The following trends, palpable and pernicious, can be expected to get worse in subsequent generations, and it may be that the time is not far off when older and better ways of living, now still with us, are utterly vanished, preserved, if at all, only in history books, if they still exist. As technology continues to dumb us down, even as it erases cultural memory, the following phenomena seem likely to become even more widespread and harmful.
1. A nation of borderline personalities
As I describe in my article “The Touchiness Of Contemporary America,” we have become a nation of borderline personalities. When we take the naturally corrupt self-interest of human nature, and add historically unprecedented comfort and convenience, we seem to get the following result: a mass of warped minds who, interpreting reality in self-interested extremes, believe that virtually anyone who fails to meet their silly (yet unwitting) expectations and entitlements is “unfair,” “abusive,” “sexist,” “racist,” and so on.
Many Americans, influenced by the media and the resentments of those who consider themselves the insulted and the injured, are now unable to distinguish between the problems and miseries that stem from the natural hardness of life and the injustices brought out by a minority of powerful persons. Human misery per se is thought to be some kind of conspiracy, the work of a bunch of unfair boogiemen, doubtless descended from Dead White European Males.
Likewise, simple frankness, without any kind of unmanly sugarcoating tacked on—the language of corporate America’s “good team members,” in other words—is now likely to be considered “hostile,” “threatening,” “intimidating,” etc. Basically, if you aren’t a happy little sycophant, endlessly timid and compliant, then the shrinks may be needed to deem that you have what they call “oppositional defiant disorder.” You disagree with their “diagnosis”? So what? They have your words and image on record, and here the only practically important thing is the perception or interpretation of those who are in charge.
Human nature, on average, has very little aptitude for objective and analytical thought. On the other hand, forcefully simplifying and misinterpreting the contexts of things, and reading into them what is not there in order to advance one’s interests, is as natural as eating and drinking, though rarely recognized. This ignorant rhetorical game, indeed, is what most people understand by “truth.”
As the young more and more become conditioned not so much to think, but to simply respond to and engage with electronic stimuli, the more faceless and impersonal the better, we can expect more and more human interactions to become effectively blind and incoherent. Here, as always, whoever has the most power will be the one who is “right” or “wins.”
2. The end of masculinity
Up until the PC assault that began in the 80s, what I will call “old school code” was the norm among men. In many instances, if you said or did the wrong thing—that is, what would have been an offense against honor in the old, high sense—a fellow man would give you to understand, by a look or language, that he’d kick your ass, or else he’d just do it; and the effect, though painful, may well have been good for you. It was not “traumatic,” and besides, you learned the hard way, the only way you were going to, hardheaded irrational creature.
Now the many negative responses to my last article here on ROK suggest to me that today even most so-called red pill men do not know how to distinguish between this old school code and what blue-pill-types simplistically and inaccurately call “macho posturing,” done out of “insecurity,” perhaps because you were “abused as a child.”
There’s no perceived difference between the way men were raised to be in the 50s and “bullying.” It’s all the same, some sort of “tough guy act,” and swallowing the red pill means nothing more than being aloof to women and not being sucked in by their games and manipulations. Asserting yourself in regard to other men will soon be the stuff of generations long past. After all, we have already come to a state of things in which the natural masculine aggression that has always been a vital part of sports causes tremendous “concern” for the media and non-athletes.
We men who grew up playing sports know that fights and tiffs, both on the court and field and in the locker room, are part of the very nature of the thing. They are rarely a big deal and can usually be shrugged off. Many liberals and non-athletes no longer seem to understand this, however. Kevin McHale (in)famously clotheslined Kurt Rambis in the 1984 NBA Finals. That sort of thing, back then, served to “set the tone.” Today, McHale would be fined and suspended as people blather about his “anger management problem.” The difference of judgment signifies our present cultural weakness.
3. The genders shall be more indistinguishable and sex more perverse
Endless selfies, duck face photos, and other narcissistic vulgarities of social media are now quite common among men, not just among the Second Sex. I often see groups of the former out at night who seem like teenage girls: they never get tired of taking their picture; they really will do this all night long. Meanwhile, when I hear men speak, in person and on television, I often wonder whether they are gay based on their womanly voices alone, even though they may seem straight otherwise. MSNBC—home of whiny liberal outrage and self-satisfied snark—is especially disgusting here.
Going along with this cultural trend is the depressing reality that dating or hooking up with an American woman under 35 is now very much like dealing with a man. For instance, I recently took a twenty-one-year-old woman home from a bar. The next morning she told me that when she goes home with a guy, she usually just gets up and leaves the next morning, without saying goodbye or getting his number. She made an exception in my case, though, because she found me “really hot.” What’s more, digging my tall, muscular body, she said that when she got up in the morning, she thought to herself, “Yeah, I tapped that.” Just like a man!
I picked up her girlfriend that morning—she too had left with a man—and as I drove them home I listened to them speak in the most shameless and coarsest way. “Did you even get his number?” asked Donna laughing. And she went on: “Was he tall? Was his stroke game good?” The friend did get the number, which, she remarked with a manly laugh, was not her usual custom.
Now I have been hooking up with college-age American women since my late teens (the late 90s), and write this about a week from my thirty-fourth birthday. In only about 15 years I have observed a startling change in the sexual character of these women: when I was 24 many still acted like women, not entirely masculine or soulless. Now that I am almost 34, it’s become quite rare for me to date or hook up with an American woman in her 20s who passes for a woman for reasons other than having a pair of tits and a vagina.
4. The end of a sense of value
Observing both people younger and those older than me, I often sense that for many of them all activities possess more or less the same worth. They seem never to consider the value of anything. Though they do take care to “work hard and play hard,” they basically pass unthinkingly from one activity to another. Some are more fun than others. None have any deep significance. People are more and more reflexive in their behavior, slaves to mere habit where in ages past people stopped to rationally evaluate the significance of their actions and way of life.
Even when it comes to doing business, many people, although they could talk on the phone, now choose to drag things out by text. It does not occur to them to simply get to the point by phone and thus save themselves time, for they do not value time itself.
They work some job which probably is either just bearable or downright contemptible. And to justify and cope with that, they turn to intense indulgence of some kind: porn, ecstasy, or who knows what. Or perhaps they are on anti-depressants since the art of living well is no longer of interest in what is amusingly still called higher education, whose real functions are to rip you off while exposing you to an agenda of politically correct resentment. You are thus left with massive student loans but no Wisdom.
Conclusion
Ralph Waldo Emerson—by far the wisest of American writers—wrote that
In history the great moment is, when the savage is just ceasing to be a savage, with all his hairy Pelasgic strength directed on his opening sense of beauty;—and you have Pericles and Phidias,—and not yet passed over into the Corinthian civility. Everything good in nature and in the world is in that moment of transition, when the swarthy juices still flow plentifully from nature, but their astrigency or acridity is got out by ethics and humanity.
In other words, human beings thrive when, having transitioned to civil society, they still retain the strength and hardihood that they had in the prior, more severe state. This is what gives rise to periods of superb art and high culture. It is also what makes other nations respect us, and think better of going after our resources or position on the world stage.
That time is now past in America. Creature comforts have made us soft and stupid. Another Great War, perhaps engendered by ecological disaster, may be needed to reduce human nature to its vital core, the source of both our vitality and our creativity.
Read More: The Touchiness Of Contemporary America
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