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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.
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.
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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