The Mannerbund is also the source of sexual morality, which is actually a subset of property rights, since women are naturally the property of men – of either their fathers or husbands. Suppose you have a good friend. Suppose this friend has a girlfriend. Do you hit on your friend’s girlfriend in front of his face? No? Why not? Isn’t she a free individual enjoying all the rights afforded to her by a liberal democratic society, including the right to accept and decline sexual offers with consent? She doesn’t have to accept your advances, but why is it anathema to even make them? The reason is that your friend’s girlfriend is your friend’s property, and if the two of you are friends, you are members of a Mannerbund with (at least) two men. She is “his,” not yours, and hitting on her would be just as bad as reaching for your friend’s wallet.

This little example illustrating how women are naturally the property of men does not require formality or affirmation by the state to be accurate. In fact, this little example is an example of civilization and order on a relatively tiny three-person scale. With two men and a woman, the correct way to resolve the problem of competition for mates is the Mannerbund and the resulting instinctual respect for property rights and the specific subset of property rights governing mates. If you want civilization, you need order, and order – contrary to the pious proclamations of some – is often most stable when it is instinctual and unspoken.

Were it not for the Cathedral-State and the economic and legal privileges afforded to women over men in the West, this example of order could easily scale beyond three people to three hundred, three thousand or three billion. Over the transition from three to three billion, it would acquire some cultural or religious veneers, but the underlying biological/socio-political arrangement would remain the same. Politics is downstream from culture when the word refers to the kabuki theater of progressive-liberal democracy, but culture is downstream from politics when the word refers to the actual systems of biological and socio-political arrangements between humans. The most basic working socio-political arrangement between humans is the Mannerbund. The only unit smaller than the Mannerbund is the man – not the individual, but the man.

It could be argued that the family (specifically the nuclear family) is a more basic socio-political unit than the Mannerbund, but this approach is incorrect. To paraphrase Mencius Moldbug, hominids need government and politics because hominids are social and violent. To clarify Moldbug, hominids need government and politics because male hominids are social and violent. A man’s woman and children are extensions of the man and dependent on the man’s capacity for violence on their behalf, i.e. on their man’s capacity to defend them physically from other men. Women and children are social but their capacity for violence –- physical, but also psychological — is negligible compared to that of men’s, and for this reason they are de facto property, not political agents themselves. The Mannerbund, not the family, is the basic working socio-political unit.

A solid and dependable Mannerbund is a necessity for every man. No man is an island, they say, and a man without a local Mannerbund is going have deeply limited capacities when it comes to securing his property and legacy. Individualistic proponents of neomasculinity are missing the point already: no man is more “alpha” than a Mannerbund. Without a Mannerbund, a man cannot control his women, he cannot ensure his immobile property’s security in the case of state failure (deliberate or not), and without security of his women or property, he cannot secure the futures of his children.