How to become a Chad

There is a way out of the machine

What do we go online for? To view pictures of cats, find recipes, fashion inspiration, talk about the news, read life hacks, catch up on celebrities...

Probably not. Probably if you are reading this you are on the esoteric side of the internet. You are more interested in bizarre memes, cryptocurrencies, homesteading, forgotten religions, military history, nootropics, archaic philosophies...

You're not a normie. Your goal is not to be accepted as part of the herd, but to break from it as much as possible, to find likeminded individuals and go somewhere yet undefined. You worship not the famous and powerful in the existing world, but ideals. Like this:

You consider yourself a Nietszchean - and Nietzsche certainly remains the most relevant and important philosopher in the current era, because he's a self-help author telling you how to be yourself. 🐝

He's living in the 19th century, in the middle of the Great Man era, when boys are told to seek out and emulate the most exemplary models of civilized men they can find. As such, Nietzsche has a problem: there are a bunch of other men hanging around in his head rent free.

Nietzsche correctly identifies the primary cause of misery among the educated in Western society to be the bad conscience: the guilt and hatred of life one internalizes from reactive men. He completely extracts himself from society to more properly be free of their influence. One by one he expels them all of them — Schopenhauer, Wagner, Germany in its entirety, eventually his father.

(And then... something breaks... he goes schizophrenic...)

Of course, in the 21st century our problem is even worse. We do not merely need to worry about being influenced by men in books, our peers, etc. Influence spills onto us in torrents from advertisements, the TV, the internet. We can scarcely parse the cacophony of voices.

As such, schizophrenics today tend not to see hallucinated popes, emperors, judges appearing at the foot of their bed condemning them. Rather the evil energy spills from the television, from billboards, from the eye in the pyramid on the dollar bill... The schizophrenic feels bad influence as electricity itself, surging through the wires, in the cables stretching overhead and lurking underground.

It's no secret that Twitter is a vast psychic battlefield, with great political and economic power at state for the victors. Every day people nervously fidget behind their screen and adopt a disaffected, aloof stance as they present to the world their half-hearted opinion in the form of a bold declaration. I follow over a thousand of these people on Twitter, what about you?

"Just log off, just touch grass", people say — a piece of ayurvedically sound advice to stabilize at the root chakra, certainly likely to help discharge any negative psychic energy for the time being. But to log off forever is to retreat out of cowardice — Chad wouldn't do that. The only way out is through.

Nowhere on the internet is the psychic battlefield more vicious than 4chan, a place where alienated men will seed each other with deep-seated insecurities for sport. Take this meme, for example, in which no matter what height you are you are told you are unlovable — even those in the "good" range of 6'2"-6'4" are left wondering what must be horribly wrong with them to not be finding "fresh, new, and wet pussy everywhere [they] go".

Chad — at this point not the cartoon but a real-world Chad, a handsome charismatic successful man like I-don't-know Zac Efron — lives in the virgin's head rent-free. The virgin can only see himself in the third person, from Chad's perspective. At the shopping mall, Chad is there, guiding the virgin to pick out his wardrobe. It must be safe enough to be approved by Chad yet not bold enough to somehow provoke him. In the gym, Chad is the virgin's lifting buddy; with each shaky rep the virgin grunts out he strives for Chad's approval.

Sometimes the virgin despises Chad. In his weakest moments he seriously contemplates murdering him along with his harem of women. But the virgin knows that following Chad's advice, (orders, demands...) is the only way he will one day be allowed to lose his virginity, to fuck. (And make no mistake, you can have slid your way into sticking your penis into multiple women, dozens of women, yet still never have fucked, not like Chad has....)

The paradox of course, is that Chad has never had Chad watching over his shoulder at all times. Chad is blissfully himself, Chad is free. The pick-up-artist community talks about this: they contrast themselves to men who are "naturals", those who fuck beautiful women without ever needing training in pick-up-artistry. To the rest of us, these men are like demigods whose powers flow from a mysterious source which can never be found, only cargo-cult reverse-engineered. No amount of learning pick-up-artistry can make a man a natural, in fact one risks getting so much farther away...

The CHAD STRIDE must have been invented by a virgin who was finally fed up by this horrible double-bind. "What would not walking like a virgin even look like?!" he asks. The CHAD STRIDE is only that which the all-too-normal Virgin Walk is not. Where the virgin's clothes are neutral tones, Chad adorns himself in garish violent colors. While the virgin finds some exactness in his motions, the Chad lets his limbs fly out randomly in all directions. In order to not let loose strings of hair flap in the breeze like the virgin, the Chad fastens his hair into an immobile block.

The CHAD STRIDE is absurdity, pure absurdity in motion. He is an impossibility — and acknowledging this is certainly a first step.

But - go back to Nietzsche here - the virgin is still trapped in the frame of the reactive man. For when he imagines transcending himself, he can only conceive of opposites. Colorful clothes to replace the dull, short steps to replace the long, etc.

What it would mean to be actively living, to be striding through life like a Chad, inventing one's own path without imagining a relationship to another, is still unknown. And so, a caricature of impossibility is scribbled to fill the void.

Perhaps the primary difference between the virgin and the Chad is that the Chad knows exactly what he wants and gets it, and the virgin is somehow confused. He knows he likes the (guilty) pleasure of playing video games and watching anime, kind of, but even the thrill is gone from these and it has become more of a compulsion. He, when he is a little more energized, also maybe wants sex, money, cars — or rather he wants to want these, but he needs the steady hand of Chad to guide him there, since he is unsure.

Ultimately, though, the virgin is wasting his time, because as everyone knows in their inner heart, these material things — sex, money, cars, are transient, hollow. They do not satisfy; those who chase them at the exclusion of all else are not honestly reflective. The virgin needs to will himself into a pseudo-desire, and the Chad who freely and naturally desires these things can only be found in the imagination.

Here, we get to the core of the problem. The virgin does not know his own desire. The virgin, or the neurotic, or the Last Man, is always trapped between two extremes. According to Lacan, the neurotic does not know whether he is alive or dead. He must force life on himself, by emulating some idea of it. The neurotic is a puppeteered corpse who puts on the clothes of a normal person, moves his hand like a normal person, adjusts his gaze like a normal person, walks just slightly too fast... It all must be enforced. Otherwise, what is he, other than some flailing non-entity, a dying fish, a tragic clown, a NEET overdosing on percocets while watching My Little Pony? And perhaps, as his vision fades to nothing, he is overcome with the feeling that he, extending spasmodically into all directions now... has finally become Chad?

What Lacan presents as the cure for neurosis is the dialectization of desire. The neurotic oscillates between these two poles: the forced automation of guilt-based reactive living and the defeated impossibility of infantile regression. Somehow, he must interrogate this dynamic, ask it as many questions as possible, break it down further, as his true desire exists somehow in the space beyond all this.

To truly become Chad, then, to look beyond the virgin vs. Chad binary, is to introduce the third term, to step outside it into the cold, frigid space of uncertainty. This is a space of discomfort, but it provides the conditions for growth.

Lacan, of course, says that the analyst should be present to handle this process. In the state of confusion that arises, the patient can easily lose his sense of confidence, collapse back into either side of the dichotomy, develop neurotic symptoms, etc.

But then again, psychoanalysis has proven notoriously inept or unwilling to cure neuroses. This is, as Deleuze and Guattari claim, because removing a neuroses creates far too much chaos, too much unleashing of primordial forces, destabilizes society, even leads to insanity. Medicine would rather replace old fixations with new ones, would rather not deal with all that.

In Gigachad, there is something that suggests the body-without-organs — a smoothed out shape, re-articulated from the inside out, existing in some fantastic ethereal plane, possessing an almost infinite energy to find vectors of becoming in any direction. Caption-wise, there always seems to be something delirious about Gigachad's desire, something dangerous, something escaping. Internet culture recognizes the power of an unleashed body, whereas mainstream psychoanalysis does not.

Chad cannot be captured in any image, any fixed form. Chad is only ever a process which does not examine itself — at least never from the third person, only ever when he pushes his face right up against the rearview mirror to be aware of where he is. Chad does not know if he is Chad or not, Chad does not care. "If you meet Chad on the road, kill him."

Chad is the man who does not care if he is a virgin or a Chad. But Chad also does not care if he does not care if he is a virgin or a Chad (ie, he might care after all, but still he does not care). And he does not care if he does not care if he does not care if he is a virgin or a Chad, and so on. Thus Chad, becoming-Chad, is an infinitely expanding series of terms, a cosmic spiral staircase.

There is no final state to become, and as such, there is always the risk of regaining one's virginity, becoming trapped, suddenly noticing the motion of one's limbs again, attempting one's best to walk normally.

The noble path is: to not relax into the quiet comforts of self-satisfied virginity, but do not arise to the castrating challenge of the Chad-image. Always hold the two in tension; the more anxiety-provoking this is, the better. Seek out, in an exploratory fashion, the third term, always the invisible third term, the non-caring, the escape, the hidden door. Through this, perhaps freedom can finally be attained.

Or have we just rediscovered the newest term in the equation, the sigma male? Perhaps, but to fully explore this we will have to wait for another time...