https://www.unz.com/isteve/is-mountain-climbing-a-social-construct
Just breaking Betteridge's law of headlines real quick.
Dishonourable mention for Jack D,
"In the end, by climbing a mountain, you have exerted a lot of time and
effort and accomplished nothing. You could have been doing something
useful – climbing up onto your roof"
A true paragon of prey morality.
The best slave is one that shames the other slaves for working less for the master than the maximum. They like to cast it as being "mature" because they never play. Presumably because they're not allowed to raise their own children? Thus they don't know how obsessed children are with being grownups. "I can do it myself!" CS Lewis: put away childish things, such as the bone terror of being seen as childish.
ProTip: don't keep slaves. They're not worth the cost. If you have to spend time managing them or noticing you have slaves at all, you're spending too much time around slave morality. It's more hazardous than nuclear waste by a significant margin. As nearly every wise writer has said, great monetary wealth is typically not worth the price. It's not bad in and of itself, it's just that you nearly always give up more than it's worth in the process.
Reality: the reason nobody before the 1900s wrote about mountain-climbing by young men was because it was so common, not because it was so rare. We also don't normally write newspaper articles about breathing. Secondly because they would usually give up before getting to the top instead of dying in the attempt. It's normal to lift heavy rocks because they're heavy - not that the emaciated and foppish city slicker would know anything about this. It is likewise extremely normal to (attempt to) climb a mountain because it is not easy. Perhaps only by a minority of men, true, but a minority that exists noticeably everywhere young men and mountains have co-existed.
Reality: Sailer is a journalist and thus malignantly ignorant. Much less malignant than other journalists, but that's only because they're competitively malignant; they redefined the low bar as a high bar and keep trying to beat it. Sailer doesn't play and as a result is way ahead (behind?) of the rest of the pack.
"Mount Olympus was climbed in antiquity, for religious reasons and for what can only be described as curiosity and tourism. There are archeological artifacts on the mountain and visits are documented in extant documents.
Japanese mountains were also climbed in antiquity, by men only, for religious reasons."
So, yes, mountain-climbing is about narcissism, but the narcissism is mainly about the ones writing about it, not the ones doing it. Narcissism by proxy. Suffering clinical levels of narcissism is a job requirement at every journalist job I've checked.
I expect random men trying to climb large mountains would score by how far you got, rather than by getting to the top consistently. Admittedly I can't confirm that, but nothing else makes sense.