Men Without Work (2016)
time.com
time.com
Society doesn't care about young men. They're pretty much left to fend for themselves. Hopefully they have a good family structure, and a few good male friends. Without that they're toally adrift.
I learned this lesson when I got a flat tire driving across two states when I was 20. No one is willing to help. I guarantee a 20 yo woman would have no problem flagging down help, heck people would stop to help without being asked.
I'm 51 now, and I understand why more and more men are checking out. The grind isn't worth it. There's a reward system in play here, you grind at life and are rewarded. Grind in school and you graduate. Grind more and you get a degree. Grind more and you get a family and career and some big toys.
It seems that the amount of grinding men have to do is increasing, and the net rewards society bestows seem to be decreasing. I won't get into a shouting match on what the problems men experience are, you can fill in the blanks with your own experiences and biases, but all the men I know seem to agree that there seems to be less of an upside to sacrificing for the greater good than there used to be. As a middle aged man strangers I meet expect the worst from me, why should I try?
As an alternative you can spend your hours grinding away at video games and leveling up. And the games are getting better every year.
It seems to me that many young men are finding leveling up in games is simply more rewarding than leveling up in real life. I wish it weren't so, but here we are.
Historically speaking, civilization is built and defended largely on the backs of young men. When they check out, it can't be a net good for the trajectory of society.
Or maybe this is a win for feminism? Women finally have work equality and so men don't have to work as hard anymore.
I don't have answers. But the trend has been clear for a long while.
Quite recently the Ukraine was drafting young men. If they decided to check out en-masse, there would be no country called Ukraine anymore. Society is a fragile thing.
A society without someone fighting and dying to defend it, can go until someone tries to conquer it - then it can be dead almost instantly without enough people willing to fight, kill, and die defending it.
Both of those are real problems.
Fighting doesn’t have to be 100% men. But if you draw out a population distribution of various useful attributes (mental, physical, etc.), most men are built for it, and will do it naturally and unprompted, and most women are not.
And when you look at what even modern fighting looks like, 99% of the women (and most of the men) are going to be trying to run the other direction.
And like in Ukraine, without folks standing, fighting, and dying, not only would Ukraine no longer exist, but the cancer of conquest that would eat anything and everything it can, would just get stronger. And eventually devour everything if left unchecked.
Attacking another country is almost always evil. Defending your own is essential, at least until we get a world without evil people.
It requires constant work to stop in oneself - and others won’t necessarily see or want to do it. True for people, true for societies too.
They are literally forbidden to leave the country (only men, 18-60yo, with some exceptions [0]).
It's not men choosing not to check-out, it's literally men being forced to die for a piece of land they might not even care for.
[0] https://visitukraine.today/blog/102/exceptions-when-a-man-ca...
Say "fuck it", let the politicians fight it by themselves, survive, and wave the whatever flag is the winning one in the end.
Or let the volunteers fight, preferably in open fields somewhere.
Who cares, it's just some lines on the map. If you're bothered by those, you can can still volunteer.
Sounds like it would work for a very small subset of the population, and screw (and likely kill) most everyone else.
1) why should anyone else Ukrainian be okay with that, let alone enable it?
2) the reason cowardice is so frowned upon is the wonton selfishness gets a lot of others killed. Brothers, sisters, daughters, sons, parents.
If someone is entangled with society, society is going to entangle with them. And anyone who doesn’t like that, is going to find out pretty quickly what the consequences are.
The problem is, that your own government won't let you leave, will make you fight (and probably die) and imprison you if you desert.
And the reason that societies don't just let folks leave is because the whole is stronger than the parts - and they don’t want you or some other part bailing and getting them all killed.
Though sometimes, even that isn’t enough.
In the best case, it's the collective good trying to protect itself. In the worst case, it's the controlling parent dragging you down with them.
While certainly a survival strategy for an individual to desert, it has heavy costs - and don't expect any friends in those who are left behind.
Yes, I know, that's why I'd pack and leave... I don't want to live in "a society" that expects me to die for it.
> And the reason that societies don't just let folks leave is because the whole is stronger than the parts - and they don’t want you or some other part bailing and getting them all killed.
So, they want to use me as a human shield? Sure, another reason to leave.
> While certainly a survival strategy for an individual to desert, it has heavy costs - and don't expect any friends in those who are left behind.
Who cares, they'll be dead anyway and i'll be alive somewhere far away and safe.
Effectively you behave like the billionaires of the world today. They have enough money to run away from whatever problems they create and therefore care little about preventing them in the first place.
You have no skin in the game.
The war in ukraine is a proxy war between nato and direct for russia. Some random Vlad and Boris have had nothing to do with it, didn't start it but now have to die, so that elenski, ursula, macron and biden on one side and putin, xi, whoever the iranian leader is on the other side measure their dicks.
Sorry, but not sorry, fuck them.
If they want to start wars.. sure, but if more people were like me and not like you (who I guess is also not in a battlefield but being a smartass behind a keyboard), the battlefields would be empty, and the only way for a battle to be won would be with putin riding a bear, biden in an old peugeot and biden eating icecream.
You are free to die for whatever you deem necessary... I don't need to die for politics and want a way out, even if that means leaving everything behind and going away.
When things get bad enough everywhere will draft you at gunpoint, and you'll either fight or die.
Practically, it includes the folks entangled with others under a specific label, under the putative control of an entity which is able to exercise a degree of control over them and others using that label. Usually in strong physical vicinity, but not always.
Practically, a lot of us exist in multiple societies. All with benefits, expectations, costs, and penalties.
One clear cut and straightforward example of course being something like a Professional Engineer, or a member of the Bar somewhere.
But Church for those who go is almost always one. Every country has at least one, with many subdivisions, etc.
They also need folks willing to drive tanks into battle (while going by burning hulks of tanks just like theirs on the side of the road), and handle 100lb shells and fire artillery while being shot at by other artillery, and many other things.
They also need people who can handle being yelled at, mentally and physically abused (by modern standards), and given barely the minimum things necessary to survive - sometimes not even that - and still function enough to survive and even do what they are ordered to do, even if it puts them in harms way. Even if it means doing things no one wants to talk about, or even horrible things.
Statistically, that means men, especially young men.
They did (and probably still do) accept women volunteers. They are out there, but there is not a lot. I can't say I blame them. Some of the videos I've seen, some are holding their own. I definitely respect them for that, they are fighting for what is theirs. It's not a place good for anyone. It is a place some can survive better than others.
Also, I dont know if we can use "willing" when talking about people who are forced to do it.
Are there women out there who could best your average man, or even an exceptional man in any of the areas I listed?
You bet.
But there aren’t enough of them to make an army. They’re outliers. And frankly, each of them had to sacrifice so much of what most women value to be that, and have such painful circumstances behind why they chose that path, that it isn’t surprising that is the case to me. And physically, each of them has had to struggle far more than their male compatriots to do it, because there are differences.
As to willingness or not - just because someone is drafted, doesn’t mean they won’t own their circumstances and do what needs to be done for the better outcome, even if they don’t like that they are there, or wish they were somewhere else.
Frankly, unless you’ve been called upon to do that, you’ll never know if you have that in you. Not everyone does.
But running away from it doesn’t help either.
That's not to say women joining the military bring large benefits. The significant majority of military personnel, men and women alike, aren't in combat facing roles. The Womens Army Corps in WWII was a big success, and the military wanted to recruit even more women than joined to the point that selective service among women was considered: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women%27s_Army_Corps
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S187704281...
95% of convicted murderers are male, and it’s not the only place with an obvious skew like that.
I'm not sure if this inspired your post, but On Killing by Dave Grossman was widely influential but not highly regarded among military people. The combat veterans I've talked to reported little to no hesitation among them or the men they led to use lethal force against the enemy. They reported not only an absence of hesitation, but an eagerness to claim credit for dispatching the enemy (to the point of getting into arguments over who killed which enemy).
Boots on the ground are still what hold it though, and that still requires the willingness to do what I was describing, even if they usually aren’t called to do it because other, more effective means do it first.
Being able to handle being in reach of artillery and mortars, also required, once you know the above is true.
Additionally, someone willing to bayonet a stranger is going to really have no issues pulling a lanyard on a howitzer.
There were some talks about that in ukraine recently, but nothing much happened on that, so women can still leave the country. - https://www.kyivpost.com/russias-war/confusion-as-registrati...
At the end of the day, even if women are not as good as men at being soldiers they should be drafted similarly. They should see the same rules/laws applied to them. But hey, sometimes we're ok with some inequality I guess.
It’s like gun registration and confiscation. The second step may not happen, but why do the first step if it isn’t being considered?
Expectations of women to have kids to grow populations of their societal group still exist, very directly - it’s a core teaching of the Catholic Church, and Islam. Judaism has it as a core requirement for marriage, and rabbis can force a divorce if one or both of a couple is not having sex (which in pre birth control times, is highly likely to result in kids).
Most religions have some element of ‘a marriage that doesn’t result in kids isn’t valid’ to some degree. It’s a pretty modern thing that a woman not having kids wouldn’t be subjected to severe social pressure, in one or more forms. And that is without taking in some of the odder cases like Henry VIII.
Not unlike a man dodging the draft, frankly, though without the threat of jail time.
In my opinion, the part that's new in modern times is the transparency caused by the internet. Rags to riches, washing dishes to becoming a billionaire, ... these stories have always been extremely unlikely to happen in practice. But without a way to check the statistics, people still kind of believed in them. With the access to information that we have now, that is changing and so people are checking out when they notice that the structure of society is stacked against them. I mean it always has been, but without the internet people didn't notice it so clearly.
And yes, I also believe that feminism might play a role, but more on the demand side: Nowadays, it is not mandatory anymore for the man to have a good enough job to feed the family, because double-income-households have become the norm. Back in the days where typically only the man would be the breadwinner, there was probably a stronger psychological pressure for men to deliver. I'm not sure if the absence of that nagging is good or bad, but it sure changed in the past 50 years.
In my experience, the man losing the job almost always ends in divorce and a bitter woman too (and mandatory child support payments on the man).
It’s a really common pattern.
Personally I think trying to reprogram humans to fight biology is a lost cause. But people keep trying.
[1] https://time.com/4425061/unemployment-divorce-men-women/
If biology is the problem, we might have an actual chance to solve this :)
Eugenics all over again. Are you serious or is this sarcasm?
I understand it was used as an excuse to justify genocide, but I don't understand why the concept of eugenics is viewed as profoundly immoral by itself. I get that it's a slippery slope, and that's a valid reason to ban it, but I never see it formulated that way, only a "NO! NEVER!!" non-argument.
We've always been fighting diseases, tried to better our condition, but if we're using genetics to prevent lethal diseases it's suddenly immoral? (Not saying it's what was talked about above, just using a clear cut example here). I really don't get it. I find on the contrary that not preventing horrible painful diseases on purpose, on the basis of us not wanting to feel uneasy, is what could be called immoral. I think that at least for clear cut cases, it should be debated.
It's a little bit like transhumanism: a lot of people use glasses, or prosthesis without any issues. It's already transhumanism IMO, but people do not label it that way, so that's accepted, while the word transhumanism itself is vehemently rejected.
I can't think of a single example from history where such philosophies weren't eventually used to justify horrible actions.
Transhumanism is great if your transhuman. Nazism was great for the Nazis. I don't see much of a difference between the two for the rest of us.
I guess it's a question of semantics. Because by reading you, using my definition of transhumanism, you're implying that wearing glasses is already a step too far (because it's using technology to improve/fix yourself). But of course I don't think that's what you believe. So clearly, these words are tainted, because we're not talking about the same thing really.
The original comment was talking about improving people through genetics and brain tinkering. That's just a modern form of Eugenics, and I thought that we all agreed that this line of thinking doesn't reach anywhere constructive and is best avoided.
Very delicate stuff were talking about here. I'm all for helping cure disease, but some argue that weakens the overall gene pool and opens up the door for superbugs etc. Win a short term battle, lose the war. The stakes are very very high when talking about this stuff. Move fast and break things... just... NO. Much caution.
As I get older, I feel the time is ripe for when the younger generation will make vast sweeping decisions which will end in them relearning the lessons of the past the hard way. Too many voices saying "This time its different" echoing all around me. Too many people willing to tear down too much that has been built. If history isn't learned the easy way, it will be learned the hard way. I guess I'm just throwing out some caution here when dealing with blanket statements about improving humans.
I just wanted to argue that by my definition, we are already in a tranhumanistic (and eugenistic) society, so we should not spare ourselves these debates instead of blanket statements and be afraid of concepts.
I probably appeared as pro go-nuts-on-brain-generics, whereas I actually agree we should be very cautious. The law of unintended consequences is indeed a strong argument.
Just a little over a year ago, July 2021, I left FAANG to start my own software consulting company and there were periods of feast or famine (especially during early days...I mean its still early days, I guess) with the income exploding then dropping to nil. In order to preserve my marriage, I sometimes (okay, often) wonder whether I should return back to the old 9-5. Life trade offs.
Unfortunately many of us us learn far too late that their marriage wasn't worth preserving in the first place.
Also might enable tax and other savings because then you purchase health insurance as a company, not as a freelancer.
Most countries have mandatory military service for all males that starts anywhere from 16-18yrs old.
Pretty much everywhere except some specific parts of the US (and still even then, though it’s not stated out loud), it’s expected for a man to get and hold a decent job, or women will ignore him and everyone will look down on him. Does it always, 100% apply? No. It’s definitely the majority case though.
Does that mean men were abandoned? I don’t think so.
Honestly, it seems more like men were a resource. Just like everyone else.
As I get older I realize that evolution is less about me and my DNA and more about the cultural DNA of civilization. There's individual nature, there's cultural nurture, and they combine at scale to create what we call civilization. Man may be a magnificent machine, but that pales in comparison to the complexities and intricacies of civilization as a whole.
I marvel that every ~80 years the entire planet is simply handed to and managed by a whole new group of humans. Not just that, but the transition is handled with almost seamless continuity. It boggles the mind.
What is civilization as a whole? Merely a bunch of different cultures, competing for resources to breed, and passing on different values to their offspring, and combining with other cultures to form new combinations and mutations.
I believe in survival of the fittest culture is what drives civilization. Few cultures are successful, and those that are don't stay that way forever. Turning the pages of history we see great cultures rise and fall. The best parts of our culture will be absorbed by others, some will be lost to time.
It's not a question of "will the west fall?" it's a question of "when and how will the west fall?". The times are a changin'. They've always been a changin'.
Ascribing to this worldview, I posit that the cultures that are the most fit long term are the ones that have the best/happiest productive outcome for everyone across society, and encourage/reward breeding and family building to ensure continuity.
If true, then cultures that don't value productive young men (and women!) will find themselves conquered or outbred by those that do. As someone mentioned here, Ukraine is going to stand or fall on the backs of it's young soldiers. We are watching the turning of history. edit: I'm not saying only men need to be valued, but that the cultural value of men is what is being discussed here.
The rise and fall of cultures is a good thing for civilization on the whole.
DNA doesn't care about your happiness, it just wants to make more humans. Happiness has to be pursued on your own time. It was never really about us to begin with.
I also don't quite get what exactly you're criticizing. Life has become too easy, which somehow in turn makes life unbearably hard for young men, so they rightfully escape and play videogames? And therefore we should all return to the good old times where a man could seek glory and purpose in war and then (of course) return home to his everloving wife and their 15 children?
I do think that the western version of extreme individualism and sexual liberation has led to a fracturing of our American/western family structure. Combined with great abundance which has enabled us to transition from a culture that places value long term stability to one that values immediate gratification. If we don't look deeper than surface level, there seem to be few downsides. But, as data like this shows, the cracks/fractures underneath things are getting larger and harder to ignore. We thought this social change was all upside, no downside. Turns out you can't have your cake and eat it too.
There was a time when the average man needed to have a stable job to get an average woman's attention and eventually start a family. That leveled the playfield for young men, and incentivized most of them to help build things, fight wars, and start families. In the past average joe 5/10 stood a decent chance at a decent life. In our current era of selfishness, playing by the rules doesn't guarantee life or mating success. So many average joes prefer escaping into video games and generally checking-out, epidemic of fatherlessness, etc. When in Rome.
I do worry that these may be all signs of irreversible western decline, which is not so much a tragedy for me, but is for my children and soon to be grandchildren. I wanted something better for them, but sometimes it feels like we just got something better for ourselves.
Lastly, to your point about the fitness of ultra-conservative cultures. Listen, I'm not judging rightness or wrongness here, it's evolution judging based merely on cultural fitness criteria. And you brought it up.
Evolutionarily speaking there must be some beneficial mechanism enabling conservative cultures to persist/persevere after all of these millennia. I believe its because it ensures relatively maximal breeding odds spread out amongst largest population, combined with social stability and continuity. And I agree it's can be downright terrible for many people living in it! But it's not about them, it's about survival of the fittest culture. DNA does not care if you are happy, only that it spreads.
And at least its better than Spartacism and other brutal ancient cultures that have thankfully died out. Turns out there are worse forms of ultra-conservatism. Please don't take this as me approving of ultra-conservatism, it's evolution doing the judging here and I'm just reporting the facts as I see them.
When confronted with data like this, I feel we should all be asking is "Are the cultural changes we are making going to ensure the survival of our culture for our children and our children's children?". Or are we pursuing a cultural dead end (and the chaos that brings) like so many civilizations before us?
Ultimately with all the ups and downs I still feel my life is a success story. But I do sense a general cultural decline that suggests my offspring won't have the same opportunities for life, liberty and pursuit of happiness that I did. And that really bothers me. That's my criticism I guess.
My son said it best, lately it's everyone for themselves. So why waste energy looking out for your fellow citizens who most certainly aren't looking out for you?
For your kids to be successful, their life strategies have to take into account the environment they're living in. Basic game theory stuff. Play chess, not checkers.
The world I was hoping my kids would live in no longer exists, and so those old strategies no longer work. In fact, they put you at a disadvantage. This is why people who "play by the rules" feel left out, disenfranchised, whatever.
So, in a world where "bad behavior" gets you ahead, how can one live a good life? And by good I don't mean materially good, but ethically/morally good (which I think is a foundation from which other good things follow). Used to be that prosperity and ethics/morals were more correlated, today not so much. I'd like my children to be prosperous enough to take care of themselves and their families, while also contributing to their communities and fellow citizens (kindness to others, and kindness shown in return). That's a hard prescription to fill these days.
So, what strategies can you use in today's environment to maximize your children's chance of building/living in that world?
I don't have the answers, but this is the best I've come up with so far and is working for me.
- Be kind to others first, in order to quickly determine what kind of person you're dealing with. It serves as a litmus test, trust but verify, etc. If they're decent people they'll show kindness in return. If they don't, then best you find out quickly. At that point you don't owe them kindness, as this is a person that doesn't share the same social contract that you do. Protect yourself from these people as you would protect yourself from an enemy (I said protect, not attack). Continue to show kindness, but on your terms. Cut ties and move on quickly when necessary. Do not lose sleep over people like this, as you are simply a means to an end for them. I tell my kids when you meet people like this do your best to stay out of their way, but don't be afraid to confront when they continue to walk into your crosshairs. It's you or them at that point, and all bets are off.
- When you find good people, double down on them. Cut the others out of your personal life, and quickly. This rule also applies to your job. If you're not working for the right kind of people, try to move on as fast as possible. There are good employers out there.
- Keep your head down and weather the storm. Bad times come and go. Good times return.
- Keep your your mouth closed. Your personal politics are not welcome in the public sphere any longer. Wrongthinking is punished. The more you reveal the more can be weaponized against you. This includes nearly all of day to day social media. I'm breaching my code posting personal stuff here, but this is about the best forum I've found online for honest dialog.
- Focus on the small things you can control, don't fret about how your neighbors are living their lives. Appreciate the small joys that your small circle brings to you.
- Understand that what you see in the media is a very warped distortion of reality. The media is a spectacle, it does not represent what 99% of day to day life is about. This includes all of social media. Ground yourself by looking outside your window. It's not that bad out there.
- Have confidence and believe in the kind of life you are building around you. Don't let the naysayers tear you down. The modern world is powered by FOMO and doubt. Do not allow these attitudes to take root in your life.
- You have power over your life and small circle. Do not be afraid to use it.
- Through it all, kindness and grace for others whenever possible.
Best of luck to you and your family.
This certainty a good way to survive but not a good way to live.
Plenty of joy to be had even if you choose to disconnect from the nonsense around you.
Something about Buddhism and suffering in there as well.
Which is super important.
In my opinion, a lot of the crazier things going on in the world are due to a lot of people not being well connected or healthy with those things, and being susceptible to manipulation by outside forces looking to harness that angst.
The digital era has propelled us further into the "hyperreality" that Jean Baudrillard wrote and warned us about. [1] You descend into pure madness the moment both feet leave the ground and you give in to it.
Our children are living in it, it will be all their children have ever known.
Living small is about keeping one foot firmly planet in the desert of the real.
Carefree singing from the prow of the ship is pretty awesome when the sky is clear and the waves are small.
It’s a solid recipe for being lost at sea and never seen again when you’re in a hurricane.
Broadly speaking, this is true. The west's recent turn to progressivism is new. Formerly, we shared many moral values with Muslims and conservative Hindus. Together, these constitute the large bulk of the world populace.
Your dismissive comment would be funny if it wasn't being proven true right now. European people are currently slowly being replaced in some cities in Europe as over half of the newborns are now from middle eastern/Muslim and African immigrant families precisely because in their culture they treat their women as breeding machines that are supposed to sit at home to take care of the kids and house chores while the male is working and providing. You know, exactly like how it was in the west over 70 years ago up till the baby boomer generation.
The Europeans of today don't reproduces as much since they pushed women into the traditional male only workforce and the males of today are expected to climb the work ladder even higher than women in order to be seen as a desirable mating partner, while also making the traditional stay-at-home mom taking care of the kids instead of pursuing a career and an independent lifestyle be seen as something shameful and old fashioned for modern European women, leading young Europeans to spend most of their prime reproductive years studying, working and competing for jobs and overpriced housing instead of reproducing, leading to their demographic collapse.
So yeah, the ones who reproduce more are surviving, displacing those who don't reproduce. I'm surprised you're trying to argue against such an obvious fact.
Adults are clearly not feeling great right now, and many kids have unmet needs, so their kids are reacting to it by having different preferences.
Some will be good and productive, some won’t, lather rinse repeat.
I'm not sure I buy this. I think consensus mate selection preference of women is still that their partner earns more than they do. With women excelling in higher ed and in the workplace, pressure is even greater for men to be successful if they want to find a wife.
Not everyone of course, but it’s an obvious pattern.
Lots of infidelity, or strained relationships.
However, there are also a lot of higher educated and professionally accomplished women that don’t find long term partners. I’ve run across quite a few of them over the years. The ones I knew more closely, the issue was often that they were very occupied with work and stressed out, which is not conducive to, well, much of anything. Gender roles not helping.
Someone with the same set of attributes but who was male, would be (and looking at compatriots, are) married with kids.
The fact that we are working towards a more equal society is not only a win for feminism, it is a win for humanity. Civilization has historically been built by men, as you say, because we used to believe that women were incapable of contributing equally. A big mistake, and a huge waste of potential talent.
Yet, there are undoubtedly forces at play it that cause a significant fraction of men to feel disfranchised. We can blame that to reactionary forces, to the last blows of patriarchy, but ultimately it's a real issue and unless we find a way to communicate across the ever deeper chasm the situation can only get more serious.
In the original comment, calling out the troubles of men as a win for feminism is a totally wrong premise. It was also an offhand remark at the end and really took away from the commment. feminism is unrelated to creating those cited difficulties and actually try to solve some of them.
The troubles described sounded more like the product of rising inequality, reduced union sway, and growing power of the corporate machine. Some also sounded like products of unhealthy machoism in society where “real men” are expected to be 100% self reliant and always do things like change their own tires
I don't have answers.
Does it? Does it also mean not cooking & cleaning? Never crying? Watching sports? Not changing diapers? Never eating quiche?
Judging from experience, mostly man do that.
Seems extreme to think that guy should change his own tire.
“ In what Fowler describes as the "most objectionable" variation of the phrase,[1] this sort of use comes closest to meaning "there is an exception to every rule", or even that the presence of an exception makes a rule more true; these uses Fowler attributes to misunderstanding.[1]”
"The exception that proves the rule" is a saying whose meaning is contested."
I don't find the objection here very credible. The usage you object to is "unfortunately the commonest". The common usage has the advantage of being the most obvious. The valences offered in the article don't seem that significant when it all boils down to what people mean by it, which is pretty well-understood. De gustibus...
It may be the case that most of the popular usage runs afoul of Fowler. But that was only to point out that, leaving aside some more or less confusing idioms, language doesn't stay put for the grammarians and dictionary writers, embrace change. My point was an aesthetic one.
Regardless, abusus non tollit usum. In my own usage, I don't see the logical flaw you do. I gave special leave for surgeons and pianists to leave off changing their own tires. Consider if my post were in a legal code or on a sign. "Surgeons and pianists are exempted from tire-changing duty." Does that make it clearer? How is that different from what you're claiming is the "logically" correct use?
I like Bacon's formulation:
"In Lawes and Statutes of a compendious stile, extention may be made more freely; but in those Lawes which are punctuall in the enumeration of Cases Particular, more warily: for as exception strengthens the force of a Law, in Cases not excepted; so enumeration weakens it, in Cases not enumerated."
I punctually enumerated the limited exceptions (surgeons/pianists), thereby strengthening the force of the compendious rule (change your own tire, if reasonably able) in cases not excepted (able-bodied men). QED.
On a meta-argument level, I agree logic isn't a popularity contest but I don't need to point out to you your logical sins of commission here:
Appeal to extremes (reductio), appeal to false authority (verecundiam), slippery slope (reductio), ridicule (ridiculum), tradition (antiquitatem), intensional fallacy, false distinction...what else?
I would add it's a "discourse red flag" when people confidently try to weaponize logical forms and legal maxims they can't handle. It's like watching a child fighting with a stick he can barely lift. It quickly becomes comical. Maybe you are missing your mistake because you're engaging in open-ended exceptionalism, the form that weakens the rule in cases not enumerated. In other words, because you proposed hypothetical disconfirming evidence (a bit ham-fistedly, tbh), maybe you are mentally carrying that forward in your own mind thinking you could come up with other examples that would further strengthen your case, but without making them explicit (minimal enumeration -- you proposed a list of exceptions with one element). Not very persuasive and actually a particularly obnoxious way to argue which I didn't point out initially because it's so common and has to be worked around in a spirit of charity (pro tip: you can't cavil with every objectionable point, there isn't time). Somehow people think pointing out instances of exceptions wins the day when all it does is suggest the need for enumerated exceptions. It may be a particularly American instinct because of a general bias to universalism (not possible in practice) consistent with ideals of egalitarian justice: One rule to bring them all and in the darkness bind them. The Decalogue is another good example of the American ideal law (Constitutionalism). Theoretically, you should be able to derive an entire legal code from such a short list of universal laws. But then why did they write Leviticus? I guess it wasn't enough. You can also see this spirit at work in the legacy of the English constitutional tradition of 'everything not forbidden is permitted' and the convention debates over whether or not to enumerate the Bill of Rights or fall back on the English tradition, yada yada yada...
Thankfully, persuasive speech is a broader field than logic so I won't hold any of this against you. The fact that you like to try to argue credits you with me. All is forgiven. No harm, no Fowler. Ite in pace.
B: “Well, I think he has a point about surgeons washing their hands and they’re definitely gentleman?”
A: “Ah but that is the exception that proves the rule! Therefore Gentleman’s hands are clean! Well that’s that, the argument is shut down”
B:”but that’s not how the “the exception that proves to rule” works, that’s actually ..”
A: <interrupts> “vox populi, vox dei!. I shall now embark on an hour long treatise on gentlemanly learnedness!”
Scene cuts to reveals it was a Monty python sketch.
And that's to assume he would have a flat; as if he doesn't check his tires regulary.
~ a software engineer with a set of gloves, a manual air pump, full size spare, and extra flashlight in his 18 year old car.
surgeons living in areas with winter: fact
surgeons driving to work: unremarkable
Flat tires happening while driving: it happens
Lug nuts being sticky or frozen: it happens
Flat on side of busy road: common
Nails, bolts and road debris causing flats regardless of tire state: unremarkable
Every single, or even a majority, of brain surgeons being avid DIY auto mechanic: not credible.
Why was the bit about the software engineer mentioned? Is it to convey that anyone who isn’t the same as that is wrong? Tons of software engineers don’t have those things. Are they doing it wrong?
No, it doesn’t.
Masculinity means not being so insecure enough to need broad arbitrary rules to proscribe what being masculine means. A real man may wear a pink flower shirt or he may not. A real man would not care. Same with changing a tire. Sure It’s a useful skill, but it’s totally unrelated to masculinity.
What we're seeing and will see more of is demographic changes similar to china where there are more elderly people and not enough young people to take over and care for the elderly.
Beyond demographic changes, there is something behind men needing a family to take care of that makes him have worth and gives him something to keep working for. Being a career slave for nothing is probably a big part of the suicide rate among men
I will say this, before a certain point in my life I figured we were purely products of nurture. I tried to change values/motivations that I was biologically programmed with. When you're young you listen to the various voices all around you.
Things didn't really work out until I began to realize that there's a lot of nature in us, and that can't be changed. We have to accept it and move on. I was fighting myself for the longest time and didn't know it. I thought I was trying to change the world, but really I was just refusing to accept myself.
I no longer apologize for what I am, and I no longer try to change my partner. I try to be a kindler, gentler version of myself. More grace for myself, more grace for others.
We are what we are. Life got a lot a easier once I accepted that.
No, this is not true. Women are attracted to apparences now more than ever. Good looks is extremely important.
>Being a career slave for nothing is probably a big part of the suicide rate among men
Why for nothing, at least we get paid to work.
I could list 100 things I've experienced as a young man that led me to my conclusions, but I'm not here to win an argument. I don't have the answers. It's the questions that matter. I'm just trying to contribute perspective to the conversation.
Realistically, most people with power are not satisfied. True satisfaction is in feeling you are a valued member of the community, whether a janitor or a real estate magnate or corporate CEO of a tech company.
I understand this is a passing remark, but I want to answer the question anyway.
Feminism is not about making men's lives more difficult or about cheering when men struggle. Most feminists believe that gender equality can benefit everyone, including men, by creating a more just society. It is not about oppression or mistreatment of any group, not of even men.
Men supporting and helping other men benefits feminism and women by challenging traditional gender roles and expectations. In a lot of countries, the cultural norm is for men to be strong, independent and self-sufficient and not to seek help or support from others, especially other men. This creates a culture of toxic masculinity (not all masculinity is toxic, only the toxic kind is problematic). In such a culture men are expected to repress their feelings, hide their vulnerability, and not seek support when they need it, etc. Often, women are expected to fit under the exact opposite (not being allowed to stand alone, expected to be vulnerable and emotional, etc.) as if we were sharing a limited pie and not the potentialy unlimited social world we live in. This is harmful to people of all gender.
Breaking down traditional gender roles and expectations and supporting and helping each other is good for everyone. This can also help reduce the stigma and shame that may be associated with men seeking help or support and encourage more men to seek the help and support they need. This in turn can help create a more equitable and just society for all, which is one of the main goals of feminism. I wish the men in my live all had the same kind of emotionally vulnerable relationships I have with the women in my life. I can't begin to imagine how hard and lonely it can be to live in a world that prevent you from connecting freely with others.
In my book, anything that makes life harder for men is a loss for feminism.
Whatever it is, we can all agree that society is in flux. Old rules are being thrown away, new and unproven rules are being written. There will victories, losses, and speed bumps along the way.
I'm not qualified to judge the goodness or badness of what's happening overall. I have my doubts, but they're mainly just for me as they reflect my personal experience and biases. Society will go on without me (and my generation) regardless of my views. In the end this is civilizations burden, not mine.
Still it's good to see stuff like this at least discussed. There was a time you got shot down for merely mentioning that many men have it hard as well.
The problem here is, that in many places, we've gone past equality to clear privilige for women (and other groups, that mostly are not young men). In my country women can get a grant every year for 3-5k eur to start a private company. Up until recently they had to work less years until (government) retirement, got higher pensions for the same amount of money paid in (still true), and since they live longer, they get to receive the money for a longer time in average. For same crimes, they get lower punishments, they get priority due to hiring quotas (especially in tech), and in recent times even existential threats are better for women than men (eg. being able to leave a war-torn country or just not get drafted to war). On the other hand, there are many support systems from women, from women-only workshops, places, scolarships, sponsorships, to shelters, support groups and treating mental healt issues way differently than with men. Add to this a lot of media (both social and mainstream) propaganda how (white) men are the problem of the world, how women are better in everything,...
How should a young, not very-pretty and not rich men feel in such a society? They're basically worthless if they don't provide for others while being treated as shit by everyone while playing at an uneven playing field. I totally understand that more and more of those men will just say "f*ck everything" and remove themselves from society that doesn't value them.
Those do not spawn out of thin air. Groups of people built them. In my region, there are many such projects and when you dig into their origin it's often women who struggled 20 years ago who then landed on their feet and decided to create support networks where there was none.
Nothing is stopping you or your community from doing the same, except strict social gender roles which can and have been broken before.
And they got financed by the governments. Mens shelters didn't, and didn't get built. Men only scholarships would bring protests and calls of sexism, while women-only somehow don't.
Sometimes they even protest against such things:
https://web.archive.org/web/20220101141736/https://www.qchro...
There are lots of male-only scholarships, some provided by male-only organizations (e.g., fraternities) to their members.
Some are even exclusively for people pursuing male-only jobs.
This is one of the most bold-faced lies of all times. As evidence against it, I'd point out to you gentlemen's clubs (the real kind, not strip joints) and fraternal organizations such as the Knights of Columbus. These are large, powerful institutions started usually by men to benefit exclusively or almost exclusively men, and to promote fraternity.
In these places, men could go to deal with their problems with other men, and not women.
Women today often complain that men put their problems on women. This ignores the fact that feminism is often the main driving force behind forcing these organizations to accept females, and thus a prime cause of men no longer having a space to discuss problems with other men.
For most people, they don’t/won’t have any sort of formal education on the topic, or if so, it will be very cursory.
Fundamentally, any given person only has so much attention and memory.
This means it’s a zero-sum game in many ways.
X thing gets more attention, means Y thing gets less.
When folks start reacting to things (like feminism or not), they’ll also use unfavorable language to do so, and smear terms to convey often backhanded definitions of things.
So at some point, the definition shifts based on how people talk about it/how the media that permeates everyone’s life talks about it, not how it actually is, or even what their personal experience has been like.
And there has been a lot of attention/pumping up/putting in folks feeds things that portray total fantasy. Both pro/con feminism, pro/con a lot of things.
So it’s not surprising that hardline, not actually helpful ideas get propagated, then reacted to, and lines get formed the way they do, with often little nuance or connection to reality.
Is there something in your appearance which intimidates people?
Why do you assume there is something wrong with OP's appearance, and that it is OP's fault if someone doesn't like how he looks? Because he is a man?
The reason I asked is because 99/100 this is fixable. The vast majority of people don't assume only the worst from middle aged men. The reason he mentioned that in particular could also mean that a lot of the anxiety is caused by depression and does not reflect the reality.
Let me lead this hornets nest with this: I'm trying to be honest and constructive here. I could use outside perspective, as I can only see my situation from within. I've done a lot of thinking on this over the years, asking myself "What is it about the first impression that I'm trying to overcome?" and "What is it I need/want to change?"
As near as I can tell it's because I am (and come across as) a fairly successful, put together, middle aged white man. And my gut tells me that this is because this specific combination of stereotypes "triggers" a common set of automatic defensive mechanisms in people. And so they expect the worst from me out of the gate.
Being a strange man immediately paints you as threat in the eyes of a significant percentage of women. My experience is that you only have one thing on your mind, that you're lying to them to get something etc. When asked why I've been told this straight up by women. I feel bad for what they must have experienced, but I'm still being pre-judged.
The "middle aged guy" part is pretty self explanatory, I represent the old guard, the old flawed thoughts, the patriarchy. If you see me as out of touch, then I'm part of the problem, and so of course you're going to take a defensive posture, maybe even try and set me straight.
Being "put together", people automatically assume you're the successful jerk type that steps on people etc. I'm not showy or in your face, but I do have a certain confident presence. I've been told it's intimidating. Combine that with some likely buried envy and resentment towards achievement, and it makes you an easy target for classist angst. You know, Occupy Wall St. types. I'm not saying that I'm all that, but dang if there aren't a ton of people that subconsciously want to pull you down a peg or two.
Being a white man falls into the current "white man patriarchy bad" trope which is all the rage in Hollywood these days. A year or so ago I was watching a movie (I forget which) with a girl I was seeing that had your standard rich entitled white guy villain you just love to hate on, and the usual group of brave underrepresented people fighting back. At one point during a scene with the evil white guy, she said out loud "You know I'm starting to hate white men". Mind you, this was coming from a white/Jewish woman! I looked at her and was like "Whoa, really? That's kind of offensive as I'm a white man". She said it wasn't about me, which of course it wasn't, but clearly there are significant subconscious cultural forces at play here. As an aside: I swear the Hollywood types are the biggest sexists/racists out there, because they literally cast roles to match pre-conceived race/gender stereotypes. Strong/smart/pretty white woman here, oppressed minority who wont back down there, smart Asian over here. Middle aged white guys have been relegated to harmless "Tim the Tool Man Taylor" idiot types, fat balding police types, or entitled rich dudes. I guess I fall into the latter. sigh
Combine all these things together and yeah, I'm sure it's intimidating on many levels. People don't see me, they see a strawman, the kind our current social climate says "here's the problem". I get this the worst from customer service rep types, who really don't care if someone like me is having a bad day and just needs help. So much time spent trying to overcome these barriers.
I'm not saying woe is me. I know how I come across is my problem. My original comment was just pointing out society doesn't look out for young men. These attitudes I see say more about persistent cultural stereotypes against men than they do about me.
Lastly, yes I'm aware that I also hold these stereotypes, that's why they sting! I can't tell where their stereotype ends, and my presumption of a stereotype from their side begins. But the distrust is real.
Please be constructive here, outside perspective on this is good. I can only see my situation from within.
No, it's not: it's theirs. We are constantly being told that stereotyping is "very very bad": against women, gays, blacks, jews, asians and so on and on... but somehow negative connotations of white men - generally falsehood - are exempted from the possibility of being seen in a charitable light.
But to me it's all about agency. I'm the one that has to deal with it, I'm the one suffering from it. The only agency I have is to change my behaviors and attitudes. Learn to live with it, learn to overcome it. I can't expect the world to change for me, so I need to change.
Without agency you just give up. Honestly I think the root of most of our countries social problems is that we've stopped believing in personal agency. I'm not a victim, I don't need special privileges to live my life.
I'm convinced that if more people picked themselves up by their bootstraps we wouldn't have nearly the number of social problems we have now.
Is it unfair? Sure. But life isn't fair. It's about playing the hand you were dealt as well as your can. I can't let myself get stuck in the trap of victimhood. I have agency here
> Or maybe this is a win for feminism? Women finally have work equality and so men don't have to work as hard anymore.
That stops working the moment young men from a subculture or from a foreign culture decide to work hard at taking over your society.
This isn't a moral judgement, or even a warning, just an analysis of what happens historically.
That's probably part of the problem. Subcultures are great, but they aren't the dominant culture. If you get too many subcultures, you start to dilute/fracture your primary culture. The center cannot hold. That's what we're going through now. Alternately, if a single subculture gets too large it simply takes over, that or as you said, we simply get conquered by an outside culture.
The primary culture is the big rules that we mostly agree to conform to (if not all of them, certainly the parts necessary to survive). I pay my bills on time, etc. Heck there are some of us now arguing we shouldn't pay our mortgages, that'd show those fat cats on Wall Street, etc.
So this is the problem: Our culture is fracturing. We can't even agree (if you believe what you see in the media) as to how to get along anymore.
The fall of empires is basically a long unchecked decline into cultural irrelevance, followed by some final economic/political collapse or territorial take-over.
Go to any third world country, the cultures are mostly brutal. People taking advantage of each other. (I'm sure someone will argue it's somehow the West's fault these countries stink, same people that argue it's the West's fault Russians are killing Ukrainians, but I digress). There's a reason the 419 scams are coming from poor places. These are desperate people that have no problem treating strangers badly. Try living in that culture. No one cares. It's everyone for themselves. This is what cultural irrelevance looks like.
Young men checking out isn't a problem, it's a symptom of the problem. People are checking out and going their own way. And if you buy into the philosophy of extreme individualism, isn't this a victory? If we can accommodate a person demanding to be referred to as xie/yo/ze/ve, can't we accommodate those of us who simply don't want to show up to the party anymore?
If people have a problem with men checking out, that's their problem. It seems to me the men checking out are enjoying themselves. When in Rome, right?
Or maybe it's time to start pulling men back into the national discussion, adding their perspective into the dialog about what a "fair" and "just" society should look like. You know, don't we want a real diversity of viewpoints? Or are these men part of the "intolerable" that the left argues it's ok to not tolerate?
If you're not willing to engage them, then at least leave them alone in their basements to play their games. They're not bothering anybody.
The article was about men checking out. I'm suggesting this is a symptom of general cultural decline.
We don't have to agree on whether or not America is becoming culturally irrelevant. I'm suggesting it is, and we can disagree on this point.
For me personally, none of this is a problem. I see it as a great source of opportunity, since my family mostly holds to traditional norms, and historically speaking, that means we'll come out ahead. As long as we can prevent the encroachment of the apathetic larger society, I'm hoping we'll win in the end. Good luck.
Yes!!! Finally I found one!!! You are the wind beneath my wings today.
That's why immigrants will risk their lives to come to America, and absolutely thrive once they get here. So much opportunity to build a future. And the rest of us get to assimilate their positive cultural values into our own. That's real diversity for you. The Great American Melting Pot. This is still an amazing country, plenty of success stories all around, no matter whatever digital media is screaming at you.
I firmly believe that this epidemic of whatever it is will be over in time. Like McCarthyism, which destroyed many lives due to accusations of wrong-think, and had to run it's course.
For those that don't recall, what finally killed McCarthyism is that it got so ridiculous that the powerful McCarthy was finally called out publicly in a televised congressional hearing "Have you no sense of decency sir?" He was dead within 3 years, a broken man. Worth the watch. [1]
It's definitely getting ridiculous here. A McCarthy moment is coming. After which it will be safe for the general public to say "Enough's enough". What's important is helping build something constructive afterwards.
Could this be because a 20 yo woman was would be seen as helpless? Women are generally viewed by society as less physically threatening. Additionally, the lizard brain of heterosexual males will bias them towards stopping for a damsel in distress, even when the chances of reproduction are minuscule. All these factors are pretty in opposition to feminism
> It seems that the amount of grinding men have to do is increasing, and the net rewards society bestows seem to be decreasing.
Disaffected young men are a tale as long as time; few revolutions would have been successful without them, and they make voluntary armies possible.
> Or maybe this is a win for feminism?
Feminism will win when the average driver reckons a 20 y.o. woman is equally likely to bludgeon them in cold blood with a tire iron as a 20 y.o. man.
Maybe. But it's the practical outcome that I'm talking about. Women are often offered help. Men aren't.
To me this seems a more detrimental situation for a man than a women. Not sure how this is being spun as a negative for women.
Or is the point Feminisim is trying to make "Stop helping me, I'm not helpless"? They don't want our help? This doesn't jibe with my experience.
Or is a right-thinking male supposed to say "Feels great when I can't get help, because people don't assume I'm helpless"? Sorry, this seems like a pretty crappy world to live in.
I personally know several women who manipulate like this to their advantage. I mean two of them have literally told me that they're being manipulative of these attitudes to get things they want from strangers. A young feminist family member recently told me she plays dumb sometimes to get men to do things for her, because since men already think she is stupid (her words) they deserve getting manipulated. When someone tells you they're being manipulative, believe them.
I'm not judging all women, but some of what I've seen ain't right.
And listen, I'm not here to rag on women or women's issues. That's an entirely different subject. My original comment is that the problems of men are largely ignored by society.
A piece from the book's author:
https://time.com/4504004/men-without-work/
Some reviews and discussions:
https://www.nybooks.com/online/2016/09/15/americas-lost-work...
https://www.vox.com/new-money/2016/10/11/13176948/labor-forc...
https://archive.ph/20170311160320/https://www.ft.com/content...
Wikipedia submissions are good when there isn't a substantive article out there, but not good when they're just a generic summary of what can be explored more specifically in other places. Past explanations about this: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
I was unemployed for most of the Great Recession and can empathize with much of this book. I also just remember the “tragedy of my twenties” realizing society had basically no interest in me. Despite a math degree and IT/programming experience. Then the myriad people I’ve interacted with in the last decade plus who are in this situation.
Luckily I now have good paying career. But I fear a society that leaves so many cold.
Many just are giving up, they don't see an opportunity here, they just are going to play video games, take drugs, and accomplish nothing with their lives.
Progress could be as simple as introducing or better funding employment programs. It’d clearly really help if there was some clearinghouse type organization informing people about labor market opportunities based on the individual characteristics. The clearinghouse could seek information directly from employers as to preferences/priorities/etc.
But also some people just cannot function in society without some kind of back support. It can’t be a social optimization to leave such people to homelessness.
https://www.bls.gov/emp/tables/occupations-most-job-growth.h...
I'm pretty sure society is not obligated to have an interest in you (I'm not trying to put words in your mouth however).
I think you become truly actualized only when you decide what it is you want, what you imagine for yourself. If what you want is in conflict with what society wants of you, you have to decide then whether it is important enough to you to take the road less travelled.
Watching biographies of various artistic people ("The Art Life" about David Lynch comes to mind, also "Crumb") it's clear that some people are just "a certain way" and will choose to live that way - society be damned. (Of course, that there are documentaries about these luminaries tells you that a few at least have found societal acceptance after all.)
And I can't help but think back to the punks, or goths or any of the other disenfranchised youth cultures that appeared to revel even in the rejection from broader society.
"The children they despise us, the difference is now we want to be hated."
If you consult statistical trends there's no reason for anyone ever to even feel any amount of joy. Either the economy is in collapse or headed towards a collapse. Either you are healthy and thus headed for illness or ill already.
It somewhat stops being a society if it says to some members "whether you live or die is irrelevant to me, I will not care either way". That's what some people experience at least some of the time.
There's a social contract. Is it still binding you if society doesn't hold up its end?
(Ethically, of course, spherical cows and all, there are many ways to discuss it - but why?)
Good fences make good neighbors.
Enforcement is the fence.
Functional societies have reasonable fences, and rarely need to test them in the majority case, because they’re functional. There is no point in thinking about testing something you know works.
When someone starts wandering off, or a problem case is there, it also deals with them in a way that doesn’t undermine everything else. It keeps problems at bay.
Without that fence, or when the fence starts being moved so it’s NOT in the right place, problems cascade and grow, society starts fighting itself and others as trust is lost in institutions and other people, and eventually, either vigilantism, civil war or mass corruption is the result. Like you’re discussing.
It’s a constant, ongoing process.
This also makes it pretty rough being an edge case, which is the context of the thread we’re in.
A society beyond a certain, relatively small size without law enforcement (or similar boundary setting and enforcement) will, no matter how amazing, fall apart as the natural forces of corruption and selfishness tear at it unchecked. It doesn’t have to be a professional corps of folks, but it has to be a working mechanism though. Even small groups have this. Usually in the form of a chief, village head, etc.
Larger groups of course need something more formalized eventually, just due to scale.
Regardless, not towing the line is going to get you stomped on, unless you’re able to get under the radar, or are part of a large enough group that you can force the apparatus to leave you alone. Though that definitely contributes to the whole ‘mass corruption’ problem.
I have grown to believe over time that this is true, and that most people are willing to throw away unsuccessful or unlucky others using this reasoning. It's depressing, but also frees you from feeling any particular obligation to society. If society doesn't either provide you with what you need or a means to achieve it, I recommend that you cheat, steal, tax-evade, and law-break as much as is personally beneficial.
And society has lots of fangs, in that sense.
It does matter. Plenty of subcultures have done stuff that is technically illegal, or at least could be prosecuted/or would be made illegal if noticed, but was quite beneficial to them in their own view, by not getting enough attention to be worth directly attacking! Or having folks be distracted enough elsewhere to not go after them.
I’m guessing most in the LGBTQ space can pretty clearly identify the difference between the two, for instance. Being accepted being even nicer than both, of course. Catered to almost unheard of!
I'm not sure that you're following exactly what I mean. I'm saying that once any ethical barrier involving 'obligation' to society is overcome, it's a problem to be calculated like any else. What are the risks, what are the returns.
As for the second part, it doesn't matter when the result is the same. I don't care if I'm being persecuted or ignored when my life is still shit. I'm not willing to sit on my hands under some false belief that turning the other cheek is pious when the only life I'll ever live is slipping through my fingers.
It tends to really bring the contrast out in the shit spectrum.
It can almost always get worse.
Young non-white men are less likely to be under the impression that society is looking out for them in the first place, so their choice of anti-social entertainment looks very different. It's more about detachment and the use of violence for personal enrichment because the social system doesn't matter.
I never personally experienced this (I've always been employed since graduation and I got married before there was tinder), but it still always feels like a gut punch to read that other people experienced it.
Female, but same hat and I empathize. In my case, I'm a lesbian who ended up with MS, so like with your average straight guy, my worth in society is pretty much based on my work life/career. I also share the jealousy a lot of straight men have for straight/bi women being more able to 'opt out'. It's not a rational feeling, but it's there.
> But I fear a society that leaves so many cold.
Me too. We can only expect people to beat themselves up for so long before some of that rage and despair is turned outward, contributing to the destabilization of society.
It matters because if we're talking biology, there aren't many people who are like 'yeah, I'm going to have the cripple carry my child!' and dating as a female with a progressive disease is not great. So from a social standpoint, I am also an 'extra' 'useless' body, like how these men tend to feel.
I really feel for people with mental health issues and no insurance. I have insurance, but have somehow still payed thousands of dollars out of pocket, and in far worse shape.
It's like they're TRYING to get people with ADHD to kill themselves. You can find countless accounts of people traumatized by this system, but they don't want to change a thing... they seem to think it's our problem just for existing. I was told to just give up on my career... nevermind that it will never matter, and the next job will just fuck me up.
I can't really put into words the rage I feel against Doctors and Psychs... this is who they expect us to go to for help.
You're raging against the wrong machine.
By rights, ADHD should not exist. The amount of task-switching humans are expected to do in demonstrating mastery of the domains of entire departments is inhuman and unsustainable to begin with. We're pumping the population so full of amphetamines to keep up that we've literally run out of them.
Medicine can't fix the fact that nobody can survive as a fisherman anymore-- he has to be a full-stack scuba diver, boat captain, marine biologist and have a whale-hunting side hustle going on. Actually catching fish is what you do on the weekends.
I don't know how you square your ideology with the fact ADHD people often struggle with day to day activities, eg. chores. So unless you think man was meant to have a women at home (I guess you could generalize to "caretaker"), I have no clue what you're talking about. Even if you solve this problem that doesn't explain the many other areas ADHD people struggle, like with basic socializing.
There's a place for critiques of our culture and work environments. However, ADHD certainly exists and needs treatment, even in a more ideal world... they had these problems in "fishing times" or whatever, they just called it madness, or figured you were a horrible person.
Now the zeitgeist in the job market seems to be "Why should we give you the gift of this job? Speak quickly and well, lest we cast you back into the void! You are a piece of shit until proven otherwise!"
Granted some of that was always around for more competitive jobs, and some fields like engineering seem relatively exempt (outside of FAANG-style interviews) due to demand, but given what I was taught to expect growing up by schools/parents vs what reality turned out to be, there's definitely been a shift.
But, if you look at trade jobs (plumber, electrician, etc.) then there’s still tons of demand and they pay well.
But no one wants to do that.
Meanwhile, I'm sitting here, jobless, with an art degree (a few credits short of a sculpture minor), watching woodworking Youtube videos in my garage-less Millennial apartment. I tend to think enthusiasm is not really the issue.
Domestic workers losing leverage isn't a huge surprise given that the last 30 years have been about globalization.
The courts, too, largely moved towards corporation rights over workers rights/needs.
Probably too minimum wages are below the market clearing levels in most places. This evidenced by places seeing an increase in the number of employed when minimum wage increased.
Bean-counting and cost cutting has always been present in business, but, likely due to the rise of modern computing and metrics/data gathering capabilities, it seems to have been taken to an unproductive extreme.
Of course that's only the social component. Globalization and the hollowing out of labor unions (at least in the US) have also certainly contributed.
This might be a local thing, but here (central europe, balkans), there are currently enough jobs for basically anyone, even shitty jobs for really uneducated and slightly incompetent people and up to great jobs.
The problem I see most is housing... "society" expects you to get a job, get a wife, settle down, make 1, 2, 3 kids, have a dog etc. You've got a good enough job, average pay... want to move out? Still expect half (or even more) of the paycheck to go for rent. Want to buy a nice three bedroom apartment in the capital (nothing luxurious, just something normal, in a socialist apartment building, a few kilometers outside of city center)? That'll be 250-300 monthly paychecks. The boomers got their apartments or built their houses during socialist times, and now we have an extreme case of NIMBYism everywhere, even rural areas.
This means that a lot of young people stay at home... and if you're at home, you have a room, a bed and food... why bother working more than bare minimum (to cover entertainment costs, parties, drugs,...) if it's almost impossible to move out and still live normally.
It does not include: - those who don't work and can't benefit from unemployment insurance (e.g., anyone fired from work for misconduct, - those who don't work and are not looking for work - those who don't work and can't work
That makes much more people overall. A recent Pew research published in 2020 estimated that an estimated 29% of unemployed americans are included in that number.[1]
1.https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/04/24/not-all-une...
Last I heard, there's plenty of businesses that are deseprate to hire people (restaurants etc.).
This is so damaging to our culture. Also, getting really sick of these insanely specific reqs, then when qualified people don't show up begging on their hands and knees: "nobody wants to work anymore".
For me it was wallowing in grad school for five years after graduating college in 2007 and not being able to find any entry level positions with a math degree due to the housing crisis, and the relative uselessness of an undergrad math degree, without useful experience in anything else. I remember the constant manic hum of "when am I going to start making real money, instead of pulling out more loans each year?".
Fortunately, I learned to program during that time and eventually got my first job writing Python for a small civil engineering start-up.
Perhaps too much of an aside but I was lucky enough to be able to take an extended parental leave when my child was born, being a "stay at home dad" for the best part of a year. It was incredibly hard work, incredibly rewarding but also a real eye opener at how society still doesn't know what to do with a full-time parent that isn't a woman. Meetups are still called "New Mums Groups", you get shifty looks at playgrounds, playspaces etc., endless questions about what it is that you do. Even the people trying to be positive end up being somewhat patronising ("oh are you babysitting today!").
Anyway, point is, true equality would mean that it's absolutely fine for a man to stay at home and raise a family while the woman is the breadwinner. We're not there and that hurts both men and women.
The American Zeitgeist around gender issues is distorted to dehumanize men and alienate anyone who even dares to recognize this fact. I'm a pretty hardcore liberal and I I'm totally astonished on a daily basis at the hate in vitriol directed at men that go without comment, let alone castigation that it deserves.
As for the rest of your post, absolutely. I love being a dad and it's a shame that our society doesn't seem to care much about father's apart from being a provider of money. Every man should be aware that if things go south and their marriage that their children could be taken away from them and they will be vilified if they try to get them back. You will not get sympathy from your friends or family or from the public at large. He will be fighting the tide.
I'm conflicted about that. Not denying that what you've said is true but I specifically chose the term "red pilled" because there are huge toxic (predominantly online) communities that are openly misogynistic. e.g. in theory I'd like and participate in the "men's rights" subreddit, in reality it's a pit of toxicity. Some of the frustration there is justified (family law definitely seems biased against fathers) but the result is not positive.
I'd also add: a lot of this societal pressure against men being accepted as stay at home parents comes from men.
Funnily there’s also research showing that a lot of gender discrimination towards women comes from women.
Perhaps as a social species we all try to keep our group from straying too far from core values.
Indeed, but so is the equivalent feminism subreddit (try "r/askafeminist" for example). And yet "women's rights" don't have the same stigma as "men's rights". What explains this asymmetry? Why is it some movements get defined by their extremists, and others don't?
>: a lot of this societal pressure against men being accepted as stay at home parents comes from men.
Really? Maybe its the company I keep, but I've never felt judged by other men when I share I love caring for my kids. If anything, I get a lot of smiles and nods irl and supportive comments online. If someone like Andrew Tate gave me shade about it, I'd take it as a reason to pity him. It takes a special kind of asshole to throw shade on a father who loves his kids, and who's kids love him.
I’d also question whether /r/askfeminists is “the equivalent”. It has 100k followers, /r/twoxchromosomes has 13 million followers and from a brief read through doesn’t feel like a particularly toxic place, despite discussing feminism/women’s issues. Maybe the key here is that women’s issues are mainlined into general conversation while men’s issues are sidelined to their own area where toxicity breeds.
> What explains this asymmetry?
What explains it is an asymmetrical history: millennia of oppression of women, often violently enforced. E.g., if you read the Iliad, it's basically a who-stole-my-woman story inside a who-stole-my-woman story; at the time, women were pretty close to property with opinions. An easy way to see the through-line to today is the history of "marital rape", where society did not see married women as being able to choose whether or not to have sex with their husbands. That was always the case under English common law, and was not fully outlawed in the US until 1992: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marital_rape#Legal_aspect
We may have removed most of the gross legal infrastructure of patriarchy, but the cultural aspects are still only slowly dissolving. We have generations more work to do there. The reasonableness you mention is exactly what amazes me. Think of all the men who haven't been murdered as the slept.
And I think this history also explains why the Men's Rights movement is so bonkers. A shift toward fairness is a loss for the people who used to benefit from the unfairness. This has left a lot of men upset that they aren't getting what they feel they are due. Some handle that well, but the ones who don't are going to fight to turn the clock back. And as Corey Robin points, out, reactionaries like that often cloak their efforts in the progressive language of the day. So we end up with "men's rights" as a bizzaro-world mirror of women's rights. And one of their heroes, one with 4 million Twitter followers, getting arrested as an abusive sex trafficker and international pimp.
Go through the issues in the second section and tell me what Andrew Tate's position was on any of them.
Spoiler alert: you can't. Tate was not an MRA, he was a pickup artist.
Male feminists also tend to find themselves in trouble, by the way. Michael Kimmel used to play the same game of lumping legitimate issues (suicide/education/family courts) in with incels upset they can't get laid. He had to retire after getting #MeToo'd, heh. Tiresome and predictable. Perhaps I should add a Google Alert for your name ;)
And my point isn't that the men's rights people don't have legitimate points about how patriarchy also harms men. They do! My point is that for an awful lot of people, those points are a cloak for a deeply emotional backlash against feminism. So I'm less interested in what they claim motivates them than what we can learn from what they actually spend their time and attention on.
I'd have a hard time denying it because I have no idea what that "sort of person" is even supposed to be. Is it just people you don't like?
I went down the Men's Rights rabbithole because I got sexually assaulted by a woman as a teenager and didn't know how to deal with it. They were the only ones talking about it, and I assure you nobody involved had any interest in relegalizing marital rape.
Rather, that seems to be a bit of DARVO given that feminist thinkers like Mary Koss would see happened to me reduced to "unwanted contact".
> And my point isn't that the men's rights people don't have legitimate points about how patriarchy also harms men.
"Patriarchy hurts men too" is empty handwaving, not a substitute for genuine solutions.
Given your little quip - "think of all the men who haven't been murdered as they slept" - I doubt you'll be interested in providing help for men (or boys, as it was) like myself. If that's the feminist line, then it is clear that feminism, to put it mildly, isn't for me.
I have a hard time believing you can't figure this out on your own, but briefly, the manosphere.
As to the rest, I am truly sorry to hear about your sexual assault. But I'm also sorry that you, like so many of the "sort of person" I'm talking about, have turned a bad experience into a reason to bash feminism rather than a reason to fight things like rape culture. If even with your experience can't figure out why serial rape victims might murder their attackers and why somebody might be surprised that doesn't happen more, then I'm not sure how I can clear up my point for you.
You're talking in circles here - you brought up what "sort of person" is in the manosphere, and your answer is people in the manosphere. Not exactly insightful.
The so-called manosphere is a wildly diverse grouping with different experiences, complaints, and conclusions. Lumping in Andrew Tate with Men's Rights is just nonsensical.
> bash feminism rather than a reason to fight things like rape culture
I can do both and it's served me very well. When feminists like Koss et al. downplay female abuse of boys, that is rape culture and I'll fight them all day long.
> If even with your experience can't figure out why serial rape victims might murder their attackers
This is a schizophrenic strawman. I understand that perfectly and I've said nothing that could lead someone of sound mind to think otherwise.
I've been called a feminist in real life (much to my annoyance) in arguments about abortion, or about behaviour online or at work. There's nothing about Men's Rights that requires taking legitimate rights away from women. I can be a good person without identifying as my own enemy.
If you were actually sorry about my experience, you might like to prove it by not making up lies, cut from whole cloth, about me and men like me, in what looks like a desperate attempt to paint yourself as One of the Good Ones.
That is a sub in which nearly every post that rises to this a "my partner/male-acquaintence did x I'm shocked" and it's nothing but a pile on about how "bad men are". Even if not every post is male critical a lot of the positives seem to be shaping on behavior. It hasn't always been radicalized like that, nor has it been focused on that type of content.
The second being the involvement with that White Feather movement. As much as people say "You don't have to put men down to elevate women," that was a prime case of it.
And after that we've still got the "boys are stupid, throw rocks at them" T-shirts, the "male tears" cups, the "#killallmen" hashtag, and so on.
Maybe all of this just escaped you, I dunno, but now that you have it in front of you, please don't ignore it.
A few years ago I tried to bring up this issue in the comments section of a paywalled (and fairly small) magazine where I voiced the view that we should move a little bit "beyond feminism" and look more towards gender relations and have a more "holistic" view on things, rather than look only from a female perspective. Not that there's anything wrong with feminism, but you know, it's just one side.
In the next article my comment was cited to "demonstrate" that men still had a lot to learn with some disparaging and condescending text.
Not the first nor last time I've seen something similar happen. Yes, you can have the occasional constructive discourse on a small scale (such as HN), but bringing the topic to the forefront in the mainstream is difficult, especially as a man. When you do succeed it captures attention for 5 minutes and then we move on and nothing really happens.
So ... I gave up. I don't really talk about it much. Why bother? It's like screaming in a void.
So what are we left with then if many of the reasonable people have given up? The nutjobs. And now it's even harder to bring these issues up.
Is it so difficult to realize those oppressors are dead and these men weren’t alive in 1920?
The internet is very good at amplifying a bunch of very motivated nutjobs. I can, if I wanted to, send death threats and all sorts of horrible things to hundreds of people before breakfast. And tomorrow again. And the day after that. And I'm just one guy with a crummy laptop.
Go out on the street and I'll bet you that most men haven't even heard of gamergate, or have only vaguely heard of it and don't really know much details. And those that do at least roughly know what it was all about will think they're a bunch of idiots.
It's not being amplified without effect, recruitment, and numbers. Jordan Peterson would not be a podcast star without a large population of followers. Those followers are being misled into misogyny and related "red pill" ideologies.
Like my mother, who is very much alive and still working, was 100% a victim of sexism: She was alive in and grew up in times where she couldn't have a credit card or mortgage, when jobs were sex-segregated, and wasn't allowed to go to college to be an engineer like her brother because she was raised to stay at home and pop out babies. (She bailed at 15 instead of conforming.)
On the other hand, that's very different from the experience of a woman born in 2003. They're both adult parts of society.
And that's without getting into the experiences of women in their 30s and 40s which, depending on where they grew up, could go either way.
I get reparations, e.g. for enslaving people. In its simplest form, you break it down to "should have been paid instead" and make that a claim that can be inherited. There are arguments about collective guilt and claims against collectives etc, but that's a second step.
But women aren't an ethnic group. Children are pretty much a 50/50 split between male and female. Those claims (for reparations, and extra privileges because other women elsewhere in a different century were disadvantaged) are very different, and make no sense to me, at all.
Even if you buy into intergenerational guilt and benefit for groups, each new generation (without exception) must come from both groups.
Then again, I think reparations in general are a terrible idea.
It's just interesting because our society is moving so quickly that you have some people alive who genuinely were personally oppressed and some in the same group who weren't.
Any progress and help will always be met with resistance if you lump huge swaths of the population together and view it as a competition.
In contrast, many spaces that are branded as "men's rights" today seem to go for an entire different vision of society, which often looks like a cartoon version of the 50s (if consistent at all). If lots of men find themselves lonely, unfulfilled and unable to find a girlfriend, I think that is a serious issue, but the solution of the "men's rights" groups - that it's the women who have cut back their own goals and ambitions, just so some men they don't even know have a chance to have sex - seems pretty insane to me.
Also note, not all women are feminists either. There are plenty of women who have issues with men taking on traditionally feminine roles because they it violates their own conservative worldview. I believe that's where the "Karen" slur originated from.
That's the thing, that's the branding. The left (with Tucker Carlson's help) managed to get everyone to think of a man tanning his balls with any mention of men's rights. This is a major coup for leftist feminists, and a major loss for human rights.
Men's rights are human rights. They are father's rights. They are worker rights. It means equal protection under the law, protection from rape and violence, protection from discrimination and threats. These are basic human rights that should be afforded to everyone. This should not be a zero-sum game: to give one group rights you should not take them away from another group! There are plenty of rights to go around and they won't run out.
Fully agreed here, I'm just doubting that the resistance against that really comes from the left - my impression is that it more comes from the right (or maybe press outlets who have rebranded to look "woke" on the surface but still promote mostly traditional views).
E.g., I haven't yet seen a feminist sub on reddit excuse a female rapist or deny that a male rape victim is a victim. Though I have read articles that have done exactly that.
Some examples of feminist discussion of men's issues from Reddit:
- https://www.reddit.com/r/AskFeminists/comments/z083j5/the_gu... While the OP is dismissive, the discussion itself is far more nuanced.
- https://www.reddit.com/r/WitchesVsPatriarchy/comments/zz535i...
- https://www.reddit.com/r/CuratedTumblr/comments/z7rsv1/mens_...
Also, I like subreddits like r/menslib which try to provide "non-tate/peterson" communities for men's issues - often arguing exactly like you did.
They don't have to, society already does this for them all the time.
Pay attention to how media frames the crime when a female teacher sleeps with an underage male student versus when a male teacher rapes an underaged female student.
My word choices are deliberate here. In a vast majority of headlines and articles I've seen, if the perpetrator of a sexual crime is female, the language is much softer about the action.
And courts tend to be much softer on them as well than on the men doing the same crime.
This makes me think this kind of narrative stems more from "woke captialist" media or from people pushing the "men are always happy about sexual attention" narrative. That narrative is considered part of "toxic maskulinity" - exactly the mindset that feminists want to get rid of.
Also note that (in the US) the legal definition of rape was changed to include men no earlier than 2012 [1] (i.e. under Obama). Under the previous definition, it was fundamentally impossible to consider a man a rape victim. That previous definition was from 1927.
So the assumption that only women could be raped was the older one. The modern progressive movement was who got men included in that definition.
[1] https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/blog/updated-definition...
[0]: https://www.met.police.uk/advice/advice-and-information/rsa/...
The left, however, has a compassion problem with men. It seems like very few people actually want to engage in a healthy way in left oriented spaces whereas the right actually talks to young men and offers them advice over a range of topics that a lot of boys feel most insecure about. I think that is something that needs to be addressed otherwise grifters such as Jordan Peterson and Andrew Tate will continue to infiltrate spaces of 12 year old boys, with innocuous seeming lifestyle advice.
The advice I see given most frequently to boys and young men by lefties seem irrelevant to their actual interests at best or patronizing at worst (e.g. "Don't rape/make the world a better place"). I rarely see advice on how to engage with their own masculinity in a way that isn't harmful. It feels like the gut reaction of a lot of people is to conveniently label boys as assigned evil at birth rather than to guide them and unpack how interactions with peers, girls, or society work.
This isn't feminists ruining young men, it is society failing to have adequate role models and show compassion to young me.
A related impression I had is that a lot of innovation in understanding and talking about sexuality has happened in queer/LGBT spaces, but relatively little of that has swept over to hetero sexuality. There are tons of highly nuances discussions about queer and feminine sexuality and relationships. This is happening far less for hetero relationships, because traditional role models and traditional ideas of a relationship still exert a strong pressure.
It happens even less for hetero men than for hetero women in my impression. Yes, men have metric gigatons of porn available, and society is still mostly wired to male definitions of attractivity. But at the same time, the the act of actually being sexually attracted is portrayed in the media as shameful and creepy for hetero men. That sort of hypocrisy can be difficult to navigate, especially as a teenager.
For those who are unfamiliar, the basic tenet of radical feminism is that the source of women's oppression is the patriarchy (OK so far, if reductionist), which is run by and for men (broadly true), and thus men are all inherently bad (whoops that's where they lose me).
In many cases, it's an ideology that ends up repeating many of the aspects of Christian fundamentalist patriarchy, just from a different angle: men and women are fundamentally different; biology dictates your role in society; etc.
Maybe men are just more vocal about their opinions regarding stay-at-home dads? Women may not exert "societal pressure" against stay-at-home men, but they're ~30% more likely to divorce them than working men (a 3.3% chance of divorce in a given year vs. 2.5%)[0].
> For marriages formed after 1975, husbands’ lack of full-time employment is associated with higher risk of divorce, but neither wives’ full-time employment nor wives’ share of household labor is associated with divorce risk. Expectations of wives’ homemaking may have eroded, but the husband breadwinner norm persists.
[0] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0003122416655340
Lo and behold, in the paper they say this too:
"It is possible that husbands’ less than full-time employment is associated with marital disruption more strongly than wives’, not because of gendered interpretations of lack of full-time employment, but because husbands’ part-time employment or nonemployment is more likely to be involuntary. Involuntary nonemployment may negatively affect marriages more strongly than voluntary nonemployment, by affecting outcomes like partners’ mental health. It is not possible to evaluate this perspective with the current data, because voluntary specialization by men in unpaid labor is rare: in 2012, only about one-fifth of stay-at-home fathers were home primarily to care for the family (Livingston 2014). Future research is needed to explore the experiences of deliberately nontraditional households, although their rarity illustrates the consistency of the male-breadwinner norm."
I'm not sure that the study supports this. I think that the terms "stay at home dad" and "stay at home man" implies a male spouse who stays at home to do unpaid housework or child rearing instead of working a full time job.
The study seems to say that, for men, being unemployed is positively correlated with divorce risk, but that doing a larger share of household labor is not.
Not all unemployed men are "stay at home" men.
Toxic Masculinity is men on men hate.
"Toxic masculinity" is men examining themselves and seeking to reject the parts they don't like. There's no hate involved at all. The whole thing is an exercise in self-expression and self-determination.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mythopoetic_men%27s_movement
For me, it was positive. When you're going through personal hell, there's a lot to be said for having others in the situation to commiserate with. Do many of the guys there sound like jerks? Sure. Maybe they even are--or maybe they're just blowing off steam in the face of a horrible situation. I think it's often the latter.
One side effect of carefully banning forums that (truly) support men is that we're left with an environment where most places that might seem to be "help" are actually dedicated to gas-lighting and castigating men in this situation. This has created a vacuum where some rather dubious looking options are actually the best available.
May the gods bless my MRAs and the guys at my local dive bar. Without them, I wouldn't have made it.
There can be people who are extremely misogynistic - but they can also have completely valid concerns and grievances that make them feel that way. "They might be idiots at best, but they might have decent reasons why they got there." Just ask any dad who has lost his children, wife, and property to an actually-false claim of domestic abuse. Ignoring those grievances, under the hope of trying to avoid giving them any respect, I believe risks actually increasing the number of misogynists because it doesn't address the underlying hurt that many of them may be experiencing, or the cause that will keep repeating itself.
It is important to remember that fair justice should be extended to all people, independence of their individual moral or sympathetic valence.
It cuts both ways. Despicable people deserve a fair treatment, and victims themselves must be held accountable for their actions.
I must be living under a rock then — this Zeitgeist you talk of is alien to me. I am a male who does not feel in any way dehumanized, nor have any of my male friends expressed as much.
Zeitgeist.
There's a pretty broad strata between those two.
That said, I don't think it makes sense to connect the issues surrounding the ways in which men and women are still gendered in society, our resulting assumptions, and the harm they do with this particular problem. Because I think this particular problem affects both men and women, though with perhaps some differences in affect that are worth calling out because of the aforementioned gender roles and assumptions.
I haven't read the referenced book, but I would separate this problem from the one described in the book. I think we're reinforcing those stereotypes when we frame the general problem of "people not having work" as being specific to men.
Even beyond that, I would challenge the whole notion that people need to be included in the workforce. I think we're framing the problem wrong when we look at it that way. People need to be economically secure, they need to have deep connection to communities, and they need to have something meaningful to do with their time. Right now, many people only get those things from work. This is true of both men and women, plenty of women talk about loss of identity and struggle finding community when they become stay at home parents.
So I would argue that the book is taking the wrong framing - both in focusing on men and in taking the wrong assumptions, or perhaps, the wrong ordering.
I can't imagine having to deal with that dynamic with what you went through, and am so sorry for your loss.
Both kind of suggest there is not much to tell, like they are doctor going out of way to give advice about stuff they normally don't talk about, just to have something to say.
Even if the advice was "Let her listen to her body, she will know when she needs help and support" would go a long way- both in assuaging the father's concern, and in reinforcing that it is both acceptable and encouraged to ask for help as the mother's body changes.
Women are increasingly treated this way too though. Women were shunned for choosing their career. Now if they choose family, their career still suffers. How can they win? At least men have a clear expectation from society. In many parts of North America, it’s increasingly true that women don’t have the freedom not to work.
We have a serious problem here. It doesn’t strike me as a problem of gender roles so much as cultural priorities (perhaps at the core of this is the pursuit of wealth and growth over focusing on family). I was as capable as my wife in caring for our son so that wasn’t a problem. The problem was that anyone ever saw something wrong with that picture, I suppose.
We also took an enormous financial hit in order for her to continue working, because there was a very real concern than her career would suffer beyond repair if she took off, but I’d presumably be able to return fairly easily with my decade or so of software development experience. This happily turned out to be true. But still, what a strange situation to have to navigate.
in my experience raising two kids women are much more looked down on for choosing family over career. My wife wanted to be a stay-at-home mom but many of her friends, and especially online, thought she was "too good for that" with some even being hostile to the very concept. If a woman has an established career and then chooses to be a stay-at-home mom she's likely to pay a heavy price socially.
Men only pay it when choosing stay-at-home dads.
It’s just economics IMO. It’s mostly double income now.
I don't doubt this at all, at least in certain circles. I suspect it's not limited to small circles, either. My wife's office culture is somewhat accepting of women leaving to raise families, but many of the women in management have totally forgone that option or have/had their kids in daycare very, very early on. I'm certainly not judging as I have no idea why, or what would necessitate that, or if it's necessarily good or bad. It's too complicated to judge in any meaningful way.
It certainly generates expectations and pressures though, and they're very harmful to people like my wife. Many of the women my wife has talked to feel distinctly anxious about managing their family life with women like that in charge. Further, many of the men in management are quite old and tend to think of leaving to raise a family as a distinct lack of commitment to the work – something which gets you excluded from "serious" work like field deployments where high reliability and commitment is considered crucial to the role.
Many women are already excluded from much of field work because some older dudes think women aren't strong enough to make the work safe. For example, under-water installations of equipment are almost exclusively performed by men because the men running the deployments believe a woman would be incapable of supporting a man if his safety was compromised. As such, the women on the team who want to progress need to fully commit in all other possible ways in order to appear viable. Leaving to have kids is essentially 3 strikes at once against your reputation in field work.
It's tough to watch.
People don't really know what to do when you demonstrate you don't have total devotion to an organization. Even if it's for a "higher calling," in the case of care, it still feels like they see it as not fully devoted. There's also this weird undercurrent that your career must be the focal point at all times in your life and that you must be constantly growing and fulfilled in it.
> In many parts of North America, it’s increasingly true that women don’t have the freedom not to work.
Yeah, this is really gross. And the norms are pushed by those who made the choice to not have a family, or to outsource/ignore theirs. In effect, it becomes a game of, "who can sacrifice the most to capitalism?" And games like that favor those who are broken/not smart enough to throw more of their lives away.
> Our culture wants men to be extremely productive and committed to wealth generation.
This drive objectifies men, and men are smart enough to realize they can't fight it, so they instead try to channel it. But it's not at all the same as an intrinsic motivation, it's an extrinsic threat of sorts. It dehumanizes men to see themselves primarily as providers rather than people. This makes it easier to prioritize their career at the expense of other things.
You get around 1 year of parental leave here in my country - it starts 28 days before expected birth for the mother and lasts for 105 days, the father also gets 30 days, but 15 have to be used during the parental leave, and the other 15 in the next few years. After the 105 days of "mothers leave" are over, both parents get 260 days to divide between themselves however they want).
The norm is for the mother to take the full 260 days, and the father goes to work. On one hand, fathers complain because they're not with their kids, on the other side, usually feminists complain about women losing a year of their carrers (because women still have a choice to go to work and let the dad use those 260 days), and hiring a could-be-soon-pregnant woman is a risk, because she might be gone for a year.
If we atleast split the 260 evenly, and made it mandatory for both parents to be atleast a bit more equally absent from work, that would solve a lot... but since women would lose the 260 day, and there's no money for both parents to be absent from work, this won't ever be implemented.
We quickly fell back into our same routine of taking walks and working on his reading and writing.
But I am definitely familiar with the questions from the mothers at the playground or the fitness class he attends.
I just tell them that I was fortunate enough to retire at 40 and I’m presently trying to reinvent myself as a web developer.
As a diesel mechanic in the midwest, I can say the decline in men that have work could be a couple of factors. First, we decided 30 years ago everyone had to go to college, and in doing so found most degrees hardly worth the paper they were printed on while landed gentry reaped the windfall of college loan income. conversely tradecraft like welding, carpentry, HVAC, engine repair, and plumbing fell by the wayside with many of these crafts given a scarlet letter and left to beg and plead for any help whatsoever. there is still plenty of work, its just been made obscure and wicked by a hand that cant reap any lending profit from it.
second, militant drug testing and background checks have created an artificial scarcity. Do i need a sober person to run a drill press? certainly, but if that person spent a little time in jail for cannabis possession i dont care. Viewing potential employees as potential liabilities has in turn created a culture of calvinist jackboots that only hire the most visibly noble --if not technically bereft-- to fill their ranks.
In e.g. Germany or Switzerland, your pot smoking drill press operator could point to a four year apprenticeship, and possibly even advanced specializations beyond that, with hundreds of recognized professional tracks. In the US, professional skills seem to be acquired somewhat more randomly, and consequently, are less portable.
There definitely is a emphasis in the U.S. on college being the "correct" path though. I recently saw a public charter school in my city advertise their entire graduating class was accepted into colleges. Clearly this was the best metric of success to them.
If welding, carpentry, HVAC and so on were clearly strong career paths, people would have figured this out and ignored the college advice. Skilled trades have the potential to be great careers, but fall short. 1. They just don't pay enough. You can go to college and learn computer science and at 22 years old have a shot at making $100K+ or even more in expensive COL areas. In the trades, you have lots of training, apprenticeships, seniority... how many years does it take to get to $100K as a welder? 2. The work is tough on your body, which has a shelf life. As opposed to an office worker who can sit in his office chair, collecting a salary, until he dies of old age. I supposed these two points can be mitigated by learning the business and eventually running your own contracting company, where you siphon your profits and employ younger bodies. But not everyone can/will go down that path.
I agree with you about the drug and background checks. I'm sure they don't help either.
The whiteboard torture test exists because there are tens of thousands of candidates and only hundreds of those actually have a pulse when it comes to developing software.
I'm not talking about implementing Kadane's or Dijkstra's, I'm talking about fizzbuzz, basic control structures, etc.
1) There's the idea that one parent does not work for a company.
This is hard for a lot of men and women to handle. A lot is put into the idea that adults need to be part of the economic productivity cycle or you're failing. Stay at home dad's are looked down on by others a lot due to this. It happens to many stay at home mom's, too.
Think about it. If both parents work they make more so they can consume more. That means more money for share holders and companies.
> what it is that you do
This assumes that the important thing to do is something related to companies and the economy. It's unsaid but assumed without most realizing it.
2) We have an idea that women can do anything men can. That women can step into traditional mens spaces. But, the opposite isn't true. That men can step into traditional womens spaces. It's a double standard. It's not said but it's thought. Even when people don't realize it.
Yes and no, I think. I agree in abstract, because I am sure it is a factor, but I will give my personal anecdata. Covid was a stroke of good luck for me, because I effectively was able to be a father and work from home at the same time ( 1st year kid - and she slept on a tight schedule ). And I will admit it was incredibly fulfilling ( albeit tiring ).
We are a dual income household and above average in terms of income for our state and I honestly do not feel comfortable enough to let her stay home full time ( which is part of the reason for my goals for 2023 are more aggressive in terms of learning and moving my skill set to the next level ). Even by myself, we are above average and I still think it is not enough to keep the current level of comforts ( and I have no idea how other people manage ).
<< 2) We have an idea that women can do anything men can. That women can step into traditional mens spaces. But, the opposite isn't true. That men can step into traditional womens spaces. It's a double standard. It's not said but it's thought. Even when people don't realize it.
Again, I think yes and no. Are there MMA fighters? Yeah, and some good ones too, but as my cousin recently said: "Do I want my daughter to be a plumber? No."
How many people want their son to be a plumber? Likely not many of the people on HN.
Does a lot of this view have to do with what people think of jobs like plumbers?
I know this thread is about a different topic but i went to a dad's lunch at my oldest's middle school. The school put on this presentation about how to be a good dad, it was very humiliating. Like it wasn't even about being a good parent it was just about how not to be a terrible parent, interviews where the guy says things like "i'm a good dad because i'm sitting at the table when my kid is eating dinner" or "i'm a good dad because i don't make jokes about my daughter's weight" etc. I was embarrassed to be sitting there and just turned around and talked, and had lunch, with my son which was why i was there to begin with.
I definitely think there’s a place in the human world for the masculine and feminine and etc. But actual bullying, which I think relates to much toxic masculinity, rightfully should be countered. It doesn’t help that much toxic masculinity, to me, seems based in fundamental weakness or fear. (So address the underlying source of fear as a psychological phenomenon.)
A big part of their emerging agenda is to get corporations and schools to recognize that the father is actually the point of contact and to destigmatize the dad who pauses or leaves his career to raise the kids.
True, but I think there’s an issue with expectations. Biases don’t change overnight. It sucks, but everyone could use a little pragmatism IMO.
TBH I’m not sure this bias will change very much anyways, as I don’t think the math supports it. If anything we’ve moved to double income, not to a role reversal.
I've seen this attitude on HN. I think a lot of posters like to see themselves in a man-of-the-house role and wouldn't want to give up their position as breadwinners.
I got a lot more comments about it than my wife did. I'd get several of the "wow, you must be busy!" sorts of remarks every time I was out. She'd get the occasional one, but nothing like me. Different expectations, I guess.
Never felt shunned or treated with suspicion at parks. Worried I might, but it was never an issue. I tend to dress pretty well, though, by the standards of my area, which probably helps.
It was a little tough getting past the editors (the section referencing all those news articles they made me put in to reach notability). I also got called a shill for the publisher.
> I'll bet this clown got paid to write this article and they did a poor job of it, too.
It's really turned me off from contributing. Years ago I got into a spat where someone didn't like something I added to an article and said my sources weren't valid since they were blog posts. I went and found a mainstream magazine article on the topic and they still balked - but eventually relented since they really didn't have a leg to stand on. They silently removed the addition a few months later. However, at that point I was over it and didn't care. The fact eventually made it back into the article a few years later when someone else added it in.
> Sax’s research found that the following five factors attribute to our society of underachieving, disengaged boys: (1) changes at school; (2) video games; (3) medications for Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD); (4) endocrine disruptors; and (5) the revenge of the forsaken gods.
From this Amazon review which also goes into further detail: https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/R2UQS7MYS7I5JI/
I'll go looking for it & will edit this (if I make it in time, before the editing window closes)
> In Dr. Sax’s final factor “the revenge of the forsaken gods,” he identified in leading to a generation of unmotivated, disengaged boys and men. Boys need strong male remodels to emulate and look-up to. Dr. Sax stressing that gender does matter because “boys and girls differ with respect to risk factors for social pathology” (p. 178).
So what are they doing instead? How are they surviving?
American society doesn’t know how to use low skilled men so we keep ‘em fed and put them to the side.
Edit: Why disagree?
What's the solution though? I can think of 3:
1) Bullshit jobs (i.e. fake jobs or real jobs that exist only to support fake jobs. This is the current answer)
2) Universal Basic Income - Doesn't solve the problem of giving people meaningful work, but gives them some freedom to discover/create their own solutions
3) Artificially making life more difficult - For example, banning furniture companies that are too good at their job. Want new furniture? Here are some tools, go and make it. Maybe find some friends to help you with it too. This solution would solve the problem, but it would be extremely unpopular and would likely need to be enforced globally, or people would just go to a place where they can buy furniture cheaply.
First solution will likely continue to be the most popular one. I hope the second solution continues to gain popularity, maybe not directly as UBI, but something similar. Third solution is extremely unlikely, it's more of a thought experiment to realize how solving real problems gives us meaning and creates bonds among people. Kaczynski writes about this when he writes about three groups of human drives.
However, these jobs are viewed as harder and less attractive than white collar work and some people balk at them.
Immigration has increased since the mid century: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_to_the_United_Stat... but I don't think many low skill jobs would exclude a native born applicant
Others are moderately-skilled, but not to the magnitude of their competition (common in art/design); or, they have technical skills that are only useful in jobs that also require conceptual/design skills (or vice versa); or, they're skilled in a niche set of tasks which hiring managers see as nice "add-ons" to another prerequisite (if outmoded) set of skills. As an anecdote: until the Meta crisis the past fall, there were a lot of openings for jobs that amounted to, "Builds XR prototypes/vertical slices so that when VR/AR goggles take off we have some sort of killer app concept ready for production." This requires someone with 3D art and software engineering and interactive design chops, for an interaction paradigm that's maybe 30% finalized. My vantage point was as an intermediate-level amateur 3D artist trying to stumble my way around Unity/UE, watching devs stumble their way around Blender/C4D/etc., all of us watching UX designers used to Figma et al. stumbling their way around both. With no room for people to bring what they CAN do to the table, and learn the rest as they go, many don't find anywhere to land.
Government handouts, but especially undocumented "gig" work and all kinds of crime, or relying on income women (or other family members) make from cleaning or whatever other shit paying jobs. Or they join the Army and serve as cannon fodder, which technically removes them from employment counts.
The problem is that there are a lot of "left behind" areas, not just in the rural USA aka "flyover states" but everywhere across Western societies, and governments haven't really figured out solutions for large, structural changes (industries closing down, less manual work needed in farming) other than handouts and leaving people to their own fate. The reality is that a lot of these areas simply are far too far gone to be saved, but it's political suicide to even admit that, much less do something about it - something like paying to re-settle people somewhere else, or to inject absurd amounts of money into these areas to make them livable again, e.g. incentivizing large employers for the long term (instead of the current "trend" to stay just barely long enough until tax credits expire and then re-locate to somewhere with fresh tax credits), subsidizing critical infrastructure like public transport, basic grocery and other stores, doctors, schools and basic entertainment.
Political incentives simply aren't lined up with what needs to be done, and to make it worse there are entire political parties who have made their entire policy just to be obstructionist to any common sense - first and foremost the GQP in the US, but also in Europe parties like the German AfD, UKIP/Brexit Party in the UK, FN in France or whatever Berlusconis and Salvinis parties in Italy are called. Additionally, eroded tax bases (thanks to decades of neoliberal, trickle-down bullshit) everywhere make the large-scale investments required outright impossible, and the rich elites have bought off enough politicians to make sure that meaningful change on that front won't ever come around.
Also, 1948 was fairly close after war. There was general systematic effort to get men returning from war into work. That includes goverment policies seeking that and employers firing women just to get men to work. Also economy was doing very well. Also, not insifignicant amount of men died in war.
Incarceration rates went up, America locks more people then most world countries. Majority of people going to prison are men. Being in prison or jail means being unable to work and having very hard time to find work after.
The world was different in a lot of ways.
GP may be more referring to the reduction in need for physical labor based jobs as robotics and automation increase, more than "post-scarcity," a "post-labor-scarcity" should arrive beforehand
But to GP's point, transitions take a long time and we are already seeing the early changes. It's not like it has not started
For example, billionaires running 3 companies (poorly) is an indicator that they could stand to pay higher taxes so the rest of us don't have to pay their share. Oil companies with a combined worth of trillions of dollars would do just fine without their subsidies when we already have cars like Aptera and Lightyear 0 getting over 40 miles of range per day on solar alone. Factory farming has not prevented us paying $5+ for a dozen eggs. And so on.
By these kinds of metrics, I would say that we passed into post-scarcity sometime between the late 60s and the rise of Reaganomics in the early 80s. Certainly by 1990 with the fall of the USSR. Everything since, and especially pivotal events like the Dot Bomb, 9/11 and the Housing Bubble popping, were due to the post-truth reality that filled the void left by scarcity. This was all fairly obvious by the time The Matrix and Fight Club came out in 1999. Similar movies like In Time are practically documentaries now IMHO.
At the same time as things like basic foodstuffs are becoming ubiquitously available, there is also a dematerialization of humanity. A prime example are household goods, like phone book, encyclopedia, cookbooks, typewriter, checkbook, phone and answering machine, etc that are made redundant by inexpensive compute and connectivity. In addition to the basics being non-scarce the highest intellectual achievements of the world are simultaneously delivered in better quality for less than ever.
Are we approaching a post-scarcity world now? Yes and, as always, the future isn't evenly distributed. A society that can afford to hold labor pools un-utilized indicates one that is rich in basic needs. For it to be a crisis that their labor is not required indicates a society poor in imagination.
Ask HN: How do you protect your children from internet addiction?
To riff on Churchill[a]: Capitalism is the worst economic system ever invented... except for all others that have been tried from time to time. It's ruthless.
There may be a better system... but it hasn't been invented yet. For now, we must figure out how to make this horrible system -- capitalism -- be less horrible, including for all those men who now find themselves marginalized by it. If we blindly let AI-powered software "eat the world" unfettered, without humane constraints, we'd only see greater concentration of economic and political power going forward, which would likely end up in some kind of really ugly societal breakdown.
--
[a] https://winstonchurchill.org/resources/quotes/the-worst-form...
EDITS: Many, necessary for more accurately articulating my thoughts.
What do I care if people die because my actions today in 100 years, I won't be around to have to face the consequences... /s
More to the original topic, republics per Boix must prevent looting from the producers; this includes both external agents--"special military operations", barbarians on the frontier, foreign commercial agents who banana your republic, etc--and internal agents, who could be those welfare queens, men out of a job and certainly not looking (I mean why would you??), or plutocrats making out like bandits.
Capitalism isn't even synonymous with free markets. Capitalism just speaks to who gets to own the businesses (those with the capital). There are alternatives other than "the state". Worker cooperatives exist and are perfectly functional and successful. Which means one economic system that isn't often spoken about might be described as "Free Market Socialism", in which businesses are governed democratically by their workers in a free market. That system doesn't really fit on the above referenced spectrum.
But it's not like Free Market Socialism sits in the middle of the spectrum from Capitalist Free Market to State Socialism. If anything it exists on a separate spectrum entirely where you're taken the variable "ownership of business" and flipped it to "workers". And then there's a different variable that forms the axis "how much of the economy is state managed".
But even the question of "how much" is the wrong one here. A much more valuable question is "which sectors" are state managed and why. And, as referenced above, at what level of the state.
And then there's the question of what kind of state we're dealing with (democratic or authoritarian) and how it's organized.
I think these sorts of things are why I don't generally find spectrums helpful when it comes to economics, politics, and policy. Then tend to boil down complex systems to single features of those systems. But the impact of those features depends heavily on the other pieces in the system. It's a feature of complex systems that tweaking a single variable can have unexpected consequences because it's heavily impacted by the state of the other variables in the system.
I think, in general, it's more useful to describe the systems as coherent objects with certain sets of features. Even trying a multi-dimensional map gets tricky fast.
Ha sure. Ok, which brand of socialism do you support and why? Socialism is a sad joke, socialists group under a banner that does not even exist in reality.
Socialism: social control of the means of production
What does that even mean in practice? Nobody knows. This is why socialists and communists always end up killing each other.
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edit: because I'm getting rate limited because socialists like to flag posts they disagree with, my response to the post below:
> Yes, worker cooperatives exist and are successful. Mondragon[1] is probably the biggest and most well known
Small private corporations that are worker run under capitalism is a very unique definition of socialism. Socialism under the silly wikipedia definition you provided mandates social ownership of the means of production. For something to be considered socialist, property rights need to be abolished and "control" needs to be redistributed in some manner. Of course "control" is in quotes because under socialism nobody owns anything, "society" owns it. Workers don't really have control either because they can't choose to sell their control, that would obviously just be capitalism with extra steps.
Nobody ever actually explains the details of any of this. The communist manifesto gets close because Marx clearly understood that to steal from people you need to kill them but he never actually prescribes the details of running the damn thing after killing all the property owners.
> In other words, there are any number of ways social control can be constructed, and has been constructed. Some more successful than others
In other words you did not contradict anything I said.
> Social control through the state of large segments of the economy has been perfectly successful both in the US and in Europe.
Perfectly successful under what definition? Neither the US or Europe have complete social control of the means of production and the little control they do exert is widely known to be extremely wasteful and inefficient.
> Driven on a road? Congrats, you've benefited from social control of infrastructure
The roads are terrible and filled with pot holes in San Francisco. The sidewalks are covered in shit. The storm drains did not function when a small storm passed the city. Please don't tell me they need more money to fix those problems.
> Ha sure.
Yes, worker cooperatives exist and are successful. Mondragon[1] is probably the biggest and most well known. It's effectively the GE of worker cooperatives. It's based in Spain, functions across numerous verticals and has 80,000 worker owners and total annual revenue around 12 billion euros.
One you might be more familiar with is Equal Exchange[2] - yes, the tea, coffee, and chocolate company. They have 126 employees, annual revenue of around $70 million, and national distribution.
Those are just two examples, there are hundreds more. You can scoff all you want, but these companies exist and are successful. They show that companies owned and governed by their employees can operate perfectly efficiently and compete in the marketplace.
> Ok, which brand of socialism do you support and why?
It's interesting to note that nowhere in my comment did I imply support for socialism. I merely mentioned its existence as a system, in the context of a conversation about boiling down the world of economic systems to a spectrum. Interesting that the parent commenter found mere mention of its existence triggering.
> Socialism: social control of the means of production > What does that even mean in practice? Nobody knows. This is why socialists and communists always end up killing each other.
From wikipedia[3]:
> Socialism is a left-wing[1] economic philosophy and movement encompassing a range of economic systems characterized by the dominance of social ownership[2] of the means of production[3][4] as opposed to private ownership.[5][6][4] As a term, it describes the economic, political and social theories and movements associated with the implementation of such systems.[7] Social ownership can be state/public, community, collective, cooperative, or employee.[8][9] While no single definition encapsulates the many types of socialism,[10] social ownership is the one common element.
In other words, there are any number of ways social control can be constructed, and has been constructed. Some more successful than others.
And no, socialists don't always end up killing each other. Social control through the state of large segments of the economy has been perfectly successful both in the US and in Europe.
Driven on a road? Congrats, you've benefited from social control of infrastructure. Drunk water from your tap? If you're in the US, the water you drink from your tap and the sewer that carries away your waste is almost certainly owned by a municipal utility - again social control. In most of Europe, entire health care systems are run by the state through social control.
In other words, state socialism - both municipal and national - has been shown to be perfectly successful when used in the sectors of the economy it's best fit for and on the scale most fitting.
As I pointed out above, social control of individual enterprises (worker cooperatives) has also been shown to be perfectly effective.
By all means, engage in the debate about what economic systems are the most effective and the least harmful. But if you're going to do it, do your homework first and leave the self satisfaction behind.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondragon_Corporation [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equal_Exchange [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialism
> Worker cooperatives exist and are perfectly functional and successful. Which means one economic system that isn't often spoken about might be described as "Free Market Socialism", in which businesses are governed democratically by their workers in a free market.
On top of that, work is where most people spend most of their lives. Right now, most people work at businesses that are governed in an autocratic way. Which means, on a very practical level, we're asking most people to spend most of their lives operating in an autocratic context.
With respect to Sole Proprietorships and Partnerships. There are some pretty big sole proprietorships and partnerships out there - with lots of employees. The bigger they get, the smaller the contribution of the sole owner or partners to the business vs the rest of the employees and the more the current system gives an unjust distribution of rewards.
Sole proprietorships and partnerships wouldn't vanish entirely. They'd just be limited to businesses where the sole owner or partner really could do all the work (or most of it with some of it maybe contracted out to other cooperatives).
It's true that the Free Market Socialist system described above probably would undervalue the contributions of founders. But the current system massively undervalues the contribution of the average worker. So it's a net gain in terms of justly and accurately valuing contributions. And Free Market Socialism would result in a much more even distribution of wealth, and therefor power.
It wouldn't be perfect, but - personally - I think it would be an improvement.
I have so many questions, but this should get us started.
> when say you envision the workers as the owners, how exactly does one change jobs then? Would I be forced to sell my ownership any/every time I wanted to leave a job?
Open question. I think there are a couple of ways you could explore implementing this.
One would be through ownership similar to what you describe. Workers would earn ownership over the course of their employment, when they want to move jobs the cooperative has to buy out their share (which would also enable retirement) at some agreed upon value. The cooperative would have to maintain capital reserves to cover this case. It doesn't really make sense for workers to take their share with them with out equity markets. They'd just be selling their equity back to the cooperative at a later date.
Another approach would be to consider businesses as institutions to be governed, rather than property to be owned. In this case, no one owns the business. The workers govern it. There's no equity earned. It would be one worker one vote. In this case retirement would need to be handled either through pensions set aside, or more likely through national social security (which we already have). It's also possible that retirement could be handled through normal savings accounts. With out a stock market, financing would happen through traditional banks (as worker cooperatives), credit unions, or municipal banks and there would be much more incentive to pay real interest on savings accounts.
In the former case, the earned equity overtime probably more accurately values workers contributions, and therefor also founder contributions.
In the later case, the system is simpler, more egalitarian, and less prone to manipulation by founders looking to retain authoritarian power as long as possible.
Important to note, I think there are existing worker cooperatives experimenting with both implementations (and probably additional ones as well), so if we're interested in seeing the effects of each approach (and possible unintended consequences) it would be worth studying what they're doing.
If I ever manage to save up enough to take a multi-year sabbatical I want to write a book on the topic and do that research.
> Another approach would be to consider businesses as institutions to be governed, rather than property to be owned. In this case, no one owns the business.
> The cooperative would have to maintain capital reserves to cover this case.
> I think there are existing worker cooperatives experimenting with both implementations
This is just factually incorrect. Mondragon has 80k employees and 12 billion euros in revenue. Equal Exchange has 120 employees, $70 million in revenue and national scale distribution. There are absolutely worker cooperates successfully competing at scale.
They do have trouble getting financing in a Capitalist economy, but they would not be an issue in an economy based on them.
Personally, I think I think one worker one vote and strong social security is the resolution to the question posed above.
This of course means the only solution to the talent disparity is an ultra-authoritarian crackdown on any type of private enterprise at all, a truly dystopian outcome that we've seen only under the likes of Mao, Stalin, Pol Pot etc.
I think the part you're overlooking (or consciously not wanting to think about) is enforcement. How do you expect to prevent someone from starting a private business and structuring it in a non co-op manner? Ultimately, this can only be enforced with violence or the threat of violence, right? So now how do you convince people used to freedom to accept widescale authoritarian violence as being "worth it"?
That egalitarianism already exists in every democracy in the world, and everyone just accepts it. The guy working the McDonald's counter gets the same vote as the PhD in Public Policy. It's a feature of democracy and people, historically, will sometimes complain about it but generally accept it as a necessary feature of democracy. I see no reason that, after a transition period, people wouldn't accept it as a necessary feature of democracy in the economic realm as well. Indeed, people working at existing worker cooperatives or employee owned businesses tend to laud and speak very highly of this feature of them.
> How do you expect to prevent someone from starting a private business and structuring it in a non co-op manner? Ultimately, this can only be enforced with violence or the threat of violence, right? So now how do you convince people used to freedom to accept widescale authoritarian violence as being "worth it"?
You are already limited in how you structure businesses and what sort of employment relationships you are legally allowed to enter in to. These are already enforced by law, which is - as you point out - already enforced by violence.
Your choices for business structure (in the US) are sole prioritorship, partnership, LLC, S-corp, or C-corp. You may not hire an employee to work more than 40 hours with out paying them overtime. You may not ask your employees to put themselves in danger in violation of OSHA. You may not enter into an indentured servitude arrangement with someone. The types of employment contracts you are allowed to enter into, and the ways you are allowed to structure your holdings, are limited and structured by law.
People already accept this arrangement as normal and acceptable. And they've already accepted changes in that arrangement as normal and acceptable. I see no reason that they could - again with a transition period - come to accept a new arrangement as normal and acceptable. Especially if it's one that's viewed as more fair, egalitarian, and beneficial to society as a whole.
Most employees are already working in authoritarian contexts with a threat of violence hanging over them For many, many working people - losing their job comes with the threat of serious economic instability - including possible homelessness, hunger, or death. This system has the potential to drastically reduce that. It would limit the freedom of business owners and founders to drastically increase the freedom of the average worker. Seems like a net gain in freedom to me!
> The guy working the McDonald's counter gets the same vote as the PhD in Public Policy.
> Your choices for business structure (in the US) are sole prioritorship, partnership, LLC, S-corp, or C-corp.
> You may not hire an employee to work more than 40 hours with out paying them overtime.
> Seems like a net gain in freedom to me!
Pardon me, but I'm going to make a mild appeal to authority for a moment. I have run for office, served on a mayoral transition committee, worked closely with elected officials on a range of policy issues (many of which got implemented), and my family are professors in public administration at the top public affairs school in the US (specializing in mediation, dispute resolution, and collaborative democracy). So... uh... I feel pretty confident I know what I'm talking about when I say, that's not naive... that's exactly how elections work.
> You missed some.
Fair enough, B-corp, and Co-op are formal structures in other states. The ones I listed are the ones available in my state, but the point stands. I wasn't counting non-profit, since it's somewhat of a different thing.
> And really you can structure a business however you want as long as taxes get paid.
The LLC is an enormously flexible structure, but there are still limits. Either way, the point stands. There's no reason we couldn't change those limits.
> Salary workers everywhere are laughing.
Agreed, and that's a failure of our labor laws. But again, the point stands. There are structures, laws, and limits. The fact that capitalist businesses are constantly trying to find ways around them isn't an argue in favor of capitalism.
> Forcing everyone at the point of a gun to give up any interests in starting a private enterprise putting their own talents to work - sounds like freedom to you? That explains a lot.
It's not forcing them to give up any interest in starting a private enterprise. They're still perfectly free to start a private enterprise. The difference is that once they hire someone, they have to give that person an equal voice in the enterprise. And yes, that increases freedom.
If you don't want to live in an authoritarian society, you have to give up the freedom to become a dictator. The dictator loses a freedom, but everyone else gains a lot more.
> So... uh... I feel pretty confident I know what I'm talking about when I say, that's not naive... that's exactly how elections work.
> The difference is that once they hire someone, they have to give that person an equal voice in the enterprise. And yes, that increases freedom.
Oh wait, are you one of those people who pretends everybody is equally capable?
I don't want to ban you but we need people to follow the rules here. If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to them, we'd appreciate it.
Capitalism means literally everything to everyone, it's absurd at this point.
And in any case, socialist countries don't outsource labor.
The problem is:
- Men without Skills in-demand-- skills which are at least somewhat fulfilling & interesting to those men.
Solution: Research labor data for careers in high demand, then cross reference those careers with skills a person is interested in. Then identify resources & a roadmap for learning those skills. And sit down, and put the time in to learn & apply those skills at a novice to intermediate level.
- Men who refuse to work. Part of why they refuse to work is that they might not recognize the solution above: to build skills relevant to a career they consider meaningful. This may also be due to a lack of monetary resources to live somewhat comfortably while building those skills (That said, I lived in a tent for months while teaching myself web development). Or they are overburdened by obligations and decided to give up and check out of society (i.e. turn towards homelessness and/or drugs)
Caveat: I know some folks who call themselves "poor folks". The reality is that their problem isn't that they're poor. Their problem is that they refuse to put together a well formatted resume, apply to jobs, and accept that they may have to start at the bottom of the career ladder. (And/or build new skills)
The concept of "Work" is but one link on a dependency chain:
Study -> Skills -> Productivity -> Work -> Career -> Build resources
What happens when all of the production is automated to the point we don't NEED 'Men to work'?
What do we do with them? What mischief do they get into when they have idle hands?
I feel like some people will gravitate back towards self sufficient activities. There are a lot of people on this site doing stuff like building their own furniture, gardening, etc. Of course I do think there will be a subset that use their time for more destructive things, as happens even now.
unfortunately there isn't a profit motive for those things, so the work in those industries tends to be low paying and requiring a high level of education.
there is definitely still a ton of work to do in the world, we just don't have anyone willing to pay for it.
Or to us.
Imagine working 40 hours a week then seeing that the machine both prepared more product and made fewer mistakes than you, or feeling like you're doing work just because someone (the government) pities you enough to force some jobs to remain non-automated.
Working with more complex, higher-skilled work that makes you feel like you're improving the lives of others is what our brains crave, not repeating menial tasks over and over again.
There's NOTHING wrong with the occasional menial task, and there's nothing wrong with being unmotivated, so long as it's not a net negative drain on society.
Once everything is automated away, I suspect it won't be the Star Trekian Utopia we'd like.
The Star Trekian utopia grew out of a 21st century devastated by a world war that saw a third of the Earth's population wiped out so... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
The Ballad of John Henry is Civil War era, but even he was a century or two after the Luddites started wrecking automated weaving machines. It's actually been a feature of the Industrial Revolution for awhile, but I think the effects are more pronounced now than ever.
Felony records, Health problems, etc. prevebting people from working.
Expecting everyone to just become baristas and waiters (which is what's happening in the UK at least) is just pushing people towards a giant mental health crisis.
Without manufacturing there is no middle-class, and the West has abdicated its manufacturing. That's led to the bifurcation of our society in two halves - the well-to-do service workers who have accumulated valuable knowledge, and the people serving them. I don't think it's a healthy outcome.
Of course people will say they don’t want to pay more but we’re already paying enough to support higher wages.
Factory owners didn’t want to pay much either so we don’t have good-paying factory work. VCs and CEOs don’t want to pay much for programmers either and we see where they’re taking the industry for the next generation.
- A 30 year old guy who lives at his mothers house. He's a part time videographer. For the last 5 years, hasn't proactively built any other skillset. Currently he says he'll work on getting into the construction industry. The irony is that he studied through calculus recently at a community college, but isn't enthused by the non-social work of a IT professional. Like other gig workers I know, he's only recently wised up to the fact that maybe he can't support himself on gig work, and that lacking business skills/knowledge he's unlikely to be a entrepreneur. Reality is beginning to dawn on him: he's getting older, and women will be less and less likely to see him as an adequate provider.
- a 32 year old guy who has a family trust he lives off of. Dropped out of college around age 19 or 20 to spend the next decade smoking marijuana and playing video games nearly as though it's a full time job. Fortunately he recently returned to finish college and will soon have a science degree. He'll be about 33-34 and start working at a career level of a typical 22-23 year old. The difference though is that he lacks common sense developed by resource scarcity & the existential need to become a professional. So, at 33, he'll be a less mature version of a 23 year old. It's sad to see. (I firmly believe young adults shouldn't be given free money-- they'll end up without a proper incentive structure. It's a bit like getting cheat codes to a game: there's no longer a reason to work at it.)
It would be better for people to be integrated into the workforce _during_ their education, to ensure that it stays relevant and to keep the movtivation. This idea of education as a kind of social enlightenment is an elite luxury, and makes people more miserable and regretful and unemployable.
I know it's a controversial view but I truly believe it: some people just want to see something physically accomplished at the end of a day's work. A roof shingled, a road graded, a cabinet hung....
When society pivots and those manual jobs go overseas, just telling everyone they're better off going into tech anyway is not going to fly.
Perhaps those career assessment test or whatever I took in high school had some validity after all. For better or worse, I understand shop classes are gone now from high school. I took a wood shop class (and still make things from wood to this day). Metal shop class was offered (stick welding was sort of the pinnacle of that class), shop class (where you worked on cars that the teachers brought in — always likely a sort of side business the teacher had going.)
My daughter went to Norway as an exchange student and it sounds as though Scandinavian schools still have some idea of a vocational track in public school education. While we may have sent most of the factory jobs overseas we still construct, wire, and plumb houses here, still build roads and bridges.
Personally, I love working with my hands. But I want a job that pays very well and offers location flexibility. (Plus I love learning an entire system of skills which builds upon itself) So, I chose IT.
But I still plan to do construction projects-- a Maker Space near me offers evening courses in welding, electrician skills, and carpentry.
I think the unfortunately reality is also that:
- There are differences in effort
- There are differences in intelligence
- There are differences in industriousness (how proactive a person is)
Which leads to some people being more suited towards intellectually challenging work. Others are more suited or interested in less mind-oriented work. Which is totally ok-- there is a huge demand for both.
So, I Agree-- Not everyone is better off in Tech.
I see this a lot. Younger people who have been led to believe by incendiary reddit and twitter rants that everyone lived like some Leave it to Beaver sitcom in the near past and they should be able to own a house and support a family at 19 on a McDonald's salary, and anything short of that there's no point participating because it's not fair. There are a lot of legitimate grievances in there regarding stagnating real wages and student debt etc. but for many it's just an excuse.
It really, really was different for the boomers. And union-won retirement benefits were so good back then. Plus that money was tied up in the retirement scheme, so you couldn't "defect" and spend it to compete for housing (driving up prices) rather than putting it in your 401k.
It's not a lack of skills. Getting a job (especially your first) is a lot of work. In some ways IMO it's more work than what you would be payed to do. Once you get payed what do you do with the money? You spend it to participate in society.
Except most of our social institutions are gone anyway. Marriage (the larger motivator) is practically symbolic at this point. All that's left are the hard economic ideas, so they can spend it to live in their own place and not deal with their mom. Even those aren't doing so well, look at home ownership or even renting. Is it worth it? Some say yes and get jobs, plenty say no.
We've restructured society so there's no place for these men even if they did find jobs, then on top of that we've brought in millions more men to ensure if that any niche that developed would be immediately filled. This is what people really mean when they complain about low wages or high inflation and it's not something that can be fixed by fiddling with the money supply.
This is part of why things like (for example, and bear with me) the failure of single-payer healthcare was such a blow. It would have been a way to end a huge factor in why people are tied to the dysfunction of the current structure, of course, but there was also a hidden loss: so many people continue to be unable to access mental health care. With the transformation of the system in Obama's first term, might we have created a crucial nexus and resource for young people and their concerns to have met and been heard by older generations? A way, in particular, for young men to embrace guided reasoning through their desires for life in a society where traditional paths had broken down? For the people observing this unpacking of hopes and lived experience to, perhaps, find the wherewithal to parlay and make way? Maybe. Instead we got Gamergate and the toxicity of contemporary social media culture, abject failures as balms for even the ills they try to address.
Of course, this is just one link in a long chain of missteps that lead us to where we are. To expand on your statement: it's not something that can be fixed by fiddling with the money supply because it's not something that started merely with poorly-conceived monetary policy.
Gets your blood flowing. Definitely that would've been preferable than just sitting at home idly playing video games and becoming more and more depressed.
I spend all on myself and find a date easily for a little money.
We continue to replace male labor with machines.
The last vestige is the trades, mostly in the construction industry.
It's only a matter of time until the technology industry gets around to disrupting male labor out of the trades.
When they don't exist, you invent them.
EDIT: Young people who can work but don't surely have a reason why they don't work.
Some are happy just freeloading and enjoying life on someone else's expense (often their parents). Others have a solid income on the side, just doing freelance stuff.
There are also those who have saved some money while working part-time. Now they just want to live their life before comitting to full time work.