The disappointing alchemy of algorithmic advertising brought me a pitch for a magazine called Field Ethos, co-founded by the lowest of the Trump scions. It's a publication for men who fancy themselves performers of the sort of masculinity typified by the victim in a Sherlock Holmes story who it turns out was murdered because he stole a jewel while doing colonialist things in the Indian subcontinent.
What caught my eye, though, was the word showing up twice in the ad's copy.
The premier lifestyle publication for the unapologetic man is here. Enjoy a mix of modern adventure, historical context, and perspectives forged through global travel while staying current with the latest products that elevate an unapologetic life.
Now, "unapologetic" is an odd trait to boast of. All of us make mistakes, even those of us who don't believe we make mistakes, and when we do make them, apology, in a genuine and I've-learned-from this sense, is the proper response. Because apology is how you outwardly signal that you're taking responsibility for your actions, that you recognize an ownership relationship between what you do and who you are. To apologize is to exercise self-control.
What you're self-controlling in the service of is the fundamentally social aspect of life. We share our world, the people we share it with have moral worth, that moral worth entails autonomy, and respecting autonomy means possessing a degree of other-regard. To be an "unapologetic man," to take on unapologeticness as a character trait, is to reject other-regard. And so to lead an "unapologetic life" is to lead an anti-social one.
Leif Weatherby, in the greatest essay ever about sports, wrote that "the real goal of American manhood," as the unapologetic kind of guy imagines it, "is to transcend accountability." It isn't just to never have to say you're sorry, but, at its apotheosis, to never have the state of being sorry occur to you. Inculcated enough, the unapologetic man lacks metacognitive awareness. He exists in a permanently stunted state, incapable of growth and learning.
In being anti-social in this way, the unapologetic man cannot socialize fruitfully with the un-stunted, because the un-stunted find him intolerable. Thus his own socialization come either through resentful interactions with more pro-social men and women, or through seeking out and surrounding himself with the unapologetic. But key to living an admirable life is surrounding yourself with admirable people, and this mode of living cuts that off. It teaches the unapologetic man that, in fact, the only admirable people are men like himself, and so the only men he admires are men like himself, and what he needs to do, as he finds himself uncomfortable in a pro-social world, is seek out sources—whether communities, or outlets like Field Ethos—that will tell him, no, he's right, and it's the world that's wrong.
After all, he believes, to both society's detriment and his own, he has nothing to apologize for.