True to his thesis in "First Advertisement for Myself" (from his 1959 collection of essays), Mailer can be seen to be attempting "a revolution in the consciousness of our time" by challenging the thoughts and practices that sanitized American life after World War II. In his biography on Mailer, J. Michael Lennon suggests that "The White Negro" was Mailer's attempt to "will into being an army of hipster revolutionaries who could bring about an urban utopia". In a response to Jean Malaquais, who had criticised "WN" in the magazine "Dissent", Mailer wrote: "the removal therefore of all social restraints while it would open us to an era of incomparable individual violence would still spare us the collective violence of rational totalitarian liquidations . . . and would — and here is the difference — by expending the violence directly, open the possibility of working with that human creativity which is violence's opposite". While "WN" embraces violence, it makes a distinction between violence by the state and individual violence: the former leads to concentration camps and pogroms, while the latter can lead to freedom. For Mailer, writes Maggie McKinley, violence seems to be an essential part of the masculinity of the Hipster, helping to oppose collectivizing and numbing social forces. In a 1957 letter to a publicly critical Malaquais, Mailer clarified his beliefs that: (1) barbarism could be an alternative to totalitarianism, and (2) that human energy should not be sublimated at the expense of the individual.