To dress in our style, to dress with a proper sense of modern male dignity places one in the minority today. It is the extreme minority. It is not the minority for negative reasons, it is the minority for positive reasons. Culture in a free society like ours is like large ball of snow. Once it gets going one way, it just keeps going that way and keeps picking up more snow (adherents) along the way. It is rolling down the hill sucking up everything in its path, absorbing these small parts into the grand whole. Every moment becoming more and more imposing as it rolls. To avoid this massive avalanche means you are in the minority. We, anyone who dresses in our style, is in this minority.
In a degraded state like the one we live in, to be on the outside of the majority in the way we are is a badge of honor, it is a sign of ascent rather than descent. Sometimes the ball of culture can be rolling the right way and in turn inspire people, dragging them the right direction, while they get sucked up by it. But this is never because of the virtue of the snowball, it is not because of the virtue or wisdom of those getting sucked up. It is because it happened to be rolling a correct way, the unstoppable force for the unthinking masses happened to be positive rather than negative. How something gets nudged in the right direction in the first place is a different discussion.
This brings us to the key point that there is no wisdom in numbers or masses. There is no wisdom to be found in the blob. Because more people do something doesn't make it correct. Because more people think anything doesn't make it right. It just means the masses think one way. It is funny, many people who seem to get this partially never really understand it fully. We, who dress in this style we love, see this often. It is very clear to us. The majority of men are absolute disgusting slobs, bums. They don't make any attempt to present themselves with any kind of dignity. They passively influence the society with their terrible low-spirit of dress, just by virtue of way they dress themselves. We all play a role in the aesthetic conflict. Some influence society negatively in an active way. We have all encountered the slob who makes some snippy comment, some smart-ass remark about the fact that we (or someone else) are not dressed like himself.
He does this because of his own guilt, his own issues. He wants to bring you down to his level, he wants to suck you down like quicksand and never let you leave. You are a reminder of what he has chosen not to be. You remind him that every day he chooses to look like a bum. He wants to destroy you for that reason. He has to destroy the reminder of this. To be reminded of this is painful, you must go. The way people destroy others today is not so often by physical means but psychological means. This is what we see often, over and over again. Emotional bludgeoning, psychological manipulation. It is individual but it is also collective. Many men want to dress better yet at every corner they have some signal directing them down, down to the slop.
An easy retort to this is "well they should just keep going and ignore it!" Of course they should, but most people are not strong enough for that. Most people just get absorbed by what the trend is and then become foot soldiers for it. Us, we are in the minority, we have the foresight, spirit, heart and strength to go against the grain. We are not like the majority. We are in the small minority on this style-front. We are thankful for that, we will continue this way. But there is a deeper lesson in this that we should not ignore. It is a lesson that extends into many other realms.
There is this strange thing where everyone is able to see a truth when it impacts them then they lie to themselves when it is not impacting them. The truth that we know to be true with regard to style is that most men look like slobs, they do so because society expects nothing of them and will continue to do so unless they are expected to do otherwise. The wisdom of the masses (bottom - up) when it comes to style means there is wisdom in look like a homeless bum. Those who seek to elevate themselves above the bare minimum, the lowest setting, to live more like a man than an animal are attacked by the ankle-biters who despise them for their rude reminder of choice and will. The low-spirits will always attack the high-spirits. As is true in style, is true in life.
The answer is to ignore this ankle-biting. Ignore the low-spirits. Ignore not only the message of blob, the mass but also the thought process of it. We cannot allow our minds to be colonized by the thought that there is any wisdom in numbers, certainly not today. The high will always be attacked by the low, always. The right always by the wrong, the smart by the fool, the refined by the vulgar. There are always only, ultimately, two choices.
Ascent or decent.