On Manliness

One of my favorite topics. The interview isn't particularly interesting, nor does it make me want to read the book. But a few excerpts are worth noting:

Moral integrity is still fundamental. Whether you win or lose a fortune, you should still keep your honor. In fact, men need to stand up to today’s moral relativism and belch. Right now we’re in a society that seems to think it’s okay to demonize our corporate leaders, instead of calling out the few bad apples. If we instead held them all up to an old-fashioned code of honor we’d be better off; after all, doing so would punish the charlatans and thereby separate them from the true icons of industry. We’d then, by default, exemplify the good eggs. Indeed, thinking of CEOs as all bad is a relativistic idea; it’s also fundamentally untrue. The same goes for our politicians. They’re not all morally corrupt. This is why I put so many codes of honor in this book. We have to live by a code of honor before we can demand others do. Then when we step into the voting booth, we shouldn’t vote for someone who didn’t pay their taxes. I’m not saying we should then vote for a candidate we’re ideologically at odds with, just that we shouldn’t support the so-called “lesser of two evils.”

And worth thinking about as we make movies:

Anti-heroes often try to fight for justice, but they don’t believe right and wrong can be truly understood or can be moral absolutes. So they fight in a dark world where everything is relative, and they become tragic, because they don’t really believe in a code of honor, a black-and-white basis for right and wrong. The wounded vets I spoke with had done things that past cultures would have given them parades for while celebrating them as good examples; instead, they often somehow feel guilty for giving their all, though they often don’t know why.