Why Don’t We Be Kind Enough to Forget About Men?
Some not Very Gracious Musings on one of the Central Ethical Dilemmas of Our Times
“No! No! No!” —Margaret Thatcher famously, on multiple occasions
My blog post “Josh Hawley A Portrait of a Right Wing Snowflake” hardly scratches the surface of my contempt for that ridiculous, vile man. Now although I’m not sure how much more it would help me to indulge more of my splenetic disgust, which is infinite, and since I’m wary of how curiously addictive anger is, I would prefer to use that post, rather than elaborate, to segue into a different but related subject in this newsletter, to broach a subject I have been meaning to discuss for a long time.
I have a conspicuous habit of postponing doing things I deem to be of the utmost importance. It’s the self-imposed pressure I guess, the corollary of trying to make an epic, or a perfect work, out of something I value supremely. The subject of this newsletter is the curious global social phenomenon of the growing number of miserable, lonely, angry disadvantaged human beings, largely white men, who for one reason or another have not just tacitly chosen to give up on modern progress, but in many cases, have actually chosen to revolt against modern civilization altogether.
Introduction, Josh Hawley is Not Wrong That There is Something Out of Wack With Young Men
Notwithstanding my animosity towards him, I would like to give Hawley a little credit for identifying an issue with guys in the world right now. He is completely wrong to suggest masculine identity is under mortal threat from feminism or the left, and he is equally wrong to assert that society depends on masculine virtues. And of course he’s wrong that the problem with men necessitates some kind of revolution, or “revival”—what he really desires is a return to masculine or rather patriarchal moral values. Obviously this call for revival is laughably ridiculous. And, it makes me very uneasy that Hawley is clearly only exploiting male anxiety, problematizing it, and attempting to politicize it, to try and turn it into a tool for the hard right, and namely for himself, to consolidate a political power base.
He is not alone in his efforts either. Donald Trump was the first to stumble on male anxiety, but since then Tucker Carlson has seized on it. You might argue Hawley would have no career in politics at all if it weren’t for Trump in particular, standing up to the politically correct world and heroically spitting on it (heroically, that is to Hawleyan man, whose psychology I think I pinpointed in my last post; in summary the psychology is like this: Donald Trump is a virtuous hero, because he is a highly offensive asshole; to primitive Hawleyan man, because Trump is a vulgarian, he is therefore smart, real, noble, good, true, and honest)
I think Joe Rogan, that stupid bodybuilder young jocks love, was also attempting to reach and build a fan base with young men, by turning their anxieties against the social progressivism of the left, and driving a wedge between young men and the elites I guess, or established orthodoxy whatever it is. On his show all he does, as an amateur apparently sincere truth seeker, is he attempts to question everything. There was this one friend of mine from high school who years ago was trying to persuade me to appreciate Joe Rogan. My friend said what’s good about him is that he makes more difficult concepts more accessible to the average person. I told my friend that’s part of the reason I don’t like him. Neither Joe Rogan nor the average person deserves the privilege, which is only conceit, to think they can access and possess abstruse knowledge without the discipline it requires to earn that access. Real knowledge is a privilege. Real knowledge one does not acquire by listening to podcasts. Real knowledge is the exclusive privilege of the few and the strong and single-minded, and the only way one so committed and gifted can hope to enhance one’s understanding of any subject is to spend lots of time alone in private, reading books for hours at a stretch. That same friend accused me of having elitist notions about knowledge. Likewise my ex girlfriend accused me of having an “ivory tower complex.” As if having exclusive values were a negative in itself, I don’t understand people who criticize elitism for being elitist. What difference would it make that it’s an elitist idea as long as it’s true that real knowledge is only for the privileged few. Maybe I am elitist. Or maybe I just have the commonsense to know that a genuine understanding of the world is not acquired or cultivated cheaply, listening to the jock podcasts of multimillionaire bald bodybuilders, mostly just tortuously affirming for an audience of embarrassingly uncertain college frat bros that yes, don’t worry there are biological differences between men and women, and, yes, it’s not bad for your brain to do acid. Thank God for that.
And last but not least, I should mention the notorious Jordan Peterson, the clinically disturbed therapist/self help guru, traveling around the world preaching transparently Christian integralist values as well as crying on anyone’s podcast or talk show who will listen to him. Peterson is far and away, the most vocal, and I think one of the most dangerous, if not at least the most gratingly annoying spokesman of all: for the cause of lost young men we could call it. Or struggling young men, if you prefer. Yeah. I know. Not even young white men now are exempt from one of the myriad identity-categories mass culture suspects of having, “struggles,” “struggling” nowadays, not without the implicit imperative that, if one of us even suspects someone else of struggling, then the rest of us must act at once to intervene to help him or her, as soon as possible whether x (struggler) even wants the attention or not. It’s the signal characteristic of “struggler” suspects that they don’t think they need help. If they don’t want it, that’s just a cry for help. Intervene in any event, if you ever feel unsure about anyone.
While I do not conceal nor do I exaggerate, my bottomless derision for these egomaniacal posers and charlatans, I concede, I think Peterson and Hawley are partially correct that there is indeed rather something wrong with young men today. I do not share their theory of what caused it. I do not blame left progressivism or feminism. And even though I’ve said this a million times, I’m still at pains to iterate I am dead against the insane solution they propose, which is to somehow make the crisis of foundering men a political issue to be addressed with policy, when it is truly, on the other hand, a social issue, belonging to a domain where intervention by government is simply not viable—like a lot of social and cultural issues, rendering just about all of them virtually unimportant, hence my deliberate staunch ice-cold, calculated indifference to the culture wars (as I mentioned a couple posts ago). Lost young men or struggling young men is merely a social epidemic, I insist, with no political solution, I am adamant.
So What in God’s Name is Happening to Dudes?
As a young man who turned 25 in November, particularly, let me describe the problem with young men today in my experience. They are lost. It is true. I don’t know exactly why. I’m not lost myself. And I submit, even if I were a lost young man, I would not tell anyone, because I would rather not identify with a group of other people. My classical liberal ethics dictate, that I am not a man reducible to a subgroup of men in the population. I am an individual. If I ever struggle, then I struggle proudly alone. Thanks very much. However to the extent one can judge their own well being—at the moment?—I would say I’m flourishing.
Other young men are really failing at life, in my observation though. I think everything that used to give a man purpose, and I’m not even sure what that even was, has somehow evaporated, leaving guys lonely, starved for attention and affection, belonging, but also craving social status and social dominance moreover; and status and dominance are things men have always craved and always will. I believe the male lust for social power is an innate instinctual biological feature of human nature, which will never change unless of course human nature does.
This is what I think makes this epidemic so alarming for those of us who wish to conserve and promote a free society like we do, and this is why Josh Hawley’s opportunistic exploitation of male anxiety freaks me out so much. While men have been deprived of their self-esteem somehow, whatever the reason is, the primordial lust to rule remains, which doesn’t exclude perhaps a desire to violently reacquire that dominance they have lost but once had.
People like Josh Hawley and those other assholes I just mentioned, are merely giving this repressed fundamentally violent base aggression a rationale, normalizing repressed male rage, and legitimating it. This presents the danger no less than of institutionalizing male barbarism, after centuries of civilization and refinement. This is a danger no other than that the beast from the pre-modern world we have fought so hard to subdue, civilize and refine may return from the ancient barbaric past to menace bourgeois society, humane decency, politeness, courtesy, civic virtue, natural rights, human rights, bourgeois morality—as a justified reaction to bourgeois morality, because people like Hawley say modern life is watering men down and weakening them.
In case we forgot, the very reason we had the European enlightenment in the 18th century, where modern civilization all began, was because we decided we wanted to stop men from inflicting ‘cruel and unusual’ violence on each other. The European enlightenment all began because certain advancements in science and technology encouraged people to want to stop oppression and tyranny in all its forms. After about a century of social evolution and the groundbreaking developments in modern philosophy, with John Locke, Isaac Newton, and Francis Bacon principally, but also David Hume, Voltaire, Burke, and Diderot—this storm of progress all culminating in the American Revolution, which as Gordon S Wood describes it, was the result of a revolution in morals, largely the product of enlightenment rational skepticism and scientific advancement begun in Europe.
We had the enlightenment to put an end violence, to put an end to the oppression of unbridled passions and the senseless brutality of what the men of the enlightenment called “the passions” and what they lead to. Rape, incest, murder, torture, lynching, beheadings, the stocks, drawing and quartering, insane skyhigh arbitrary taxes, arbitrary punishment, wars over religion, dueling. The enlightenment, secularism, humanism, toleration, reason, rationality, truth, objectivity, persuasion, science, commerce, cosmopolitan virtue, independence, republicanism, the bourgeois moral values undergirding all of this progress, were all elements of a humanitarian war to attempt to master unreason, passion, male violence, war, tyranny, superstition, ignorance in any case.
And I’m not sure why, but all this great stuff has oddly gone out of fashion and receded from man’s scheme of values in the internet age, notably since Trump emerged, though it had to have been incubating in utero beforehand. Perhaps it’s because no one has any respect for history anymore. Perhaps because the study of history has been so thoroughly corrupted by revisionism, “alternative” theories or perspectives or something, so no one thinks history is relevant or even real anymore, because it’s all interpretation or something. Sometimes I wonder, when I hear people talk nowadays if human experience has become completely and utterly solipsistic. People are always judging things nowadays according to how it “impacts” them. One hears that word a lot, “impacts.” Everyone nowadays can never shut up about how they feel and their feelings, always their own feelings, or whatever they identity with and therefore feel impacted by. It’s like we’re all just passive, neutral, autonomous matter cast adrift through life, as if life were all empty space or a desert, except for when we hit something or someone hits us, then we get “impacted.”
Either the left at a liberal arts college will try and say history is all imperialistic, and everything there ever was were only the result of a conscious conspiracy of all-powerful, all knowing old white males systematically, actively, deliberately successfully in all events colluding to oppress the rest of the world. Or, Kanye West will try and say that Hitler and the jews have each made morally equivalent contributions to society, like he was saying on Alex Jones’s show, with that sock on his head. Or Graham Hancock will tell you civilization was actually built by “ancient aliens.” So in any case, yes, perhaps history has become irrelevant, because no one believes there is any objective view, which leads them insanely to conclude that objectivity is therefore not worth striving for anymore; and egocentrically anything that suits one’s subjective fancy in the moment, now one is somehow licensed and at complete liberty to just believe.
A War of all Against All
Everything is zero sum in the 21st century. Everything. Everything is interpretation. Everything is perception. On a more crudely reductive level, a lot of people would blame our current politics on the Iraq war or the financial crisis, and the alleged failures of globalization, so now no one believes in either universal moral truths, or that homo economicus benefits the world. Because who were we to invade Iraq goes this infantile argument, and who were they Wall Street, to fuck poor people over and tank the economy? Cultures are all relative, so foreign wars are hubristic, unjustified and immoral; the creation of wealth just leads to inequality, recession, stagnation and cultural decline.
Lo! The paranoid philosophy of today’s nationalist right: while modern progress (supposedly) exploited us, used us, and failed us, the left meanwhile is imposing their utopian hypocritical progressivism on the world, in an attempt at world domination. Even if the rest of us are overcome, demoralized, and incapacitated with cultural/existential despair, the left at least still believes in utopian revolution. And even though we don’t believe in modern progress anymore, we should fight the left regardless of what the hell we believe.
People on the reactionary right today see what they judge to be the failure of liberalism and the rise of the radical left, as connected. Modern democracy and modernity, they cynically assume, only leads to stultifying hollow progressivism and gender pronouns. And they think because liberalism leads to totalitarian progressivism, that justifies doing away with liberalism if only to stop the totalitarian progressivism. The reactionary cultural despair driving the nationalist fascist right in this sense, bears no small significance for men in particular, banal or anticlimactic as that probably sounds, my dear subscribers, and ridiculous to point out.
But everything is ridiculous now, so let’s not be surprised if people want to brutally kill and/or dominate each other for the most banal reasons or no reason.
Vulnerable young men are becoming sort of political footballs in this existential war on bourgeois progress. An authoritarian hatred of freedom, borne of severe anxiety, despair and loneliness, people like Hawley are translating into a political project for reactionary post-liberal authoritarian order, packaging it for all the stupid lost men out there who sycophantically watch and worship Jordan Peterson, Joe Rogan, and/or the most explicitly vile yet least threatening to the democratic order, Andrew Tate.
Anyone Who is Lost is a Loser
Let me be abundantly clear, the lost young men I have seen and come across and read about, this growing angry, lonely cohort of the global population—I have no sympathy for. I have no pity or compassion for, to any degree, in any amount at all. Even the harmless benign ones, I must say, their desperation repulses me. It offends my independence, my loftiness of spirit, and my pride cringes and shrinks at it whenever I see it. I can’t stand anyone who I sense is looking for an answer. And I’ve seen in so many places that followers of Jordan Peterson, say, feel as if they were lost and then they were found. I loathe mysticism moreover, so I don’t believe there are answers regardless, or that life has anything to do with a man’s search or quest for meaning.
As a Nietzschean, I think life is inherently meaningless and has no purpose. All that we can realistically do—unless you want to kill yourself from ontological despair—is live abundantly every day, by living life as a perpetual creative act. As Nietzsche said, life can only be affirmed on an aesthetic level. Because there is no supreme being, neither in the religious sense, or the rationalist Descartean or Pascalian sense, and there is no Leibnizean mechanism, and existence is not a wind-up clock; there is no Hegelian or Marxian teleology towards which anything at all is bending towards, dictating for him what man either should or should not strive for. There is no Schopenhaueran “will” either, where life is like a gigantic meatgrinder, and every material thing is an illusion, whose only meaning is suffering. Schopenhauer is just a westernized more grandiose, grandiloquent Buddhism. Acknowledging that there is neither free will or determinism, Nietzsche called himself somewhere a “freewillist determinist.” In Twilight of the Idols in one of my favorite passages, ‘he says that nothing gives man his qualities. Not god, not the state, not other men, not even man himself.’ This is the full quote.
“What alone can be our doctrine? That no one gives man his qualities -- neither God, nor society, nor his parents and ancestors, nor he himself. (The nonsense of the last idea was taught as "intelligible freedom" by Kant -- perhaps by Plato already.) No one is responsible for man's being there at all, for his being such-and-such, or for his being in these circumstances or in this environment. The fatality of his essence is not to be disentangled from the fatality of all that has been and will be. Man is not the effect of some special purpose, of a will, an end; nor is he the object of an attempt to attain an "ideal of humanity" or an "ideal of happiness" or an "ideal of morality." It is absurd to wish to devolve one's essence on some end or other. We have invented the concept of "end": in reality there is no end.”
I think it is these ideas of mine which make struggling young men, looking for answers, waiting for Josh Hawley or Jordan Peterson, so hard to watch and repellant and indecent to me. In addition to my Nietzschean ideas, my Thatcherite neoliberalism, my Hayekian moral principles of individual responsibility, fundamental to my ethics, also emphatically rejects that these men are somehow the products of our society (so I don’t see them as victims). Hell these men are the society!! If men nowadays are “lost,” or rather as I would prefer to see it, feckless, irresponsible, and impulsive which they are, that’s because men probably spend all their god damn time watching Jordan fucking Peterson!! Rather than working for example, like they used to, making fucking money, keeping quiet, and not fucking pitying themselves.
Clamoring For Attention and Respect
To me part of the problem with dudes these days is that they are too open about their feelings. Like everyone in these very vocal times, they’re just like the rest, clamoring for attention. They won’t just shut up and keep their complaints or grievances to themselves. As I tried to point out in my last post, the absurd thing about Josh Hawley is that he sounds extremely wimpy, or he’s a “snowflake” in other words, the pejorative we tend to reserve for millennials and SJW’s.
In the old days, it was considered unmanly and obscene for men to talk about their feelings and it would be seen as shocking and distasteful if Jordan Peterson were to cry in public for attention, or for Josh Hawley to make appeals to emotion in his speeches about culture and men. It would be unmanly back in the day. Back in a more morally upright responsible time, it used to be characteristic of manliness that men actually kept their emotions in check.
Like, I thought what was honorable and manly was to have self-control and NOT to talk about our feelings for god’s sake. While Jordan Peterson is crying his eyes out every time he goes on tv, and Josh Hawley is driveling about the left at the “commanding heights” of our institutions, I wonder what actual American masculinity would have to say about Peterson or Josh Hawley. I don’t think the classic icons of American masculinity such as the men in John Wayne, Humphrey Bogart or Clint Eastwood movies would think very highly of men like Josh Hawley. For the record, I like American masculinity. I’m a big Clint Eastwood fan, I love the spaghetti westerns, “The Good the Bad and the Ugly, “High Plains Drifter,”“The Outlaw Josey Wales,” “Pale Rider,” “Unfrogiven.” And I love Humphrey Bogart, “The Big Sleep,” “The Maltese Falcon,” “Casablanca.” Grizzled westerners who save a town from a bunch of bandits and then disappear. Cocksure witty private detectives who call people pal and call women honey.
It’s nothing more than a fun old movie trope to me, but I love American masculinity. How could you not? It’s awesome and hilarious. And though I certainly don’t think it needs to come back—I don’t think that would even be possible to reinvent it—I admire it as a feature of its historical era in American cinema and popular culture.
But my point is if you’re a man, I thought you’re not supposed to admit that you’re hurt. So the irony to me is the problem with lazy men nowadays as I see it, has much less to do with feminism but more to do with Jordan Peterson and Josh Hawley who are making men weaker by giving them the comforting excuse of blaming the left or modern life or porn or god fucking knows for their own issues. These charlatans see themselves as rebels against the decadence of social progress. But it’s the opposite. On the contrary, these guys are so to speak, the final consequence of decadence, of the wider gradual erosion of social morality in the 21st century—they embody the moral decay of mass society—reaching its apogee—in a male identity feminism-in-reverse, insidious and obscene global movement!
What really terrifies me is that I think sooner or later, people like Josh Hawley or Peterson could start leading a men’s Metoo movement with perfectly straight faces and no irony at all. I can’t really imagine something more obscene than either a male political social justice movement or perhaps Male Pride Parades. But I think it’s not out of the question to imagine, that with the way things are going in this world so removed from principle and concrete reality—and zero sum—such a thing could happen some day soon.
More benign and thoughtful people like Richard Reeves even get under my skin for the same reason. Reeves wrote the international bestseller “Of Boys and Men,” about how men are increasingly doing much worse than women, academically at least and careerwise, while women have just been doing better and better. I haven’t read his book, but I have watched him speak and read about him, and he makes a good argument that guys are indeed starting strangely to fail. However, what bothers me is his implicit suggestion that this is potentially a political problem with a political solution.
As I am not a feminist or a racial justice advocate, and considering as in any case, I emphatically deny and reject identity politics out of hand; and especially while I recognize the left has only become more excessive in their demands to recognize and accommodate individuals according to their group status, in reductive terms, I find a focus on males now (well-intentioned though it may be in the case of Reeves) just all the more revolting and disturbing. My persuasion more or less is, revolutionary left identity politics is bad enough, is reactionary right identity politics really what democracy needs to add on to it? If we can agree feminism is ridiculous and corrosive, why would you suggest we need a Menism? Feminism wouldn’t even be so excessive—it wouldn’t even be a movement anymore—if feminists only stopped self-victimizing and if feminists only stopped believing all men are sexist predators omnisciently conniving against their interest. Are Hawley and Peterson suggesting men start self-victimizing too? How is emotionally attaching yourself to any kind of group identity at all even a respectable way to help yourself? And how is that not utterly unworthy of your dignity from the beginning, whether you’re a man or a woman?
If you abhor the social justice woke left, and if you’re against say diversity and inclusion or affirmative action (as I am certainly very much against both) then I would ask you, what do you want to just nuke constitutional democracy then with a male identity movement? What else would two extreme strains of identity politics forebode, but as they engage each other more and more and build on destroying each other to give themselves more and more power, in Girardian mimetic rivalry, what would this threaten but the total dissolution of individual liberty, all for the sake of glutting one or another tribal interest group’s voracious demands to have their status recognized, reserving for oneself the selfish license to impose their tribal identity on the rest of us, coercing anyone who’s not in the group, to pay respect, as a measure of lawfully sanctioned political justice for the marginalized? How sickening! Whether it’s women marching wearing pink hats and waving signs with slogans about the patriarchy, or disgusting men in dodge ram pick ups with stickers of American flags and skulls—identity politics either way, in any form, is poison for constitutional democracy, and it is disgraceful for everyone involved.
So What Do We Do About the Sorry Losers Out There Who Feel Disenfranchised?
Nothing. The cause of under-recognized men needs to stop right away at once. A male identity politics would be no less ridiculous or antidemocratic or corrosive than feminism has been (with men not getting due process for sexual assault at colleges for instance, because of Title xi) or the racial justice movement (which is attempting to undermine the whole legal system and currently unleashing record violent crime on society meanwhile with bail reform laws and underfunded law enforcement). No free democracy either, as a political or a legal ideal, can afford to privilege one group over another, reducing people to competing privileged and less privileged groups, the wards of benevolent or malevolent regulatory states. That is tyranny. It is in Hayek’s phrase, the Road to Serfdom.
Resisting Serfdom
In light of all this insufferable whining about men, I recently had the idea i’ll be damned if I contract anymore male friends. I told a friend this recently. This is my new years resolution, I’ve decided: not to allow myself any new male friends. I’m raising a retaliatory trade barrier on friendship. I have a handful of friends, none of which as far as I know, are wrapped up in any way in this young men hysteria. I don’t need any more friends. Men do not need help. They need no compassion. If anything they need less compassion. If anything, what young men need is to get their asses kicked. At the very least those of us who are independent should be kind enough to give lost men the space to either figure themselves out or die trying. Or not trying. It doesn’t matter. Let’s be kind enough to forget about the forgotten men.
Leaning into Forgetting about the Forgotten
They’re not our fault. I’m inclined to guess if men are weak and feckless nowadays, then it’s because of terrible parenting. Parents don’t raise their kids to be self-reliant men and women anymore. They teach them only to do whatever and marry whomever makes them “happy”, because their kids are “special” probably, so parents these days don’t care what their kids do with their lives. It’s curious to me how the “support” parents have for their kids now to do whatever they want (the product originally of the self-esteem movement) coincides with robbing them of achieving or doing anything valuable. The reason for this is: if we have no standards for our kids, and if everyone is special no matter what, then no one is really special at all. And kids aren’t just going to be underachievers but also lazy and entitled. Proper stricter parents in the past used to expect more from their kids— that is to do things that are morally worthwhile in life, rather than encourage them to chase cheap happiness.
I read this great book a year ago called The Narcissism Epidemic, Living in the Age of Entitlement, by clinical psychologists, Jean Twenge and W. Keith Campbell where I learned that parents have offered their daughters boob jobs as graduation presents in some cases. I read in the Wall Street Journal recently that some parents have even intervened to help their children find romantic partners online, without their kids’ permission. I have read that just as so many girls are suffering from eating disorders, young men are working out too much, and can even kill themselves through excessive exercise, developing an addiction called “body dysmorphic disorder.” I remember in reading about the guy who shot up that school in Michigan last year, his parents got him the gun he shot his classmates with for his birthday. What insane, morally bankrupt, tasteless parents buy their teenage kid a fucking assault rifle for their god damn birthday? If men are pathetic nowadays, it’s partly the parents’ fault.
But men are also their own fault. And the ever expanding welfare state subsidizes and encourages their infantile dependency. As American Enterprise Institute Scholar Nicolas Eberstadt documents in his statistical demographic research, the growth of the welfare state since the 70s has led directly to more and more young men specifically, dropping out and disappearing from the work force. These young men are neither employed nor looking for work. However they are freeloading on welfare benefits.
A few months ago at the grocery store I work at, I rang up two apparently able bodied college age young men who were obviously high—as a former stoner I know what it looks like—and they absolutely stunk of weed—on a Saturday morning—and one of these guys paid for the groceries entirely with his mother’s food stamp card or EBT (electronic benefits transfer). That was my most egregious experience with this sloth, but I’ve rang up a million able-bodied men living on food stamps. And, I have a friend who’s a musician, and he told me has a fellow music friend who, after complaining about his financial circumstances, my friend noticed this guy buys himself steaks with his food stamps! When my friend said to him, if you’re struggling so much, then maybe you shouldn’t spend your money on steaks, the guy said to him, Oh but I get that for free with my EBT. In one anecdote, this is the problem with men nowadays! It has very little to do with the left, or feminism.
As a side note, it really depresses me how people like Josh Hawley or jordan peterson are blaming the women’s movement, because it’s also a convenient crutch for them to take a swipe at the advancement of women in society in general. There is a lot of loathing and resentment and even rage on the hard right I think simply for the fact that women have more choices than they used to. This has led to women getting married less, divorcing more, and having fewer kids. And women exercising their freedom of choice, in this respect, is driving a lot of this we-need-to-help-the-young-men bullshit. It’s a barely disguised resentment for the successes of women.
Let’s Applaud our Neoliberal Women
It’s very sad for neoliberals likes us because the success of women in contemporary society we owe almost entirely to the market economy, allowing women to work and acquire property for themselves, liberating women from the repressive confines of sexist traditional gender norms. I took a women’s history course in college where I remember learning that women first started working in the masses, assembling weapons in factories during world war 2. After the war it became increasingly common for women to work and thus become independent. To whatever extent you want to argue women have done better since the 40s, we owe their successes largely to market capitalism. And individualism. Now that women have acquired the greater opportunity to compete in market society, and accumulate property, women and girls are flourishing. Now we hardly have a second thought about a female ceo, or a female doctor, a female investment banker, or a lawyer or an entepreneur. It’s the most normal thing in the world. The growth of female income and the development and the social acceptability of a woman’s free choice to use their liberty to have kids or not, marry or divorce, and that she is increasingly comfortable with choosing to do what she likes with her life: is a vindication of our creed, that a free market and private property laws and individual rights, not just makes people wealthy; but by making people more independent, the market inevitably makes society more fair. The fact that women are doing so well highlights how well adapted they are to a globalized skills-based economy, and conversely it shows how well a globalized economy is suited towards promoting the flourishing of minorities, when government paternalism only holds people back. Just when we should be celebrating the triumph of the market economy to make individuals more wealthy and free, making women the competitive equals of men—people like Jordan Peterson are desperately trying to draw attention to the poor lost young men who have, through no fault of women, sunk into sloth, dependency, and self-pity, as more industrious, ambitious self-determined women seized the day and started outcompeting them.
Strong Men Do Not Cry
Young men are feckless, indolent, undisciplined, irresponsible, and lazy, and our bloated entitlement state draining 60% of the federal budget, feeds their dependency directly with benefits targeting their levels of income. The less money you make, the more benefits you get. What kind of message does this send to young men?? But people like Josh Hawley and Tucker Carlson and Jordan Peterson make this dependency so much worse permitting men the license to delude themselves with the convenient fiction that the reason for their failure is that society doesn’t give men enough attention and status.
In addition to bad parenting and the entitlement state, I would blame our general cultural permissiveness which has allowed men the luxury of opening up, by destigmatizing talking about one’s feelings. The supposed mental health crisis is an unhealthy national obsession. We want to delegate and defer the issue of any person we don’t trust to the mental health authorities. Republicans to avoid any gun restrictions at all, want to argue school shootings are all mental problems. And Biden in his horrific SOTU the other night, is now suggesting we deal with the crime surge with more mental health professionals and social workers. What in the fuck are a bunch of social workers and therapists going to do about rampant violent crime! Life is not a therapeutic issue to be addressed with caresses, hugs and kisses and fucking clipboards in claustrophobic tiny offices. No. We need stricter background checks for gun purchasers to curb mass shootings. And we need more law enforcement to stop the violent crime. Really I’m half expecting that within the next ten years democrats—and maybe some republicans would support it—perhaps to add to our entitlement budget, we draft an “Affordable Mental Healthcare Act” where the government taxes us to see a therapist with an individual mandate coercing us to register for a therapist with our insurance companies. There is already growing bipartisan consensus that we are in the midst of a national mental health crisis. Do not be surprised if we go down this dark road of considering unilateral policies to medicalize potentially all of our emotional needs.
Towards a Conclusion
It is my belief that our pervasive, degrading i’m-ok-you’re-ok culture, a paternalistic entitlement state, and incompetent feckless parents who have largely reneged on their responsibilities as parents, have made men into entitled victims of circumstance, spineless wimps, undisciplined sloths, and whiny infants, reduced to having to look up to therapists and self-help gurus turned far right politicos for moral support, just to get through the god damn day. I would not be surprised at all if a male identity movement were spawned under the auspices of an obscene support group, with a bunch of men crying snd leaning on each other with Jordan Peterson and Josh Hawley leading the movement, marching and whatever. #MenToo. Donald Trump’s Proud Boys would probably be in it as well. Sniveling, crying men all marching together for lost struggling young men. It probably wouldn’t look that different from this.
Graeme Sloan Bloomberg News
Here is a great example of how completely obscene the relationship between i’m-ok you’re-ok self-help, and the plight of lost young men, is. When Richard Spencer, worldwide leader of the “alt-right” neonazi movement was punched in the face in the street for saying fascist things, he started crying on camera. And he was so deluded as to claim whoever punched him was trying to take away his first amendment rights.
No! No! No!
Someone punched you in the face, Richard Spencer, because they were offended by what you said. It had nothing to do with your rights. People have been punching each other and shooting each other, and getting into bar fights over offensive words for millennia. That doesn’t make violence alright, but it happens all the time. One should know better than to go out in public blaring fascist hate if one doesn’t want to get socked. People want to hit such people who might say they sympathize with Hitler or deny the holocaust. I would want to punch you too. Would you be surprised if you got your teeth knocked out and would you cry about the first amendment also if you went straight into the ghetto and started yelling racist slurs?
Spencer only made himself cry to cast himself as sympathetic and marginalized, because he’s a neonazi psychopath! No doubt it was all a performance for the lost young men out there who might identify with him, whom he thinks he can recruit to join his alt right group which cares not the smallest fuck about free speech anymore than Hitler did. But did you notice Spencer’s evil tactic? He’s a brutal neonazi right? None of Hitler’s guys would ever do this, but Spencer cried. Spencer had intuited from the culture that by making appeals to destigmatized emotional weakness and appealing to the logic of identity by making a claim that he is marginalized, he saw he might have an opening with future disciples.
To Hell With Lost Young Men
I watched this clip on youtube of Jordan peterson on piers morgan’s (not that I watch Piers Morgan) show where he cried after Olivia Wilde denounced him on social media for sympathizing with incels. In case you didn’t know, Incels are violent misogynists and decentralized terrorists who kill women they assume would never have sex with them. It’s a global phenomenon started on the internet, and it has been deadly. The abbreviated term, Incel, means involuntary celibate. So literally it’s a contradiction in terms, because celibacy is by definition a voluntary activity. To say one is an involuntary celibate is to say yeah i’m an ascetic monk about sex, but I did not choose to be this way. Someone made me. It’s someone else’s fault that I have chosen celibacy. Women made me a self-denying ascetic monk against my will. Very creepy right? Everything fucked up and wrong about identity politics, I would argue, so far, is captured in this one extremist movement.
Anyway Jordan Peterson is vocally compassionate towards them, because he sees them as victims or products of a society that is not kind enough to young men. It’s disgusting. And it’s deeply insulting to women that Jordan Peterson has compassion for these twisted sociopathic homicidal misonynists. They might be struggling in a sense. They might have mental issues. Sure. I bet they are. But it’s obscene when your willingness to help someone and have compassion for them goes beyond the moral imperative to hold someone responsible for their actions and clouds your ability to judge them.
Like, according to Peterson’s logic, I wonder were the jihadists who flew the planes into the twin towers lost young men? Is osama bin laden a lost young man? Would hitler be a lost young man who lost his way and what found himself committing genocide? Is the taliban or the iranian government composed of lost young men, killing women, because feminism makes these poor lost young men insecure? I read a great book a year ago called Age of Anger by Pankaj Mishra, where he diagnoses the crisis of democracy as a crisis of enlightenment values. The thesis of his book was that not everyone shared in the progress of the enlightenment, not everyone liked it, and it excluded a lot of people. The west’s exclusion of the rest of the world has been going on for hundreds of years. Russia is an example. Germany. The middle east. Africa. So the third world and Eastern Europe according to Mishra’s theory, hate us because they resent our successes. I think Mishra is right. But just because some people composing Al Qaeda or ISIS or Iran are the modern world’s refuse, does that make it the west’s—our—responsibility to apologize to them or have compassion for them, as Peterson would suggest?
No! No! No!
The most asinine thing I’ve ever heard Peterson say was that Vladimir Putin’s Russia is actually a part of the west, and he said that Putin with the war in Ukraine was only trying to defend Russian orthodox values from western skepticism about gender. It really is as if Peterson thought that every angry hateful man out there were innocent and a victim of feminism, and that he believes there were actually a decent individual inside every male extremist he could somehow bring out. In the mean time Peterson’s saccharine pity for extremists makes feminism needlessly cruel, when in reality feminism is really very bland. And his obsessive love of men I think is necessarily a hatred of women, modern woman at least. His love of men is a hatred of women and a virulent hatred of the left, not based in reason or commonsense, but sheer spite.
Even if you wouldn’t go that far as I do there, you might still plausibly wonder, Does Jordan Peterson think everyone and anyone can and should be saved? Why does he think men are so special anyway? Why does he care? What’s in it for him? It makes you wonder. In any event I think whatever his motivation, there’s a good argument that Jordan Peterson’s excess compassion for incels, on an ethical level, is demoralizing, if not dehumanizing, to women.
To hear about Olivia Wilde’s public disgust for his incel apologism, Peterson burst into tears and said something like “what is it gonna take!” There was a Shakespearean amount of overwrought, highstrung pathos. It was totally fucking nuts. I was repulsed.
In that moment, although I’m glad I’m off it, I wished I had social media to retweet Olivia Wilde’s tweet. I would say something like— Damn straight Olivia! Fuck this guy! Fuck you Jordan Peterson! Fuck you Josh Hawley!
Fuck lost young men!
—Jay