Before the Cage
Return to Sacred Struggle
True focus strips life to its primal essentials. Humans call this “flow state,” yet animals experience it more purely—it’s the primal clarity of a predator mid-hunt. There is no abstraction, no idea of “focus,” only pure instinct guiding action without hesitation. Picture the lion stalking through the tall grass, muscles taut, eyes fixed on the antelope. Its world shrinks to this single, vivid purpose. Each breath beats with the rhythm of the hunt. It exists completely in the sacred simplicity of the moment. It does not know focus. It is focus.
Productivity is often mistaken for purpose, as if completing more tasks could give life meaning. To breeze through pointless work is its own kind of despair. What we call distraction is often intuition whispering, “This doesn't matter.” But the machine keeps running, and we’re scared to step off. Flow is the echo of a time when effort and meaning had not yet split.
Labor today remains an indisputable reality. This is no weak Marxoid manifesto against effort and strength—real struggle, both meaningful and primal, is still the surest path to building the world we desire. Modern labor has perverted our primordial desire through the mimicry of primal rituals in conference rooms instead of caves. Corporate team-building exercises manufacture the instinct for camaraderie and shared achievement held deep in our blood. Rituals do not degrade us by repetition alone, but by divorcing repetition from real stakes and real transformation. It’s akin to wolves pacing endlessly in glass enclosures, their hunting instincts reduced to pacing under fluorescent bulbs. They are well-fed, yes, but their eyes remain empty, and their wildness is turned into performance. The issue is not labor or the imitation of primal instincts, but labor emptied of purpose. When our ambitions align with our actions, even the most droning tasks can feel energizing. Thus, true discipline is not about forcing compliance to emptiness, but about committing ourselves to something deeply meaningful, even when it's hard.
Yet long before corporate cages, the suppression begins subtly and systematically, within institutions designed to prepare young men for adulthood. College quietly channels youthful strength into polite conformity, numbing primal instincts. Students learn to confuse obedience with ingenuity, reciting approved opinions and parroting professors as if these performances were their own inspired creations. By graduation, the young man’s ambitions are already diluted. He leaves not ready to build, but ready to be managed, primed for the soft reward offered by corporate custodians. Thus begins the long domestication.
Such gentle taming culminates in the modern salaried job, the perfected bread and circuses designed explicitly to sedate without suspicion. The “salaryman” quietly believes himself responsible, maybe even virtuous, never noticing how predictability has hollowed his will. Dreams aren't crushed—just downsized into quarterly bonuses, incremental promotions, and weekend escapes that replenish energy without igniting passion. The chains are soft: false urgencies that quietly drain life’s purpose. He sits behind the glass, clean and calm, but never wild again.
“Corporations only care about profit,” critics insist. Maybe so—but profit is merely the surface. Beneath it lies a deeper instinct: fear of uncontained life. Professors, HR reps, psychologists, and middle managers—all play out their part without knowing it. They enforce the script, not out of malice, but from a quiet need for order. Like termites, they only see the wood in front of them, never asking what house they’re hollowing. They believe they are helping. They call it safety, wellness, and social responsibility. Each gesture, each policy, each correction chips away at the spirit until nothing wild or noble remains.
The erosion of spirit is seen most vividly in places where conformity has reached its pinnacle. In Japan, the salaryman embodies the perfection of corporate domestication—silent, orderly, enduring daily humiliations with bowed head and lowered eyes. The packed trains, the synchronized steps, the quiet submission: none of it imposed by force. Each trip leaves me torn: I admire the discipline, but it’s a beauty bought by surrender, where comfort is gained and something vital is lost. The loss is spiritual. It’s not dead, just emptied. Tokyo, many would say, is borderline utopia. It shows how effortlessly primal instincts yield to ease, how willingly wildness surrenders to order. My complicity ends with a ticket; theirs lasts a lifetime. The fierce spirit doesn't cry out. It grows quiet. Then it bows.
Still, under the surface of modern order, a deeper memory stirs. Before men were tamed, they were hunted. To sleep was to risk being torn open by teeth. To eat was to steal from something stronger. There was no safety, only vigilance. In this distant world, strength wasn’t cultivated; it was demanded. The boy alone in the forest was not there to “grow.” He was there to live or die. No guidance, no ceremony at the end, just the dark, and the thing in it. When he returned, if he returned, he was changed—not improved, not matured, but marked. A line was crossed, invisible but permanent. Once, it was a celebrated rite of passage in becoming a man. Today, we treat it as a symptom.
Some remnant of him remains today. Bent but not broken. Still hunted—though now by comfort, routine, and the slow rot of compromise. He longs for something fierce enough to match his strength, holy enough to sanctify his wounds. For the ache within him is not merely for danger, but for purpose. Modernity gives him comfort and calls it care, starving the soul while feeding the body. It soothes him into sedation and dares to call it love.
What is needed is not a return to raw animalism, but to a higher kind of wildness—one shaped by will and spirit. He is Nietzsche’s noble beast—not the primal man blindly raging, but Zarathustra descending, instinct disciplined into purpose. He longs for harmony with something greater than himself, something that demands everything but promises transformation. But in that vow, the heavens stir—then lightning splits the sky, violently illuminating silk chains, and with them, the creeping temptation of surrender. Driven by restless longing, he ascends into isolation. Every step upward deepens his solitude, and though he despises the weight of that silence, he knows descent means betrayal. He sees clearly what awaits if he turns back: a slow decay of the spirit into bitterness, strength collapsing into cynicism, and a life mocking what it once stood for. No voice urges him onward, no hand steadies his path. Still, he climbs.
Not every man hears this call. Most remain gently sedated, grateful for comforts. But the noble man—he who pauses mid-task and feels nausea at meaningless routine—knows overcoming is possible. It requires courage: risking exile, ridicule, poverty, and loneliness. The path is clear: reject domestication, reclaim primal strength, and remember what it is for. The climb is not rebellion. It is return.
What, then, is there to be done? We do not tear down the system—we outgrow it. Begin with your body. Restore vigor through sun and steel. Walk freely under the sky, strain against heavy weights, and refuse easy comforts. Your blood remembers freedom when your mind forgets. The body is threshold, not destination. Reject the lie that your mission must be assigned. You were chosen before you arrived—the call is etched into your bones. No man gave it to you, and no man can take it away. Your only task is to answer. If you take a salary, do not let it take you. Remember what you were sent here to do.
The stallion gallops freely across open fields, driven not by force but by an ancient instinct to run wild beneath the sun. To be whipped into compliance is an insult to its spirit, an attempt to domesticate what should be wild. Likewise, man was not made to kneel to the world. Discipline is fire held in the hand, not from rebellion for its own sake, but instinct aligned with purpose. Authentic freedom lies not simply in the absence of masters, but in the deliberate choice of what deserves mastery over us.
Yet why choose this path? Why reclaim this primal fire at all? Something in us knows we are far from home. We were born into a world where the sacred was buried, and still it calls. Remembrance begins the ascent and restores the stolen fire to a world grown cold. The ache in your chest is not confusion—it is memory of glory, calling you back. The highest life draws the whole self upward, demanding ascent without rest. The same wild spirit that moves the stallion to run drives the man up the mountain. He ascends, not to escape the world, but to serve what is above it.