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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.
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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