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Just to make a general observation about the gender war as a followup to my comment on the Promise Keepers organization:
I think we can generally observe is that women’s main complaint about men is that desirable hetero men are unwilling to exclusively commit. If we accept this, we can also see that this is actually two complaints rolled into one. 1. The men that are willing to commit are undesirable (icky, clingy, lame, “chopped”, entitled, toxic, porn-addled, skinny fat etc.). 2. The men that are desirable are unwilling to commit. (On a tangent I’d argue that most of the lipstick feminist complaints made in the mainstream media by middle-class women about men in general do usually boil down to the rather similar complaint that 34-37-year-old successful, well-paid, charismatic, tall, ambitious etc. urban men are in no rush to marry 31-34-year-old college-educated middle-class office worker women.)
If we look at this logically, to the extent that it even makes sense to try doing so (which is a valid question in itself), there are two potential remedies for this problem. 1. Focus on the undesirable men that are willing to commit and somehow transform them into desirable men i.e. alphaize the betas 2. Focus on the desirable men and incentivize them to commit i.e. betaize the alphas.
Now I don’t know about you but to me it seems self-evident that #2 has more potential for success no matter how you look at it and yet virtually everyone who makes any sort of recommendations regarding this entire issue (and that does not only include Red Pillers) is promoting #1. No, really – I’ve never seen anyone advocate for #2, not even the Promise Keepers or, for that matter, any other similar group that does not claim to be feminist and is at the same time pushing the nebulous concept of a new positive masculinity.
Am I seeing things that are not there or is this really not the case? Because as far as I can tell, it is. It seems like there is a general unspoken consensus in society that trying to compel sexually successful men to commit to women is a completely impossible, pie-in-the-sky idea that deserves no attention at all; that, in other words, expecting modern women to elicit commitment from the men they are attracted to is laughable lunacy.
Good post. It does a good job of clearly stating the problem of R/K selection theory in the context of human beings.
The vast majority of human history is a bunch of elite men getting lots and lots of women pregnant. The problem with this is that once you hit the agrarian revolution, let alone the industrial, the necessities of society at a scale beyond the village means you have to find some sort of social institution to prevent a lot of intra-male mate competition.
Enter marriage.
Marriage is a miracle. It's institution (which is close to a human universal, btw, in any society that's progressed past hunting-gathering) creates a way for males to pacify their natural urge to kill other males as means to guarantee mate access, and also creates a basic economic and social building block. Throw on top of it property and inheritance rights, and you've got yourself the beginnings of something durable.
When the institution of marriage breaks down, you can see what follows. It isn't anything new, it is a de-evolution to our chaotic ancestors' way of mate selection. Does this kind of sound like the modern dating market? Lack of commitment, multiple partners in parallel, "infidelity" beginning to lose all meaning and significance, "situationships" being strategic ambiguity by both men and women to hedge their bets.
I'll dig it up later (if I remember) but I was listening to a podcast where the guest had a great line. Marriage, specifically the wedding, isn't about a public commitment of love to the other person, it's about publicly signaling that both of you are off the market and that you'll abide by all of the laws and norms around marriage - and so should other people! There's no ambiguity. If you sleep with a married man or woman, you're a homewrecker. You should know this because of the publicly displayed wedding band that is visible at all times (and also, you know, that other person should tell you they're married).
But marriage, at least in the west, is utterly meaningless - doubly so for any sort of real legal or social consequences for failing to live up to its requirements. Cheated on your wife? No big deal, there's couples counseling. Or you can just get a divorce. You've been divorced? Who hasn't! It's so easy to do now that you don't even need a reason other than "I guess I just don't like him/her anymore."
And we haven't even got to the wildly out of balance reality of the legal system. If I'm a 34-37 year old male, tall, in good shape, earning a high income, getting married is such a high risk that many lawyers specifically recommend against it. The only exception being a prenuptual agreement that is so stacked against the wife that it becomes quite foolish for her to get married because she'll be in a kind of economic concubinage.
As many others have said, the way to fix this issue - to the extent that it is possible - is through recultivating social esteem. Marriage should be a capital-B Big Deal and should be reserved, frankly, for worthwhile men selected by women with honor and virtue. I'm not going to get all "virgins only" here, but when a retired pornstar marrying some guy isn't scene as laughably retarded, we've got a problem. Marriage should be seen as a goal for the ambitious young man in the same way that starting your own business is - not for the feint of hard, full of needs for sacrifice and hard work, but, ultimately, a quite noteworthy achievement.
Adultery should be a crime. I'd not recommend locking people up for it, but it should be a misdemeanor that is publicly searchable. There has to be real consequences for promiscuity that violets a marriage contract. If you want to sleep around with other unmarried folks, that's fine.
Finally, I don't see how you can re-invigorate marriage in a wholly secular worldview. An important mental shift is in seeing "husband" and "wife" as a distinct and special human role. What are the specific and unique duties a man has to a woman and vice-versa in a marriage. How does one's behavior necessarily change? If these questions aren't answered thoroughly, you devolve to the modern secular marriage; roommates who occasionally sleep together and file taxes together.
To comment on your framing of "alphatize the betas" vs "betatise the alphas" -- the answer can only be to alphatize the betas through a series of verifiable and impossible-to-cheat milestones in life. This traces back to ceremonies and traditions around the journey to manhood. In human history, a woman wouldn't marry a man who couldn't provide food and shelter for her and their likely offspring. Today, marrying an unemployed man or a man with shaky employment stability should be a not starter. Physical fitness matters - fattys need not apply. I think the biggest missing piece is social and community esteem. If a man has literally no friends or has no meaningful community network, he is not marriageable - even if making millions of dollars!
But again, even with the rubric I've just laid out, it doesn't matter unless marriage matters.
So, how do you incentivise people to actually sign up for your newly highly gatekept version of marriage? All those people in situationships are not going, "I wish there were a death pact contract I could enter with a partner that society and law would force us to respect". You can't just decree from above that some action is to be seen as desirable and have people abide; otherwise social engineering would be a lot easier.
This is something that a big state could easily do. The US and much of the West quasi-criminalized going outside during Covid, there is an enormous river of state power that merely needs to be directed towards pro-social ends. In Britain they arrest thousands of people for tweets, that's their 'incentive' for people to think a bit more carefully before they speak. The state can indoctrinate children for hours and hours a day, there's a gigantic surveillance apparatus watching just about everything, they have 20-40% of GDP to spend...
Our elites simply need to make a decision and then enforce that decision and then it just happens. The difficulty of social engineering is overestimated. The US did it pretty well, they pointed bayonets at teenagers so they'd go to school with blacks, they forcibly bussed whites to black schools, implemented affirmative action schemes to give blacks better jobs. It didn't change performance-based outcomes that much but they certainly could produce behaviours, they dramatically reduced racism just via straightforward suppression and indoctrination.
They could suppress adultery too, it's really not that hard. But they don't want to.
The risk I see with 'make marriage a much stronger contract' social engineering is that even more people opt out of it. Marriage has already become an elite institution, with the commensurate dysfunction among the lower classes who aren't getting married.
Marriage worked better when everyone did it, because it reinforced the norm. The collapse of that norm is tragic, but making marriage even more exclusive and difficult is going to collapse it further.
For a lot of people, when you have an utterly destroyed shell of an institution, it doesn't make much sense to even bother with it. It's pointless paperwork that can be undone on a whim, but at the pain of much more paperwork and likely legal wrangling.
Elite women obviously still want to opt in, because they're likely getting a wealthy man on the hook. If you're both poor? Who cares? Religious people still do it, because their religious communities still enforce some amount of social approval for proper use of it and some amount of social sanctions for improper use. It's still a somewhat stronger social contract for them, if not a legal one.
In Whit Stillman’s brilliant indie debut, Metropolitan, Taylor Nichols’ commedically-pessimistic Charlie Black is convinced that the entire preppy class is doomed, fated, to suffer downward social mobility.
Late in the film, Charlie engages a man in a bar, a member of the preppy class perhaps a decade his senior, looking for confirmation of his theory. Man at Bar, played by Roger W. Kirby in his lone acting role (who in real life would go on to co-found the law firm of Kirby McInerney), tells Charlie, resignedly, that he is going to have to accept that many of his peers will indeed be successful.
I’ll set aside elite, as I am not sure exactly how that would be defined, but most college educated Americans still get married. And, like Charlie Black, commedically-pessimistic single men need to accept that the upper two quintiles of Americans are still mostly getting married, and for reasons beyond and exempting ensnarement. Things like love, support, companionship, respect and admiration shared between two imperfect people looking to build a life together.
I will grant that one could want high marriage rates solely for their cumulative societal impact. And structural changes have reduced that rate, but much moreso the lower one travels down the socioeconomic ladder. And all the same, when I see getting someone “on the hook” errantly proffered as the driver of marriage in, say, the top two quintiles based on income, I want to tell the speaker to rejoice at the institution’s decline.
For every black- or red-pilled unwed man I encounter online that has reduced women’s motivations down to a hypergamous id — wicked daughters of Eve, all! — I hope they realize they have been set free. From experience, the overwhelming supermajority of a marriage is spent outside of scratching one another’s physiological itches, and as such, any man that does not particularly like women would be wise to avoid marrying one. You almost-invariably wind up cohabitating and spending time in each other’s company.
I guess most of this comes down to what one categorizes as "elite", as that was the specific category mentioned.
In any event, yes, love and such. Great things. Though I have heard it flippantly put, "You should marry for love and not for money... but it's just as easy to love a rich man." But that's neither here nor there. I do believe that many folks marry for love, but then the challenge returns to your court. Is the driver of whether or not people fall in love their position on the socioeconomic ladder? I doubt so. When it comes to discussing differentials, or particular categories like "elite", there may be other factors concerning what modern marriage has become which may be relevant.
No, that would be mistaking a second-order effect for a first. The requisite is proximity, which itself is heavily influenced by position on the socioeconomic ladder.
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