There’s a section in the ‘What Men Do’ Guide entitled ‘The Tribe of Heroes’, the theme of which is that Heroes exist all over the world.

A guy who follows the WMD Code can easily become dismayed by the Fear of finding himself on his tod; he’s trying to live a Life based on what he considers are Real Values which feed Self Respect and a sense of enriching the lives of others, verses the standard capitalist dogma of selfishness, greed and grab all you can whenever you can.

And sure, you can find other Heroes at home here in Yorkshire; from time to time we Yorkshiremen meet a Southerner who, somewhat to our amazement, turns out to be, well, OK…

            …even though he’s called Lance, drinks G&Ts and supports Chelsea.

Where you really become aware of Heroes worldwide is when you decide to do some backpacking abroad, doubly so if you don’t speak the native language and they don’t speak English.

In those circumstances what you find is that things happen that don’t happen in Huddersfield; a guy does you some kind of favour – it happened to me once in Southern Egypt where a guy dressed in the native Nubian costume shared his cold water when he could see I was at a point of exhaustion and was totally tapped out of money.

Kissed his ass? That’s the least I was prepared to do…but fortunately I didn’t have to. He was clearly overjoyed by my attempts at a profuse thanks made doubly so, I confess, when I lied and said I supported Manchester United.

But thinking about it since, that and other instances like it has made me realise how much our personal knowledge of the other guy is actually an inhibiting factor to a relationship. The knowledge – as in the case of the aforementioned Lance – prompts all the negatives in my own conditioning to rise to the surface, so instead of behaving spontaneously as I did at the fringes of the desert, I began – at least initially – to build on my prejudices.

And I ask you; how many times does this happen? Isn’t it the instinctive reaction of knowing too much? Aren’t we allowing ourselves to be separated from each other rather than bonding naturally as guys?

Sure, we’re Alone because we’re male. We’re programmed to clean up our own shit and that only Action Counts, but that doesn’t necessarily mean we have to become untrusting. To have a sharpened awareness of Sensing, just as we had a couple of million years ago when we were the hunting band’s tracker, has always been a Positive force, allowing us now to sniff out fellow Heroes when in the old days it was a bison.  

But we guys haven’t really changed all that much, so let’s go along with the present system to earn a crust, but don’t let it fuck us up as human beings.