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Young productive men are functionally slaves in modern western societies. They work for a pittance while the vast majority of their economic output goes to their betters through many mechanisms of taxation and redistribution, they have no political representation as a class (it is illegal) and are regarded with malicious contempt by their master classes.
All areas of society are made to cater to women and the elderly under the systematic rule of this tendency, and young men are legal targets of institutional ridicule, persecution and ever growing extraction by legitmate authorities. Propaganda films are made showing them to be innately evil, large budgets are spend on their political reeducation and the press and entertainment media use them as scapegoats constantly.
This unthough hierarchy is especially salient in my own country of France. Pensioners have more income than working people (you read that right) and yet on top of it every class but young men gets subsidized tickets and other trivial advantages in every area of life at their expense. Moreover, goods, areas, services and even jobs are routinely reserved by custom and at times law to the elderly or women. A common feature of such systems throughout history.
Of course this is all a byproduct of a political regime of limited democracy that has both accidentally and by design minimized and essentially neutralized the political power of youths and men even as they are the providers of the security and violence that upholds the system. Another common feature of slave societies.
As others have warned before, including famously Friedrich Hayek, this is unstable and ripe for a revolution. One that I hope won't feature the concentration camps for pensioners he foresaw.
The main difference between this system and patriarchal elderly rule is that it is impersonal and therefore void of empathy. The State confiscates economic output out of the hands of productive youths and doles it out to its clients who therefore are loyal to the State, not to productive youths. And indeed the State uses this loyalty to repress and humiliate uppity member of its tax cattle, not to uplift or empower them. There is no ascension into the ruling class or passing of the torch here. Nor is there any recognition of the effort or reward to be expected except more confiscation.
Like the horse Boxer in Orwell's story, the system just wants young people to work themselves to death to fund pensions and benefits with no expectation of reward or amelioration of their condition. And explicitly no expectation that they'll get to enjoy pensions of their own because it is demographically impossible.
In contrast the traditional system would afford political leadership, familial leadership and social status to its earners in exchange for loyalty and sacrifice to the death for their dependents and the State. A more constraining deal on the surface, but also a much better one than subsistance as cattle bereft of rights or dignity.
Eh, in less modern societies it seems to me property has been king too. It'll be awesome to be a young able-bodied man with no property versus an old decrepit dude with no property, but any given property is more likely to be in hands of some older patriarch than the young man. Hereabouts in more rural times it was a common arrangement for the eldest son taking the reins of a homestead farm to sign a contract spelling out how to keep up his retired parents' lifestyle. A man without an inheritance will have a really hard time getting to having it made as good as one who does. The reason the industrial revolution was fed by an endless supply of workers happy to go for Victorian sweatshop wages and working conditions was, AFACIT, if you didn't have your own homestead or cottage or whatever, even if young and able-bodied, the pre-modern pastoral lifestyle might not give you much of a chance at a home or marriage or dignified old age. There was an endless supply of itinerant laborer men in dead ends that sucked way more viscerally than the the present day sort.
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I don't think that is "explicit". You might consider it obvious but I don't think it's something political messaging typically owns up to - at most they acknowledge the existence of a problem but gesture at immigration as a surefire fixer.
He's talking about France, where everyone acknowledges that the pension system is going to have to be cut eventually- and eventually means 'in the mid term future', not 'in 100 years'.
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French politicians have publicly declared on now multiple occasions that our pension system is unsustainable and will collapse if not drastically reformed. It is a commonly (though not universally) held truism in my country that even immigration cannot solve this problem. We no longer are in the 1990s. What was implicit is now explicit.
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I think there are really two separate but related issues here: The forced redistribution of wealth and the lack of respect. Based on what I know about human psychology, I think it's the second issue that's more important.
I tend to doubt this. Because if France is anything like the United States, there is still a lot of opportunity for the most talented (or otherwise elite) young men to achieve the social status and respect I mentioned above. Let's suppose you are earning roughly $1m a year as a man in the West. Yes, you are paying ridiculous taxes and probably supporting a few single moms, but there is still a lot left over to (voluntarily) make a nice life for yourself and for the people around you. A life which is far better than anyone could get from collecting social security, welfare etc. Why would such a man put together some kind of revolution and disrupt the system which is working reasonably well for him? And without elites, how far is a revolution going to get?
I think the bigger problem is family formation. When men achieve money and status, they tend to get married and stay married. When women achieve money and status, they tend to get divorced and stay single. Ergo, forcible transfers of money and status from men to women can be expected to negatively impact family formation. And this does seem to be happening in the West.
France has very, very few salaries anywhere near that high.
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France is unlike the US precisely in this way. Which is why French Engineers are so numerous to leave and work for US companies.
I think Americans don't have a feel for how ridiculous taxation and redistribution is in France because they are always astonished when I give specifics. For instance: we are now to the point that the French State spending in proportion of GDP is higher that it ever was in the Soviet Union.
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Young productive men are substantially better off now then they have been for practically all of history. Despite taxation, the amount of wealth even the poorer man in the first world can access is still greater than many kings of the past. No matter how rich or powerful you were in the 1500s, you did not have a car or a smartphone or a video game console or a TV or take flights to Hawaii for vacation and probably not even indoor plumbing in many areas. Your food was still mostly limited to regional availability and what was in season. Most of your children would still die before they were five, and you were still unable to treat health and pain concerns in a meaningful way. Have an infection as a king? Tough it out like everyone else
Even the poorest dudes working at a gas station, it is not "a pittance", you have wealth beyond the dreams of many in history. Your children are alive, you have basically infinite entertainment at your fingertips, you have all the tasty food you want, you have clean and good looking clothes, you have incredible healthcare that can do what just a few centuries ago would be considered miracles. You aren't spending your time hauling buckets of water or poop as domestic chores.
Are you not talking about the west here? Every young man has political representation in western democracy. IDK what country you could be referring to with "it is illegal", but I'm not aware of any where men do not have suffrage.
I will say I do not know the inner workings of France well, but I can confidently say that the general point that you are richer, meaningfully richer in what you have and the quality you have it in, than almost everyone in history remains true. And from what I can tell at least, France still has suffrage for young men so I don't know what you mean by it being illegal.
Rich slaves are still slaves, absolute wealth is not in contention, dignity and station are. The station imposed on young men by modern western society is one of subservience and inferiority.
Suffrage is not voice, nor is it political representation as a class. No political party or organisation represents the interest of men as a class and those that purport to are banned by law or decree in France, Germany, the UK under the aupices of discrimination.
Liberal democracy in effect only serves the interest of the selectorate, which by the demographic force of the baby boom does not need include young men. It follows from the natural laws of politics that all viable politicians are bound to extract from them to give to their coalitions.
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The same would be true, if you literally reintroduced African slavery in the US today, and It was probably even true back when slavery was still legal in the US, so I don't see how this argument is valid.
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Yep. What he said.
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