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And what happens when the rewards for all that effort are, rationally, not worth the effort and expense?
More to the point, after a guy goes through the painful efforts of making himself better, can he expect to achieve a loving marriage, have a kid or two with a loyal wife, and see these kids to adulthood in an intact home?
The stats on that are bleak, as of now.
If not, then what, truly, is the point? Why does he do what he does if not to preserve his status and pass on his genes?
The answer the "Traditionalist" view, which I've outlined above, gives to these questions is perhaps best exemplified in comments by Fox News talking head Tomi Lahren, as covered in this Shoe0nHead video, particularly the bit she said on Piers Morgan's show, on the topic of what women owe men in return for their efforts (at about 15:17 in the linked video):
It is your born duty as a male to work, suffer, and sacrifice for women, children, and society with absolutely no expectation of reward for it, simply because it's part of being a man, and if you don't do it, you're not a man.
In asserting this duty, Western traditions will tend to emphasize it being the will of God, or some such; East Asian ones will tend to put a bit more emphasis on owing it to the spirits of your ancestors. But in the end, they all reject the liberal/libertarian "pure individual," atomized and unbound by any obligation or duty not freely chosen. Instead, you are born in a particular place, a particular time, to a particular family, in a particular class, a particular nation, and, yes, with a particular sex. This unchosen role into which you are born comes with equally-unchosen duties and obligations to which one is bound. (Like the "filial piety" owed to your parents — even if you didn't choose them, and didn't choose to be born — recognized by pretty much every culture save the Modern West. Note, after all, that the first of the Ten Commandments involving one's duties to fellow human beings, as opposed to the earlier commandments covering one's duties to God and the sacred, is "honor thy father and thy mother.")
The duties remain, but the actual structure that supported and encouraged performance of those duties have atrophied.
Guys don't have an innate urge to uphold their society or even their neighborhood. Their drive is not to just accept a crappy status quo simply because its "normal."
Especially when there's clearly a class of male who is accruing all the benefits and status and women, and enduring much less of a sacrifice. I can't think of any stable, highly civilized society that survived long with such an imbalance.
Saying "men have a duty" rings utterly hollow. They need "buy-in." Stakes, if you will.
I'm not even criticizing the point that being the male protector is a thankless role. That is part of the game, sure. I'm criticizing your implication that men will just cast aside their own interests to become a protector, unless they identify something they need to protect.
A society that values them, or a genetic legacy that will survive them. Or, AT LEAST, the promise that they'll earn their way into a blissful afterlife. Valhalla works as a reward for a society that wants men to go forth and pillage and die in battle, and even that society promises rewards to their men.
The promise of Western Society was that the men would drop everything to repel invaders or catch and kill a criminal or rescue people from a natural disaster.
And then, when the crisis passed, they could return to their farm, with a wife and kids they were relatively sure were their own, and would otherwise have significant leeway to run their own affairs. If they survived the crisis.
That promise has been eroded and replaced with nothing, the duties have no real attachment to any underlying purpose whatsoever, and the previously stableish equilibrium has been wrecked by unpunished defectors.
How can you not expect rebellion at that point?
"What's the penalty for failing to carry out my expected male duties?"
"Get screeched at by harpies for having toxic masculinity, rejected by any moderately attractive woman, and the spoils of your efforts captured by foreigners and sociopathic male rivals."
"OH. Whats the reward for carrying out my expected male duties?"
"Get screeched at by harpies for having toxic masculinity, rejected by any moderately attractive woman, and the spoils of your efforts captured by foreigners and sociopathic male rivals."
"Well then."
They ain't going to fight for a civilization that doesn't at least pretend to work in their favor.
Agreed, and I'd totally support fixing them back up (reactionary Monarchist, here).
Because material comfort, electronic distractions, ersatz simulacra of success, etc. dull the rebellious spirits of the youth. Obesity, falling testosterone levels, and psychiatric drugs all suppress it further. Plus, peasant revolts have always failed outside of East Asia, and modern states have (or are gaining) various institutional and technological advantages that make them increasingly rebellion-proof.
Basically, all the same reasons Tyler Cowen gave in Average is Over for why we won't expect rebellion when 80% of the population, rendered economically superfluous by automation, are immiserated and packed into overcrowded favelas to subsist on beans.
Oh yes. This is indeed a recipe for the collapse of liberal civilization, with basically two possible outcomes depending on how well memetic transmission of modern Western views can be maintained.
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Where the Traditionalist view fails now is answering what equally-unchosen duties and obligations apply to women, what mechanism is attempting to enforce their application to women, and what society's duties and obligations towards men are. The answers to those three questions seem to be a hat trick of "nothing," which makes the Traditionalist view less than compelling.
For the Fox News normie-con values of "Traditionalist," or the kinds of (now shrinking) church congregations Dalrock used to write about, sure.
But, yes, some real traditionalists, who have managed to resist the GOP-flavored version of feminism, do at least have answers for the first and third questions, even if, due to their small size, their enforcement mechanisms are limited (at least for now).
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Which is why feminism is, despite the pretense of its practitioners, the ultimate successor to traditionalism.
In an environment of equality- where both sexes can hold the male role thanks to progressively increasing mechanization (it's been going on since the steam engine, but ramped up hard in the early 20th century thanks to a revolution in lightweight portable mechanical power generation)- men are as a consequence owed the inherent dignity of
womenhuman beings.We have a name for people like this: up until about the mid-1960s, they were called "liberals". That whole "rights and dignity of man" thing is pointing at precisely this moral hazard.
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