Image via Pixabay.
by Ryan French
Quietly, something has gone terribly wrong with how young men are being taught to matter. Across forums, livestreams, and social media feeds, a culture has emerged that reduces masculine value to a single metric: physical appearance. The practice is called looksmaxxing — the systematic pursuit of aesthetic ascent through whatever means are available, from steroids and peptides to bone restructuring and surgical intervention. At its core, looksmaxxing rests on a single ideological premise: that physical appearance is not merely one dimension of a man’s worth, but the one that ultimately governs all other forms of value. Its consequences are documented: young men expelled from universities for smuggling steroids into dormitories, arrested on drug and battery charges, hospitalized for suspected overdoses. And yet the ideology continues to proliferate, delivered to the majority of teenage boys by platforms that profit from their insecurity, whether they sought it out or not. It promises transformation. It produces, with remarkable consistency, young men who are chemically dependent, socially isolated, and unable to conceive of their own worth outside a hierarchy they did not build and cannot escape.
The young men who enter this system are neither cynical nor deluded. They are responding to something real — the collapse of any shared sense of what a man is supposed to be. Looksmaxxing steps into that absence with something that, on its own terms, feels entirely rational: a system of quantification that converts subjective judgment into something fixed and measurable. The fact that this ideology is making them sick does not make them foolish for having reached for it; it makes it more dangerous, because it provides a stable framework for evaluation in a context where no shared standards remain.
This structure takes form in the codes men inherit and the lives those codes shape. In All the Pretty Horses, Cormac McCarthy dramatizes a masculine code that persists despite its failure, sustained by the absence of anything to replace it — a code whose demand for constancy without questioning, honour without flexibility, and strength without vulnerability leaves John Grady Cole wholly alien to the world he loves. Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morality clarifies the psychological structure that sustains this code: when shared meaning collapses and the will to power has nowhere to go, it turns inward, optimizing within a degraded value system rather than creating something new. Written decades before looksmaxxing existed, these two texts together reveal the psychological structure the ideology inherits — a structure in which the young men inside it emerge as casualties rather than its beneficiaries.
McCarthy’s novel makes this kind of structure visible from its opening pages in the figure of John Grady Cole. The first thing All the Pretty Horses establishes about its protagonist is what he has been handed — not who he is — and the distance between those two realities is where the novel’s tragedy lives. John Grady Cole does not choose his values. He inherits them. The masculine code he lives by — honour, constancy, emotional restraint, the refusal to change his mind — arrives already formed, absorbed from a world of vaqueros and cowboy myth that has already begun to disappear before the novel even opens. This is what the code conceals: it is not a personal ethic, but an inherited framework — a set of instructions for how to be a man that precedes him and will outlast him, even as its original ground — the frontier, the ranch, the self-sufficient life on the land — has already given way. What John Grady receives is not a living tradition but its residue. Like all residue, it retains the shape of what it came from without retaining its substance.
The code’s central demand is permanence. “A man does not change his mind,” the novel insists (McCarthy 181), transforming integrity into refusal. Constancy is not a virtue here so much as an identity, the one thing that remains when everything else has been stripped away. McCarthy reinforces this when he associates courage not with the ability to face uncertainty but with the ability to remain fixed despite it: “all courage was a form of constancy” (235). To waver is to risk losing oneself entirely. The coward “abandoned himself first” (235) — as though reconsideration were not growth but self-betrayal. What appears as moral seriousness is, on closer inspection, rigidity dressed in the language of honour. The code asks John Grady for consistency rather than goodness. The novel is clear that these are not the same.
This is precisely what Nietzsche identifies as the signature of ressentiment. In The Genealogy of Morality I.10, he describes the psychology of those “denied the proper response of action,” who “compensate for it only with imaginary revenge” — a psychology organized not around what it affirms but around what it cannot allow itself to become. The man of ressentiment “is neither upright nor naïve, nor honest and straight with himself. His soul squints; his mind loves dark corners, secret paths and back-doors” (GM I.10). John Grady’s silence, his emotional inaccessibility, his refusal to assign blame — “I cant see where it would make me feel better to point a finger” (McCarthy 155) — reads less like equanimity than like an avoidance of anything that might force him to examine himself. The code does not permit that examination.
What presents itself as strength is, on closer inspection, a form of constraint. In the Genealogy I.13, Nietzsche argues that “it is just as absurd to ask strength not to express itself as strength” as it is to ask weakness to pass itself off as something it is not. Genuine strength, for Nietzsche, is spontaneous and self-affirming — it acts, moves on, and does not require the world’s cooperation to sustain itself. The code John Grady inherits cannot do this. It can only hold the line, endure, refuse — and call that endurance virtue. As Phillip Snyder argues, McCarthy “consistently undercuts the ideological and pragmatic foundations” of John Grady’s cowboy self-identity (203). But “undercuts” does not fully capture the novel’s force. McCarthy does not simply expose the code as unstable; he shows that it persists even after its foundations have collapsed. The masculine code does not give John Grady access to life. It gives him a performance of it. When the world stops showing up to watch, the performance continues anyway — which is the most damning thing McCarthy shows.
The code does not collapse so much as wear down over time. There is no single moment of recognition, no dramatic rupture where John Grady sees the framework for what it is and walks away from it. Instead, it erodes — across the prison, across the loss of Alejandra, across a judge’s casual indifference to what actually happened — each encounter quietly demonstrating that the world does not operate on the code’s terms. John Grady absorbs all of it in silence, as the code demands. The weight of that silence accumulates until it produces the one admission the code can barely contain: “I dont feel justified” (McCarthy 290). He has done everything right — held the line, refused to change his mind, endured — and it has produced nothing: not resolution, not moral clarity, not the sense of rightness the code implicitly promises. The failure does not belong to John Grady. It belongs to the structure itself, which was never equal to the world it claimed to govern.
Nietzsche’s second essay in the Genealogy describes exactly this turn inward. When the instincts of a “wild, free, roving man” have no external outlet, they do not disappear. The frontier is closed, the enemies are gone, the world has become too complex and indifferent to be mastered through honour alone — and so the instincts turn inward. “Animosity, cruelty, the pleasure of pursuing, raiding, changing and destroying — all this was pitted against the person who had such instincts,” Nietzsche writes, and the result is a man who “impatiently ripped himself apart, persecuted himself, gnawed at himself, gave himself no peace and abused himself, this animal who battered himself raw on the bars of his cage” (GM II.16). This is the origin of what Nietzsche calls bad conscience — the invention of an interior wilderness to replace the exterior one that has been closed off. John Grady does not know he is doing this. The code has no language for it. But the dynamic is legible in everything the novel shows us: a will to power that, having nowhere left to go, begins to consume the very identity it was meant to sustain.
This inward turn becomes most visible in his relationship with Alejandra. Love introduces a dimension of experience the code cannot accommodate — one that requires negotiation, vulnerability, the willingness to reconsider. John Grady cannot offer any of these things. The code does not permit them. “You dont know what is the situation here,” Alejandra tells him. “You dont speak the language” (McCarthy 188). Alejandra’s assertion exposes a masculine code that no longer knows how to meet another person halfway. Nell Sullivan argues that the Border Trilogy’s masculine world sustains itself precisely by expelling alterity — women, vulnerability, difference — in order to preserve a closed circuit of male self-reference (Sullivan 231). Sullivan’s account clarifies the exclusionary structure, but expelling vulnerability does not make it disappear. With Alejandra, John Grady doesn’t refuse connection so much as find he has no way to reach it — the code left him fluent in everything except the thing she’s asking for. What it shuts out comes back as a hollowness he can’t name or answer. He didn’t choose this closure; he inherited it, and its logic is the same either way: a will with nowhere left to turn but inward, tightening on itself until what looks like discipline becomes a slow form of self-destruction.
The novel leaves us with a man who has lived his code faithfully — and found that fidelity produces emptiness. “He felt wholly alien to the world although he loved it still” (McCarthy 282). The code has given him identity at the cost of belonging, constancy at the cost of connection, endurance at the cost of meaning. Nietzsche’s closing line in the Genealogy reads like a diagnosis written for this ending: “man still prefers to will nothingness, than not will” (GM III.28). John Grady rides on not because he has somewhere to go, but because stopping — opening, yielding, becoming something the code has no name for — is more than the inherited framework can accommodate. The will persists. The meaning is gone. It is here, in this hollow persistence, that McCarthy’s mid-century cowboy and the twenty-first-century young man staring at his reflection begin to look unmistakably alike.
John Grady Cole and the looksmaxxer are separated by seventy years and entirely different vocabularies for their suffering, but they are haunted by the same absence. The code John Grady inherits and the hierarchy the looksmaxxer submits to are both answers to the same question — what makes a man worth something? — and both answers share the same fatal architecture: they point the will inward, toward endless refinement within a given system, rather than outward toward something worth striving for. In both cases, the self becomes a project that can be endlessly improved but never completed, because the standard it answers to cannot provide meaning, only comparison. Neither framework asks what the striving is actually for. Neither has an answer. It is precisely this absence — of purpose beyond the code, of meaning beyond the metric — that Nietzsche identified as the defining crisis of a culture that has killed God without replacing him. When shared meaning collapses, he argued, human beings do not stop willing. They redirect their will toward whatever remains available. They optimize. They endure. They hold the line. What they cannot do, without something genuinely transcendent to orient themselves toward, is live.
Nietzsche had a name for this figure long before the algorithm produced him. In the prologue to Thus Spoke Zarathustra, written in 1883, he described with uncomfortable precision the endpoint of a culture that has abandoned transcendence for optimization. The Last Man is not a villain. He does not rage or destroy. He has simply stopped striving for anything beyond his own comfort and optimization, having quietly abandoned the possibility that life might require something more. “‘What is love? What is creation? What is longing? What is a star?’” Zarathustra asks — and the Last Man blinks (Z Prologue 5). Not because he is stupid, but because the questions have stopped feeling meaningful. He has organized his existence around what can be measured, compared, and improved, and in doing so has optimized himself out of the capacity to want anything that cannot be quantified. “‘We have invented happiness,’ say the last men, and they blink” (Z Prologue 5). The earth has become small, and on it hops the Last Man, “who makes everything small” — a figure whose race, Nietzsche notes, “is as ineradicable as the flea-beetle; the last man lives longest” (Z Prologue 5).
This is the type of man looksmaxxing produces — shaped by a value system that has reduced human worth to a single legible metric and organized an entire practice of self-development around ascending it. Looksmaxxing is better understood as a response to a collapse in masculine meaning: a value system still capable of ranking men, but no longer capable of telling them why any of it should matter. Van Valkenburgh’s analysis of The Red Pill community reveals that this logic is not accidental but structural: the philosophy “superficially resolves a contradiction between hegemonic masculinity’s prescriptive emotional walls and an inherent desire for connection by constructing women as exchangeable commodities” (Van Valkenburgh 84). The body becomes the primary site of optimization because it is the most legible currency in what the community calls the sexual marketplace — a framework in which a man’s entire social worth is reduced to his “sexual market value (SMV),” defined simply as “one’s worth in the sexual marketplace; often conflated with one’s attractiveness” (97). The contradiction Van Valkenburgh identifies — between stoic masculine self-sufficiency and the desperate need for external validation — is not resolved but dissolved, by turning the self into a project that can always be refined. Aurélien Daudi, applying Nietzsche’s framework directly to body-optimization culture, identifies this as the Last Man’s defining gesture: genuine self-overcoming replaced by the performance of it, discipline organized entirely around social visibility rather than transformation of values (Daudi 152). It looks like striving. It is optimization within a closed system. The system persists because it still offers rank after it has ceased to offer meaning.
The ressentiment structuring this system is explicit. Tietjen and Tirkkonen argue that “it is the affective mechanism of ressentiment that transforms loneliness into antagonistic emotions” in the incel community — and that this community is organized around what they identify as the laws of “lookism,” a hierarchy that ranks men by physical appearance and excludes those at the bottom from social and romantic life entirely (Tietjen and Tirkkonen 1233). This is Nietzsche’s slave revolt without the transvaluation — ressentiment that has found its metric system but cannot find its way out. The looksmaxxer does not reject the hierarchy that degrades him. He submits to it more completely, disciplines himself more rigorously, hoping that sufficient optimization will finally produce the validation the hierarchy keeps withholding. It never does. The goalposts move. The standard shifts. The body is never quite enough. And so the will turns further inward, the optimization intensifies, and the young man who began by wanting to be more attractive ends by turning that drive against himself, mistaking destruction for ascent.
It would be easy to condemn this. It would also be wrong. The young men inside looksmaxxing culture are not there because they are weak or vain or stupid. They are there because something real is missing — because the culture that produced them failed to offer any framework for masculine meaning that could survive contact with the actual conditions of their lives. John Grady Cole inherited a code whose transcendent ground had already collapsed before he received it. The looksmaxxer inherits a culture whose shared values have dissolved entirely, replaced by metrics and algorithms and the hollow promise of ascent. Both are responding rationally to a genuine absence. Both are being destroyed by the response. The difference is not in the intensity of their effort but in what that effort is allowed to touch. One turns toward a world that no longer answers. The other turns toward a system that never could. “One still works, for work is a form of entertainment,” Nietzsche writes of the Last Man. “But one is careful lest the entertainment be too harrowing. One no longer becomes poor or rich: both require too much exertion. Who still wants to rule? Who obey? Both require too much exertion” (Z Prologue 5). The Last Man is not lazy. He is exhausted by a world that has nothing left to ask of him that matters — and so he optimizes, and blinks, and calls it a life.
What neither John Grady nor the looksmaxxer achieves is what Nietzsche actually wanted — not the Last Man but the Overman, not optimization within a degraded system but the creation of new values from genuine strength. “The time has come for man to set himself a goal,” Zarathustra declares. “The time has come for man to plant the seed of his highest hope. His soil is still rich enough. But one day this soil will be poor and domesticated, and no tall tree will be able to grow in it” (Z Prologue 5). The tragedy is not that these young men lack the will. They have enormous will — it is evident in every extreme measure undertaken in the name of ascent. What they lack is not discipline but direction — not effort but an object worthy of it. The tragedy is that their will has been captured by a framework that points it entirely inward — toward a statue that can always be refined but never completed, toward a hierarchy that always withholds what it promises. The soil is still rich enough. But the seeds being planted in it are not growing anything.
McCarthy does not offer an alternative. Neither does Nietzsche, at least not in any form that can be directly lived.
What can be said is this: the masculine code — whether John Grady’s or the looksmaxxer’s — fails not because the men inside it lack seriousness or will but because the code asks the wrong question. It asks what a man should be rather than what a man should love, pursue, or build. It orients the self inward and downward, toward refinement and performance, rather than outward toward something worth striving for. Nietzsche’s deepest objection to the ascetic ideal is not that it demands too much but that it demands effort in the wrong direction — effort that consumes rather than creates, that tightens rather than opens. “Man still prefers to will nothingness, than not will,” he writes at the Genealogy’s close (GM III.28). The will is not the problem. It never was. The problem is what it has been given to do.
John Grady Cole loved the world. That is one of the most important things McCarthy shows us and one of the easiest to miss. He loved horses, land, and the particular quality of light over the Mexican desert. He loved Alejandra with a seriousness that the code, ironically, prevented him from expressing. The capacity was there. The framework that might have directed it toward something livable was not. He ended up “dead centre to the world… all of it taut and trembling and moving enormous and alive under his hands” (McCarthy 119) — connected to everything, belonging to nothing, sustained only by a code that had long since stopped being able to tell him why any of it mattered.
This is the inheritance looksmaxxing culture is passing on. Not cruelty, not stupidity, but a framework so narrow that the enormous aliveness of the world — love, creation, longing, all the things the Last Man can no longer name — has nowhere to enter. The young men inside it are not beyond reach. They are, in Nietzsche’s terms, men whose soil is still rich enough. What they are being handed are not seeds but mirrors — objects that return their own image rather than pointing toward anything outside themselves. They do not open the world. They close it. That is the difference between a code and a life. A code tells you what to be. A life requires you to figure out what to love. McCarthy knew this. Nietzsche knew this. The algorithm does not, and it is the algorithm that is doing the teaching now.
Works Cited
Daudi, Aurélien. “Social Media Hedonism and the Case of ‘Fitspiration’: A Nietzschean Critique.” Sport, Ethics and Philosophy, vol. 17, no. 2 (2023): 146–161.
McCarthy, Cormac. All the Pretty Horses. Vintage International, 1993.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. On the Genealogy of Morality. Edited by Keith Ansell-Pearson, translated by Carol Diethe, Cambridge University Press, 2007.
—. Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Translated by Walter Kaufmann, Penguin, 1978.
Snyder, Phillip A. “Cowboy Codes in Cormac McCarthy’s Border Trilogy.” A Cormac McCarthy Companion: The Border Trilogy, edited by Edwin T. Arnold and Dianne C. Luce, University Press of Mississippi, 2001.
Sullivan, Nell. “Boys Will Be Boys and Girls Will Be Gone: The Circuit of Male Desire in Cormac McCarthy’s Border Trilogy.” A Cormac McCarthy Companion: The Border Trilogy, edited by Edwin T. Arnold and Dianne C. Luce, University Press of Mississippi, 2001.
Tietjen, Ruth Rebecca, and Sanna K. Tirkkonen. “The Rage of Lonely Men: Loneliness and Misogyny in the Online Movement of ‘Involuntary Celibates’ (Incels).” Topoi, vol. 42, no. 5, 2023.
Van Valkenburgh, Shawn P. “Digesting the Red Pill: Masculinity and Neoliberalism in the Manosphere.” Men and Masculinities, vol. 24, no. 1 (2021): 84–103.