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Notes -
What Happened to Society's Life Script
In the fifties, the American dream was, for the vast majority of people, pretty obvious. You find a job with the main employer of the town, whether that was a coal mine or a factory or a railyard or whatever the case may be. You marry, if not literally the girl next door, then something close; maybe a high school sweetheart. If you were a woman you were then expected to stay home and be a housewife, and except for a few very highly-female coded jobs, that's just what you did. If you were a man you might have been required to serve in the army beforehand, but few people went to college; only if you were wealthy and/or very, very smart. It mostly wasn't your decision either way, about any of it. 'Should I go into the military, or skilled labor, or go to college?' wasn't a question very many people had to ask; usually what you did next after finishing high school was readily apparent, often literally by having only a single option or a very small set thereof. If you did have the opportunity to go to college- most people didn't- both the university and your parents had much more say in what you did there. And I think we should note- the vast majority of people here could find respect as a worker bee. This is important because the vast majority of people have to be worker bees to have a functioning society.
Today, that is not the case. Everyone who wants to can go to university, or near enough. Many people stay in university long past the point at which it does any good, in point of fact. The military is 100% volunteer, and few people live with access to a single major employer. Young people can't find spouses, and these days don't seem to be able to blunder into relationships either. Every individual can, with certain reasonable limits, do what he wishes, and nobody with institutional power seems keen to say no, that's stupid, do this instead.
And it seems that we have lost something, there. Occasionally conservative pundits will start talking about the success sequence- finish high school, work full time, get married, and then have children. There's some other obvious things that go along with it, like 'don't do drugs'. But the gist of the success sequence is, well, a (somewhat vague)life script. And realistically the success sequence is the sort of thing our culture should be putting more effort into promoting; it isn't the default message despite every idea therein being a good one.
I think the youth agree with me, here. Jordan Peterson's popularity, notoriously, came from offering boomer dad advice. Recently there's been discussion of positive male role models to replace Andrew Tate; Andrew Tate's pitch isn't much different from tons of other redpill influencers. What's different is he's selling 'you, too, can be like me, just do x, y, z'. Obviously he's a lying grifter, but his fanbase are mostly teens. What replacement for his (dumb)life script are these positive male role models offering? The pro-social version of Andrew Tate isn't the male feminist activist. It's Mike Rowe.
Unfortunately, "work hard, at a quite possibly unpleasant job" isn't a great sales pitch. But I want to circle back to the point I made ending my discussion of the fifties- most people have to be worker bees. In a functioning society there are few girlbosses because there simply are not very many bosses- the average person will always make the median income, live a not particularly impressive lifestyle, and live in flyover. To put it more pithily, average people will always be average. And being average isn't, well, a flashy and appealing thing. In the past, lack of options meant people became average worker bees. Today, people have the option not to do that; they may not be Indian chiefs and fighter pilots and surgeons and other high status jobs instead, but they're being something, and usually that something is below average, gig workers and basement dwellers. It has to be said, therefore- most people can't figure it out on their own. For every unrecognized genius there's a dozen schizos. Boring middle-aged advice serves a useful purpose; to throw out the social pressure to follow it was a mistake. The question becomes, then, 'how do we bring it back?'
I’m not too familiar with the specifics of Peterson and Tate’s philosophies/grifting. However, from my vantage point, those who shriek at them are typically inverse weathervanes, so the two are probably doing something right.
My sense is that Peterson is already on the wane, and his ability to be a “red-pill” influencer is limited by his daughter’s hoetry, as a divorced single-mother, party-girl, and general e-thot. The optics are just bad: Physician, heal thyself. Which makes the AI-generated JP readings of the “having a daughter is the ultimate and final cuck” pasta all the more hilarious and devastating, although he may have gotten many of those taken down (but not all!).
A more blackpilled take might be: “If Peterson wasn’t able to stop his daughter from hoeing around, what chances do the rest of us have?”
It’s also possible the pro-social version of Andrew Tate is… Andrew Tate. Perhaps his advice is net-beneficial to young men, in helping them be more willing to stop cooperating in the face of defection. To the extent his advice hurts the Wonderfulness of women, maybe it helps young men more (albeit, pro-social behavior is often defined as what benefits women, so something that is an X loss for women but a X + Epsilon gain for men would be considered anti-social, even if Epsilon is quite large). He could be providing an essential service in expanding the Overton window, or at least slowing it from further shrinkage or swimming left.
On some level JP has to know he's peddling nonsense. You're never going to be successful in simply 'inspiring' a nation to return to tradition without the political mechanisms and social norms that enforce that behavior. Its why I get tired of the red pill message that essentially says "you need to be a man and put your woman in her place!" Oh putting her in her place is easy. Not going to 'jail' is the hard part. And the latter is why the former never happens. For it to work, you need to revive to the social controls that punishment deviant behavior. Good luck with that.
Have you ever disagreed with a woman...about anything...ever?
Being wrong is easy, you go "oh shit babe, you're right, my bad"
Being right is worse than some historical forms of prison torture.
"Easy" lmao bruh almost literally anything else is easier
You forgot his second part there: "Not going to 'jail' is the hard part."
Any guy can 'put a woman in her place' by punching her in the face. But nowadays that tends to get you arrested for assault, not "if he loves me, why doesn't he blacken my eye?" versions of the past.
Punching? How uncouth. The proper way is to use a lash no thicker than your thumb on parts of her body that aren't seen in public. Non-consensually, aftercare optional.
I'm unable to tell whether your meaning is literal, ironic, pretend-ironic, or pretend-pretend-ironic to express distain for people saying those things pretend-ironically.
Do you think (a) regular birchings are part of healthy monogamy, (b) such disciplinings were regularly practiced in the west before feminism?
Just regular ironic, I think.
I think many men in enforced monogamy would have to resort to physical "punishment of deviant behaviour" if they wanted to "put her in her place" as referred to by Tretiak above. I can't say whether that was common in the West but in my region of the world which Tretiak may or may not originate from, the idea that the past was very much "spare the rod and spoil the wife" is quite widespread.
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