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Has the Occident betrayed its young men?
I have been feeling intense abjection lately vis-à-vis my culture, and I wanted to explain why here. Much has been said about how the West treats its young men, particularly with respect to feminism and and wealth redistribution. But more and more, I have been feeling that the state of things is truly one of complete betrayal. Complete betrayal is weighty and generally seen as impossible to come back from. This is different from simply feeling that something is off.
My argument for it constituting complete betrayal starts with the following. Humans are fundamentally animals. As animals, they require resources and reproduction over everything else. The West provides a lot of distraction for its young men, that is true. It provides, certainly, a lot of education, whether they want it or not. Many such things are provided better than ever before. But at the end of the day, humans are animals and the true duty of a culture is to provide those it is loyal to with reproduction and resources, namely resources which convert to shelter, food, reproduction access, and child investment. Humans have a useful single number for all of this called money. So for a human animal, it is really about reproduction and money. Culture/society might provide young men with distraction, but does it provide a mate and an income?
I believe the situation is one of complete betrayal, because culture/society actually deeply interferes with young men getting income and reproduction, and does quite a lot to prevent it and keep young men alone and poor. This is nothing less than complete betrayal. Let me explain the specifics as to how this is done.
Sexually, every revision to law and culture in the last 100 years fit the pattern of preventing, delaying, or degrading the marriages of young men. Every prohibition that was dropped was a prohibition that served young men. This includes adultery laws and laws against divorce. Every prohibition that was strengthened is a prohibition against young men. These include prohibitions against marriage at certain ages and prohibitions against the husband's authority in the home, as well as prohibitions against having sex in many other circumstances, especially on university campuses, which in the late 20th century were the last great place for spouses to meet. On top of that, every sexually related cultural movement interferes with the reproduction of young men. LGBT is a great distraction and tells young men to have sex with each other instead of with women. Modern dating culture says have barren, temporary relationships with the opposite sex. Radical feminism teaches women to be functionally lesbian or asexual and otherwise to avoid romance with men. Taboos have been created to ostracize young men who criticize these cultural movements. It is extremely easy to imagine a culture that better serves its young men reproductively. The fact that it only ever gets worse is a sign of the betrayal.
Economically, credentialism has eaten away at the right of young men to have an income. They are now commanded to stay in school to later and later ages. When they work, the tax burden is immense; more and more money goes to foreigners, single women, and the old. Every government handout taxes young men and married men and pays out to women, children, pensioners, and foreigners. More controversially, I also believe young men are systematically underpayed when they do work, although mostly this goes to redistribute wealth to middle aged men, which young men become, so it's probably the least bad of all the problems and is best fixed by reversing the tax burden on young men from heavily taxed to becoming net receivers of welfare even while working. Credentialism also needs to be curtailed, and then younger men can build more marketable skills at younger ages, boosted their base at any given age pay insofar as the age-income correlation is meritocratic.
Young men pay taxes largely so family courts can threaten whatever marriages they do establish, instead of defending them, so that their money can go to the education system that robbed them of several years of income and work experience, so that their money can go to old retirees who set up this system, so it can go to immigrants and foreigners, so it can go to single women who won't get married, and so it can go to police who will arrest them if they ever end up breaking one of these back-breaking rules that were set up to oppress them. That's complete betrayal by culture & society.
What does complete betrayal imply? It means Western young men should never die for their country. Don't ever join the military. If you get drafted, dodge it if legally possible. Young men should never contribute to their country. Insofar as legal, enter a parasitic profession like finance and drain your country dry. They deserve it because they allow it and they hate young men anyway. Young men should leave their country; move away from the west. Start a city-state in Latin America with a charter from Honduras where young men are served and not betrayed. Go help develop a 2nd world country where young men are served and not betrayed. Pay taxes in the new country. If your old country demands taxes abroad, renounce your citizenship, because your country is a traitor.
In other words, young men are like a Jew in Christian Europe. They are hated by their neighbors, so lend to them and charge as much interest as possible. They are hated by their neighbors, so never fight invaders for them, strike a deal with them if they win. They are hated by their neighbors, so they should move between places and never settle in one place. They should demand maximal pay for minimal work, because they are hated by your neighbors. They should be a Zionist, and dream of the foundation of a new Israel. A place that does not despise them.
I appreciate feedback on this. Maybe I am overreacting or got something wrong here and the situation is not so dire. But as I have lived my life, this is the conclusion I've increasingly come to.
This whole conversation is just the result of the growing victimization crisis we have in society. Us men are in a better spot now than throughout all of history, and yet just like with everything else all anyone can do is be angry and cry that things don't match up with their ahistorical fantasies of the past.
The average man of history was not some rugged chad forging their way into the wild west nor were they the rich royal with their pick of the wenches. No, the average man lived crappy lives with only the crappy people around them in their hyperlocal area. Food was scarce, medicine was laughable, the only women you would get with were just the fellow peasants you happened to be around and most of your kids died before you even bothered to name them.
Now we live in a time of abundance. I met my wife through the Internet and we lived several states away at the same time. We hit it off in personality and interests and we have children. Before, I would have just been forced to pair with whatever local peasant was available and now I get someone who matches with me well instead. It's not to say it's perfect at every point, but any and all relationships between two different individuals will have areas where they differ and don't match perfectly. The soul mate is a lie and compromises must be made sometimes. She is not my perfect fantasy wife and I'm not her perfect fantasy husband, we're humans not dreams.
Perhaps the before system was better for the loser men who enjoy a win by default. A much lesser and lower quality win, but at least it's a win, something they can't get now. If there was a historical acknowledgement of the downsides there is an argument to be made that yes, for some people it was better. And yet what I see of these loser men today is that they want it all and won't settle. They want the abundant choice of having a top notch beauty who fulfills all their fantasies brought about by modernity, but they also hate that abundant choice means they have to match up as well. But they don't, won't, and can't because they're still the peasants like always. It's often accompanied of course with porn addled unrealistic standards of womanhood too, meaning even the weak concept they might have of settling and compromising has still been tilted towards the insane.
And yet many more men want to come to the US and other western nations (or Western like nations such as Japan) than those who want to leave. It's obvious why. Because as much as people want to complain and complain, they do truly understand that life is better here. Immigration levels are the ultimate rebuttal to anti west sentiments, the 2nd and 3rd worlders want to be here, we don't want to be there. Even when Americans do leave, it's almost always to other western nations. And even when they do move to non western nations, that is still mostly done by utilizing their immense wealth disparity to explicitly avoid the average life the natives there hold. They live in gated communities with security.
Just because it's better here than in shithole countries right now doesn't mean it's better here than it was twenty, thirty, or forty years ago.
You play to win the game, you don't play to just play. Or, in other words, winning is all that matters.
My goal is to make sure this isn't necessary in America, but we're sixty years or more down the slippery slope and don't have much evidence of slowing or reversing. It's these people who come from places where those walled cities are necessary that make it necessary in the US, too, so the fact that they want to come here really doesn't move me at all. They don't get what they want.
That's true, but presumably there should be mass desire for movement somewhere if we're fucking something up in a significant way and we just don't see it. Maybe the fuck up is universal, in which case we should question if it was ever solved to begin with and it's not just an ahistorical illusion glossing over the generic human experience. Or maybe it's the downside of a tradeoff where the upside is just too good, and the complaint is really just people wanting to have their cake and eat it too.
There's gotta be some explanation for why no one can get things right and also be a country that people want to be in.
There are some incel losers who would benefit from state mandated girlfriends, because they simply will not have girlfriends otherwise. But for me, and many non losers like me, we would lose out. Relationships are not all equal quality. Sure I guess we still have girlfriends and wives, but the central bureaucracy would never care to grant me what I have now with my wife, someone who I get along with extremely well. I'll get some average fuck who I hate being around.
Because after all, the point of central bureaucracy in general is to parasite off the winners in pursuit of "fairness". They will inevitably fuck it up, the same way that central bureaucracy economies fuck up their harvests and their central heating and everything else. It's the entire point, the loser parasites must feast off something.
Where?
If you're already living on the golden goose, you have nowhere else to go. And while the goose is hardy, it is not invincible, and democratic systems are apparently helpless against the influx of ~infinite people that want to live on the goose until it suffocates and gets smeared into what a Pakistani bricklayer considers wealth.
Easy, liberalism only really works when it believes in itself, and being at least a little bit arrogant about it. You have to retain the ability to say "I'll tolerate your backwards idiocy, but my culture is better."
Once people start to consider racism as a worse crime than rape and murder, because liberalism no longer seems capable of saying "fuck you my culture is better," you're coasting on the works of better men with real souls.
Exactly my point. There is no mythical land that is better than the west. If we're fucking things up in a way that other places do better and can be done without sacrificing other gains, name the other place. But no one can, because we live on the Golden goose already.
There is no real world example of the better place, just imagination. But in imagination land there's also free ponies, waterfalls of booze, and everyone skateboards around doing sick tricks. It's always better and cooler than reality.
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I feel like this essay kinda nailed it: https://www.compactmag.com/article/the-lost-generation/
For a long time now, leaders of every organization have been under pressure to hire more women to make things more equal. They don't want to step down themselves, or fire anyone, so the easiest solultion is to just prioritize women for every new position. The result is that, while overall employment still tends male, new hiring is strongly stacked towards women.
On top of that, there's technology and automation, putting downward pressure on employment in general. No company wants to hire anyone at all.
On top of that, there's the relationship between the sexes. Women might say they want an equal partner, but their revealed preference seems to be that they want a partner who's superior to them and has power.
Put it all together and you've got an absolutely toxic situation for young men. I don't like where this is going.
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The purpose of a man is protection, which is to say strength. If you aren't strong enough to provide, society will discard you. If you aren't strong enough (singly or in groups) to do anything, your feelings about that don't really matter.
Progressives say otherwise, but they still believe. Which is why almost all of them regard weak and weird men as rather subhuman. (While still practicing those social skills that also signify collective strength. It would be rude to say it. Which really should be obvious.)
(Working in finance or consulting if you can swing it is a "duh" though. Buy a nice house. Buy two.)
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So to be clear, your position is primarily based on the idea that young men want more than anything to get married and have children?
If so, your argument seems to be based around a peremptory dismissal of any idea of democracy or freedom, in favor of telling Young Men that this is what they want. Because I don't think there is any time in history where people actually believed that Young Men wanted to get married and have babies as a thing in itself. Young Men want to have sex with beautiful women, and marriage along with rules around sodomy are largely a trick that gates having sex with beautiful women in such a way that you have to get married and have kids.
Most of the history of talking about Young Men is how they don't want to get married and have kids, and how to buffalo them into doing so. Young Men want to sow their wild oats, they want to hang out with their buddies, they want to go off on cockamamie adventures. They don't want to settle down.
Now, you can announce that ultimately they will want marriage and children, so marriage and children is what is good for them for ideological reasons around religion or a certain philosophical view of evolutionary biology. But that isn't what they want in the normal sense of the word. That is what you want for them.
Every legal and cultural change around the sexual revolution was driven by Young Men seeking sexual license, not by old women. As @2rafa points out, the most masculine way to exist is gambling, risking that one will end up in the bottom 20% of men who have poor prospects in the belief that one will end up in the top 20% of men who have excellent prospects.
So when you say that this is a betrayal of Young Men, what you mean is something like "spare the rod, spoil the child;" that society has allowed Young Men to eat ice cream for dinner and stay up late every night and needs to force them into marriage and children.
Play published in 1623, Shakespeare's "A Winter's Tale":
Shakespeare is, of course, known for his 100% trustworthy characters, like Dick the Butcher or Polonius the Fool, who always espouse the author's wisdom.
Have you read any Shakespeare? "The passions of horny young men are stable, prosocial and a force for Good in the world" would be a... surprising moral to derive from his plays.
The character @HereAndGone2 quotes is not a Polonius-style poser, just a shepherd delivering folksy wisdom that any sensible audience member recognizes as correct. And although A Winter's Tale features one plotline where a young man's (chaste, generous, marriage-oriented) romantic aspirations get reconciled by fate with his elders' more rational plans, the overall plot is very unfriendly to the exact type of porny fantasy-fueled sexual envy and possessiveness you see in the state-mandated-girlfriend crowd here.
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I think I'll trust Shakespeare's jokes about young guys as being representative of views at the time rather than "but what about the character that doesn't fit your schema, checkmate!" re-writing going on here.
I'll certainly believe that a stodgy old shepherd believed that about young men, and that could well be realistic for the time. But it doesn't mean the shepherd was correct, nor even that Shakespeare believed the shepherd was correct.
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I think you are identifying something real but then constructing an almost mythological explanation for it. I understand and empathise with your feelings, but you're weakmanning your own argument by implying western civilisation has consciously betrayed young men. That framing gives too much agency to actors and too much coherence to the so-called process. Nobody sat down in 1975 and devised a fifty-year plan to make men lonely, childless, credentialed, and politically disengaged.
The more likely (and unsettling) explanation is that no betrayal was necessary! Imagine a society whose institutions are individually adapting for perfectly reasonable goals. But there will be tradeoffs. A civilisation formed around family formation would make different tradeoffs. A civilisation organised around national greatness would make different tradeoffs. A civilisation organised around religious mission would make different tradeoffs. A civilisation organised around maximising its GDP makes different tradeoffs. But that doesn't mean anyone explicitly wanted to produce these outcomes.
Employers want more educated workers, labour flexibility and risk reduction. So educational requirements rise, workers become geographically mobile, and degrees become screening tests. Cities want higher productivity, so economic activity is packed inside a handful of expensive metropolitan areas. Investors want assets to appreciate indefinitely, so housing becomes increasingly unaffordable. Governments want social stability, so human behaviour is policed and monitored. Corporations want consumers, so identity is increasingly expressed through consumption rather than family formation. None of these "actors" need to hate or even think about young men or any single individual. They're just enormous systems constantly working to preserve themselves.
And they don't want young men to die glorious deaths in imperial wars, settle frontiers, found dynasties, build cathedrals, or raise large families. Instead, we need to upskill, network, garnish resumes, maintain employability, and keep the annual reports sexy. And that feels infinitely sterile in comparison.
Okay, but do you think reversing the welfare state would leave any significant policy impacts segueing to the kind of outcomes you'd want to see?
Inertia is extremely durable. And capital likes inertia. It does not have a face, it does not have a roundtable of anime villains rubbing hands and plotting global domination at Evil Inc. Elon Musk can suffer a seizure and die on live camera, President Donny can get assassinated, Putin can get mauled by a bear, and Xi Jinping can get imprisoned on the same day, but capital stops for no one. Come Monday, it's just another headline.
I’d argue that if there was a betrayal, most the architects were men of the Lost Generation, like Allen Dulles and his brother. Boomers are just the fall guys because they’re the only ones still around to blame.
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Did "the West" betray young men or did "the liberal striver class"?
...and can "the liberal striver class" be described as "betraying" young men if were not first allied?
Liberalism has been at war with masculinity for a close to century now, CS Lewis wrote an entire treatise on the subject 83 years ago.
C.S. Lewis was wrong, then.
Technology has devalued a man’s labor. Handcrafting loses out to machine tooling. Conscript armies lose out to professionals with air support. Local farmers lose out to plantations in the third world.
There was and is no war. Liberalism’s love affair with the profit motive made it quicker to incorporate these changes in value. Our more authoritarian competitors either got with the program or, again, lost out.
The motives for war are largely orthogonal to how it is fought.
Your desire to paint everything in purely materialist terms is simply another example of how the liberal mindset seeks to undermine and destroy traditional Western notions of virtue.
Okay, but what if the terms actually are materialist?
What you're seeing as war goals are more or less incidental, because liberalism does not particularly care about virtue. It will sometimes go to bat for a short list of inalienable rights. Outside of that, it is a materialist ideology, and competition is not war.
Then "value" is defined solely in terms of blood and treasure.
If the terms are actually materialist, then competition IS war and there is nothing further to discuss.
You’ve lost me.
Liberalism says to go ahead and pursue your treasure, but don’t stomp on certain rights. If you want blood you’re supposed to invoke the greater social contract. It’s materialist without devolving into the Hobbesian state of nature.
Liberalism also allows replacing “treasure” with “virtues.” That’s your own business. Other people are not supposed to stomp on you for it. Again, competition without war.
I don’t see how this scheme constitutes a war on virtues. Not masculinity, not Christianity.
What are the material properties of these "rights" you refer to?
What does it mean for something to be "inalienable" within a materialist framework?
The belief in rights as something distinct and inalienable, rather than something that is bestowed (and can thus be revoked) by the state was an observably conservative/illiberal notion in Lewis' day and i think it has only become more so with time.
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Machine tooling in no way devalued a man's labor, because the machines were built and run by men. Amusingly, this held into the computer era (except during WWII, for obvious reasons), which was a point in the culture war.
It quite directly did. Factories started to close the gap between men, women and children when it came to economic value.
That relative loss was completely outweighed by the explosion in total economic value that came from labor-saving machines. It still moved enormous numbers of people out of the house and into the factory. It still put any society which relied on unassisted manual labor at a massive disadvantage.
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In theory, a situation can arise where men's labor is just as vital as ever but still devalued because a small number of men can do the work of many. I mean, people would starve to death without grocery stores but they still can't charge you $500 for a loaf of bread. There are just too many competitors ready to step in and sell for less.
Is that what's going on with male labor? I tend to think so. I find it telling that the Japanese character for a man combines "strength" and "field." And that traditional cultures strongly preferred male children regardless of whether it was a dowry culture or a brideprice culture. I think that before the industrial revolution, having an able-bodied man in your family could easily mean the difference between life and death.
And the character for "woman" was originally a stick figure drawing of someone kneeling with their hands held together and head bowed. A symbol of submission.
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Theory or no, that is not the story of the Industrial Revolution.
Just means Japan's language is old.
This is writing with Chinese characters, so very much yes. Thousands of years ago a typical man was a farm laborer.
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Well would you agree that before the Industrial Revolution, male labor was vital on an individual level in a way that it is not in the present day?
More vital than today, perhaps, but the breakpoint was not the industrial revolution.
Ok, and would you agree that compared to some point in the past, a smaller percentage of men is necessary in the 21st century to do the vital work of society such as supplying food and maintaining infrastructure?
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Finance is not parasitic. I'm very open to the idea that as a society we'd be better off if we found a way to subsidize very smart people into jobs with more high leverage externalities but finance as a field is actually quite positive sum. Having a bunch of smart people direct resource allocation to its most in demand use is actually hugely beneficial to the world. Imagine the vast amount of value lost if people with great ideas and potential weren't able to get capital allocated to their endeavors. The main people who think finance is some horrible negative sum industry in my experience are people who have never actually interfaced with it or worse, had front office sales roles.
I do have one friend who is some kind of commodity trader and who considers finance at least occasionally negative-sum. He's mentioned examples like, wars have been good for his business, and some financial instruments and the way they are used are in his opinion clearly designed for extraction as opposed to efficient allocation.
And this is at least for me the main worry: Finance is simultaneously complicated and opaque as well as important enough that it seems to me trivially easy for them to just become an extractive middlemen, and even if the state attempts to plug loopholes, they'll probably always be a step ahead. Needless to say, I consider the state itself the same kind of problematic extractive middlemen, which means they are in practice natural partners in crime instead.
Lots of things are occasionally negative-sum. I am not inclined to get rid of all of them.
But then, I might just be defensive about my own line of work.
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Yeah but Finance is largely allocating to SAAS bullshit due to margins at this point. There's benefits of liquidity, but most of the truly transformational stuff we've seen in recent years (Like SpaceX) has had a lot more to do with Elon Musk's personal ballast and raising money for a space project now would generally be incredibly difficult since Finance beancounters say no.
Isn't "Finance" a pretty wide axis? If you include everything from angel and VC investors who are looking at such radical startups all the way to traditional banks evaluating local business cases for loans to highly risk-averse bond funds, it's hard to call it all anything in particular. SAAS is perhaps overweighted, but that is something that gets acknowledged, and there are some advantages to the model (easy scaling, low up front costs) that make it attractive.
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Do we actually have a financial system that directs resource allocation to prosocial ends? Are people with great ideas and potential getting capital directed to their endeavours? To some extent, yes.
But safe returns can also be found in 'house prices up only!' lending, which directly undermines the demographic sustainability of civilization and transfers wealth from young to old. Or SEO/adtech/addictive mobile games.
What about the returns of offshoring industrial capacity? Or standard MBA-tier 'cut investment, cut R&D' wrecking? This kind of sabotage can be very lucrative for well-connected individuals but is corrosive to the national interest as a whole. Or cynically favouring mass immigration to lower wages and thus stalling automation and productivity growth. Privatized gains, socialized costs.
Just because there are smart people in finance, it doesn't mean the sector as a whole is doing a good job. Very smart people can do tremendous damage, more than any idiot robber or murderer.
Housing prices only go up thanks to government policy. You can't really blame the finance industry for that.
The government is responsible for land use restrictions and migration, sure. It's ultimately responsible for regulating and organizing the rest of the economy. But finance is directly responsible for issuing credit, which directly contributes to house building v land appreciation. If they provide more credit, prices will rise! They are creating money when they extend loans.
If an owner lets a dog off the leash and it bites someone, who is responsible? The owner or the dog? Both, to some extent. The owner was unwise to unleash an untrained dog. And the dog's natural characteristics favour biting, that's just what it is. The financial sector pursues profit in the same way. That's fine when profits are made directing capital towards productive development, bad when rendering cities unliveable by ridiculous land appreciation.
Finance also does its best to channel money to lobbying groups and supporting political parties that perpetuate the status quo
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You are aware that mortgages are propped up by Fannie and Freddie, correct?
This is probably true in the narrow sense of price to income but it's not true in the sense that people care about (monthly payment to income). In either case, it's quite clear that mortgages have existed in the modern form, with some changes in interest rates within certain bounds, for nearly 100 years and can't possibly explain the housing crisis. Getting rid of mortgages would have a one time price cut and then you're back on the old trend line.
Mortgages aren't the issue in and of themselves. Besides, I'm talking about the Anglosphere generally not just America. The issue is whether credit is deployed for new builds or lending to buy existing houses at higher and higher valuations, effectively bidding up the price of land. Banks devoting so much of their lending to mortgages because it's 'safe' is the problem.
People being chained to enormous mortgages isn't ideal either, it prevents people moving around easily, locks them down in jobs with the high debt load. Yes, price to income is important actually!
What's profitable for banks is not necessarily ideal for the economy, which would be better off with more lending to industry and development. House prices could be permanently lowered by redirecting lending from buying up existing housing stock to new-builds but this would necessitate boomers losing some money and is off the cards.
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The Case-Shiller index went down (in nominal terms) from 2006-2012. It's roughly flat (again in nominal terms) now. Median sales price went down from 2006-2009, and is dropping now.
When I go and look at a graph of US house prices vs median income, that's not exactly the conclusion that comes first to mind!
https://www.longtermtrends.com/home-price-median-annual-income-ratio/
How about 'home price/median income is at its peak, higher even than the very top of the housing bubble' or 'the salary needed to buy a home doubled from 2017 to 2025'.
The claim was "housing prices only go up". They don't. That's different from the claim that housing prices are high now; they are. As for that graph, since the median household income series ends in 2024, data after that aren't accurate.
The claim was ''house prices up only!' lending' is bad, gesturing at the idea that bidding up the price of land is bad and a poor use of credit. Not that house prices only go up. House prices occasionally fall but have been rising as a general trend since financial deregulation. House prices are higher than ever before.
The facts straightforwardly support my conclusions, whereas your claim is misleading in the extreme.
"House prices up only!" lending implies that lending for houses is safe because house prices only go up. Since this is not in fact the case, it is your claim that is misleading.
A lot of things have been rising as a general trend (the S&P 500, for instance). That's different than monotonic increase.
As for "financial deregulation", I don't know which particular one you mean.
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Thanks. House prices mostly only go up. A correction highly relevant to my point.
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If you think that middle-class homeownership as the default is a good thing, mortgage lending is the biggest pro-social things banks do*. The transfer from young to old is driven by housing scarcity - generous mortgage finance just determines how it plays out.
If we didn't have a mortgage finance system that allows desperate upper-middle-class youth to somehow-or-other scrape together enough money, then the Boomers would be selling out to investors who would become a new landed aristocracy. Given the less-generous mortgage system in the US post-2008, this is already happening at the low end of the market. (Hence the moral panic about corporate landlords buying SFHs - this is actually less harmful than individual landlords buying them, but easier to demagogue).
* In dollar terms, the mortgage bond market was traditionally bigger than the stock market. The recent run-up in the stock market means this is no longer true in terms of outstanding market cap, although the SpaceX IPO will mark the first and possibly only year when the stock market was bigger in terms of new issuance, which is a better measure of the impact finance is having on the real world.
Mortgage lending is important. But there's a distinction between lending for new builds to expand supply and foster development vs fuelling property bubbles and land speculation. It's not impossible to make houses cheaply - financial resources could be directed to replicate the postwar baby boom era of cheap housing and industrial development. That's how it happened in the first place, financial repression and capital controls. Credit was directed into creating new housing stock.
This doesn't happen naturally. It is often more profitable to buy houses in desirable areas since they're not making any more land. Elastic credit, inelastic supply - prices rise. It can be a lot 'safer' than lending to industry, from the perspective of the bank. If a business fails the money can be lost, whereas you can always repossess a house.
In 17 advanced economies, the share of mortgage loans in banks' total lending portfolios roughly doubled over the past century from 30% in 1900 to about 60% in 2014. More productive industrial investment has been crowded out.
It does happen naturally. It DID happen naturally. Well, sort of; the timing was partly because of relaxation of capital controls forbidding mortgage lenders from lending for development. But that relaxation happened because the time was right and the lobbyists were called in to remove the obstacle. The banks wanted to lend for development (because they could see the wave of demand coming), but were prevented, until they had the laws changed.
The banks also wanted to lend during the early-2000s bubble. After the bubble, housing has been durably repressed, but this isn't for lack of funds; the US is awash in funds. It's because the reaction to suburbia, the New Urban anti-sprawl smart-growth people, who had been on the back foot for a long time, were able to use the housing crash to get the upper hand politically, which they still have.
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You are wrong about the changes in the second sexual revolution; it began with protests by male college students against being banned from female dorms. Before the first sexual revolution young men's sexual opportunities were limited to prostitution or after marriage(at which point one would no longer be considered a 'young man'- and the average age for which was almost certainly older than you expect. Even when teen marriage happened, it was a girl thing). Between the two it came with the subclause that non-occult sexual acts required marriage. Young men wishing to sow their wild oats benefitted greatly.
And what happened thereafter to the marriage rates, marriage age, and birth rate?
Uh no it was about 21 for men during the USA baby boom, what are you talking about? In antiquity is was also around 21. Do you think 22 year old men are middle aged?
On X they're calling this capeshit history. That means it's storybook fantasy. A neat, little, visual, graspable event « kicked off » everything. Oh boy! It's like a little modern Homeric myth! When the reality is what happened is some esoteric cohort effects caused peoples' instincts to shift and so on.
Yes, male age at marriage reached a temporary minimum in between the two sexual revolutions. But we actually have male age at marriage data about as well as could ever be expected, and historical male ages at marriage tended to be late twenties or early thirties. Moralists just before the first sexual revolution recommended 25+, Romans talked about 30 as ideal and normative- and what data exists suggest these were, broadly, reflecting general norms.
Marriage rates declined with the second sexual revolution. That's bad. But the norms in between the two sexual revolutions were not durable or sustainable.
You are way off, sorry. None of this is true.
You're just making that up.
You just got off a short ban and you can't stop this low effort sneering at everyone who argues with you. Your discourse in general is obnoxious and you've already been given a pretty long leash for an obvious ban-evading alt (pretty sure I recognize your previous incarnation), but our patience is running thin. Well, my patience is running thin anyway. Take another three days off- if you want to accuse someone of "making things up" your argument needs to be more than "Nuh uh!"
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Shame on him for not pre-emptively sourcing you, but greater shame on you for replying with "nuh uh". @hydroacetylene is in fact correct.
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-demographic-economics/article/marriage-age-ushape/F94BC91AFF2CF4A9B5031C52476B06D9
(U shaped marriage age)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_European_marriage_pattern
(Late age of marriage for bothe men and women in europe)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Works_and_Days
(Late Recommended age of marriage for men)
...
Argue a priori, argue a posteriori, or ask for sources. Don't "nuh uh."
Age of first marriage for men until recently didn't get much above 25, with about a 4 year age gap. Now it's over 30 with a 2 year age gap. The current situation is much more different from the historical norm than the 1950s nadir at about 22 with a slightly over 2 year age gap.
no but you see this is good because young men expecting to have sex with young women (to say nothing of the opposite) even in the confines of a marriage is bad
imagine having sex with women that are actually young, couldn't be me, i hagmax like Ben Franklin
if we could we'd push age of marriage up to 40, 50, 60 because they'd be more mature then and more cognizant of the risks, that would be good
especially because most of us are already unhappily married and we want to help our kids avoid that, but we have no idea how to do that so we just tell them to delay it and they trust us, dumb fucks
imagine marriage was an important part of living life, and imagine that you'd ever want to maximize the amount of fulfilling life time you (or others) will get
Oh, drop it. Marriage rates declined because with the sexual revolution, now you could shack up with someone without benefit of clergy, and if old squares called it "living in sin" and clucked disapprovingly at you, you could bask in the moral glow of superior enlightenment. Finding out if the two of you were compatible, especially sexually, was important before you embarked on anything as serious and important and long-term as marriage. Better to break up early than get married and then repent at leisure.
Now we have people living together for years, practically married, even having children together, but never tying the knot. Then there are late break-ups and both men and women complain about having to get back into the dating scene. Women complaining that they've been with their boyfriend for five/seven/ten years but he never mentions marriage at all.
Even before that, marriages were often delayed due to money. You can't marry unless you can support a wife and multiple children, and for a lot of men, even men in what we would consider the professions, that took a long time - there's even a painting about it! Certain entities such as the East India Company would forbid their employees from getting married before the age of thirty, in order to ensure there were no distractions from putting all the man's energy into the job. A lot of people never had the chance to marry at all, due to poverty; if you weren't the eldest son (who would usually inherit the farm or the shop or whatever property there was) or the eldest daughter (who had the best chance of getting a dowry), then you had little to no chance of marriage at all (unless you were from a rich enough family that could support multiple children's marriage portions).
Are you married right now? Were you a virgin before marriage, or if unmarried, are you still a virgin? Because if the answer is "no, I'm not married and I am sexually experienced", then you have had the best of both worlds and the advantages of Free Love that past generations struggled for. You have had the fruits of the sexual revolution but appetite always wants more.
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I think it's worth noting that for some men (both young and old) life has never been better in terms of amassing wealth; getting sexual access to women; etc. I realize that your complaint is limited to young men, but as you point out, most of the time young men become middle aged men who become old men.
Well, lesbian until graduation anyway. Anyway, suppose there is a polyamorous relationship which entails one man and two women who believe themselves to be lesbians or bisexual or whatever. If they have children, then from the perspective of reproduction that's a big win for the man.
This is just polygamy where the patriarch has a yuri fetish. Feminists think it should be illegal and polyamory never works out like that.
Sexual access to women is way down. Wealth is up but that's because of technology and in spite of society, which is always stealing.
This is an extreme exaggeration.
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"Polyamory" when explicitly called that, sure, but that's a tiny part of what can be broadly understood as such. I'd say polygamy, either explicit or implicit, makes up for most of polyamorous relationships, across the political spectrum.
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I knew a situation where an older guy (maybe 60s) was living with two amerindian sisters in their 20s, providing for and sleeping with them both. Wonder if it's easier with sisters. Though to be honest I highly doubt any of them had ever heard the word 'polyamory'. The vibe was much more Great Frontier mountain man finds himself in the not-entirely-unpleasant situation of caring for two Shoshoni gals cut off from their tribe.
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Women are rarely interested in sex with a social status inferior. A man needs only relatively high social status compared to the type of woman he is interested in to have many accessible options.
If a man is not a combination of poor, fat, short, weakly, socially autistic, and ungroomed he should have a reasonable amount of options of sexually available young women. Only height is out of the control of a man, everything else can be improved with sustained effort.
The manosphere and all those weird “PUA” communities I’ve noticed have this strange vocabulary for describing things they don’t even understand. All their talk about how to become a “high value” man is so bizarre when you take into account that good men (even in the status department, not just their moral content) are often the ones who don’t get laid. Thugs, idiots, people with a “hood” accent, no direction in life, etc. Broken women generally play around in the milieu of broken men; because the latter are easier to control than well adjusted ones who won’t tolerate your bullshit. A man who can’t see past a woman’s games may be one she doesn’t respect, but will nonetheless have relations with. A man much her superior is one who can see through her games and won’t put up with her nonsense. The woman isn’t going to ‘not be who she is’, and the man isn’t going to compromise his integrity by allowing such a human wrecking ball into his life. That’s nothing but a recipe for conflict and disaster but in a democracy of two, one vote has to count more than the other.
Ummmm, citation needed.
You want to come to my hood? I can show you in person.
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I don't disagree with your points, but I was addressing strictly what improves male sexual access to women per @dailydogma and not women of good relationship potential.
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I haven't seen statistics, but I know about a situation like this where the man was finessed by his girlfriend into bringing another woman into the relationship. Although it initially seemed like some kind of ultimate male fantasy, eventually the man felt as though he had been cheated on and turned into a kind of third wheel. But they did have 5 children so from a reproductive standpoint it was a big win.
As far as legislation goes, my sense is that polyamorous relationships have not been a big priority for feminists.
On average, perhaps. But I think that for a minority of men, it's way up. Because the internet and smart phones allow men to cast a wide net.
I don't understand this comment so I am not going to respond.
How did your friend end up? Divorice? Or is he still in the yuri cuck chair?
They were never married but in any event the two women live together and raise their children, the guy doesn't live with them but the relationship is amicable. He pays substantial child support and makes weekend visits to their household from time to time. He has learned his lesson and is engaged to a woman who is very conservative.
Apparently "learned his lesson" means "found a THIRD wife" lol. This guy is straight up an african patriarch. His are the genes that will persist through the current demographic collapse.
Are there any particular lessons to learn from the way he grooms himself, acts, treats women, etc.? Or is it all rules 1 and 2? I figure if I can reach a third his power level I'll be batting at-par.
Well the new girl is from a traditional background and is NOT open to the idea of of being intimate with another woman.
I would say he's not particularly physically attractive but to borrow a phrase from the incel community, he has been money-and-status maxxing over the years.
But also, his path was largely happenstance. He had one serious partner who ended up turning the relationship into something polyamorous and then cheated on him, resulting in him leaving and finding someone else.
If the goal is to maximize one's genetic legacy, I think the power move is to join an ultra-religious group like the Amish, Quiverfulls, or Haredim.
I think that's the general way poly goes; forget the types who have entire communities about it, rules, jargon, treat "The Ethical Slut" as the Bible, and make it their entire identity. The general person who goes "Honey, I want to open up our relationship/marriage" is only looking for an excuse to make cheating acceptable, be it the man or the woman who suggests it, and very soon afterwards they will break any 'rules' laid down or dump you for their new honey. Better to say "No" and get out first.
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The semi-recent news story about the african patriarch with a hundred+ wives mentioned that several of his wives eventually chose to live outside of his property and sustain themselves. But it remains the case that they are still raising his children and unlikely to bear any other man's children. Your friend's exes are wives enough for any sociological purpose. That he has to support them while they no longer have sex with him isn't unimaginable for many married heterosexual couples.
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With Friends like these, who really needs feminists... Yes lets put all young men into the bucket that makes them just animals, justify all the stereotypes that men just want to fuck and breed. The level of misandry in this post is quite high and you even have to the gall to pretend you are championing men's rights. You going around and repeating boomercon sexism: "all men are pigs that just want sex" is not revolutionary. News flash, men are people! And people want more than to just satisfy their base urges to have sex and spawn heirs.
Maybe Herbert was more prescient than he knew. We need a Gom Jabbar. Kill off all the men who's sole goal in life is to be an animal. They are holding back our species.
No, he’s mostly right. Your rendition of this is an uncharitable caricature IMO, but you can put it any way you want to. Virtually all men do want sex. Maybe not of the variety you have in mind, but they want it in some form or fashion; and the fact that they also have “other” wants, doesn’t negate those that are fundamental to their biology.
Yes men want some sex, but it's not their core driving impulse. Maybe for some hypersexual men but its a big world with a big range of libidos. Many don't want kids, some don't want partners. This convergence to "all men are just horndogs that want to pump out kids" is a weird conservative meme that refuses to adapt to contact with reality.
Well yeah, you’re essentially arguing with a meme conception of the idea, but underneath that caricature biology is still a real thing (and one that gives meaning to life incidentally).
I am using "meme" in the definition of the core metaphysical idea underlying a narrative or belief.
See this is what I disagree with. So I don't think I am arguing with a caricature based on your emphasis of it as true. Biology has given me no meaning in life. This is like saying science tells you what matters. It's wrong. Biology put us on this world but does not define the meaning of our lives.
You are satirizing a position and arguing with its caricature. If you ask most people the world over as best as it’s been approximated thus far, most of them do want it, specifically for the reasons I’ve drawn attention to.
Am I?
OP has literarily stated here That the only point of life is to make offspring and everything else is a worthless distraction.
Yeah, and he’s basically correct.
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Sex and reproduction aren't the same thing, though, and reproduction is arguably easier for men now that it's fairly straightforward to contract it out.
A surrogate costs something like $250,000, how does that compare to the historical price of a wife?
$250,000 would be the high end of a normal range for a domestic surrogacy from what I understand, with the low end being something like $60,000 if you don't go through an agency or go international.
Average cost of a wedding in the United States is about $35,000, and of course higher if international.
If you were correct that modernity was one big one way ratchet against the ability of young men to reproduce it would be illegal as well as immoral.
This is true in the US but in the rest of the anglosphere commercial surrogacy is illegal and in much of continental europe all surrogacy is banned.
Based!
Still, though, I think my point stands.
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And that doesn’t change my answer either. Globally, most men want both.
I don't disagree that most men want both.
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They don't even want to breed, that's part of the problem. Porn in all its easily available varieties, 'love is love so nobody can kink-shame you', and real life relationships being tough because there's another human being with their own wants, needs, and desires in the mix who isn't there just to jump on a trampoline for you, means that sticking with the stimulation you accessed first at age ten and which warped your emerging sexuality into this particular mould is the siren song drawing them away from marriage and fatherhood.
Why is this wrong, or wronger than what you wrote?
It's a problem for both sexes, but an unsupported claim that young men all want to reproduce (not 'have sex', we can all take that as a given, but 'have children') is not in line with general historical trends. It's the guys in folk songs denying that 'the kid is not mine, I never promised to marry you, we never had sex, well if we did then you're the kind of whore who'll sleep with a guy before marriage, so you'll sleep with any guy so how do I know it's mine?', not the women. If the young men were panting to have babies with their girl, they'd be leaping at the chance "wow, you're up the pole? let's buy the ring right now!" No shotguns required.
Not just folk songs of the past, but our time.
Did anyone say "all"? Most men do in fact want kids.
I'm sure there's folk songs on both sides of this question.
It's also quite well established that the fertility decline is due to marriage decline, which I think is hard to put entirely on men.
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Lotharios existed in every age. And doubtless so did women overeager to use them to beat all men over the head.
I don't think folk songs about Casanova and his disciples prove much about the majority of men who broadly loved, married, and procreated on schedule.
To be fair, there are. "She left me for a richer guy" is the spear version. But the men are never lamenting "She promised to marry me, then left me here alone with a baby and everyone is shunning me and now she claims I'm a liar and she never knew me".
Folk songs about a wife leaving a man in the lurch, though...
"You picked a fine time to leave me, Lucille
With four hungry children and crops in the field"
Yeah, Lucille was a bad girl. Probably running around with that Ruby!
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Because contrary to the OP's opinion most people aren't slaves to biology. Most incels could passport bro it up, or pay for sex but its not what they really want. Want people want is to be desired for who they are, they want to self actualize, they want a partner.
If women are getting out competed by 2D pixels and onlyfans models talking to you, then the blame is squarely on them. The "real-human" being problem cuts both ways. She's not going to find the romance novel dreamboat out there in the real world.
When you say “incel” in this context are you referring to the original template of a hideously, physically unattractive man or what an ordinary man is who can’t get laid because of women’s hyper inflated standards? Most men won’t date international because of high financial costs, cultural incompatibilities, no guarantee of a high payoff in your pursuit; and that situation isn’t improved for them either by your following suggestion that a man should commit crimes in order to get some. That’s about as useful as saying they could rape someone if they wanted to. A horrible suggestion as well.
I agree with you about what is at the root of these men’s desires. Men wanted to feel validated and loved as much as women do and many of them are willing to pay the cost of doing it. A man will often commit his entire life to his wife and kids doing bone crushing work, if he knows it’s making them happy and bringing them joy. It’s a pity so many women can’t see or appreciate that.
The latter-ish. The original circa 2015 definition for men who think they are the former but are mostly just average to slightly below average. But for who have certain levels of anxiety, neuroticism, autism/adhd, social anxiety, introversion and risk aversion so as to make it hard for them to find a partner.
This assumes that prostitution is legal if frowned upon.
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Pornography is a symptom of the problem. Men often go to porn because they can’t get it normally. And it’s not to say men aren’t willing to work for it. If you want to get to the apple, you’ve got to climb the tree. But if someone comes along and tells me I have to climb the Eiffel Tower to get it, I’m going to ignore them.
There's problems with men accessing porn even when in relationships; Nancy Friday* of 90s sex book fame recounted an anecdote of how, as a young woman, she felt rejected and hurt when her older lover masturbated - she was there, she was available, he didn't have to do that! But she learned to accept, thanks to his careful teaching, that men have needs and different attitudes to sex than women, and sometimes guys just want to get off without complications.
*These books were first published in the 70s but were hits again in the 90s, when erotic publishing for women really took off with the likes of Black Lace and others.
I’ve read Nancy Friday myself and I’m aware of the problem you’re talking about. Porn consumption doesn’t always stop just because people are paired off. Some men just want to get off easily without caring for their girlfriend or wife, and some do get sucked down the hole of addiction. But these are peripheral issues at the margins that lie away from the core of the problem among those who watch it.
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I'm inclined to think it's both a cause and a symptom. There are observable issues that can be directly linked to widespread pornography use, including porn-induced erectile dysfunction.
Men go to porn because it's easier than dealing with a real woman, men also have more difficulty doing what has to be done to get a woman because of porn.
This is by no means intended to imply that modern women don't have their own major issues going on.
I think you’re both right. Porn has a lot of social and sexual downsides, which we find hard to talk about, because they’re squeezed between feminist critiques of porn (which don’t really care about practical effects on male sexuality unless they can be marshaled for critiques of objectification), religious critiques of porn (for which any objective problems are post hoc evidence for a position already held), feminist arguments in favor of porn (in which case male sexual consequences are almost irrelevant), and general male liberal arguments in favor of porn (for which any sort of critique registers as one of the above, and thus dismissed).
Porn-induced is a strong word, but certainly porn-exacerbated sexual problems when encountering a real woman are real and serious. As is what the nofappers talk about with escalating pornographic taboos, where the attraction to normal vanilla content becomes exhausted by the massive overflow of sexual novelty available in porn, leading to attraction to more taboo kink content to get off, leading to exhaustion of attraction to taboo kink content, leading to more taboo kink content just to get the same arousal…
It’s not hard to meet men who’ve never touched a person’s genitals before but their entire sexuality is organized around complex kink structures. And you can’t run before you can walk, so the young pornbrained guys are unable to comprehend vanilla sex experientially.
That said, I think tretiak is right that young guys feel like they have narrow options in terms of sex. And I’m not actually convinced that men are using porn instead of meeting women, as I think men’s desire for companionship is much more complex than just locate nearest vagina. They use porn to get off, but of course the emotional longing and the desire for intimacy and the want for someone to hold on cold winter nights still remains.
Where porn damages sexuality becomes prevalent much later, if they do meet a woman they like, where they realize they’ve seen a thousand women have sex with men, but don’t know the first thing about what they’re doing.
Introversion has something to do with it, and the internet in general, but this affects both genders, and the flip side of the young men playing video games instead of touching grass are the young women scrolling TikTok instead of touching grass. I’ve met women like that. They’re often very dateable, especially if you’re an introvert. But unless you get very lucky, you’re not going to meet them.
What your argument seems to suggest is that men aren’t meeting women as much because their hunger is satisfied by porn, but I’m not at all convinced that lonely men are that way because they’re not hungry enough. But the young men we’re talking about are simultaneously ashamed, inexperienced, overexposed, under-touched, desperate for intimacy, terrified of humiliation, and living inside a culture that offers him infinite simulacra and few bridges to reality.
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Addiction or misuse of anything will always lead to problems. The solutions that would best stymie its consumption aren’t likely to materialize because of the ideology of personal choice that dominates western social life. They do often go to it because it’s easy on occasion, yes that’s true. But most of the time it’s because they’re lacking in opportunity.
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If you had actually properly read Dune, you'd know the only way out is through. Supermen like Paul are the result of eugenics. They were bred from animals. Nietzsche talks about this. Placed in its proper context, you are rejecting animal life for something lower: no life at all. You will never be a pneumatic. What do you want other than reproduction, to sit around high and distracted? That's your only other option.
That's just silly.
There's still art and culture, and science for men and women of leisure to create and experience.
All of Shakespeare's descendants died out in the 17th century, do you believe that his contributions to art aren't a good enough legacy to leave behind? Or Newton and Washington, who had no biological children, and yet I challenge you to find two men who made more of a lasting impact on the world.
As far as we know Jesus of Nazareth had no biological children, and look at his impact on history. And Julius Ceasar's two confirmed biological children, Julia and Caesarion had far less impact on history than his adopted son. Who was a bigger legacy for Socrates, Plato or his biological children Lamprocles, Sophroniscus, and Menexenus?
Eugenics is all well and good in the long run, and I don't think most people really objects to voluntary eugenics to remove genetically influenced diseases from the population. But I think even when you have two aristocratic people of "good stock" you're often going to get a Commodus, historically speaking. Dune is partially fantasy, because the kind of organization and longevity needed to pull off a multigeneration eugenics program on that scale would tend to make the actual people being produced kind of redundant.
But also, I think that eugenics is the retreat of the lazy and unexceptional. Unless you have produced a master work or an empire that will long outlive you, how lame is it to be proud that you have "good genes" with nothing to actually back it up? Go out and prove you have great genes, and give us another great man of history to look up to!
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Maybe you need to go re-read both Dune and Nietzsche. The whole point of the Bene Gesserit Gom Jabbar is to weed out people who are slaves to their instincts because the power of the Kwisatz Haderach in such an animal would be an active detriment to the species. Treating people as animals is what Leto II did but he is the main villain in the series, by far. Herbert does not make that subtle. Leto II at least has a semi-noble goal. But nothing of what you are doing is eugenics, there is no noble goal in labeling all men as animals who are slaves to their biology. Nietzsche likewise does not have kind things to say about men who could not command themselves, who were slaves to their desires. I would take it a step farther and say that someone who is a slave to their desires is an untermensch.
This post's base premise is that all men are just rutting beasts shackled to the brute primordiality of their biology and the o-so-evil society that won't allow these poor beasts of burdens to do what they were made for. Yeah... tell me you hate men without telling me you hate men. Apparently the feminists have you so Manchurian candidate-ed that you don't even know which way is up.
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Sexual access dominates a huge portion of the mindshare of men, especially young men. Obviously it's not the only thing they care about, but it's a huge aspect of their lives. I don't think this post reduces men unfairly in that way. And this post is correct that the sexual marketplace has gotten much worse for the average man, though I'd chalk that up more to how much more efficient the internet has made sorting, although feminists certainly haven't helped things with their occasionally insane demands.
It does. I wonder, though, how much of it is actually a desire for sex and how much of it is a desire for the good ego feelings and positive feedback from one's peers that having a lot of sex with attractive women brings. I think the main reason why male incels suffer is not because they lack sex, it is because they feel like losers and failed men.
What do you think the results would be if incels were offered the choice of a publicly proclaimed relationship with a woman on condition of absolute chastity, or regular sex but total secrecy with the same woman.
The sex. They still do genuinely want sex, or at least they think they do (in the case of those who have never had sex yet). And they still would get the ego boost from secret sex. So the only thing missing would be the approval from peers.
I think their answer to this question would also depend a lot on whether the woman secretly loved him in a romantic sense, like it was a clandestine love affair thing, or whether it was more like prostitution or a get laid and leave every week kind of deal. I think most of the incels would choose the former, but would seriously hesitate about the latter.
I think the typical incel would reject prostitution because it doesn't provide the ego boost, and indeed actually for an incel has a high chance of being bad for the ego. But the typical incel would jump on the opportunity to have a get laid and leave every week kind of deal. It's better than what the incel currently has.
I don't know. Maybe that's true. I don't know that you could ever say I was in the incel category, but when I did feel foreveralone during college, I would have felt like a woman desiring me without having affection for me would be an insult. I was offered a friends-with-benefits arrangement and turned it down. Sex without affection is just empty, gross.
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Very much an open question, and I presume it differs significantly from person to person. A lot of it is young men not being able to status signal like they would like to.
The question is not really open. Incels have status-anxiety, which is why they do not happily visit prostitutes. Relatedly, incels are commonly known as weird loners without any friends, which is also related to status.
A lot (though not all) of people see relationships as status markers, and incels especially so. This is why their obsession with looksmatches, hypergamy, entitlement, etc. They do not really want to have a happy relationship with another person, they just want a plus one to the company potluck.
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I suppose I have aged out of being a "young man" but just barely, less than a couple years at this point depending on the cutoff range you have in mind. It was never a massive aspect of my life. And it wasn't some massive aspect of my very diverse set of friends either. And I changed several big cities in my 20s. Oh there were a couple that were more interested in getting laid but it wasn't about sex, it was about being wanted. I agree that the dating marketplace has gotten worse for the average man. I just don't agree that the average man is super interested in sex that it "dominates" their mind.
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The negative changes in social mores preempted the explosion of the Internet and certainly social media and online dating. The mortal wound had already been fired much earlier than that. The collapse in standards and norms of decent behavior paved the way for opportunistic moral scavenging of all varieties. Add to that the fact that a large share of women were allowed to abscond from their social position in relation to everyone else that requires “responsibility,” and allows them to treat relationships like it’s some kind of “game” for narcissists to fool around with.
And now both men and women are in a position today where no one knows what to do or how to do it because they all rebelled against the life scripts they were given and smashed it into a thousand pieces. No one trusts anyone. And you can see it in ways otherwise decent people reduce themselves to the tactics of manipulators to make any kind of social progress with someone, because it’s all they know now.
You can observe it quite easily and see manipulators from a mile away if you’re paying attention. Once a manipulator can pinpoint what you’re susceptible to (which they register as a “weak point” in their minds) they will use it against you. If you’re a decent man or woman today and your perceived “weak point” is to be decent and compassionate towards others; they won’t truly be your friend but will happily use the term so they can use the title of your relationship so they can pressure you into assuming they’re entitled to exploit you. Your “friendship” in that regard is simply a term used to get you to drop your guard. I don’t believe in conditional friendship. Put in work or get out of my face. I deal with this somewhat frequently at work. I know who my friends are and who my “friends” are.
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Apparently if you tell an animal from the species known for its intelligence that it's actually being helped by being neutered, even though that animal can look around nature and read Darwin and everything, many animals from that species will fall for the trick in a way a dumber animal never would. What is the purpose of intelligence at that point? We might as well all be ants, then we will be immune from feminism at least.
Michael Shermer wrote in a chapter of one of his books why intelligent people believe weird things, and the short answer to that was they’re better at rationalizing beliefs they’ve arrived at for non-smart reasons. I’ve come across arguments before for all kinds of interesting positions and it felt strange processing the logical structure of it, because it’s clear to me that the conclusion is false or mistaken, but it isn’t entirely clear at any single point what’s wrong with it. The quote falsely attributed to Tertullian in defense of Christianity, “Credo quia absurdum,” (“It is to be believed because it is absurd.” Who would invent something so off the wall?) is once such instance when I sometimes reflect on it.
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The idea that young men are somehow financially worse off than they were previously is just dead wrong. It's another example of the demand for bad economic news being much higher than the supply. There's never been more opportunity in an absolute sense. Taxes paid to foreigners is a total red herring. Taxes sent to the Olds is definitely a problem, but it's a problem that even the young infuriatingly don't want to solve -- trying to get people to slash SS + Medicare is almost a nonstarter, even though I've been pushing for it for years. The average 20 year old man still sees himself as a temporarily embarrassed septuagenarian.
Sexually, this piece is more defensible, although I still wouldn't support what it's saying unconditionally.
The other big problem with this post is the target. Saying "the West" or "the state" is at fault is wrong in the sense that it treats the government as some ultimate entity that must ensure fairness. The state just does whatever the people tell it to do in a democracy. Feminists and wokes have co-opted it a little bit, while Olds have co-opted it a lot. If you think it's doing something bad, then the solution isn't vicemaxxing, it's to change the government to something better. There's been quite a bit of success pushing against feminists and wokes, but much less success pushing against the Olds because people have not mobilized against them.
This is true in the US, where economic growth has been fast enough to keep pace with Boomer greed. It isn't true in other first-world countries with slower economic growth and similarly greedy Boomers. The detail is confusing because the relative price of housing has increased so much compared to both other basic necessities like groceries* and minor luxuries like streaming video subscriptions or avocado toast.
This makes the online generational wars very confusing, because people from across the Anglosphere (and from globohomo communities outside it) are posting to the same websites and think they are participating in the same conversation.
* The relative cost of healthcare has also increased, but that isn't a basic necessity for the young men we are talking about.
Sure, I mostly have a US perspective.
I'd say it's probably mostly still untrue in the rest of the West. Even for the UK which has been stagnant for the last decade or so, I doubt that people actually had better or even equivalent standards of living just looking at the data. Though this data isn't quite at the quality I would like (inflation-adjusted median wages).
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The average 20 year old man IS a temporarily embarrassed septuagenerian. Life expectancy at 20 is over 55 years.
Sure, young people eventually become old people.
The problem is that young people don't want to pay for old people, but they want still have someone pay for them when they get old. They want to keep SS + Medicare, and have little inclination to fight against NIMBYism. But they don't like high taxes or high housing costs that come along with those. So they use criticism of "the establishment", or "society", or immigrants, or billionaires in place of the real culprit.
That’s being quite unfair to the younger generation. I wouldn’t want to pay for the older generation either when they expect you to pay for everything. I tend to think people would object less to taxes if they saw evidently good or great value in the rollout of services paid for by it. Even when people complain about taxes they’re not really complaining about it as much as how ineffectively the money gets spent on by an inefficient bureaucracy.
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The West refers to the places I'm talking about. I said society and culture, not state, so I don't know where you're getting this from. I said neighbor a bunch at the end, not civil servant far away in the capitol.
Young men become old men. It wasn't old men in their capacity as men who caused a lot of these problems. I agree old men should have less but economic replacement migration and TFR destroying feminism are also huge problems.
I never said that, I said they have been betrayed, not that they are overall poorer than 100+ years ago.
You're right that you didn't say "state". But your advice in the third to last paragraph was mostly pointed at things that would affect the country/nation which is what I meant.
The degenerate "my group is oppressed" narrative is extremely attractive for most people, and it leads to vicemaxxing where being an awful person is recast as getting karmic justice for perceived inequalities. Blacks went down that path in the US and it turned their culture into something worthy of nothing but contempt. It's insane to me that the online right wants whites to also go down that path. Your post is echoing similar sentiments.
Wokes were responsible for a lot of terribleness that afflicted Western cultures recently. They're getting a lot of hate now, which is well deserved.
But the Olds have rigged the welfare state in most Western nations far more than feminists or wokes ever have. If you want to complain about taxes, we should compare the amount of money going towards groups like feminists vs how much is going towards the Olds. It's not even close. Then we'd also need to throw in all the problems caused by NIMBYism, which is a defacto subsidy for Olds.
People hate high housing prices and high taxes, but for some reason that doesn't translate towards animosity towards the actual source of the problem.
Saying there was a "betrayal" is weak without backing it up.
If your argument was "our money we once had was stolen!" then OK. But that's not true as I've pointed out.
If your argument is instead just "we're much richer than we were before, but not quite as rich as I wish we were", it's hard to call that a "betrayal".
Well to be fair it was Lyndon Johnson and later Richard Nixon who led them down that path primarily, but I think you’re giving too much credit to Vance outside the media pipeline. Literally no one I know pays attention to him or has the slightest clue what he’s says or does.
It doesn’t make sense to you because you aren’t looking at the problem the way civically responsible do. If I’m comparing two competing tax programs from different parties, the one that costs less isn’t always the optimal solution if the one that costs more spends money on the services that most directly affect you. But the problem is also worse than that. If accepting your tax program means I have to onboard all the social values of your party, I’ll take the hit to my wallet and live with it.
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No, blacks are just like that. Anyway, I don't want people to pity young men, I just think young men should demand to stop being robbed or otherwise should seek the collapse of the West. I believe that if my neighbors steal from me, they deserve to be overrun by the third world and to lose everything nice that they like.
Young men are prevented from making money they can naturally make, and what they make is stolen from them to be given to other groups. Yes, society is richer due to tech, but that doesn't detract from the broader society's crime against its young men. It's like if Elon Musk makes a million dollars, and I rob him and steal $950,000 of it, and then I defend myself with, he still got what he deserved, or maybe a little less than that, but that's okay because I donated some of it to an African charity, and he's already rich anyway so it doesn't count. Guess what my stealing society will do? Put me in prison anyway, for the crime they do to me. So they are hypocrites too.
Are you serious dude?
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I do think it is important to have some perspective here. Individuals, men included, have never been freer. Mandatory conscription has declined since the cold war, education and knowledge is accessible to everyone, and outside of the big cities it is possible to live very cheaply as long as you don't mind having very few material possessions. No job can turn you into a wage slave. You are free to save up, quit, and live your life as you please. Wages are high enough that a single man with good financial sense can build savings over time.
Social mobility has never been easier. No longer are you bound to the same job that your father had. If you are born smart and driven, but low class, you are free to get an education, build connections at university and create a better life for yourself and your children. The social roles of gender and class have eroded, giving you more opportunities than ever before.
Male dominated jobs have never been safer. You are not going to die at 60 because your lungs were destroyed from inhaling dust at the factory. The western world has tons of regulations concerning ventilation, overtime, how much you are allowed to carry at once and so forth. If you do get an injury, modern medicine gives you better odds of recovery than your forefathers could have even dreamed of.
If you do initially fail to create a good life for yourself there are social safety nets that can catch you and potentially allow you to start over and learn from your mistakes. The strength of these depend on your country, but at the very least you are not going to starve.
A man who takes ownership of his life, builds an understanding of the world he lives in, and takes the initiative to improve his station has better chances than basically any man who came before him. The issue of course, is that young men are not raised to do this.
Where I agree with you is that society lies to young men. We are raised to be obedient and easy to manage, then bombarded with messages of how we are the cause of every problem in the world. We are taught to expend considerable effort on providing for minorities (anyone who isn't a white man) due to notions of guilt and fairness. Young men are taught to play it safe, avoid risks, and do only as others tell them. This completely fails to prepare them for a world that actually rewards risk taking, courage, independent thinking, and initiative.
Then, of course, there is the whole dating thing, where men are lied to about women want for their entire childhood, only to be ridiculed as adults for failing to attract any.
I do see problems, but overall I think your message can only hold true for men born into high social status. Historically, the majority of men have been largely considered as cheap disposable labor, and have led extremely harsh and thankless lives. For those, the current world by far outclasses what we had a hundred years ago. It isn't even close.
I don't disagree with your overall points, but Lord what a stupid sentence. How do we even define freer or less free?
We have to start by deciding which we value more, little brother freedom or older brother freedom? The little brother becomes freer the less free the older brother is. The older brother can beat up the younger brother, take his things, make him do things. This makes the younger brother less free. The parent gets involved, punishes the older brother, restricts his freedom to bully his younger brother. The older brother becomes less free, but the younger brother becomes more free. He isn't allowed to beat up his older brother, but he never could anyway, but now he can keep his things his, he can play with his toys how he wants to without getting bullied.
Which is the freer childhood? These hierarchies are like nesting dolls. The family nestles within the religion, the culture, the state legal system.
Most arguments about freedom come down to this kind of problem. What level of hierarchy are we freeing?
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Well, you might, although ~all of the people who do are also chainsmoking alcoholics who haven't eaten a vegetable since they were kids or run more than fifty feet since they were in high school. But you have options other than the coal mine.
That is one hell of a chainsmoker.
I consider this a sign of great progress personally. The fact that your trajectory in life is not determined by society the moment that you are born, but is largely down to the qualities you develop and the choices that you make throughout your life, is not something to be taken for granted.
Granted, there is still a strong correlation between lineage and life trajectory. Upbringing matters a lot. But the simple fact that society won't actively stop you from trying to break out of your social class is huge.
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https://x.com/xwanyex/status/2003154577604919451
Yeah, I would agree with this for any western country. Assuming you are an able-bodied citizen, while there may be unfair structural disadvantages against you, there is currently no structural oppression so bad that it is impossible for you to get ahead.
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I agree with abundance mentality, economic advancement is huge and it's why young men don't move to a Muslim patriarchy. Those people are poor. However, betrayal does not require destruction; merely a plot to offend. It is true that young men are not destroyed, and the gains in wealth in general are greater than the costs of betrayal. That doesn't excuse the betrayal at all. Young men are more free from nature than ever before, but more subservient to their enemies than most times in human history.
Most of what he wrote isn’t even remotely true the closer your analysis actually gets to the ground. If path dependencies don’t exist to you, then yeah everything makes sense. But socioeconomic mobility? Spoken like a person who’s never experienced that problem in their entire life. Yes, wisdom and good decisions can get you pretty far in life on occasion but that isn’t the whole story or even most of it.
This has never been true. All that technology or modern society has empowered human beings to do is lift a corner of nature to momentarily peer behind the veil of things. The idea we’ve somehow become separate or distinct in some sense is exactly the kind of thing groups of people begin to think right before disaster strikes and a calamity smacks them right in the face. His conclusions are ones I agree with but not entirely for the reasons he states.
Regarding socioeconomic mobility, my point was that many structural barriers to social mobility have been removed. You are not going to be denied a job or degree based on family name, and if you don't have the money required to get an education you can borrow them. Just make sure that you get a degree that will enable you to pay it back.
There are absolutely psychological issues that make climbing hard. Your bad decisions can absolutely come back to haunt you too. And like your link to the Star Trek quote says, success is never guaranteed. But it is certainly more possible now than at most other times in recorded history.
Considering what I am arguing against is that society has betrayed men, I think the point that "structural barriers to social mobility for young men have been reduced drastically over time" is a good data point to support my point.
The reality is that while you’re right in that some structural barriers have been removed, what’s replaced many of them as been a trough of artificial barriers that impose other roadblocks to mobility. This is one of the ‘very’ rare instances I actually agree with libertarians.
Just take a look at licenses, credentialism, and occupational licensing that restrict employment. Not that some aren’t necessary but structurally a lot of them are rent-seeking mechanisms that protect those already employed; rather than ensuring baseline competence, which inflates consumer costs and limits entry-level opportunities across the economy.
If you’re an employer requiring college degrees or high-level experience for entry-level tasks, you’re going to inadvertently filter out capable candidates and artificial bottlenecks. Then there’s regulations which impose high fixed costs of hiring and deters companies from bringing on new employees, which is going to slow down economic growth and job creation.
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Yes, it is almost entirely is.
97% of young people who follow all three steps are not poor as adults
Might want to add 4) "avoid meth, just never try it" to that list.
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On #3, men who have everything going for them but still can't get a relationship I must strongly disagree. I do not know of any man who has achieved career progression and muscles, but who also can't get a relationship unless he is unsatisfied with the quality of the women available to him.
Too much hedging here. You added lifting to the equation. Why should men have to lift in 2026 when it doesn't even matter for raiding another village and taking? Is the quality of woman available to him his looksmatch? Or is he lifting and attracting fatties?
Oh its very much just lifting for looksmatch for a man that can find no willing women otherwise. Physical employment requiring movement and use of muscles will be effective, and a man gets paid on top of it. However, blue collar work can result in injuries and often results in a shorter lifetime earning potential once middle age takes its toll.
Often, a man will have no chance to demonstrate his honor, decency, and other good qualities to a woman unless he can first draw her eye with his muscles. My grandmother often tells all her grandchildren (~15) that the thing that drew her to my grandfather was his big muscles. In her old age she repeats the story quite often as if she was telling it for the very first time, it's deeply etched in her memory.
Hence the adage, "just lift, bro".
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None of that contradicts that wisdom and good decisions gets almost everyone in the US pretty far in life.
Then you clearly didn’t read my comment.
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Also a huge chunk of people he defines as not poor are actually poor in many ways.
I got into an economic argument with somebody once where I was trying to explain pricing and cost differentials and the different ‘types’ of costs involved in business contract negotiations; and this moron just couldn’t understand what “cost” meant outside of exchanging money. He was completely incredulous. I was trying to explain material input costs in production, energy requirements, etc (you know… like how following a recipe baking cookies requires the resource costs in food to do it?). This dude just wasn’t having it. Or the biggest cost of them all which is time (time is money, quite literally).
If you’ve spent any time in infosec at all it’s a concept that becomes clear. That’s why KPI’s like MTTR, MTTC, ALE, etc., are so important when measuring and calculating the financial impact of system downtime and why high impact business sectors of the economy are willing to pay such a premium for retainer services of incident response companies in the event of getting struck. Can’t fulfill contracts, orders and obligations? Time is money. You’re fucked.
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It is not just technological and economic advancement. Liberal democracy, belief in meritocracy, and free-market capitalism gives you opportunities that only people with preexisting wealth and influence would otherwise be able to attain.
The fact that these are under attack is a problem, but their advantages are very much not nullified yet.
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Not even close to true. Freedom on the frontier blows anything we have out of the water, and it's not close. You cannot have freedom in a panopticon, it's a misnomer.
Plenty of people have been much, much freer than this, and most of them are in the past of this very country.
It’s because ordinary people mistakenly accept a simple “freedom of motion” as an adequate substitute for the [real] feeling of freedom that comes from the absence of financial insecurity, the absence of neighborhood crime, the ability to express a distaste or prejudice without retribution, or simply being empowered to get up on a whim and move somewhere else.
Freedom from want and freedom from fear, as FDR put it, are not freedom but security expressed as freedom.
Reminds me of the quite commonly expressed notion over the last decade all the way to today, that censorship of wrongthink is required for free speech, because for women/POCs/LGBTQ+/etc. to have free speech, they must be free from other people expressing opinions that "make them feel unsafe" or "deny their humanity/basic rights/existence/etc." Another case of people smashing a square peg through a round hole because the roundness is what's been declared as sacred.
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It shouldn’t be any surprise to you I don’t agree with his ideology. An insecure population isn’t one that lives freely either. What the hell kind of freedom is it if I can’t walk outside my door without getting accosted by a criminal? Reminds me of the reaction ordinary Russians had of communism when they saw the plenty and relative abundance Americans lived in when compared with their own. The communists said, “But that’s exploitation…,” and the people shouted back “If that’s exploitation we want to be exploited!”
Who cares what FDR thought? (Damn… that’s deep dawg.)
Freedom isn't something handed to you. It's something you're able to hold onto on your own. When you try to give it to everyone whether they can hold it or not, you don't actually spread freedom around. You change what the word means until it fits people who can't carry the real thing, and what you're left with is safety, or dependence, with the word "freedom" stuck on top.
If somebody can grant you your freedom, then somebody can take it back. That isn't freedom. It's permission, and permission always comes from a person standing over you. A freedom you have to be given is just a nicer word for being managed.
What you're describing isn't freedom for everyone. It's a guy who can't count on anyone to protect him and isn't allowed to protect himself, being told that's what free feels like.
I don’t subscribe to the idea that living with the mentality that I have to be prepared to “take” my freedom for myself at any moment is true freedom in any way I should find desirable. Freedom is a wonderful thing, but I don’t fetishize the concept the way people do in the west. In Scandinavia you have a right to roam that doesn’t exist in the US. In China you have the freedom to be publicly intoxicated without running afoul of the law. In France you have a protected and enforced “right to disconnect” from your employer, ignoring any communications from them after hours. These are freedoms that don’t exist in the US.
There comes a point where I really don’t care whatever someone wants to call it. Call it whatever you want. I’m a results driven guy. If someone wants to come along and drop some “profound” deepity a famous American president once said, with his arms crossed and a grin on his face he can do that; does that change the reality of the situation?
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It's never been easier for the average person to make enough money to not feel financial insecure.
If this is critical you can move to the countryside, which is much less crime-riddled than it was during the frontier days.
This is a pretty corny idea of freedom
There's nothing stopping you from moving except a way to support yourself financially, and it's easier than ever to save a bunch of money and/or get a remote work gig.
It's not that easy. I'm a white man with a STEM degree that tests at ~135 IQ, had good marks and all of that, and I pretty consistently can't get this right now. Seems to mainly go to people of preferable ethnicities. Statistically I am still better off than a huge majority of men my age. There is just no way someone with a 100 IQ can do what you're saying if it's not falling out of a tree for me.
If you're trying to get your first job and have no better options that spamming resumes online then OK I can see your point, especially if you were unlucky enough to choose computer science.
If you're mid-career or later though, with a STEM degree and 135 IQ then this is really just a skill issue.
Demonstrably untrue.
It was never trivial to support yourself, especially as a midwit or worse. The point is that it's easier today thanks to technology than it ever has been.
Only if you believe that IQ/competence/etc. are equal between those ethnic groups.
That wouldn't matter to the statement being argued:
Affirmative Action can exist and be bad and also not really matter to the employment prospects of any individual white person who isn't looking for a cabinet post or an NFL coaching job.
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You can always say that, it will still work even when you tell Mr. 1 in 1000 to rank up to 1 in 100,000, just so he can have a decent life, but the point is I have more skill than a majority of people, but it's still hard. So how do you expect the average person to be any better off?
Stats are too vague. What are Asians? Who is white? What about my field? I think Indians and Chinese are hired way more than they deserve in tech, and it crowds out white talent, these stats don't disprove that at all.
Sure, but still not easy.
I can confirm this, my current job is working with about 90% Indians where roughly only 1 in 50 are anything even approaching a competent software dev. Given that the managers are all Indian, this strikes me as pretty naked ethnic bias. The handful of East Asians I've worked with at least usually seem competent though.
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[citation needed]
And the barriers to entry have never been higher.
This is about right up there with just telling a homeless man to flip out his phone, dial up an Uber and go buy a house somewhere. So if you were some rando making say 60k a year, he should just quit his job, forego his bills, drive far out of his way and somehow live on the countryside?
Maybe freedom of speech is a corny idea. People should test it sometime in their society by seeing who they’re not allowed to criticize.
There’s nothing “stopping you,” from having the same opportunity to become as good of a Basketball player as Michael Jordan. There’s no specific “law of nature” that says you couldn’t build an elevator to the fucking moon. There’s nothing stopping you from going to a library and reading every book there is on fixing cars and becoming an auto mechanic, you’re still not going to get hired.
I really think people that speak like you have truly never experienced any difficult life circumstances of the kind that oh, you know… prevent you from doing the kind of thing you’re talking about.
Nostalgia economics is totally wrong.
By "countryside" I meant more of "anywhere outside the urban core". It doesn't have to be the complete boonies. There are plenty of low crime areas out there still relatively close to cities, and it will usually actually be cheaper to buy a house out there than it will be in the city. The downside is a longer commute.
"Freedom of speech" has always been fairly limited if your idea is actually "freedom to express prejudice". It's true that you probably can't expect to shout the word n!gger 20 times in a professional setting today... but I doubt you could get away with that 30 years ago either.
I know about wokes wanting to make any political opinion to the right of far-left verboten in polite society, and I agree that's bad. But your "freedom to express prejudice" is just a complaint about the Overton Window, which has always been mushy and ever-shifting.
What? There's genetics which is a hard-stop, and a ludicrous amount of effort too. That's very different from simply moving somewhere else. I really don't understand your point here.
If someone wanted to move across the country, it's far easier today to apply for jobs before moving than it would be in the 1990s or 1950s. There are of course things that could stop people from moving, but the point of this discussion is what's changed over time for the worse.
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The frontier of exploring the US only happened for a very short time. Maybe if you go back to the times before agriculture, you will see men be mostly well respected as members of their tribes. But for most of recorded history it seems clear to me, that the majority of men lived under conditions that would be considered borderline slavery in today's terms, essentially being forced to fulfill whatever role they happened to be born into.
I don't think 300 years is a short time, actually.
You are making a lot of assumptions that I don't necessarily agree with.
Freedom is not safety, and freedom is not leisure, and freedom is not prosperity, and freedom is not the ability to recover from mistakes. Those are all valuable in their own way, but they are not freedom.
Of course not, why would I? They're not me, they're not my people, they're not my ancestors, and they're not what we're talking about.
You are the one who first said "majority." I made no argument about numbers or proportions, just existence.
Some men have been much, much, much freer than I ever have been or ever will be, and I'm not going to sit here and let you say that I'm so free because I have medicine, but I can't own a gun and I have to get a permit to build a house. I say bullshit, that's not freedom. It might be prosperity, or it might be safety, but it isn't freedom. This freedom lasted for generations, and many chose not to take the chance because freedom isn't safety or prosperity. Now that choice is gone, and it's not coming back.
And some men are today as well! What does that have to do with anything? Why are you counting yourself as someone who would have been among the frontiersmen instead of the disease ridden factories or back breaking farm labor of that period? In time people might speak of the spirit and freedom of the startup entrepreneur of today who romantically earned no returns yet lived on VC money with a hope for striking it rich with a buyout. And you'd rightly point out that many of those startup founders failed with nothing to show for it or never got funded in the first place, but what do you think happened to most of the people on the frontier?
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This is a discussion about whether society has betrayed men. Talking about the majority of men then is the point.
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You're failing to separate human actions from surrounding abundance. Human parasites make regulations. The way to deal with parasites is judging them as bad and acting accordingly. Abundance has increased because there is more technology. Just because parasitism has not increased as quickly as abundance, does not mean society is not more parasitic than before.
I think you are taking it for granted that most men have access to this abundance in the first place. That is a political choice. It is absolutely possible for the majority of resources to be controlled by relatively few individuals that everyone else must choose to either suck up to, or accept starvation.
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Men relish competition, hierarchy, inequality and status. For all the discussion of the welfare state, the late 20th century did provide many men with that. At the same time, men like being winners, not losers. Men seek to dominate other men. Men invented communism and socialism, but most modern-day leftists are women.
These statements lay bare a fundamental challenge to any group-based understanding of male identity, which is that for underlying evo-psych reasons, males cannot ever have true gender-based in-group solidarity. For one man to have five exclusive sexual partners, be they wives, side chicks, baby mommas, ‘plates’, other men must go without. Male reproductive success is uncapped. A woman derives no real benefit in most cases from locking down every man, a man does for the inverse. This is why only a small minority of men reproduced historically according to some (disputed) figures. This is why the most male-dominated, masculine, primitive societies that postdated the Neolithic Revolution involved in many cases forms of polygamy. Whether in Utah or the Arabian peninsula or in Elon Musk’s bizarre IVF harem, when the ‘longhouse’ of settled, city-led civilization fractures, men screw each other over to monopolize access to sex and to women.
Young men yearn for high variance life outcome scenarios. They do not want to be average. They want a world split into a small number of winners and a great number of losers and they want to gamble on being in the former category. They may rage against it. They may hate themselves for it. But they want it all the same. They don’t want a world without chads. They want to be chad, fucking some other guy’s girlfriend while he waits for her to come home from the club. This, too, is the fantasy that Clavicular and others offer their viewers.
The sexual revolution can have screwed over most men and yet also still have been a (young to middle aged) male invention. A man can be a loser at life and still want to preserve the hope that an unequal system offers him. The students at the Sorbonne rioting to get access to the girls’ dormitories (one of the seminal events of the sexual revolution and thus of modern sexual history) were not old men. Even Hugh Hefner was not an old man when he got started.
Monogamy was imposed on young men, like every form of welfare, largely by the old of both sexes. It was imposed because of the instability of the alternative, but young men don’t care about that. Young men do better in unstable times than anyone (certainly better than children, than women, than the elderly), even if most still suffer in them. When they cast off its shackles, they set themselves up for their present situation. Why? For the same reason almost all gamblers are men. Because most young men would rather gamble on a 20% chance of dominance (financially, sexually, politically, whatever) than accept a lifetime of being average in a ‘fair’ system.
This is true at the margin compared to a status quo of feminised welfare-state capitalism. But peace is almost always popular with men who remember war, and the New Deal (and equivalents in other countries) was popular with men who remembered devil-take-the-hindmost libertarianism. Several posters have already mentioned that traditional socialism and communism were very male because they emerged from male-dominated labour movements.
Even MAGA feels more nostalgic for the time when Walter the Schlub could get a $20 an hour union factory job and a 6 who ironed his shirts and didn't get fat than they do for a more mythical past when the top 20% of white American men could crush their enemies, see them driven before them, and hear the lamentations of their women.
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This reads like a feminine fantasy of the male psyche. You hope that the man you admire wants to be an alpha chad. In reality the average man prefers something like 50s white America or postwar Japan, where every man is guaranteed an acceptable female mate. Every man knows that if he lived in Alpha World he's screwed. Every man! Every man who has ever lived has grown up around men older and taller than they are. We have all been cucked by the father, the uncle, the brother, the cousin, the grandfather, and the jock down the street since the day we were born. I have met men a hundred times hotter than I am desperate to be screwed by a man 10 percent hotter than they are. Every day I see extremely hot men who seem completely unaware of their attractiveness with ridiculously ugly women.
In the 50s housewife-for-every-man scenario, all he has to do is behave, fit in, and one woman out there will be fine for him. We all know that as soon as that breaks down we're in a horrible competition with the fittest guy around. Men are obsessed with NOT being alpha chad males: Every day I see dozens of men who would be so hot if only they didn't have some fugly male ponytail or godawful neon polyester workout gear or xy other little signaling device that says to women they're vulnerable, to treat them easily, that they are not a rugged alpha male so please don't expect much, because they're embarrassed of their ranking in the sexual world of competition. Do women really like this? Men want to have their vulnerabilities assuaged by a woman but I think women find this off-putting.
As a man, I find competition unfair, hierarchy a hideous evil, inequality morally repugnant and status an empty and sinister mirage. I relish none of these things. If I find myself winning in any of these areas, it boosts my ego, but in an immoral and unethical way.
I think it is possible but only in extremely small groups of people, no larger than an extended family. I can accept that my father and uncles are perhaps a better mate for the women in my group, but that is with the understanding that they will step down at some point and I will dominate once their time passes. The complexity of modernity and the city erases the stability of this and erodes in-group solidarity. I suspect men in pre-60s America were able to come to some sort of equilibrium of understanding among each other that echoed this sort of arrangement in modernity but its undoing has been nothing but terrible for men after its interruption.
I doubt this. I have always imagined it as a gentlemen's arrangement to equally distribute sex to everyone other than the alpha chads. Monogamy of 1950s seemed to result in millions of the offspring of non-chad-alpha men being now sexually outcompeted by minority and immigrant chad offspring in the USA today. Imagine men of any race moving en masse to Japan, or look at mating patterns of Thai nightlife: more dominant men of non-Asian descent outcompete the local 10th generation beta sons. If given a choice, these men should choose the monogamy path for solidarity with each other rather than screwing over the 90+% of men who are not alphas.
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The natural feeling between men is mere indifference, not competition. Men compete for status within mutual areas of interest. Men build civilizations while it’s women’s job to maintain them. Men are willing to compromise on their instincts for a better vision of life, provided all other parties involved uphold their role in playing the part as well. I’m only going to try and fuck you over if I think you’re going to try and fuck me. So let’s not go there; it’s best for the sake of all parties not to get stupid in the head. Men don’t naturally gamble on high risk outcomes, they assume high risk scenarios because the payoff tends to produce better long-term outcomes. Believe it or not, most men aren’t as sexually driven in the way you describe as you might think.
You link to the middle of a dragonball Z clip that has nothing to do with the rest of your argument.
Not sure how I mixed that one up.
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I never mentioned monogamy or equality in my post. I really wish Melania Trump would film a porno with Elon Musk (or, whoever, maybe some hibristo badboy model with some dark blood and hunter eyes who is 25 years her junior) to help you see that the sexual revolution did, in fact, screw over all men. She could, you know. Maybe she is just of too virtuous character to do it. But eventually something like it will happen, and unlike Anne Boleyn, she'll be praised as a powerful girlboss and the geriatric demented king she cheated on will just sit there looking like a cuck.
I don't know what to do with this comment, because you want a married woman to be unfaithful so that... you can prove the sexual revolution harmed men? So you want cheating in order to demonstrate that it's all cheating? If she is faithful to her marriage, that's no good to you?
I don't know, this and the boast about your 135 IQ makes it sound less like "this is my analysis of the problems of modern manhood" and more like "The world owes me a living, I'm superior, I should be getting the promotions and sleeping with all the hot chicks!"
You can't argue that young men are not getting faithful women and want a woman to be unfaithful. Do you not see how you're cutting off the branch you're sitting on?
And Anne Boleyn did not cheat on Henry, she just over-reached and made the wrong enemies so when they saw an opportunity to bring her down, they took it. They used accusations of sexual infidelity because they knew that was the one thing Henry would not forgive and was the one thing that would motivate him to get rid of her (he may have tired of her by then, but the prospect of being the laughing-stock of Europe for divorcing the wife he had turned his entire realm upside-down to get was holding him back). Unless you really do believe she was committing incest with her brother in order to get pregnant with that son which would save her?
B-b-but my totally historically accurate Hollywood movie based on the highest quality romance novel smut said that was why would they lie?!?!
Oh, I haven't watched any of these shows, but the clips I see of The Tudors, for one, make me smile. They have the youthful, vigorous Henry who is still studly, not the gradually aging and sensitive about it monarch whose children all died unborn except for that one daughter (and then later another frickin' daughter which is no frickin' use) who was hyper-conscious of his need for an heir in order to stabilise the Tudor claim on the throne, and hyper-aware of time passing to achieve this. Anne failed him by not being able to produce the needed heir she had promised him (and the record of both Katherine and Anne in trying to achieve that is eye-popping, especially Anne; they spend their time either trying to get pregnant, pregnant, or recovering from miscarriage/stillbirth before trying once again to get pregnant), and by being aggressive about his wandering eye (the classic mistress's dilemma of 'if he cheated on his wife, you'll never be secure that he won't cheat again once you are the wife') so she had to go, but the problem was that he needed a reason and "she didn't give me a kid" wasn't enough, not when Elizabeth had been born. He had turned the realm and the church upside-down to get her, walked over people and waded through blood to get Anne (Thomas More's execution had shocked Europe), so now he couldn't easily dump her. Not without making himself look like a fool and proving all his enemies domestic and foreign correct that Anne was more trouble than she was worth and he had made a massive boo-boo, and Henry's pride could not abide that. So when he accepted the excuse of her adultery, even though that made him out to be that figure of fun the cuckold (something almost perfectly engineered to sting his pride and his ego about his masculinity), you can see how desperate he was to get rid of her and of course he immediately started spinning it that he was the victim. Henry did love playing the part of the tragic victim, constantly wronged by those about him taking advantage of his generosity and kindness and trusting nature.
Enter the range of enemies she had accumulated, often enemies themselves but all happy to work together once the opportunity to get rid of her presented itself.
I don't like Anne (I'm a Katherine of Aragon and Thomas More stan) and I think she was an example of riding the tiger, but the adultery charges were trumped up. The confessions were obtained through torture and were very shoddy. She had behaved stupidly and allowed the kind of courtly love flirtation in the Tudor court to go that step over the line, but I really don't think she was sleeping around, and her panic over the misstep ironically was the wedge her enemies needed:
Then, a few years after his victory in the struggle for power and survival with Anne, Cromwell himself is on the scaffold and the headsman's block. Henry has no gratitude and no forgiveness once he feels he has been failed. Eaten bread is soon forgotten, indeed.
Wolf Hall is another series I haven't watched, I've read the books and they are well-written and good, but Hilary Mantel was such a fan of Cromwell (and I'm not) that I can't watch the show. Ironically, Mark Rylance would be a better fit if cast as Thomas More not Thomas Cromwell, if we go by appearances and the famous portraits of the two men. I've always liked Rylance as an actor and think he could do a sensitive interpretation of the part of More.
Henry's court is a fascinating place to read about, there was such intrigue and politics and international scheming going on for decades as he squandered the money his prudent (not to say avaricious) father had left in the treasury (full and healthy at the start of Henry VIII's reign) and the plunder of the dissolution of the monasteries on extravagant building works and increasingly futile Continental military adventures.
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The men who would make such a gamble are definitely a minority.
And a minority that often has an extremely short lifespan.
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I have many issues with how our economy is set up, and I have some issues with things like marriage law that seem give women priority rather than equality, but when it comes to some other things I am very happy with the last 100 years of changes in norms and laws. I am happy that here in the US, there is effectively no military conscription. I am happy about the sexual revolution, that I am free to be sexual in whatever way I want to be. I don't feel that I would have any difficulty in finding a wife if I wanted one. I am also happy that I am not being pressured by society to find a romantic partner or a wife, if I don't want one. Maybe I'm an outlier when it comes to men, and granted I am a bit older than "young". I'm not so sure though. It's hard to say what fraction of young men who are having trouble finding partners are actually having the trouble because of changes in social norms. Certainly many of them are mainly being held back from meeting women by shyness rather than by lack of opportunity. And certainly many of them are freely choosing to avoid marriage, rather than being held back from marriage by the state of society.
Why don't you want one?
How about:
All of this is cultural, and you are not immune to it. Part of this is changing what people want, to the detriment of society.
Well, when the guy is writing how he really wants Melania Trump to break her marriage vows so he can prove how the sexual revolution cheated young men, are you surprised women would avoid romance with that attitude? "I want women to be cheating bitches to prove I am right when I say they are all cheating bitches"? Would you tie yourself to a guy who resents that his sexual orientation makes him want to fuck you, when he hates everything about you and wishes he could just hide you in a box until he wants sex then put you back in that box afterwards?
Young men in the 60s and 70s (and let's be frank, forever) wanted sex without commitment. No getting tied down with the old ball-and-chain and a house full of kids, but being able to get sex from your girlfriend of the moment - or even as many girls as you could get! - was the dream. Young men want variety and novelty and the status victory of being able to get hot chicks at the drop of a hat, and persuading women that this was liberation for them (and let's be fair, a lot of women did talk themselves into this being liberation, to be able to approach sex the same way men did, with no fears around unwanted pregnancy, or being judged for being sexually experienced outside of marriage), so both sexes wanted the revolution.
But young men (and young women) become old men and women, and experience leads to finding out that the dream often is a dream and reality is quite different to what you hoped would happen.
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I'm romantically successful and in a decent wealth percentile given my age and effort, but I'm judging society based on their actions and not mine. It only ever make things harder for me instead of working with me. Same for all the other guys I know. We persevere because we're ultimately what keeps the world going, that's why a young man Atlas Shrugged moment would be so powerful.
Being challenged and overcoming challenges is what makes you stronger. Society doesn't work for a lot of people. Everyone probably feels some facet of society is actively making things harder for them, persecution complexes non-withstanding. Beware of anyone who promises you solutions to make society and life simple and easy, they are lying to you.
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Why should it be easy for you? You do seem to be expressing the idea "I am naturally entitled to this amount of good things, why am I not getting them?"
None of us are entitled to anything.
So you support abolishing laws then? I suppose then I could just take some old person's stuff without the socialist violence force gunning for me. Although I'd have to form a squad so some other anarchy raiders don't get me...
That seems to be precisely what you want to do:
What else is "be disloyal, be a leech, drain the country dry and then flee elsewhere" but "I would steal other people's stuff if the law wouldn't come after me".
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Your estimate of your importance is overblown. Societies have always been able to keep running while essentially all the young men were off trying to kill the young men from some other society.
Barely. And those young men were indeed Atlas, because if they didn't do that, the other young men would come in and destroy everything and sell the populace into slavery.
"Young men as protection racket" doesn't make your case sound as good as the Atlas thing.
You talk like you were never under 30 yourself. It wasn't a racket anyway, the US government is a protection racket because there is no enemy at the gates that can't be deterred with state militias. There was genuinely an enemy at the gates back then, and the young men defending didn't collect taxes a lot of the time.
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