This essay was originally published at In Mala Fide on August 19, 2009.

It’s been a month since I started this blog, and two people have remarked on my chosen name for it, In Mala Fide, and the fact that “mala fide” translates into English as “bad faith.” The first was she-dissenter and pseudotroll sparky in this comment, and the second was Lawrence Auster in his critique of my critique of him. Neither seem to think very highly of my choice. In Mala Fide has a deeper meaning beyond being a snappy blog title - I didn’t choose it at random, but after a considerable bit of thought.

Two bloggers I read recently posted on this subject. First, Kamal S. posted an essay entitled “You Can’t Survive Without Being A Rebel.” An excerpt:

Just the other day, a really fine example of the Contemporary American Illiterate (Ilitteratus Americanus Contemperaneous) accused me of being a natural born rebel.

While this accusation didn’t exactly strike at the center of my sense of self worth nor drive me to contemplate suicide — it did cause me to begin thinking about what causes individuals to rebel against society at large.

What immediately struck me is how difficult it would be to survive *without* being a rebel. If one were to attempt to survive by following the rules of society as officially stated, the natural evolutionary laws would give the offender quite a punishment.

The essay goes on to describe how the rules of contemporary American society effectively force people to break them in order to stay afloat, using college sexual harassment codes, our Kafka-esque tax laws, and violent crime statistics as examples. It concludes with this:

If you want to reproduce, succeed economically, or merely stay alive in modern America, you *must* become a rebel. Your other option is to be a meek virgin who spends all of his or her time indoors (afraid to go out, for fear of being robbed, raped, assaulted or murdered) filling out those 4,000 pages of IRS forms and sending your money away to a government which can’t protect you from anyone but yourself.

Next, MarkyMark recently posted an article entitled “Bitter Boys.” Here’s a sampling:

The word “bitter” is such a loaded term in our society that most people are afraid to ever admit to experiencing the emotion. Well here’s a fact that the world will never tell you: It takes a man to admit that he’s bitter – at least to himself.

The truth is, it is impossible for prudent, intelligent, red blooded, heterosexual men living in feminist countries not to be bitter once they realize the truth about WW & divorce laws because that sobering reality basically means the death of their hopes and dreams for ever having a family in their home country.

When you think about it, those are devastating realizations. For most of us, it means pretty much having to completely reevaluate our life’s goals and what we are living for. This is not an easy thing to do. It also means having to “get over” something that is deeply instilled in most of us (the desire to marry and have our own family).

Bitterness, like mourning, is a necessary part of grieving after a tragedy and realizing that you can’t marry and have a family unless you’re certifiably insane is a tragedy of the highest order. Bitterness only becomes a problem if you allow yourself to wallow in it for too many years.

We all know that society is sick and civilization is waning, but how is an individual supposed to react to this? Once you’ve learned that following the rules is a sure way to get screwed over, you can’t go back to being Boobus Americanus (to borrow from Mencken). Western civilization, in its politically correct, feminized state, demands that you bend over and grab your ankles in order to be a good citizen, and breaking the rules will earn you the contempt of society at large – and yet, breaking the rules is the only way to survive. There’s no proper ethical code in existence that requires people to submit to tyrants who seek to bind them in chains. Much like how the Christians of the Roman Empire refused to worship the emperor, sane Westerners are refusing to worship the various false idols that comprise our dying culture. Running on the corporate hamster wheel to pay off six figures of student loans that you racked up so you could get that job on the hamster wheel to begin with, spending what little discretionary income you have left on pointless objects you don’t need, and working towards being unhappily married to an irritable sow who will divorce you at the drop of a doughnut and move halfway across the country with the kids out of spite – no one would call that a sane or sensible way to spend your life.

When the pseudonymous Asia Times Online columnist Spengler unmasked himself last April, he stated his reason for choosing that nom de plume was as a joke – the name of the German scholar who wrote The Decline of the West appropriated for a column in an Asian newspaper. A bad joke, but it has a point. The name of this blog, In Mala Fide, can be thought of as a jab in that vein. The moral configuration of Western society, as chronicled on this blog and others, requires its best citizens to rebel, to go against the grain, to behave in mala fide in order to secure their own fortunes.

Take the concept of game, for instance. Conventional wisdom holds that women want nice guys who will respect them, dote on them, and treat them like princesses. Any guy who tries this, however, will end up getting LJBF’ed by every girl he wants to bang. On the other hand, complete assholes often find themselves up to their chins in vaj. The conventional wisdom of dating and courtship is wrong, so wrong that an entire online community sprung up seeking to uncover methods of seduction that work. Boobus Americanus opposes game, denounces it as manipulative and dehumanizing, and the fact that it works doesn’t cross his mind at all. If you practice game in your personal life, you are, according to the dictates of modern society, behaving in mala fide. Members of the MGTOW movement, who reject the values of our corrupt culture, are another group of individuals behaving in mala fide.

Behaving in good faith according to the principles of our degenerate civilization will inevitably lead to your demise. It is not immoral to behave in bad faith in regards to such a society – you have no obligations to a culture that only seeks to harm you and keep you down. Rebelling is the only sane and moral option in an insane and immoral world.

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Ferdinand Bardamu took the red pill and has no regrets. He blogs at In Mala Fide. You can follow him on Twitter here.