21st Century Übermensch
In Pursuit of my Inner Chad
Hey guys.
A lot has happened since my last post in February. I got my second COVID vaccine and went into a month-long migraine blackout. Then I was blind for a while. I wanted to come back here and write about the darkness and the headaches and the doctor’s offices and the rebirth. But that’s old news.
Final exams are officially over and school’s out for summer.
It’s time to become Chad.
I am become Chad, creator of worlds.
- Oppenheimer
Who is Chad
Chad is a meme created by the group of self proclaimed internet virgins known as incels. They’ve coined a vast dictionary of terms that describe their self-identified shortcomings. These fellows are under the impression they will never get laid and that any attempt to develop themselves would fall flat in the face of their genetically determined ugliness.
The name Chad came to represent their ultimate antithesis—the rich, handsome, privileged male with inborn confidence who gets laid with ease.
This is how it all began. Virgin versus Chad.
This genre-creating meme depicts what the incel perceives as fundamental behavioral and physical differences between themselves and the Chad.
Chad has never heard a song in his entire life.
From the dark depths of the manosphere, upwellings of Virgin Vs Chad memes brought nutrients to the mainstream waters of the meme-plex where normies like you and I swim.
Anything can be seen through the Virgin vs Chad paradigm.
Behold:
For millions more, click here.
With this meme format, Chad came to represent pure goodness across all domains, while the Virgin is listless, flaccid, and can’t look life in the eye. Chad is vascular energy; Virgin is limp, neurotic, and shrinking from life.
Chad is even supportive:
Chad Reborn
Chad’s adoption by the mainstream as a picture of goodness is probably related to the same cultural undercurrents that gave birth to the term big-dick energy to describe those who have compelling confidence without becoming douche bags.
There are plenty of other analysts out there dissecting the psychology and cultural relevance of Chad and Virgin—you should check out this video by MemeAnalysis for more—but what really draws me to Chad like bros to a keg is the mode of being that causes me to identify with him.
I was originally pursuing Chad as a mental event, hunched over my keyboard, deep in thought like a lifeless Virgin. I became distant from my inner Chad. I castrated him with the scissors of abstraction and spectatorship.
Chad does not simply live out there in the memeplex, but as a physiological state within our own nervous systems. I believe this physiological state is related to what Peter Limberg calls Thumos.
Chad, as an indwelling god, is full of Thumos.
He is the voice that appeared to me as Hulk Hogan, filling me with power, social acuity, and motivation.
Before I go on, I must examine my Chaditude for a moment to acknowledge that unchecked Chadery has in times past transformed me into a pervert-narcissist and Machiavellian-Bro-tard, causing me to guzzle whiskey as it pours from the mouth of a mounted boar’s head in a frat cabin deep in the mountains.
It is for this reason that during our last call, PseudoMentor invited me to consider the Minimum Viable Chad, a spur of the moment invention that he gifted me with magnanimous grace. Total Chad move.
Minimum Viable Chad is the degree of success, aesthetic beauty, and social confidence that allows you to live beautifully without making others cringe or flinch when you join the dinner table.
It is Minimum Viable Chad that allows me to map the frontiers between the Brother-Mother-Lady-Loving-life-embracing Chad and his coked-up inverse, Dark Chad.
Dark Chad is that evil brother known to all who have smoked too much Thumos and fought someone outside the club. Dark Chad caused the 2008 financial crisis. Dark Chad beat you up in high school and fucked your girlfriend. Dark Chad invents Tesla Motors .
The Chad Within
Chad Mode has been waiting within me with big, buff, open arms. I am filled with confidence, joy, lust for life, and a throbbing prosocial motivation.
Along with the energy boost Chad Mode has hit me with, the Chaditude also comes with an attendant social code of conduct and ethical imperative. The optimal Chad supports his friends and family and actively strives to bring out the best in others. The Chad binge watches Daniel Schmachtenberger and because of this, the Chad is omni-win. See below:
Just as Chad is not a fixed identity but a being-mode, so is Virgin. If you’re skeptical of my bandying about the pejorative “virgin,” with ease, please note that it is just another domain of the inner landscape. I have spent months of my life in Virgin Mode.
My understanding of Chad is not meant to be prescriptive by any means, but an invitation to try on the Chad-skin coat yourself and assume the identity of a contemporary archetype of perfect masculinity. What does that look like?
To enter Chad Mode, I wanted to focus on the two things that activated my inner Chad like a Soviet sleeper agent in the Kennedy white house: Hanging with Muh Boys and Creating Art.
As luck would have it, I got to do both recently in a full expression of my inner Chad.
My new friend Willem called me up and asked me to play the main role in his indipendent film. He had no script, just a compelling excitement and a festival deadline. The only qualification was that the character I played would live in a van.
We rented a U-haul, and as we drove around, my character quickly took shape as a coke-addicted, careless, rich ass-hole. Dark Chad incarnate.
But behind the scenes, I was flexing as fully optimized Chad. Willem and I spent 72 hours bro-ing down hard in the cab of the van; exhausted, happy, jovial, and confident while we created our story moment by moment. There’s no better way to bond with the boys than a road trip and an art project all wrapped up into one.
More cavemen joined the tribe as I called up some of my best friends to fill out the new roles we needed. Together, we said yes to life and the challenges it threw at us with a hearty grin and a slap on the ass.
If this sounds homoerotic to you, check out this meme, then text your best bros right now and tell them you love ‘em.
Part of what I enjoy so much about becoming full-chub Chad is his unashamed masculinity. He loves his male friends freely. The tribe is strong. It’s a wonderful phenomenon.
As Chad, I create freely, too. There’s no self-consciousness. There’s no fear. There’s no academic haze, no castrating university to mediate and judge the work.
There is just Chad in a beautiful dance with life.
What’s next is too continue experimenting with Chad, feeling into his highest highs and his limitations. I will simply say yes to what comes next.
Per Aspera, Chad Astera
If you feel compelled, email me. What did I get wrong? What did you like? Who is Chad to you?
campbell.b.dixon@gmail.com
Check out our movie if you want. We had a ton of fun making it. Willem submitted to an Italian film festival hence the subtitles.