view of human nature is not just wrong but obviously wrong, and that it cashes out in a serious misunderstanding of what power is and how it works, which generates all the sicknesses of our postmodern condition.

For comparison, if you’re familiar with the study of wolf behavior that gave us the idea of “alphas” and “betas”:

The theory goes that wolves in a pack are in a continual state of conflict, with an “alpha” who rises to the top through ruthlessness, and maintains his status continually by intimidating the subordinate wolves, punishing them for attempting to mate, taking their food, etc.

But the observations that generated these theories were taken in a Switzerland zoo in 1950, where twenty unrelated wolves were held in a tiny enclosure.

Later studies of wild wolf packs revealed that wolves are highly cooperative and prosocial, because they’re basically just families — a breeding pair and their offspring.

It turns out that animals whose survival depends on cooperation are actually equipped with instincts to cooperate — just not with unrelated strangers in a prison.

This is the kind of mistake that only a modern rationalist academic sperg would make, to regard people and even animals as interchangeable individual utility machines, and ignore the structures that they are built to create and live within.

I’m going to suggest that the primal circuit of hierarchy is the same in humans as in wolves — it’s the reciprocal bond and instinctive shared interest between father and son.

That hierarchy is obviously built into us.

If you’ve been a father, you know that that hierarchy is not exploitative — it’s not characterized by contempt from the superior party, or resentment from the inferior party.

It’s the most unequal relationship any of us will ever be in — you’re bigger, stronger, smarter, you have all the money, and still today, basically all the legal rights.

But even under those conditions, your desire to see your children powerful and successful and happy is so strong that it’s not always obvious who has the upper hand in the relationship.

If you had a good father, you know how earnest the desire is to measure up, to make him proud, to make him laugh — to win honor from him. And if you didn’t have a good father, you know what a hunger, what an absence that is.

This reciprocal psychological circuit is what allows us to create harmonious relationships between unequals: to play “honor games”.

These are social games that are not defined by power and raw material interest, but by the pursuit of honor and glory and status within the group. The rules are enforced by collective loyalty, and love of the game itself. This is the archetypal game being played in Camelot, or Sherwood Forest, or war movies, or mob movies. This is the game that all young men want to play.

That’s in contrast to a “death game”, which is purely transactional and coercive. This is the game of the wolves in the zoo enclosure, or the prison yard — it’s also your relationship with your boss, your landlord, the bank, or the government: just contractual arrangements backed by the threat of force, and — critically — those contracts are always structured and interpreted to the maximum benefit of the stronger party.

It’s called a “death game” because the stakes are your ability to provision the basics of life: you follow the rules, or face unemployment, eviction, bankruptcy, prison.

For most of you, “real life” is 100% death games — it’s how you earn a living, it’s how you provision all your needs. If you’re unlucky, it’s your marriage.

Meanwhile, your relationships with family and trusted friends — the people with whom your ancestors would have played games of honor — are fundamentally recreational.

The family comes home at the end of the day from separate lives, lived among strangers, to spend time together, after the work of real life is done, and it’s time to consume.

This makes it very difficult for us to be aspirational to one another, or to demonstrate loyalty, or courage, or nobility of spirit, because you never do anything that matters together.

But people who are unimpressive in the context of a death game can show extraordinary ability & energy & courage if you can get them playing an honor game.

So the basic foundation of human social organization is neither the geriatric longhouse nor the bandit camp — it’s the tribe, the clan, or in modern contexts, a mafia — but always a family, and then a clan of families, bound by personal relationships between their patriarchs.

Cooperation and coordination are always hard to maintain, but that’s where the leap is the shortest, where biology is most strongly on your side — so that’s where a people invariably starts.

But unlike wolves, we are also capable of abstraction — which means we can stretch this instinct of kinship across other relationships.

Ibn Khaldun called this asabiyyah, which literally means kinship between men, and its his explanation for how the early Arabs were able to conquer the far wealthier and more numerous Byzantines. You can say similar things about the Greeks and the Persians, or the Mongols and the Chinese:

Brotherhoods playing honor games are orders of magnitude more powerful than armies of slaves and mercenaries playing death games.

This is what makes a people a people — it’s their ability to map this vertical circuit of patronage, and this horizontal circuit of brotherhood, on to this identity group so that it feels like a family.

So we are cultivate loyalty to a patron, and patriotism for a Fatherland — which generally means the land of your fathers, where your fathers are buried. We are capable of imagining a king as pater patriae, the Father of the Fatherland.

When Plutarch explains why the Roman elite were first called patricians, he writes:

“Romulus thought it the duty of the foremost and most influential citizens to watch over the more lowly with fatherly care and concern, while he taught the multitude not to fear their superiors nor be vexed at their honours, but to exercise goodwill towards them, considering them and addressing them as fathers[.]”

So you can think of history as this continual attempt to access the feudal instinct — the biological circuits of reciprocal loyalty and self-sacrifice — as strong as you can get it, but always at greater scale, and greater heights of abstraction.

The story of especially the last three hundred years, for technological reasons, has been the triumph of managerial quantity over aristocratic & human quality, and the consolidation of government into ever larger people groups, in which the feudal instinct is diluted and strained farther and farther from its biological roots.

From innumerable clans and tribes, to thousands of feudal states, to a hundred or so nations, to two global empires, to one Rules Based International Order.

Some on the Right pine for the big industrial ethnonationalisms of the 19th and 20th centuries — and they were obviously more “real” than the states we live under today — but they have to be understood as basically the last stop in this process of abstraction, stretched across the broadest possible definition of a “family” — and if you make any serious study of that period, it’s obvious that people back then were already feeling that things had started to wobble.

There’s always power in numbers, but it comes at a cost: the more people you absorb, the more distant and diverse your “brothers” become, and the harder it is to access these natural feelings of solidarity.

The borderless global “civic nation”, then, has to be understood as the total dilution of the feudal instinct, like homeopathic medicine: a universal empire in which the circuits of kinship are fully abstracted, fully ideologized, and nothing is left of the biological substrate on which the state was founded.

The state now governs an arbitrary population with nothing particular in common at all, and can no longer justify its existence by protecting the inside from the outside, because there is no inside or outside.

So, rather than representing the citizens in external conflict, the state goes to war with conflict itself, interposing itself as the defender of the weaker party in any hierarchy, and breaking down the stronger.

This is why you grew up being taught that there is no such thing as an honor game, and every historical example of an honor game is propaganda for suckers.

Because, if there are only death games — only transactional calculations of self-interest — then hierarchies can only be corrupt. A death game relationship between unequals is inherently parasitic and exploitative, which gives the state unlimited moral license to abolish the relationship, and replace it with a transaction, mediated by the state.

And at the scale of a modern state of millions, all distinctions and particularities generate hierarchies and inequalities — which, in turn generate conflict. So there’s nearly-endless fuel for the new engine of the state’s self-justification.

This process eventually reaches down to the most trivial details of our most intimate relationships: so the state, which once supported the primal and instinctive architecture of human connection, now goes to work shredding it.

The total state now runs campaigns to get your wife running her own checking account, and working her own job, and managing a chore chart to precisely allocate the domestic labor.

Trillions of dollars in taxable wages and taxable consumption, as well as decisive new voting blocs, are unlocked by convincing her that an unequal relationships with a man is inherently exploitative.

That’s what Leftism is: The final ideology of the state at infinite scale, fully detached from — and at war with — all human particularities.

And now that it attacks the bond between men and women, parents and children, it is at war with human existence itself.

And, again, who “we” are, in this room, is just people who see where that’s headed, and want to stop it — at least where our own families and cultures are concerned.

I’ve laid out all this theory so that we can talk about how this process is going to continue unfolding, and how we should organize in response.

It starts by understanding that the proper project of the Right is ethnogenesis.

We have to become a people again, so that we can play honor games, so that we can become excellent and admirable in ways that only brotherhoods playing honor games can be.

But honor, like desire, cannot be negotiated.

It isn’t going to happen because we dreamed up the right criteria, or the right bylaws, or the right incentive structure. You can’t and shouldn’t trust people just because they’ve read the right books or said the right slurs.

In fact, in my experience, it’s a thousand times easier to take a dynamic, productive, action-oriented guy and get him reading the right books, than it is to take a a guy who has read the right books and get him to do anything.

It also isn’t going to happen because we rekindled our collective enthusiasm for some historical institution that is already dead and defeated.

There’s a whole lot of important work that can be done within the existing political system — we’re working hard to get our guys in the Administration, taking over our local GOPs, city councils, schoolboards, etc. — but all that work is in the interest of protecting and incubating and feeding our thing until it can stand on its own.

We have to understand what we are doing as pre-political — essentially biological. It’s rebuilding society on the basis of human judgment and personal relationships, between individual men with names and faces.

At EXIT, we do deals, raise money, run work parties, and start businesses because those are the highest-stakes things we can do together that aren’t against the law. They build organizational capacity, demonstrate character and alignment, and won’t get us Waco’d.

But even that is only a start — we’re just collecting and developing guys that we have reason to think will be good in a foxhole, & we’re building some shared history — but peoples form in a crisis.

All of this work is just getting into position to find out who our friends really are.

So you may ask, well, how is this kind of system, built on personal loyalty, supposed to scale? How is it going to compete with Westphalian states with populations in the hundreds of millions?

And my answer is, it doesn’t scale. If you think that global managerial liberalism is sustainable forever, then we really have reached the endpoint of human history, and I have no answers for you.

But there are at least three reasons to believe that we have reached the end of the line.

First, basically every liberal Western state is insolvent. When nobody has any notion of the state as the commonwealth of his people, a patrimony to which his children are entitled, then there’s no reason for any constituency to insist on fiscal discipline. the bag is full of holes. If you don’t spend it, your internal enemies will.

Second, liberal Western states are no longer capable of winning wars. The scale of the global empire demands the filing off of all the distinctions and particularities over which we might kill each other — but when a population has as little in common as ours does, it becomes impossible to pacify them internally without rendering them inert externally.

People might join the military for free college and healthcare, but they won’t actually kill or die for it.

The third reason to believe that this infinitely diluted human connection is unsustainable is the collapse of fertility rates.

Having children is not an autonomous, utility-maximizing, rational decision — so the kind of people produced by managerial societies don’t do it. All of the reasons that people give their lives to the task of raising children are buried in those particularities that managerial societies must deconstruct and discard.

In a sense, the birth rate crisis is the good news: it’s an indication that human beings are not willing to tolerate endless deracination, they won’t live like zoo animals, they won’t breed in captivity.

There are no more bonds left to break; the state is now starving and consuming its own vital organs, and competing power structures are already springing up like tumors.

So it’s going to fall apart — the question is, what will replace it?

We are all atomized creatures of gay liberal modernity. We’ve had already had most of our particularities amputated. We have no idea what we would kill or die for, or who would kill or die for us.

So we have to start over, at the very foundation of human organization — the last truly irrational, truly transactionless, truly human relationship: our relationship with our children.

What we have to restore are not nations, but Great Houses — families that are sovereign, living economic and social organisms — the center of their members’ actual economic and social life, not just the people they share the barracks with at the end of a corporate workday.

We have to rebuild the illegible-but-binding ties of love and loyalty that once existed within — and critically, between — families; first and foremost because it’s a better and happier and more natural way to live, but also because these are the ties that will survive the decay of the global state.

The project of becoming a people again starts with raising our kids to play the honor game: repatriating the economic life of the family, and taking personal responsibility to educate our children, provide them with a living, and help them find admirable partners with whom to carry on the family’s legacy.

It also means building parallel institutions of status for our children to grow into, which compete with the best the global state has to offer — which means we have to unite with the most admirable and excellent families we can find — the people with whom we want to play the honor game, the people we want mentoring our kids, and raising our kids’ friends.

The ultimate consummation, the victory condition, is to find the families who will raise your kids’ spouses — the families with whom you would want to forge an alliance in blood, which is the natural way for families to become, literally, one people.

And if we can achieve that, we’re no longer just trying to get out kids through this civilizational bottleneck — we’re engaged in a multi-generational project of human cultivation.

To make all of this happen, we need high-capacity guys to pool capital, build businesses, cultivate social and political influence, and train their children to go to work for the family.

They have to become personally aspirational — to draw their wives and children and friends into what they are creating — because, at present, the attraction of truth and beauty is all we have.

It’s a tall order, but it seems like every energetic, dynamic right-wing family guy I meet recognizes that something like this has to happen. I talk to guys who grew up in wealthy families, who went to the most prestigious schools in the country, who say, basically, “the rails of elite education just don’t work anymore. The schools don’t lead to jobs, the jobs don’t lead to families — I’m going to lose my kids if I don’t build something for them.”

This is the game that the best men on the Right instinctively know they want to play. I don’t have to do that much vetting. The right guys come to me.

In the last verses of the Old Testament, Malachi writes:

“Behold, I will send you Elijah the prophet before the coming of the great and dreadful day of the Lord:

And he shall turn the heart of the fathers to the children, and the heart of the children to their fathers, lest I come and smite the earth with a curse.”

I’m going to suggest that we are living through the fulfillment of that promise and that curse.

The future belongs to those who show up.

EXIT News

* Weekly Full Group Calls, Tuesdays at 9PM ET:

* This week (11/11) we heard from Nate Hochman on his work with Ron DeSantis, America 2100, and Eric Schmitt. Call was not recorded.

* Next Tuesday (11/18), we will have a Q&A with Patri Friedman, founder of Pronomos, the world’s leading VC for charter cities and Special Economic Zones.

* The following week (11/25), we will have a pre-Thanksgiving call on Albion’s Seed, Anglo-America, ethnogenesis, etc. from an EXIT academic whose domain of study is the throughlines of Anglo-American culture.

* Other Calls:

* Paideia Project standing call on Wednesdays and Thursdays, open to all EXIT guys.

* New Guy Networking is now on fourth Tuesdays, at 8:30PM ET (just prior to the full group call.)

* Meetups (Members only) — Members can check their regional channel or contact DB for full details.

* 11/7-11/8 was a record weekend for meetups! EXIT guys got together in Nashville, St. George, Minneapolis, Austin, Washington DC, Columbus, Portland.

* 11/14: Seattle.

* 11/15: Toronto. The boys are going hunting in rural Ontario.

* 11/15: Houston. Going to a shooting range.

* 11/17: Dallas.

* EXIT cocktail hour for San Diego (11/15) available below the paywall on last week’s post. EXIT cocktail hours are a great way to get to know your local EXIT guys and find out if full group membership is right for you.

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The Feudal Instinct

EXIT Podcast (private feed for joe.substack@hootman.org)