Dark, sinister, wicked thumos—shadow thumos—is undisciplined, reckless, and selfih.  Instead of being willing, shadow thumos is willful.  It’s consumptive and thievish; it’s prowling, arrogant nature is hell-bent on satiating one’s inflated ego and sordid appetites.  Shadow thumos puts a man, or more accurately a man-boy, at the exclusive center of a universe in which all others are to serve and soothe and please and change his diapers.  Shadow thumos ultimately is childish by nature, but it’s extremely developed and proficient in its ability to harm and destroy.

Visually, for instance, shadow thumos is a guy ostentatiously grabbing his crotch and thrusting his hips; this is where such a man pours his thumos, into the messenger of his distorted obsession with self-gratifying pleasure.  This is a zone of trickery for women who are attracted to thumos but unaware of or unwilling to recognize its dark side.  (Much, though not all, of rap music is the unofficial soundtrack to shadow thumos; its “artists” give ample and ongoing illustrations of its imagery.)

Men with low or no thumos often complain of this.  Whether out loud or to themselves, they ask, “Why do the jerks always get the women?”  The answer: Even dark thumos usually is more attractive than low or no thumos.  (That’s the subject of the next chapter.)

Men commit more than 90 percent of sexually predatory crimes.  It’s sinful thumos that makes men willing to commit acts of profound and vicious evil, stripping others of their God-given dignity and marring their essence for a cheap and abusive thrill; this malevolence crushes weaker people in its winepress of wrath.  When propagandist Joseph Goebbels said that Nazi fascism was “in its nature a masculine movement,” he was describing one of thumos’s blackest expressions.

The following are terms, flavors, expressions, and moods that describe shadow thumos for us to consider, ponder, and pray about: