I only became aware of Andrew Tate about a year ago and having come across some of the things he’s said really make me wonder if his public persona is just performance art. Consider this one:
In case the link breaks, here’s the text:
Most of you will never make your fathers proud.
Not truly.
Not deep in his heart.
Only victory in battle can do that. It’s evolutionary.
Your dad pretends he’s proud of your ecom store while wishing you were a champion.
You failed. Cowards.
The ridiculousness of this verges on well-crafted.
First, it’s just silly. Victory in battle doesn’t make fathers nearly as proud as building well-made things does. Just meet some fathers, or be one. But even on its face, being able to provide food to his family doesn’t make a man’s father proud? Seriously? It’s fine if they starve to death, all that matters is that he beat someone else in combat? Yeah. Right.
Evolution does not, in fact, favor the inability to keep yourself alive under normal circumstances†.
Also, I find it highly amusing that apparently a successful hunter counts for nothing, it’s only fighting other human beings that counts, according to evolution. Because it’s fine to starve to death because you can’t kill a deer, or to have your children killed by a jaguar that you can’t track down and kill, but if some other man beats you in battle and you have to pay taxes to him as a result, evolution just hates that.
Yeah. That’s plausible.
(There are a thousand ways to point out that this is wrong, I’m sticking to just a few that happen to occur to me first to save time.)
What’s also rich about this is that Andrew Tate has never, so far as I know, been in any battle. He’s played punching games for money under strict rules that prohibited the one guy (carefully selected for being no bigger than him) he was fighting from pulling out so much as a sharp stick, and which was actually surrounded by a metal cage to prevent the other guy’s friends from helping. But I can find nowhere in his biography that he was ever on a battlefield where people wanted to kill him and used every means at their disposal to try to do so.
The persona of Andrew Tate is almost perfectly pure bravado. He talks very, very big, but in ways that he obviously doesn’t measure up. According to him, he made is money being a digital pimp—running a camgirl business (i.e. basically, using internet video to do realtime pornography). But even more impressively, according to him the real money came from when he would have the naked woman handling the public chatroom while he pretended to be her in his DMs and then conned men into sending “her” their life savings, selling their house and giving “her” the proceeds, etc. That is, he made most of his money by flirting with men while pretending to be a woman.
This is the guy who lectures men on how fathers are evolutionarily programmed to only be proud of their sons if they cage fight.
It is possible, of course, that the man has this little an amount of self-awareness. But it’s starting to become more plausible that this is actually some elaborate piece of performance art.
†It would, technically, be more accurate to phrase this as: evolution does not place no value on the ability to stay alive under normal circumstances. That said, in the broader context, people who go looking for fights tend to suffer consequences and people who focus on one thing tend to neglect others, hence my original phrasing. It’s not wrong as a critique, it’s just not as accurate a summary of what I said immediately before.
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Chris Lansdown 