Escaping the Stable

The Plight of Thoroughbreds and Draft Horses

Recently, the grand spectacle that is the Kentucky Derby concluded. The most famous horse race of them all, it’s a gambling extravaganza as bets are made against the world’s top horses competing in a riveting, sub-three-minute race. These horses, some worth millions, are bred from the finest stock. And this stock is getting narrower, with every horse having the legendary Secretariat as an ancestor. Not only breeding, but every aspect of their life is analyzed and controlled to the most minute detail. They are trained from infancy, mixing scientific rigor with long, hard-won knowledge with regards to diet, training, and grooming to create some of the fastest creatures in the world.

The competition is also among the most vicious, and most of these horses, bred and trained for greatness, will find themselves incapable of competing in the highest tiers of the sport. While still valuable, all but a select few of them are cursed to be a bitter disappointment to their master.

Also, while they are magnificent beats on the racetrack, their specialization makes them suitable for some tasks and not others, and their specific breeding towards racing only makes their versatility wane. These horses, while fast, would struggle against other breeds such as the Clydesdale when hitched behind a wagon or forced to plow a field. The Thoroughbred’s ability in the narrow range of racing is impressive but would likely falter under other harsh conditions.

The Draft Horses didn’t have to be the best in a specific competition, but be strong, reliable, and able to take on a multitude of tasks to exhaustion. While a core part of American frontier identity, both are of little use in the modern age. They worked themselves to becoming obsolete, a hobby item for the rich rather than a core necessity of survival.

The Draft Horses and Thoroughbreds have little freedom compared to the horses in times past. The Mustangs who roamed the plains and gathered in herds, eating, reproducing, and fighting for survival in a world where that had no man to call them master, no breeding regimen to create the perfect specimen to serve man’s needs instead of the traits that brought survival in the wild, with all the unbroken spirit and violent life it entailed.

We’re seeing the same sort of specialization in human societies now, with the same effects. A little while ago there was a Twitter thread discussing the so-called ‘Thoroughbreds”, children of the elite class who went through enormous amounts of training to gain access to the top-tiers of academia.

By middle school, they are spending summers at various math and science camps and doing STEM after school programs. I cannot stress how common math camp is. Most people I have met in STEM PhD programs have gone to math camp, and basically all know each other from their early days going to various math camps as kids. Moreover, in middle school, a lot of the parents start on SAT prep and hope they can do the bulk of their preparation before high school because in high school they have more difficult things to worry about. I know a lot of folks who got the SAT score they used for college in 8th grade. Some kids even have dubious non-profits that they started in middle school that they build up throughout high school in order to project sincere interest in outreach over a long time period—god forbid college admissions programs think you just created a non-profit to get into college. If the high school they want their kid to attend requires testing, they start their kids in test prep classes a few years prior to the high school admissions exam.

Intense competition for arbitrary credentials has created an environment where every moment is dedicated to training for getting a high-level position. Many people read the thread in disgust, not just because such control was inhuman, but also because such a myopic and stifling environment will create conformist drones, not someone who can truly revolutionize the field they plan on entering. Like the Thoroughbred horses, it seemed to be training for a meaningless intellectual sport than truly innovative living.

As Librarian of Celaeno wrote in response, “They're not thoroughbreds; they're draft horses, broken to the bit and halter.”

There’s a lot of truth to this, that these are just Draft Horses of a certain specialty, and these so-called Thoroughbreds live inside a stable they can never leave and trained to never want freedom. While seemingly to be elite, and having far more credentials, their real life is one that has little difference to the average workhorse they strive so hard to differentiate themselves from.

Also, the hypercompetitive nature will create a small clique of winners who reach prestige, and a massive class of losers doomed to become a second-rate bureaucrat or researcher in the vast machine. There is a class of not-quite-elites, often bitter and resentful, that fell short of the task they were raised from birth to achieve.

Most of these types are doomed to spend their lives in meaningless minutiae, whether it’s applying for grants from the government, laboring through the post-doc program while desperately looking for a full professorship, or becoming a cog in the ever-expanding educational bureaucracy. Being the losers in an artificial and viciously competitive game, there’s nothing awaiting them than a sad waste of all the skills they spent their lived accumulating.

One would think they might have been better off being Draft Horses, but unfortunately, they are in an even worse plight, largely obsolete like their equine counterpart.

It’s a fascinating evolution, given that the idea of the Draft Horse used to be closer to a reference to the working classes, who put in long hours in mundane jobs, predictably punching and then going home to a modest home with wife and kids. A couple of generations ago, there were a dignity to the working man working a basic trade. There was an understanding that while he was not going to be a great leader, make a revolutionary innovation, or expand his aspirations past his provincial home, he had value.

While unimpressive from a status standpoint, he found an acceptable lot in life. Sure, maybe his wife wasn’t the prettiest girl, but he wasn’t much of a looker himself. Maybe he spent every weekend just watching sports and sleeping in. Still, his work put food on the table, and he was able to have the consolation that his long hours supported his family. To the wife, her husband was not exciting, but he was a good provider and kept them in comfortable existence, helping out with home projects and other domestic chores from time to time. Such a life was full of frustrations, unachieved goals, and often wasted potential, but they lived a decent life. In mass numbers, they were the dependable laborers and families that anchored a people.

Nowadays, this Draft Horse is the most disrespected demographic in the nation. Even welfare queens get more deference in the modern status hierarchy. Much of it has to do with the denigration of trades but more has to do with our unmatched material wealth. No one, unless they are incredibly foolish, is ever at real risk of starvation anymore, and culture has reestablished its priorities.

As women entered the workforce, the value of a man’s paycheck dwindled. No longer was the dependable but boring man seen as husband material. The ease of everyday life along with a larger share of possible mates shifted the balance of power away from the stable workman to the specialist striver and the anti-social adventurer. Marriage, the bedrock which led the Draft Horse to accept family honor in return for long hours of labor, is a relic. A patriarchal marital structure where the average man maintained a little kingdom was eliminated in favor of a largely matriarchal arrangement. A man found that even fatherhood could be easily replaced, and easier divorce made it happen with increasing commonality. The Draft Horse found his hard work detrimental, since those long hours signaled in the eyes of the court a man who showed neglect of his kids but had a decent paycheck to pilfer. And that’s if he can even find a woman at all anymore.

The mercenary nature of the job market, along with the different priorities of employers, also put them in an impossible disadvantage. Most corporations now try to look past the current job he is applying for, trying to ascertain whether he has “Leadership qualities” and opportunities for advancement outside the humble post he is applying for. It’s no longer acceptable to expect to stay in the same position, and there’s an expectation of strong flexibility, even if it means a new career entirely. For the hungry up-and-comer, this is fine. For less agentic men, it’s an impossible demand. Where once we had elites with a sense of noblesse oblige for their lower-tier laborers, whether it was the farmer, the master craftsman, or the head of the estate, the average man expects to get fired on a whim.

To paraphrase what Manosphere influencer Rian Stone has said about this type of man “The plow horse used to be able to look forward to a decent stable and hay after his work, then being supported in his old age. Now he’s sent straight to the glue factory.” Now, the men who would likely be the draft horses of old are playing video games, with many putting in 12-hour days mastering them with the same discipline they once did to carpentry, bricklaying, etc. that once supported a family at home. And these aren’t the worst cases, as countless numbers have committed suicide on the installment plan with opioids and alcohol.

Hyper-Domestication

The Thoroughbreds have found themselves bred for a world that gives no joy, and surprisingly little use to the people who spent countless hours and money to get them a leg up. At best, they may be a status symbol to a tiger mom or dad to parade around. There’s the suffocating stink of over-socialization in all of their efforts, the joy of learning and exploring replaced by meaningless checkboxes and subtle political jockeying to get an edge on the competition.

They were “broken” by increasing demands from their elders to prepare them for the real-world, and through a brutal irony found out that by the time they grew into adulthood, the world they trained for had already passed by. It’s the equivalent of a Jockey forming a star racehorse only to see The Kentucky Derby close down before his debut.

The elder elites haven’t gotten the memo regarding these changes and, if anything, have doubled down.

It’s tragic these thoroughbred types have likely never had a job that dealt with every rung of society. While a job at Tim Horton’s in High School would likely instill far more practical experience than whatever fake charity they “founded”, colleges don’t see it that way, their striver friends don’t see it that way, and they are left with a vacuous understanding of the common man, which either leads to their contempt or assumption everyone else thinks like them. It also, paradoxically, limits their agency, as their insulation from working and middle-class work gives a massive blind spot to opportunities a well-educated man can exploit off the beaten path.

The modern Draft Horses, in contrast, have been bred for seemingly no purpose at all. These men are largely average intelligence were broken in through years of education they didn’t get much out of, told that work with their hands was counterproductive, and pushed into a world where credentials are everything, and personal honor means nothing. While there used to be a path to go from apprenticeship to master tradesman, or at least work a basic job with other locals. Now they are stuck working with foreigners they have no connection with, drug-addled dregs who couldn’t get anything better, and a boss who could replace him in an afternoon. This sort of company is poisonous, and the idea of “honest work” rings on deaf ears.

Probably the most infuriating aspect of this phenomenon are pastors and traditional Conservative types online who think that returning to 1950’s norms is simply a matter of will, oblivious to the civilizational changes that have made that arrangement obsolete. Even on the rarer occasion that a woman can stay home with the kids with the man being a breadwinner, the abundance of modern life and far lower risk of total impoverishment makes his weekly paycheck far less important. Hyper-credentialism as a status signal has made doing “honest work” dull and an impediment to advancement. Good luck getting a big break after your stint as a cashier at Panda Express. You can argue this is unfair and complain about women all day, but they are responding to the new incentives, and it’s irrelevant to them that old-fashioned men and their ideas are being lost in the shuffle. Men need to bring something else to the table.

Being a Mustang

It’s a rare time in history where nearly every subculture has elders with such shockingly low level of awareness of current trends. Both elites and religious authorities are offering a path that they assume is the optimal low-risk, high-reward option for them, because that’s what they did. Unknown to them the old path is now low-risk, no reward.

Nobody wants a Draft Horse to plow the fields anymore. We have tractors for that. Nobody wants a Thoroughbred with all the right certifications, that market is flooded. Even though this is the case, there are still masters who pat their thoroughbreds on the head, saying they’ll reach great heights. There are still masters encouraging their Draft Horses to keep working as the stable is ready to collapse, their fur is full of fleas, and their ribs are protruding from starvation.

Since Aristotle it’s been understood the temperaments of man differ. Some are wild and free spirits, and some yearn for a good master. Regardless of where one it on this spectrum, there comes a time when it’s understood that the status quo, the social expectations forged into you from youth onwards is a losing strategy. You have the option of being cold, disheveled, and miserable, or to charge ahead, break through the fence, and seek greener pastures elsewhere.

In a world with no worthy masters, the only option is rewilding. For the Thoroughbreds, it means either galloping away from meaningless laptop class sinecures that give a decent paycheck but leave the soul hollow. It may mean finding opportunity in the most unlikely of places, where the other Thoroughbreds fear to trod. For the draft horses, it means to trot away from elders who tell you to buck up and work a job that breaks body and mind for no reward. If one’s labor will not earn social respect, find something to earn self-respect.

The ones who succeed in the new age will likely be through a zig-zagging mess of varying experiences, lessons, and intuitions that the elder stock will be unable to fathom. From the comfort of their stables, they will see a new breed emerge from the hillsides, embracing the awe and terror of their new freedom. Perhaps a worthy master will appear in the future, perhaps not. What is sure to reemerge is the primal, wild spirit lost to over-domestication.

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