What is humility then, if it is not a rejection of victory, abundance and accomplishment?

It’s humility that makes you love God most because it makes you realize how much you are blessed with that you likely don’t even deserve. And not the false hand-wringing humility of the politician or the vain religious zealot. But the kind of humility that is a sword tempered against your own worst self, your own arrogance and pride that wear the face of your victories and your accomplishments. You must pull back their stolen masks and see them for the enemies they are. For they were your virtues that made you win, not your pride, though she likes to take the credit. It was your surrender to excellence and not your arrogant claim to it that made that muse touch your shoulder when you were victorious. Pride is a part of you, a rotten part, and the greatest pride of all is believing you can ever fully get rid of it and relax your garrisons against it. The worthwhile endeavour toward humility is not a showy pursuit of poverty or self deprecation, but rather, a noble battle to constantly remind yourself that everything good about you is thanks to the grace of God. Nothing more. And everything evil about you is something your pride would like to conceal from you. Nothing less.

Painting: Sir W Russell Flint from the illustrations of The Canterbury Tales of Geoffrey Chaucer, 1913

“Metaphors make connections which are not contained in the fabric of reality but created, by our own associative powers. The important question about a metaphor is not what property it stands for, but what experience it suggests.”

- Sir Roger Scruton, On Beauty

In our post-romantic society, we think of the poet as someone who talks about his or her feelings in heartfelt rhyme. Poetry has become the wet discipline of overly sensitive wallflower types who never really have their hair brushed properly. It’s surprising that this is what poetry has become, considering it finds its conception in epic stories about war, conquest and the trials of the human soul.

Homer, Dante and Ovid hardly resemble the sentimentalists who are allowed to call themselves poets today. But what is the functional role of a poet if not to tell epic stories or to express his most sensual experiences? Neither of these is the main function. The main purpose of poetry is metaphysical: it is the creation of language itself. And every generation must have new poetry to reinvigorate the language with life lest it become stagnant and die.

Language is a living, breathing thing; it is an organ of mankind that exists in the magical space between us all. It connects human beings across time, space, age and culture. However, language is also always referential. The “meaning” of a word is always a reference and this means all meanings are actually metaphors. Every single word is a metaphor.

Every word you use is a little poetic universe of its own. Take the word “dog” for example. It is a referring to the schema of a living thing we can recognize and distinguish from “cat”. When a child learns the word, he learns it as an association for that cute four legged creature with floppy ears and fur that he saw in the park. He distinguishes it from “cat” at home which although four-legged and furry, has much more of an attitude and pointy ears on its head.

All words refer to something outside of themselves to have meaning. Metaphors also make connections between two objects that are not directly connected. It follows that all language is made up of metaphor. A great example of this is the word “Odyssey”. The Odyssey is a story about a treacherous and arduous journey. People may say the phrase “It was an Odyssey to make it to this event”. In this case, they are using the word “odyssey” as a metaphor to explain how arduous their journey was. They are comparing their journey to the one in the story even though the two things are not directly connected.

Eventually, you can imagine that the definition of the word Odyssey may become “difficult and arduous journey”. And this, is where words come from. Anyone who has ever thought about metaphors (my precious kindred spirit philosophizers you) will know that the fundamental problem with any metaphor is that it is necessarily imperfect because it is merely a comparison. It is not a replacement. When we say “the city never sleeps” we are not literally referring to a physical building not falling asleep. The sleep part is a metaphor for stores being closed and roads being empty. Everyone in the city has become “dormant” with the word finding its etymology in “dormir”—to sleep.

Etymologies by the way are nothing ore than the pedigree of metaphor that led to the current usage of the word.

All metaphors are like maps: they represent the terrain but are not themselves the terrain. As such, they will miss certain aspects of the true experience they describe.

Think of every cliché line you’ve ever heard. “He’s like a kid in a candy store” is a common metaphor (a type of metaphor called a similie) which describes a person who is in a place where he can see everything he desires within reach. Like a “kid in a candy store” he might be full of childish glee, gree and impatience. But this metaphor is a cliche because it’s clearly not written specifically for that one instance. It’s copied. It has become so much a part of the language it is almost a word. This makes it unsatisfying because there might be other aspects to the situation that it does not capture. Something fresh is needed. This is what the poet can do.

He might write, “He was a starved prisoner invited to a banquet” which adds the dimension fo desperation which the first cliche metaphor does not capture.

“He was an ant on a pile of sugar” adds the dimension of helplessness against one’s basic instincts and also debases the character to the level of an insect.

The poet refreshes the language with new metaphors so that they are always capturing some unique and original dimension of reality that the existing language cannot. As such, language, thanks to the poet, is constantly recalibrated against reality from which it draws its vitality. In this way, the poet helps to keep the language alive.

1) In reality, Mulan would have never been able to keep up with the other men no matter how hard she trained. In fact, she would have held them back considerably and would have been a liability. The most athletic girl is still weaker than the least athletic man.

2) It was odd that not one man in the whole army had both brain and brawn. Very unlikely that only the one girl soldier would be able to contribute significantly via strategy and intellect.

3) It tells girls they can earn honour only by doing boy things and that if they're awkward at doing girly things, it means they're not really meant to be girls.

4) It vilifies a society that tells women that they don't belong in the military, even though that's a reasonable and good message.

5) It was the first step in the trans agenda becoming mainstream because it planted the seed of the idea that a girl can reliably become a boy if she disguises herself.

BUT! You might argue. It's a fairy tale! They have all kinds of "unrealistic" things in them! This is where most people reveal how little they understand fairy tales. Even in proper fairy stories (and Mulan is not a fairy story because there are no fairies) the enchantment is what delivers the unreal element and this unreal element works within its own logic which may be different than that of the real world. Mushu the dragon did not give Mulan her extraordinary qualities of being able to keep up with the men. He did not suddenly make the entire male army have an IQ of 50.

The unreal element of a fairy story may aberrate from reality, but the mythical idea about humanity that the story delivers is always true. This is why fairy tales are not lies. They are ways of telling the truth in a way that goes beyond mere lists of literal facts. Because most of the important truths in our lives do not lend themselves to lists or material explanations; they are immaterial.

For example, wolves do not talk to little girls, and yet, Little Red Riding Hood contains some very important truths about the world: there exist men as vicious as animals who will disguise themselves as women to prey on little children. Mulan was the beginning of Disney's hand in cultural subversion. It is a movie I won't show to my future daughter without making her question these important things!

This has been one of my Substack “shorts” segments. Access to my long-form essays is available to paid subscribers only, where I delve deep into these topics beyond just the surface level! If you want to think about the world beyond the political and ideological, subscribe now :)

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However, other (immature) women hate a very pretty girl a lot more quickly. Their jealousy, consciously or unconsciously, compels them invent or imagine negative things about a prettier girl, in order to assuage their feelings of inferiority. People automatically assume you are promiscuous or narcissistic because of your beauty. You get more unwanted sexual attention. You must be very careful about whom to trust.

Of course everyone would love to be more beautiful. It's stupid to deny it! But is prettiness everything?

Most people don't care about YOU; they care about how you make THEM feel! This means it doesn't matter if you're pretty or ugly. If you make people feel good being around you, it doesn't matter if you have the ugliest mug on the planet, people will like you. This is called charm and it is more powerful than prettiness all day, every day. So if you are ugly, or even "mid," and you spend all your time being insecure about it or even thinking about it, you're going to make yourself insufferable to be around. This is very similar to the objectively pulchritudinous who are unfortunately obsessed with their appearance. Very annoying!

Everyone loves someone who pays attention to them and not to themselves. The uglies need to be told this, and not the molly coddling lie that they are just as beautiful as Miss World. Sorry, that's just not true for 90% of women.

The social skill that the uglies, mids and pretties all must master in order to develop charm, is to stop thinking about their appearance at all and focus on how they are making the person in front of them feel.

This is both a remedy for vanity, and the essence of charm. It matters how you look, but really, how you make the people around you feel, matters much more.