The Gorean Philosophy (For the Free)

For a long time now, many of us have held this as a ‘secret’, some­thing which was avail­able to oth­ers but only if they did the work of read­ing the Gor nov­els, read­ing relat­ed works, THINKING FOR THEMSELVES, and arriv­ing at cor­rect con­clu­sion. For that, they had to be inter­est­ed, ded­i­cat­ed to the jour­ney of dis­cov­ery, avid read­ers who could appre­ci­ate an archa­ic style of writ­ing, fair­ly intel­li­gent, and able to con­sid­er the issues both hon­est­ly and objectively.

Time has proven that very few will achieve more than a rudi­men­ta­ry under­stand­ing with­out the help of oth­ers who have gone before them, shar­ing under­stand­ings and insights through dis­cus­sions and demon­strat­ing them through actions. Since one of the def­i­n­i­tions of insan­i­ty is to keep doing the same thing again and again and expect­ing a dif­fer­ent result, I’ve decid­ed lay out the basic foun­da­tion of what the Gorean phi­los­o­phy actu­al­ly is, in the hopes that those who read this, will test it out for them­selves, per­haps read the Gor nov­els with an eye to see­ing these things play out, and then build some­thing of val­ue on this foundation.

To begin with, since these are words you are read­ing, it’s impor­tant to under­stand that the words them­selves are very impor­tant. They attempt to con­vey a spe­cif­ic mean­ing and avoid con­fu­sion, to leave as lit­tle as pos­si­ble up to inter­pre­ta­tion except where that inter­pre­ta­tion is nec­es­sary and delib­er­ate. If you’re famil­iar with all these words and their exact mean­ings, I ask your patience as I go over them one more time.

• Foundation — An under­ly­ing basis or prin­ci­ple for some­thing (Google Dictionary). It may also be thought of like the foun­da­tion of a build­ing in that it bears the entire weight of the struc­ture above it, every part of that struc­ture’s weight goes down to the foun­da­tion and not out­side of it.
• Principle — A fun­da­men­tal truth, doc­trine or tenet, a guid­ing sense of the require­ments and oblig­a­tions of right con­duct. (Dictionary.com)
• Values — A set of prin­ci­ples, stan­dards, or qual­i­ties con­sid­ered to be worth­while, desir­able, or impor­tant. (Dictionary.com) Another word for a “pos­i­tive val­ue” is a “virtue”.
• Morality — The dis­tin­guish­ment of right action from wrong, good or bad, based on a spe­cif­ic set of val­ues. (Dictionary.com)
• Ethics — The body of morals, prin­ci­ples, and val­ues dis­tinc­tive of a par­tic­u­lar cul­ture, group, or indi­vid­ual. (Dictionary.com)
• Ethos — the fun­da­men­tal or dis­tinc­tive char­ac­ter, dis­po­si­tion, or spir­it which informs the beliefs, cus­toms, and prac­tices of a cul­ture, group, or indi­vid­ual. (Dictionary.com)
• Philosophy — a coher­ent set of val­ues, prin­ci­ples, and morals which are inde­pen­dent of lan­guage, cul­ture, or epoch, and used to under­stand and deter­mine being, knowl­edge, or con­duct. (Dictionary.com)
• Gorean — There is only one def­i­n­i­tion of ‘Gorean’ which is, all at once, intel­li­gent, sane, and seri­ous; a ‘Gorean’ is some­one who strives to live their life accord­ing to the Gorean Philosophy. Anything else is either a game or fan­ta­sy, insane, or just stu­pid. (LionHeart of Gor)

If there is the slight­est ques­tion about these mean­ings, look them up for your­self. You will dis­cov­er that each of these terms has a num­ber of mean­ings, and it varies by dic­tio­nary and edi­tion over time. This inquiry will in turn demon­strate that the def­i­n­i­tions I’ve post­ed above are both valid, and in some cas­es, a syn­the­sis of mul­ti­ple def­i­n­i­tions which are all appro­pri­ate to this essay.

The Gorean Philosophy is not real­ly com­plex, it’s not rock­et sci­ence, if all you want to do is to gain a basic, func­tion­al under­stand­ing of. If you wish to under­stand more, and more deeply, there’s a wealth of knowl­edge out there which goes back to the days of Plato, for you to delve into. Yes, read­ing the source books, the Gor nov­els them­selves, is more than a good idea; it’s cru­cial to ensure you know the truth of what the Gorean Philosophy is, for your­self. Yes, it was for­mu­lat­ed by a Professor of Philosophy, Dr. John F. Lange, for­mer Holder of the Chair at Princeton and CUNY, with par­tic­u­lar exper­tise in the phi­los­o­phy of Ethical Naturalism. Much of the style of the Gor nov­els is about what you’d expect from a man with that back­ground, how­ev­er, it can be dis­tilled, sum­ma­rized if you will.

The con­text with­in which the Gorean Philosophy resides is that of the Natural Order (some­times referred to as ‘Naturalism’. The Natural Order is the empir­i­cal­ly-derived source of under­stand­ing of now the nat­ur­al world and all with­in it, nat­u­ral­ly exist and inter­re­late. This pro­vides evi­dence and proof of the moral cor­rect­ness of Natural Law. In con­trast, ‘pos­i­tive law’ derives it’s author­i­ty from gov­ern­ment, and ‘divine law’ derives it’s author­i­ty from the Divine.

Or to put it anoth­er way, the Natural Order address­es the nat­ur­al state of being for men, women, and how they nat­u­ral­ly relate to one anoth­er, and how humans nat­u­ral­ly relate to the nat­ur­al world (that’s a lot of uses of the word ‘nature’, but they’re all need­ed). It estab­lish­es itself as the author­i­ta­tive source through obser­va­tion of human­i­ty through­out the ages, across thou­sands of years and thou­sands of soci­eties, across con­ti­nents and cul­tures, look­ing for sim­i­lar­i­ties between suc­cess­ful, vibrant, grow­ing human soci­eties to deter­mine the basis of what is right (pos­i­tive) and what is wrong (neg­a­tive) for most human beings. There are always out­liers from the mean, extremes of the Bell curve, for which these these things may not apply, but the norm is not deter­mined by the extremes.

The First Principle of the Gorean Philosophy, then, is that liv­ing your life in con­so­nance with the Natural Order is going to give you the great­est oppor­tu­ni­ty for inner and out­er har­mo­ny with your­self, and there­fore, a greater oppor­tu­ni­ty for real hap­pi­ness, untaint­ed by the dis­sat­is­fac­tion that comes with act­ing against your own instinc­tu­al self. This specif­i­cal­ly pro­motes mas­culin­i­ty and male dom­i­nance for men, fem­i­nin­i­ty and female sub­mis­sion for women, and under­stand­ing that human­i­ty is part of nature and the nat­ur­al process, respon­si­ble to do no more harm to the world around us than is nec­es­sary for human needs.

The Gor nov­els speak of a num­ber of spe­cif­ic pos­i­tive val­ues which are always going to be con­sid­ered ‘good’ in terms of Gorean moral­i­ty. This means, of course, that actions which go against these virtues are, by def­i­n­i­tion, neg­a­tive and not recommended.

Gorean Virtue	Examples
Conquest	To fight for what you believe in
Defiance	Refusal to sub­mit to oppression
Courage	Refusal to sub­mit to fear
Hardness	Fortitude, accep­tance that some things are dif­fi­cult, even painful, and work­ing through them regardless
Strength	Indomitable will
Freedom	Refusal to sub­mit to the imposed con­trol of oth­ers or things, hav­ing a choice, per­son­al sovereignty
Duty	Fulfilling the com­mit­ments you have under­tak­en, stand­ing by your word even when it’s to your detri­ment, main­tain­ing your loyalties
Integrity	Maintaining your prin­ci­ples in the face of adver­si­ty, accep­tance of respon­si­bil­i­ty for your choic­es and actions
Truth	Refusal to accept lies, or to lie; stand­ing for the truth based on real­i­ty vs pre­tense or falsity
Pride	The hon­esty of being proud of who you are and what you do
Self-Reliance	Doing for your­self, earn­ing your way, not being on charity

Do these virtues sound famil­iar? They should. Not so many decades ago, in our own cul­ture, these are char­ac­ter traits which were great­ly admired and sought after. If you’ve been read­ing the Gor nov­els, you’ve seen these things spo­ken of, and enact­ed, again and again. I could dig out the quotes to sup­port each and every one of these, but this isn’t a cheat-sheet on what’s in the Gor nov­els. This is a dis­til­la­tion, a sum­ma­ry, of the Gorean Philosophy, noth­ing more.

None of those prin­ci­ples or val­ues are sub­ject to debate, they are all part of Gorean moral­i­ty because they are all explic­it­ly stat­ed to be and illus­trat­ed to be, with­in the Gor nov­els. What is debat­able is how they might apply, or what forms they may take, or how impor­tant each one is, and how one might recov­er from a lapse.

While hon­our has been men­tioned as a Gorean virtue, I pre­fer to treat it as an inde­pen­dent issue because it’s much more com­plex than rat­tling off a few exam­ples. There is per­son­al hon­our which is inter­nal and known with cer­tain­ty ONLY to the one who may claim to pos­sess it. There is a social or cul­tur­al hon­our which is under­stood by every­one in a com­mu­ni­ty so that when they see it, they know it for what it is. And there is the act of hon­our­ing, ver­sus an act of hon­our. This is a top­ic which deserves it’s own essay.

In sum­ma­ry, the fun­da­men­tal prin­ci­ple of the Gorean Philosophy is to live your life accord­ing to the Natural Order, as it per­tains to under­stand­ing our­selves, the nat­ur­al rela­tion­ship between men and women, and the rela­tion­ship between human­i­ty and the nat­ur­al world itself. Most oth­er prin­ci­ples will be found to derive from this, or from an appre­ci­a­tion of the of the things which the Gorean phi­los­o­phy val­ues highly.

How well we express and embody Gorean val­ues in our actions is what earns us respect. Self-respect, and respect amongst our peers; oth­er Goreans. No one is per­fect, no one is an ‘avatar’ of any val­ue or virtue. These things are the virtues that the Gorean Philosophy places a high val­ue on, so they are things we strive for, as best we can. As Goreans.

Some believe that by ‘giv­ing out the answer’, I’m depriv­ing a seek­er of the val­ue they might gain from dis­cov­er­ing it for them­selves. Been there, done that, worn out the t‑shirt. By try­ing to reserve some­thing so sim­ple and clear to a cho­sen few oli­garchs, we hob­ble the devel­op­ment of the Gorean com­mu­ni­ty. The real chal­lenge isn’t in fig­ur­ing out what the Gorean phi­los­o­phy is. The real chal­lenge is fig­ur­ing out how to best live it in your own life.

The final point has to do with what a phi­los­o­phy is. By def­i­n­i­tion, a phi­los­o­phy is inde­pen­dent of cul­ture. It is up to us to do the hard work of dis­cov­er­ing how to best imple­ment a phi­los­o­phy into our lives, into our worlds. It isn’t easy, and those of us who have done it, have paid the price many times over as we strug­gled to fig­ure it out. In the end, how­ev­er, being who you tru­ly are is much eas­i­er than main­tain­ing a lie. As an old say­ing goes: Gor isn’t hard, for Goreans.

What did you think of this?