This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
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.
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.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link