This is a 4,400-word guide to help men respond—not react—to the potential for needless debate, petty status dynamics, and physical violence found in social fields1 where men with a certain threshold of testosterone gather. Essentially, it helps the less foolish man win at “goofy politics.”
“To consort with the [goofies] is harmful: there is no person who can go into a crowd [of goofies] without either becoming more like them or leaving them better — but one must be strong enough to effect that change.” — Seneca, paraphrased
Friendships can be tough.
Some friends want to hang out with you more than you want to hang out with them, and they get butthurt when you don’t. Others put you on a pedestal, only to be disappointed when you don’t live up to it.
There are some you think are so amazing they must be too good to be true, and they confirm it when they reveal their true face.
Then there are the rare few who feel like friends for life, as if God assigned you to each other.
Some groups of friends can feel nourishing, while others can make you feel stuck. Friends come and go. The ones who go can be heartbreaking, making it hard to trust the new ones who come.
But what is a friend?
It’s not such a straightforward definition, and the word is used liberally to describe many kinds of relationships: acquaintances, colleagues, companions, and even people you’re parasocially connected to on the internet.
One way to understand friendship comes from social psychologists, who divide friends into two types: agentic friendships and communal friendships. The former are based on doing things together—shared projects and accomplishments. The latter are formed through emotional bonds and prosocial activities, where being social is valued for its own sake.
Traditionally, agentic friendships are seen as masculine and communal friendships as feminine. While a good start, I find this dichotomy lacking. A better friendship taxonomy comes from Aristotle, who offers a tripartite model.
Friendships of utility
Friendships of pleasure
Friendships of virtue
Friendships of utility and pleasure roughly map onto agentic and communal friendships. The first category—friends whose bonding is based on utility—are not loved for themselves but for the benefits they provide each other. Think business partners. Friendships of pleasure are based on affection and tend to fade when the good times end. Think drinking buddies.
According to Aristotle, the rarest and wisest form of friendship is one based on virtue.
Such friendships are of course rare, because such men are few. Moreover they require time and intimacy… people who enter into friendly relations quickly have the wish to be friends, but cannot really be friends without being worthy of friendship, and also knowing each other to be so; the wish to be friends is a quick growth, but friendship is not.
Such friendships are rare because virtue cultivation is practically non-existent today. A friend of virtue is in relationship with another not only to solve something or to belong, nor to gain utility from the solving or pleasure from the belonging. They are in relationship with another while also being in relationship with a third thing: something that sharpens their character, closes the chasms between their egos, and unites them in integrity toward what matters most.
Friendships of virtue are what I am oriented toward. But they are hard to come by. Not only are they demanding, but there is a shortage of people who are called to cultivate such a standard. Instead, those who receive the call often find themselves surrounded by NPCs, petite sociopaths, and goofies.
As long-time readers know, I’m indiscriminate about where I pick up mental models. I use terms from the political left, the political right, academic philosophy, self-help and therapeutic spaces, and extremely online internet vernacular. When I see a good term, I use it. The phrase “goofies” is one such term. It comes from hip-hop circles, often found in rap lyrics, and it’s the perfect word to describe a certain kind of male friend we can add to our evolving friendship taxonomy.
Some definitions from Slang Dictionary:
A goofy is a silly ass mothafucker who kinda wacky but they chill. “You a fuckin goofy bro.”
Chicago term for a lame or a snitch. “Aye bro that goofy ass nigga snitched on us.”
A Lame A$$ N*gga that people take as a joke.
Here is ChatGPT’s breakdown:
In Black American English and hip-hop vernacular, especially from the 2000s onward, “goofy” evolved into a sharper insult. It came to mean a clownish, unserious, or untrustworthy person—not just silly, but lame, fake, or socially unaware. “Goofy ass dude” or just “goofy” became dismissive ways to describe someone who tries too hard, lacks self-awareness, or acts foolishly in serious settings. Eventually, “goofies” (plural noun) emerged to refer to a type of guy—usually male—who is annoying, cringey, or embarrassing in a socially performative way.
Yes, the goofies. They are everywhere, and while many are harmless on the surface, Seneca was right—they are existentially harmful.
The goofies will hold you back. The goofies will corrupt your word. The goofies will be the first ones lining up for sexbot enslavement. There are no goofies of virtue. There are just goofies.
Chillin’ with them is a virtue hazard, unless you treat it as a spiritual practice.
I write on this Substack to help myself become less foolish. This journey consists of figuring out how to relate to difficult people who promote foolishness simply by their way of being. Given my anthropological proclivities, typologies form, and abstracted character profiles emerge. These help me—and hopefully you—wisely navigate social foolishness.
I will treat this entry like a National Geographic special: I am a philosophical anthropologist entering the interpersonal wild to investigate the goofies.
However, please do not commit the social sin of labeling an actual person as a goofy—especially as if the designator were destiny. No. If anything, you acknowledge that the abstracted character profile exists, and that this individual is displaying similar qualities. With this knowledge, you begin to discover ways to become virtuous together.
The truth is, I love male camaraderie. I think it’s high time we men de-goofify our male social fields, alchemizing such camaraderie into something virtuous.
The Goofy Profile
Goofies fall into the “friendships of pleasure” category in Aristotle’s taxonomy, but it’s a low-grade pleasure—drinking, blazing, perving, etc.
Goofies do not have high agency, but rather mid-to-low agency. They may be competent enough in their jobs but lack the generalized competency needed to respond to the complexity of the world and impose their will on it.
More critically, they have mid-to-low integrity. In essence, they lack trustworthiness. When it comes to critical matters, they are not the guy you reach out to for life advice or entrust with a secret. Their lack of integrity shows up most prominently in their words.
To put it simply, they talk shit.
Lots of shit. They talk out of their ass, run their mouth, spout nonsense, blow smoke, and flap their gums. Philosophically speaking, they bullshit.
In On Bullshit, philosopher Harry G. Frankfurt distinguishes bullshitting from lying, noting that liars are actually more similar to truth-tellers because both have a sensitivity to the truth that the bullshitter lacks.
Someone who lies and someone who tells the truth are playing on opposite sides, so to speak, in the same game. Each responds to the facts as he understands them, although the response of the one is guided by the authority of the truth, while the response of the other defies that authority and refuses to meet its demands. The bullshitter ignores these demands altogether. He does not reject the authority of the truth, as the liar does, and oppose himself to it. He pays no attention to it at all. By virtue of this, bullshit is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are.
Bullshit, according to Frankfurt, is “unavoidable whenever circumstances require someone to talk without knowing what he is talking about.” Goofies are bullshitters through and through. They talk, and talk, and talk, but their words have little fidelity to the truth.
This goes for goofies who fashion themselves as intellectually minded as well; the only difference is that their bullshit has the veneer of truth claims that sound smart on the surface.2 Goofies of all stripes speak to gain fleeting status among the group by being right about everything—a poor man’s proxy for the certainty displayed by the alpha males they admire.
The humorous thing is, when even slightly challenged, they change their position on a dime. One moment, they’re committed to a truth claim in the strongest way possible, only to radically switch.
Goofy: Bro, these Ghibli AI images are the best thing ever.
Peter: Really?
Goofy: Yeah, you know what, these Ghibli AI images are so stupid. Why are all these nerds creating them?
However, when challenged more directly, they tend to double down without any real reflection or inquiry:
Goofy: Sexbots will be amazing.
Peter: I don’t think so.
Goofy: What are you even talking about? Machine-learned orgasms, bro!
While talking shit can be fun if done with awareness, when it’s done with unconscious earnestness—as a default setting in a social field among a group of men—it quickly reduces the group’s collective integrity and, eventually, its agency, corrupting the individual members in the process.
The Goofy Vortex
When there is more than one goofy present, a “goofy vortex” forms—a gravitational pull that sucks all its members into it. When caught in a goofy vortex, you begin to unconsciously adopt the conversational patterns of goofies, and your words start becoming untethered from truth.
Paraphrased Seneca is right. Amongst goofies, there is no grey area—you either become more like them or leave them better. This choice point arises when you feel the pull of the goofy vortex. The easiest move, and sometimes the wisest, is to leave such social gatherings. Or, better yet, avoid them altogether.
Seneca, paraphrased again:
Do you ask me what you should regard as especially to be avoided? I say, [goofies]; for as yet you cannot trust yourself to them with safety… To consort with [goofies] is harmful; there is no person who does not make some vice attractive to us, or stamp it upon us, or taint us unconsciously therewith. Certainly, the greater the [goofies] with which we mingle, the greater the danger…
However, if you're ready to play less foolishly on a more difficult setting, and choose to chill with goofies, then you need to steel your Stoic resolve and become rock-like in it, grounding yourself in the source where truth springs. Only then can you resist the gravitational pull of the goofy vortex.
How you do this is quite simple in theory: respond, not react, by being truthful with your word at all times.
Sometimes, you can convey disagreement like in the Ghibli example above, or more directly, as shown in the sexbot one. However, the most devastating move is simply to look at them with a neutral face and give an ambiguous “mmh”—acknowledging they said something without clearly signaling approval or disapproval.
Such a response is shocking to the goofy—not because it undermines the truth claims they just bullshitted with, but because it shows that you understand the game they are playing while signaling that you are not playing it. Insecurity floods their body with the terror of being exposed, threatening their status among the group.
Goofies are simple to understand, and to do so fully, it’s best to read anthropologist Frans de Waal’s book Chimpanzee Politics: Power and Sex Among Apes.
With “chimpanzee politics”—or “goofy politics” in our case—goofies will cohere around whoever they deem to be the alpha, giving that alpha validation. This is a Faustian bargain for the alpha, as the validation they receive is empty. Due to the goofies' lack of integrity, their surface-level loyalty can shift at a moment's notice.
I interviewed de Waal in 2019 and asked him to describe what an alpha male is:
The alpha male, both among chimpanzees and in humans, is not always the biggest or strongest male, nor someone who adopts hypermasculine traits for the spectacle, like Andrew Tate. Rather, he is the man who is politically skilled at coalition-building and has the best supporters. Goofies are never the alpha male; instead, they tether themselves to whoever they deem the alpha to be.
If you communicate the truth to them—not just within the narrow propositional realm the conversation pretends to operate in, but in a way that reveals the realities of the social field and who they are as a person—their status in the eyes of the alpha and the group itself becomes threatened.
Two things can happen next. The goofy will either hurry to win your approval or, if you have not demonstrated sufficient impressiveness to be seen as their new alpha—or if an existing alpha male is present whom they seek validation from—they will go on the attack.
The Goofy Attack
The goofy attacks are threefold: they either debate you, try to one-up you, or fight you.
If you want to “leave them better,” you’ll need to be prepared for each.
1. Debate You
The goofies, once they intuit that you are not playing their game, will counter whatever you say in hopes of catching you in a “gotcha” moment. If you are a reader of Less Foolish, I assume you are proficient in reasoning, know “the three fallacies,” and have a deep respect for speaking truthfully.
If you have these things, such challenges will be very easy to overcome. The main thing to remember is to know what game you're playing when an unprompted debate conquest arises. The book Extraordinary Tennis for the Ordinary Tennis Player by Simon Ramo offers a helpful mental model: a distinction between “loser’s games” and “winner’s games.”
Loser’s games = focusing on minimizing mistakes.
Winner’s games = focusing on maximizing success.
When learning tennis, amateurs play a loser’s game, meaning the majority of points come from “unforced errors”—mistakes that result from a lack of skill. In essence, one wins a loser’s game by avoiding mistakes and waiting for the opponent to make them. In contrast, professionals play a winner’s game, where victory comes from creating “forced errors,” making amazing shots the opponent cannot respond to.
When it comes to debate contests with goofies, they foolishly aim to play a winner’s game by displaying reasoning prowess they do not possess, attempting to create a forced error in your logic. In response, you merely need to play a loser’s game: tell the truth, guard your premises,3 and avoid speaking on what you do not know. You wait for them to make an unforced error, revealing their own foolishness to the group—which will happen quickly.
I was at a social gathering recently where a goofy vortex was present, and one guy kept trying to debate me, claiming I said things I did not. I knew what game to play, and my move was a simple one: “I did not say that.” To which he responded, “Yes, you did.” This went on for a ridiculously long time, and I firmly stayed with the simple truth. In assertiveness training, this is called the “broken record” technique—a non-fancy yet powerful move.
He finally stopped trying to “win” and sought clarification, which I was happy to give.
2. One-upping You
If the goofy realizes they cannot defeat you in a debate, they will move to verbally crude methods in an attempt to lower your status—such as insults, put-downs, and trash-talking.
Now, this should not be confused with the obscene banter of “breaking balls,” where men trade insults as a form of bonding. Such ball-breaking is what anthropologists refer to as a “leveling mechanism,” in which men create a temporary, non-hierarchical social field to ensure no one man becomes too overconfident, and therefore overbearing.
As
correctly points out in the video clip below, breaking balls is how many men become friends:The right move here is to laugh it off or, if you're verbally quick on your feet, playfully hit back to let them know you're in on the game. If it becomes mean-spirited to the point of disrespect, then you’ll have to do something.
In uncompromising masculine spaces, violence can occur immediately when breaking balls goes too far—as this scene from The Sopranos, the best show to accurately portray human psychology, clearly demonstrates:
In more civilized spaces, when one-upping from goofies becomes uncool or too aggressive, I recommend “meta-communication” as the first line of defense. Meta-communication is the ability to call out social dynamics as they’re happening, in a way that stops them from continuing.
Communication does not only happen through spoken words, but also through body language. In fact, one-upping through physical posturing—such as placing your hand on another man's shoulder—may appear to show camaraderie, but can also function as a subtle display of dominance.
This 2003 Channel 4 documentary is one of the better films that captures such behavior:
As the documentary shows, those in the military need not display such primal body language, because their hierarchy is firmly established and not under threat of being re-established through physical posturing. It is only in social contexts where one’s status is in flux that such behavior becomes the norm.
As the Sopranos clip shows with verbal communication, one can also show disrespect through bodily communication—like slapping someone's back one too many times. I experienced that kind of disrespect once, in a bar when I was younger. A guy I knew—a friend of a friend—had this proclivity for unconsented touch and kept slapping people on the back.
I have a formidable resting barbarian face, which deters most men from disrespectful back slaps, especially repeated ones in a short span. So after his third slap, the only thing going through my mind was: “Who the fuck is this guy?!”
Obviously, my first instinct was to kill him. Fortunately, my Stoic side—always close by—kicked in, and I assessed the situation: I could slap back, a little harder than he did to me, which risked escalating the situation but would most likely send him the message to stop.
Or, I could make the bolder move and engage in meta-communication. While he had goofy qualities, he wasn’t a goofy, and I knew he had a thoughtful side, so I calibrated my message appropriately:
“Hey man, you are slapping me on the back more than what's normal, and when you do, I feel less connected to you.”
He was taken aback, apologized promptly, and never slapped again.
This is what men’s circles refer to as a “clean cut.” From the ManKind Project:
With clean warrior communication, a man can authentically communicate with those around him. If needed, a warrior can enter verbal fray with the clean cut of his sword rather than with the bludgeon of a blunt club.
Clean cuts get to the source of the foolish behavior in a way that stops it without doing undue harm. It’s about speaking the truth with situational precision. As Honoré de Balzac says: “Power is not revealed by striking hard or often, but by striking true.”
It’s hard to pull off, especially in the heat of an exchange. Men’s groups like the ManKind Project offer opportunities to practice, but I’ve found the best way to practice clean cutting outside of experimenting in the interpersonal wild is through Luke Archer’s “verbal aikido.” (See his series at The Stoa.)
3. Fight You
Goofies are pack animals. They usually do not escalate to physical violence on their own, especially if you can disarm them verbally.
Since they lack core integrity, this bleeds into their overall self-confidence, which they overcompensate for through various personas: tough guy, cool guy, guy’s guy. These personas mask their inability to maintain steady confidence when serious conflict emerges, often leading to cowardice when they are directly challenged.
However, if drunk and their ego gets sufficiently wounded, violence becomes a possibility and can start quite rapidly with a few choice words or a threatening physical move. Responding to such “fronting” requires a delicate balance. Since ego-driven street fights are unpredictable and can lead to serious, lifelong injuries or death, it's best to de-escalate the situation.
How you do this is by adopting an internally calm, non-threatening, yet assertive presence.
You want to maintain a sense of internal fearlessness, as fear can make you overcompensate and take the bait—reacting in kind, for example, by stepping toward them in a threatening way.
At the same time, if fear is present and shows clearly, without any compensation, it will signal weakness. Violent men can smell fear—even the goofy ones—and will sense an easy victory.
During this phase of brinkmanship, you do not blink—externally or internally.
Next, you engage in non-threatening body language. You do not match their intensity. Your voice is steady, your tone relaxed, your pace slow. You create in your own body the internal reality you want to see in theirs: peace.
You speak with control and allow them to “save face”—meaning, you do not further wound their ego but acknowledge some truth in what invoked their anger. You convey that you’d rather talk it through, and as a gesture, you offer to buy them a drink.
With most men, this will be enough. However, such de-escalation protocols will need to be undergirded with a specific character trait to avoid an unregulated physical contest. In short, they need to feel your “gameness.”
I first heard this term from
, in what I consider the best book for men: The Way of Men.
Donovan references author Sam Sheridan, who investigates the emotional and psychological side of professional fighting through his books The Fighter’s Heart and The Fighter’s Mind.
Sam Sheridan wrote about it in A Fighter’s Heart. Gameness is a term used in dogfighting to describe, “the eagerness to get into the fight, the berserker rage, and then the absolute commitment to the fight in the face of pain, of disfigurement, until death.”
When a dog—or man—has gameness, the switch flips, and he goes all in. Full berserker mode. He remembers he is an animal who beats his chest, howls at the moon, and rips throats out with his teeth. In modern parlance, he goes “psycho,” but in a narrowed, hyper-focused way that promotes a single objective: win or die trying.
Such gameness is independent of size.
The raw courage of gameness may correlate with the surety of greater size and strength to some degree, but many smaller men are as game as or more game than their larger counterparts. Flyweight fighters are a good example of men who are extremely game, though they are far less strong than many larger men who are less game. Weight-classed combat sports show that men of all sizes can demonstrate terrific gameness.
It is also independent of skill. My favorite scene of gameness is in Cool Hand Luke, when Luke enters a boxing match with the group’s alpha. While he is the smaller and less skilled fighter, he is the last man standing, earning the respect of his fellow men.
If you do not have the capacity to go all in, and if another man—especially one prone to violence—does not feel your gameness, then you’ll forever be at a social disadvantage among such men. Your de-escalation works best when your gameness can be felt. Yet, in rare cases, de-escalation may not work, and if you find yourself in a situation where there is no way out, then—game theoretically speaking—the only way out is to go all in.
I’m a pacifist at heart, and I’ve only gotten into a few fights in my life. The most serious one was a bar fight in my twenties. A guy was looking to fight my brother, and I redirected his ire toward me. After he landed the first punch, the switch flipped, and I went after him. I left with a black eye, but the fight ended with me being pulled off from on top of him. Put simply, I had more gameness than he did.
It feels good to dominate another man, as it produces a kind of primal high. But you want to cultivate the wisdom to avoid such confrontations (as my “Wisdom Moment” essay shows), because they’re rarely worth it. Still, you also have to let go of the taboo against violence when necessary. As a man, you need the courage to flip the switch when the moment calls for it.
Goofies can smell your gameness. And when they do, they leave you alone.
De-goofication?
To summarize …
You stood stoically firm in front of the goofy vortex by being truthful and revealing the truth with a simple “mmh.”
You played the loser’s game and allowed them to lose the debate, potentially with something as basic as the “broken record” technique.
You engaged in meta-communication—calling out the social dynamics, providing a “clean cut,” and ending their foolish ways for good.
You de-escalated the situation and allowed them to smell your gameness.
You just modeled for them how to be a virtuous friend. You embodied integrity—with your word and with your presence.
At this point, to the average goofy, you’ll seem like a mystical, otherworldly creature. Because you are. You do not belong to this world. The fallen world that constantly makes excuses for unvirtuous games, following the false logic that “since this is the norm, it’s okay.”
It’s not okay.
Yet you need not engage in a full-blown de-goofification. This is not your project. You’re not their coach or therapist. Besides, they aren’t the type of guys who have a coach or go to therapy.
Instead, after becoming impenetrable to all the goofies’ foolish influence, you engage in the spiritual part of the practice: you see the good in them.
You do not harm them or punish them for their goofiness. Rather, you simply see the good in the goofy. And they have good in them—however small or hidden. It’s there. You just have to attune yourself to it—which becomes easier to do when you regularly attune yourself to it in your own life.
Do not make a big fuss out of it. Just point it out through a small, parting compliment. Maybe they are kind to animals. Maybe they love their children or partner. Maybe, at times, they are socially considerate. Feel it, say it, and allow it to slowly become the prominent aspect of their personality you see.
The good is love manifest. Seeing the good in another person is an act of good itself, manifesting greater love into the social fields you find yourself in.
That’s how you leave them better than you found them.
If you have any questions, insights, feedback, or criticism on this entry or more generally, message me below (I read and respond on Saturdays) …
A social field is a handy term I use throughout this Substack. First learned from Otto Scharmer’s Theory U, it can be understood as the invisible dynamics at play when groups of people cohere, influencing how they relate to one another.
Some academics call this “pseudo-profound bullshit”—“seemingly impressive assertions that are presented as true and meaningful but are actually vacuous.”
In Think Again: How to Reason and Argue, philosopher Walter Sinnott-Armstrong describes premise guarding as the act of purposely weakening your premises to make your argument harder to refute: “To change the premise from “all” to “many” (or “most”), or “some,” or from “definitely” to “possibly,” or “significant chance” (or “probably” or “likely”) is to guard the premise. Other ways to guard premises include self-description, as in “I believe” (or “think,” “suspect,” or “fear”)...’”