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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   9398 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 17, 2025

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We despise the experiences our ancestors told us would build character in young people, then are shocked that we lack men of character.

Building things, inventing things, writing things. Some athletes, I'm sure, but I doubt many were at the top of the pecking order at school.

Bohr was on the Danish National Football team at the Olympics. Hemingway boxed and played football. Every president between Eisenhower and HW Bush, except LBJ, was a varsity athlete. Robert Moses was a varsity swimmer.

but read say CS Lewis about his time at school for a counterpoint.

And yet he still became CS Lewis.

Or look at Elon Musk who went through a heck of a character building school experience back in the bad old South Africa:

Isaacson—who has authored other best-selling biographies, such as those of Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, and Leonardo Da Vinci—writes of young Elon’s time at a South African “wilderness survival camp known as veldskool.” The business savant refers to it as a “paramilitary Lord of the Flies.” There, “bullying was considered a virtue,” Isaacson writes. “The kids were each given small rations of food and water, and they were allowed—indeed encouraged—to fight over them.” Small and awkward at the time, Elon was “beaten up twice” and lost 10 pounds during his first stint there. At one point, attendees were “divided into two groups and told to attack each other,” Isaacon writes. “‘It was so insane, mind-blowing,’ Musk recalls. Every few years, one of the kids would die. The counselors would recount such stories as warnings. ‘Don’t be stupid like that dumb f**k who died last year,’ they would say.”

Which sure sounds like it would be bad for Elon Musk, awkward target of bullies, and not at all like character building. It probably isn't something I would choose to send my kid to as described. But then he turned into Elon Musk. So we shouldn't totally discount that being the victim of bullies is a canon event that builds the character of the outcast who becomes a genius.

Sorry, I'm up too late and a bit bleary, but this just doesn't match on to my experience of life at all. Being good at this stuff (except football) makes you a loser. There is nothing that schoolboys (and often pre-1980 or so the men that they grew up to become) like to sneer at more than some swot earnestly making an effort to be good at things.

What the original comment advocated for was not sports specifically, or for every kid to be forced to hang out with every other kid and play sports. It was for kids to be allowed to self organize to do what they want to do. That can be form a band, that can be D&D, can be a creative circle, can be a WoW raid.

I've all the sympathy in the world for the loser, the outcast, the dork, the nerd, the geek. But I don't think they are any better served, ultimately, by safetyism than is the jock.

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