I’m Worried About Our Boys

Angry young men with no feeling of agency are a dangerous thing.

I got into an online discussion this morning that has me thinking about something I don’t enjoy contemplating — the predicament facing our young men right now.

I have 5 sons, and I don’t know how to guide them no matter how much time I spend on this. The future is a black box.

The discussion today began in response to a growing meme where Gen Z guys appear to be identifying with and idolizing Anakin Skywalker — who, of course, grows up to become Darth Vader, Dark Lord of the Sith. An iconic villain. A ruthless authoritarian who does countless unspeakable things in service of maintaining power, even if he is somewhat redeemed in the end.

I think this tweet from a young Catholic brit named Connor Tomlinson helps succinctly set the stage for why this meme has become popular:

Gen Z love the Star Wars Prequels because young men relate to Anakin.

A prodigy who has everything taken from him by alien savages, and is told he can't have a family or aspire to heroism by political institutions which constrain his potential while refusing to solve problems.

The only reason I saw this in my timeline at all is because my old pal Hilary White replied to it, saying:

I'm GenX and I saw Star Wars ('77) in the theatre a bunch of times and was playing lightsaber battles in the park all summer. And it has taken me til middle age to figure out the Jedi weren't the good guys. The Jedi were the Boomers who set up a society no one could live in.

My interlocutor in the discussion, who I’m not going to drag into this post (because it’s not about her arguments, but the predicament itself), made the sensible case that we need to choose a higher path and find better stories to take our lessons from.

I understand her point of view. I just don’t think it maps to the present situation.

So I’m going to chop up and remix the replies I’ve already written to allow me to explain my concerns here, outside the context of this particular back-and-forth.

First, I don’t think a lot of people over 40 are tracking just how blackpilled with cynicism young men are right now. They don't think there's any hero's journey available to them where they can win.

I’m inclined to think that even Christian boys these days increasingly tend to see Christ's victory as only accessible spiritually. When they're dead. But they have to live in the world of the now, and it's been ruined by politicians and religious leaders who have sold their future for personal gain.

And so, they are turning to authoritarianism as the answer. They have been institutionally locked out of pulling themselves up by their bootstraps, as it were. Take away a man's agency to accomplish things that are noble and good, and the only thing he thinks he has left is force.

To stop this turn towards authoritarianism from growing, we would need to work with them to develop a better path forward through the present tangle of seemingly intractable problems.

But I don't think there is a path forward. Not one I can see from here, anyway.

The only way things right themselves, in my opinion, is through a sufficiently catastrophic set of circumstances that we get a “hard reset,” and nature reasserts itself.

The Leftists have captured all the institutions, and they are brainwashing our kids. Some of us are fortunate to have kids who can resist, but most won't. I lost two siblings to the progressive mind virus. They are both smart, and were both very decent people before it happened. Now I find many of the things they say and think to be alien and unrecognizable. One of them has cut off our parents and any siblings who don’t buy fully into her crippled secular religion. And she’s old enough that I don’t see any reasonable hope she’ll grow out of it.

Which leads me to another thing I’ve been wrestling with.

A concept I’ve been developing over the past year is something I call “the impotence of truth.” If someone has chosen to invest in a particular narrative — especially if it secures their identity or framework for looking at the world — it is almost impossible to disabuse them of that view using facts and nuance. We’ve all experienced this with others, whether it’s someone who refuses to take accountability for their own actions, or someone caught up in some ideology we recognize is destructive, or someone in a relationship with someone who is clearly not good for them, etc. No matter how eloquently you try, you cannot talk them into seeing the error. They are fully committed at a precognitive level.

I used to believe that “the truth will set you free.” But as I began encountering the experience of having good faith arguments rooted in fact and evidence rejected outright in favor of a pre-selected narrative with increasing frequency, I have slowly had the notion that the truth does anything at all on its own completely beaten out of me.

The Gospel allegory of seeds falling on different kinds of ground is apropos here. Only on fertile ground can truth grow and flourish. And fertile ground means an epistemological orientation that prioritizes fidelity to reality over confirmation bias. In other words: if you don’t cultivate the humility to admit that something you believed was true turned out to actually be wrong — and most of us struggle with this even at the best of times — you’re going to have a really hard time when confronted with evidence to the contrary.

As someone still going through deconstruction/reconstitution of faith after being somewhat famous for having a very strong set of religious viewpoints, I run into all kinds of reactions from people — including those who fervently want to hold me accountable for changing my views to match more closely with my experience and understanding of the facts.

It’s also why, to use a more out-there example, people in the know talk so much these days about the perceived danger in revealing in a definitive way that non-human intelligences (NHI) are visiting the earth through advanced technology. They warn that it will cause ontological or epistemic shock. If you believe for scientific or religious reasons that NHI cannot exist or cannot be here, what do you do when they show up on your lawn? Does it break your mind? Does it break your faith? Does it break society itself?

So to return to the problem at hand, I think the West is really under a kind of spell. It is the spell of the post-war order, the so-called liberal consensus. Outside of a few rare centenarians, it’s the only world anyone alive has ever known.

And it’s a complete anomaly in human history. It has brought a completely unprecedented period of wealth and stability and security to the world, and we have come to see it as baseline “normal.” But it has become decadent and logistically overcomplicated and self-destructive, and it is now facing imminent collapse — both through shrinking populations and changes in military and geopolitical expressions of power.

The catastrophic second and third order effects that were forecast as a result of the loss of human labor through depopulation might be forestalled through the rise of robot labor. The jury is still out on that. But either way, The World Order, as we knew it, is going away.

And as we live through the tumult of the interim period, very bad things are happening — and it will likely get worse before it has any hope of getting better. Therein lies the appeal of the Robotopia of Hyperabundance promised to us by the AI bros. Elon Musk keeps telling us we won’t need to save for retirement. Some are saying we won’t need money at all.

I’ll believe it when I see it.

Even if it comes, we’re going to have to go through hell during the transition. Maybe that’s why the big tech bros are building bunkers in far away places. Maybe they know. Maybe they just watched too much James Bond.

But I digress.

My interlocutor today suggested Aragorn from Lord of the Rings as a better replacement model for young men than Anakin from Star Wars. And Aragorn’s certainly nobler. Righteous in his cause.

But I don’t see how he maps to the present moment.

When Tolkien was writing these stories, there was no post-war order. No globalism —not like now. No mass immigration from the third world, no liberal consensus that has turned into a disaster for the average person struggling to find work and a place to live and make ends meet. The world had not fully shaken off the memory of Christendom, nor had it yet achieved the technological advancement of thousands of years in just a century.

We also hadn't yet seen the utter emasculation of institutional Christian religion.

Very few things about our current state map cleanly to the before times. And God hasn't intervened to fix things up until now, so we shouldn't put our eggs in that basket.

These boys are facing a future without jobs, without a home, without the kind of woman they feel they can marry and live a happy life with. They're lonely and angry and assaulted by an endless barrage of sexualized imagery (both online and in person) luring them away from the straight path like a siren’s song. The more they give into that call, the more they resent themselves, and women in general. They are experiencing a felt loss of anything like meaning and purpose. If they're white, they see literally everyone else forcibly put ahead of them in line for anything they want to accomplish. And they're told they're evil for even being something they had no control over — the male descendants of European Christians.

The porn and video games and weed young men have increasingly been caught up are bad, to be sure, but in a way, they were also the things holding back the violent pendulum swing. I'm not sure anything can stop that for much longer now. We have backed these boys into a corner, told them they're privileged at a time where they see no advantage to being who they are, and then, to add insult to injury, we keep punishing them for merely existing.

And though I come at this from a generally “conservative” point of view, people on the Left are seeing it too. Eric Weinstein, who says “I don’t have a Republican bone in my body,” says that boys are being pushed further and further right by this culture, these schools:

Scott Galloway, another loud-and-proud leftist public intellectual, talks about how young men have no way to demonstrate excellence anymore, and how social media and algorithm-driven dating apps are changing mating behaviors in ways that exaggerate hypergamy and diminish opportunities for men to find good matches:

So the anger we're seeing isn't just adolescent rage or victimhood-mindset. They have recognized the injustice of their situation, and the only thing they think they have left is the oldest, most primal impulse a man has — to take it by force.

If you don't have a civilizational reset event of some kind that breaks down feminism's death grip on every door to power and personal development and allows men to be men again, we're cooked, as the Zoomers like to put it. The toxic empathy-derived policies downstream of that asymmetry are actively killing what’s left of the West.

Break that stranglehold, and you've also got a shot at killing the prevalence of critical theory that keeps driving woke ideologies like "institutional racism" and the rest of the excuses for creating a prejudicial prioritization system wearing “equality” as a skin suit.

But this is why I keep coming back to catastrophe.

I think nothing less than an event that is so destabilizing that it forces us back into natural hierarchies will do it. There's no leader, no matter what sign he hopes to conquer in, who can un-zombify the West. The narratives are too strong, the truth too impotent in breaking down their walls. As long as believing in ruinous ideologies is possible while sipping your pumpkin spice latte in peace and relative prosperity, the people who hold to them will remain steadfast until there’s nothing left.

The truth may be impotent in the telling of it, but the reality of a survival situation can only be denied at the cost of your own destruction. Make no mistake — even in such a scenario, some people will hold to the narrative at the cost of their own lives.

I don’t like being cynical. I have no interest in being a doomer. I want hope for the future — not as much anymore for myself, but for my children. And yet, I am afraid that for a hopeful future to one day exist, we may very well have to lose everything we've come to regard as normal.

The odds aren't good that most of us reading this today will live to see the other side of it, even if it happens soon. Whether that’s because it becomes too violent or too impossible to manage or just takes a very long time, I don’t know.

If you think I’m getting this wrong, please talk me out of it.

I would actually like to be shown a way out that isn’t this.

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