No one expects young men to do anything and they are responding by doing nothing
As a middle-aged man who&#x27;s been studying this stuff for a while, I&#x27;d like to throw in my observations.<p>We are in a Masculine Crisis, and both men and women are suffering, because gender isn&#x27;t zero-sum, and a society that damages men is just as harmful to heterosexual women, who struggle to find men. Late-stage capitalism&#x27;s breakdown of the family (which it molded into a bourgeois form, then let rot) happened in black communities about 40 years before it started to hit rural whites. This makes it hard to sympathize with the so-called &quot;white working class&quot;, who clutched their pearls and moralized and showed no sympathy at all when this dysfunction was hitting blacks in Detroit, half a century ago.<p>What is a Masculine Crisis? Well, I think this sentence hits it straight on:<p><i>Some of the jobs he can get don’t pay enough to give him the self-respect he feels he needs, and others require him to get along with unpleasant customers and coworkers, and to maintain a submissive attitude toward the boss.</i><p>When you tell men that the only way to be masculine is to &quot;provide&quot;, and then deprive them of all means to provide except to subject oneself to the whims of a high-status person--a person given that status not on merit but simple random accidents of heredity--you leave them without a decent choice at all. Not playing is no option (a man must &quot;provide&quot;) but every play is a losing one (the requisite self-emasculation of subordination). Whether this is a condition of low expectations (society has given up on men) or high ones (as workplace pressures mount, due to the erosion of worker&#x27;s rights and dignity) is irrelevant; either way, it shuts people down.<p>Of course, the experience is pretty awful for women, too. Work, for 95% of people in this society, is just horrid. No one should have to do stupid shit to survive--I hope we can agree on that. I just don&#x27;t think this particular social ill is as gutting for women as it is for men.<p>When it comes to the Masculine Crisis, we on the left are really missing the opportunity. Ex falso quodlibet; principle of (possibly literal) explosion. When no options exist for someone, he tends to make one. I&#x27;m not an accelerationist of any kind (leftist or rightist) but acceleration is happening. Alas, the left is so deep in the cul-de-sac of gender being entirely socially constructed (which is not true) and therefore meaningless (which it&#x27;s not) that they can&#x27;t figure out how to operate in this environment. So, instead, the Masculine Crisis is left to be exploited by the center-right (Jordan Peterson) or worse, the actual fascists.<p>Conditions like this produce war. Why? Because five thousand years of human history have produced exactly one situation in which a man can be subordinate and still accept himself as a man--to pick up a weapon and join an army of some kind. Mind you, I don&#x27;t want war; I&#x27;m staunchly against it except as a last resort. However, conditions like those in the modern workplace (except for those born into hereditary wealth) are at such a level as to throw young men into hopelessness... and they will often do anything for those who promise any kind of hope, no matter false.