What Institutions Do Failing Young Men Have?

I. Stagnation

Do we have functioning institutions that exist to support failing young men?

An MR post that has stuck with me for a few years starts out with:

The contemporary world is not very well built for a large chunk of males.  The nature of current service jobs, coddled class time and homework-intensive schooling, a feminized culture allergic to most forms of violence, post-feminist gender relations, and egalitarian semi-cosmopolitanism just don’t sit well with many…what shall I call them?  Brutes?

Tyler Cowen calls them Brutes. This is a good description of the phenomena he goes on to enumerate. But there is another taxonomy of failure that I have seen since this post. The deprecation of gender roles among the newer generations seems to have accelerated, and I’m increasingly observing non-brutes who live lives of feminized alienation.

Their failure pattern is a different one than being a brute, which is becoming nothing at all, and never learning how to become a man. They live in the shadow of their potential, and do not learn the masculine virtues that provide depth of purpose. They lack meaningful mentorship, and are not raised to learn the ancestral priors of how to live an effective life, or feeling a sense of belonging.

These deeper cultural failures you can only learn through observation, but the macro trends provide a more general evidence: This is one of the most important charts of our era, which shows the ongoing decline of the male labor force participation rate. This chart indicates we have deep and low-frequency process causing the degeneration of men.

There is a lot of time spent writing on the young man question, with different theories, whether it’s due to the decay of traditional values, or lack of labor movements. I’m sure some of these theories are right, but most of them would require a decisive win in a culture war to be ‘implemented’. And given that the culture war in America feels like trench warfare, that is unlikely to happen.

I have been thinking about it even more recently, as last week my wife’s cousin, a young man in his early 20s, committed suicide. Like most suicides, his was tragic and complicated in its own way, and I hesitate to try and infer what system level parameters resulted in his decision. He had a childhood bordering on abusive in an intensely Evangelical family, before being excommunicated for questioning these beliefs.

In his final years, he worked a series of part-time minimum wage jobs, and watched youtube or played video games in a basement he was renting. He tried to create an identity separate from the poisoned one he inherited from his parents. He was never able to escape his past, or find a community he could join.

I have been wondering, which institutions might have helped him? And more generally, what institutions can help these young men, who having been failed for whatever reason, find themselves becoming young adults without having learned the fundamentals of how to operate as a man.

II. Our Current Institutions.

Currently, for troubled and high-risk young men it seems as though the default paths are to become homeless, develop an opioid addiction, end up in prison, live as a NEET, or work an alienating low-wage job. Historically there have been successful attempts at crafting paths for troubled young, and we’ve either abandoned them, or are letting them decay.

Higher-education is the most obvious institution, but the debt burden of college has chipped away at the value of college as an escape. This path was never for everyone, but it was a great one for a subset of intellectual men. It was once possible to get accepted into a perfectly fine college, leave your old life, and live and attend class while supporting yourself through part-time work.

College does require a base level of executive function and intellectual ability. Genetics aside, these base levels of skill can be decimated by an abusive childhood.. College wouldn’t have been a realistic path for my cousin. Even if he did have the money, I’m not sure he had the executive function to strategize about it as a solution to his problems.

Unfortunately, money aside, these are no longer places for a large subset of young men. With 60% of students now women, these institutions no longer have a culture or vision that seems to appeal to subsets of young men.

What about the military? Rob Henderson wrote an article on “Americas Lost Boys”, where he shares a story of how the military saved him, which we’ve probably all heard variations of before:

But during my senior year, a male history teacher, an Air Force veteran, encouraged me to enlist. He knew my grades were awful—I graduated in the bottom third of my high school class, with a 2.2 GPA—but saw something in me, potential that I hadn’t yet discovered or maybe didn’t even want to. I enlisted out of desperation at 17.

The military does still fulfill a role here, and clearly works in many cases. Of course, the violence of the military isn’t suited for everyone (have you seen Full Metal Jacket?). Plus, we’re assuming it’s a peace time military. I had a few friends from highschool, some of whom are now dead from suicide or an OD after their days in Fallujah.

In any event, my cousin wouldn’t have joined the military. It wasn’t in his nature. In his last year he was quietly rebelling against his conservative upbringing, and letting his family know he identified as communist and queer. Like many men, he wouldn’t have been cut out for the military. I wonder if they would have even let him in.

The military can be useful for brutes who need to have discipline kicked into them, and probably still works in that regard. It isn’t for everyone though, and I wonder if the push for a more inclusive military is steering it away from its focus on men — although this is a topic I shouldn’t speculate on.

III. The Civilian Conservation Corps

An institution that I think would have been likely to help him, would have been the Civilian Conservation Corps of the depression era. This was a work-relief program, and was effectively make-work for men who were unemployed.

You would join a group of a bunch of young men, give them a captain from the army, go out into nature, build stuff, and do manual labor.

The motivation for this program was the existential threat of unemployment from the great depression. Three million men took part in the CCC over a 9 year period. That would have been roughly four percent of all men. Interestingly enough, our employment to population ratio for men aged 25-54 is 85%, which is as bad as it was in the 1940 census during the great depression. At the time of the great depression we felt this justified radical action to provide young men with activity and skills training — not anymore.

The handbook for enrollees openly advocated masculine virtues.. There is this deep emphasis on hard work, being strong and rugged, and the unashamed way of writing about “building strong men” right on the cover of the handbook. Could you imagine anything of the sort today? Now it’s the opposite, with institutions distancing themselves from any sort of focus on male specific issues, in favor of inclusivity.

The wording in some of the pages of the handbook is remarkable:

The clean life and hard work in which you are engaged cannot fail to help your physical condition and you should emerge from this experience, strong and rugged and ready for re-entrance into the ranks of industry, better equipped than before.

They work, play and eat together. Learning to get along with 199 other men without hurt feelings or broken noses is one thing every enrollee must learn while in camp. CCC cap life is a healthful one. It offers many opportunities for self improvement, physically, mentally, and vocationally. Boys who “can take it” will get much out of the CCC. They well may be proud of belonging to such an organization

For young men today, who are ruined by an adolescence of hyper-stimulation, lack of direction or familial support, and food bordering on poison, working outdoors and eating clean would be the first time in their lives that they experience the transcendental value of labor and virtuous living. The benefits to being a young man and using your body, whether it’s lifting weights or exerting yourself outside, are huge.

How would this help? Well, men aged 18-22 are inherently high-risk for being victims or perpetrators of violent crime, or suicide. If you can help men make it through that age, even if nothing else is accomplished, they become lower risk for making poor, often criminal, choices, which will burden them for the rest of your life.

More prominently It occupies a missing space among institutions. While it has many of the same aspects of the military that focus on building physical prowess, discipline, and bonding with other men, the energy is focused on construction of our country (even if it’s make-work).

While we often talk about the need for men to develop valuable skills, this requires a baseline foundation of stability, understanding hierarchy, and discipline. Young men are volatile and often high-risk. The virtues of masculinity attempt to solve this problem, by installing firmware that makes them interoperable with society. A large-scale make-work program that teaches men these skills could provide value to our nation.

With the start of WWII and the draft, the CCC was no longer required. We now have a period of slow degeneration, where men incrementally drop out of the labor force and languish. But it never seems extreme enough for us to create new institutions to try and solve our problems.

VI. Masculine Virtues

The failure of modern institutions to focus on masculine virtues effected me as well. Growing up I had support, resources, and natural drive, yet I needed to reason through why my parts of my life felt wrong. Throughout my formative years I often felt depressed and turned to drugs and video games as coping mechanisms.

I didn’t engage with my masculine side, and spent most of my time being a nerd, without realizing the harm I was doing to myself. I half-assed sports, and other than that I never was part of any group where I had to practice both my physicality and mentality as a man. As far as I can tell, this is now the default for a significant amount of young men.

It wasn’t until I was able to connect and cultivate with my own masculinity, that I realized how many of my challenges were due to failing to cultivate a deep imperative that I had. Eventually throughout my 20s I became interested in boxing and weight lifting.

At the core of masculine virtues though, there is the need to get along with other men, and to find your place on the hierarchy. If you feel your place on the hierarchy is just, you may admire the man above you. If you feel it is unjust, you will engage in pro-social behavior inline with group norms (or at least not anti-social behavior) to switch places with them. Institutions that can help young men learn and navigate these hierarchies are essential. Jordan Peterson can’t do it all on his own.

V.

Like all of those who suffer, my cousin in law’s suffering was an interaction between the social structure he inhabited as well as his own idiosyncratic trauma and suffering. For any individual it’s not realistic to cleanly identify these two components. This identification is complicated by the fact that those likely to be visibly negatively impacted from a social level failure are most likely to suffer from idiosyncratic issues. As it is the compounding of issues that pushes people over the line.

What I can see though, is that currently in America there are few, if any, institutions that cater to the most lost young man. No place where they can sign their name and say “I’m lost, please turn me into a man that I don’t hate.”