Henry Dampier

On the outer right side of history

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The Public Policy Challenge of Male Motivation

Faced with the unprecedented drop in male labor force participation and a simultaneous rise in the female  labor force participation rate, the American policy establishment has chosen to notice the problem and double down on the evident and widely agreed upon causes. In the Atlantic, Derek Thompson writes (in a single draft, because he is not paid enough to think) that this is because of the “rise of women and the growth of the safety net.”

Men have become less motivated to work as women have arisen in legal and social status. Thompson has no recommendations, which is just as well.

According to the St. Louis Federal Reserve, for the first time ever, the male labor force participation rate has now dropped below 70%, to 69.2%. In 2007, before the bailouts, it was 73.3%.

The female labor force participation rate has also dropped since 2007 from 58.9% to 57.2%. That’s not as much of a drop as with the men, but still significant.

This has also lead to pseudo-philosophizing about how men are not as useful to modern work as women are, that manufacturing is less important (which is false), and that muscles are not as important as brains and communication and connection and feelings. None of these things are true and many are not empirically verifiable claims.

Women and the children that they bear are the motivation for men to yoke themselves to serious careers. As fewer women of all classes have been willing to subordinate themselves to the traditional marital arrangement (propagandized to reject it in the school system and by corporate propaganda), men instead elect to become lotus eaters.

If you are discriminated against in the work place, if your wife can cheat with impunity and then loot family assets, and if your social position is permanently at risk due to being labeled an ‘abuser,’ a ‘racist,’ or a ‘sexist,’ it is much safer for a white man to skate under the radar, not be too ambitious, and avoid risky relationships.

‘PUA’ has become a recognizable acronym even in mainstream outlets because this male adaptive strategy has become so popular.

This even has an impact on inheritance, as parents know that passing assets down to male heirs is far riskier than giving assets to female ones. Any man’s assets can be seized by his wife at any time and for almost any reason. If you pass funds and property down to women, you can be reasonably assured that she will keep it for herself.

Moral Distraction is Easier Than Addressing the Issues

As men become more aware that their assets can be seized by their wives on a whim, fewer are willing to enter heterosexual marriages. It is a psychological curiosity that gay marriage has become such a progressive fixation as this far more important trend is occurring. The legal situation of heterosexual marriage and child-rearing is a free-fire zone of misery, but the chattering classes fixate instead on giving sodomites rights that they do not even show much interest in making use of.

There is an appetite for moral self-flattery in the American middle class that only becomes more pronounced as you look further up the ladder. Because the lower class in America is so disgusting and reprehensible to their betters, the middles and better are always looking abroad or to palatable substitutes for opportunities for moral uplift.

It is odd that an upper middle class woman will see better opportunities in moral self-flattery through adopting a negro babe from Haiti than through adopting a home-grown negro.

It is odd that performing community service in Kenya will help you get into Yale, but that performing community service in Newark, Camden, Oakland, or Chicago’s South Side would be unthinkable to any private school student or their ambitious parents in America. It would never even be suggested by an admissions consultant.

The standard excuse is that the American ‘safety net’ provides for these unloved domestic negroes, whereas foreign aid never does enough for the more exotic varieties on other continents.

The Inversions of America’s Last Days

When Europeans settled America, most settlements only provided property rights to white men. Throughout the continent, but in the south most of all, status could be enhanced by purchasing negroes from African slave traders, and then setting them to work on the farm. Only the wealthy could afford slaves.

Today, status can still be enhanced by purchasing black babies, although they are no longer given useful jobs or social roles in large numbers. It’s called adoption. Urban politicians compete for status by unveiling new grand plans to bring black people up to the same levels as whites — by taking over their lives at every stage through educational, correctional, and make-work institutions.

This process is popular for the better-off whites to root for, because it makes them feel like morally superior people. Good folks are perpetually concerned about improving the lot of the ‘oppressed,’ even if all of the programs designed to help those people tends to make them far worse off than they would be left alone or segregated.

Instead, most are dumped into prison-like public schools. The men inevitably wind up in prisons. Even the best among them must deal with the gravitational pull of a  culture that has abandoned even the pretense of Christian social norms.

The minor artistic achievements of the Harlem Renaissance or of the great jazz musicians are forgotten (except by white NPR listeners): instead, the press glorifies rappers.

Whites enhance their status relative to one another in part by pretending to do wonderful things for black people without doing anything that’s terribly good for those same black people. In their finishing schools, Americans learn to morally flagellate themselves for the ideology of ‘white supremacy’ held by their ancestors. This self-mortification has an obvious pleasurable aspect, so much so that college graduates practice it in a ritual fashion even after they have graduated.

A social structure that used to be dedicated to motivating European men to civilize a continent has been inverted, in spirit if not yet in form. The males are no longer motivated to be men, and the women are dizzy, with their superiors commanding them to behave like men because the males refuse to be men in increasing numbers, yet the advice is rarely followed.

The solution is to invert the inversion, and then to fix it in place using political and social systems that are less prone to leftward drift.

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As Social Trust Wanes, We Weaken

The West is in a crisis surrounding a general collapse in social trust. Rather than focusing too much on the macro political situation, I would rather explore the consequences of this at the personal level.

Unlike when my grandfathers were working, or when my father worked, it is common for employees to distrust their bosses and their co-workers. There is no sense that the company exists for the long term benefits of its stake-holders. At a far lower level of technology and gross profitability, employees even at the lower level could expect to advance their careers within the same corporation for their entire lives. My grandfather was not an executive — he was a simple accountant at General Electric — but his retirement package ultimately made him a multimillionaire. He lived modestly for most of his life, did not work long hours, and raised two children.

Before the 1970s and after the collapse of the New Deal, it appeared for a brief time that norms supporting property rights had returned to the fore within American culture. The public culture was anti-Communist until the 1960s ran their course. The FBI under J. Edgar Hoover suppressed domestic left-wing factions until completely collapsing in the late 1960s. By the 1970s and Nixon’s resignation, the organized subversive left had achieved complete control over American institutions of cultural influence.

The 1945-1972 era was a brief interlude during which the left regrouped as public cooperation with the Soviet Union became illegal. In 1971, Nixon severed the last link with the gold standard, and the great inflation of the 1970s combined with the collapse in public order demolished general social trust.

This was the time when many of today’s baby boomers came of age — during a time of cultural confusion and economic chaos. The inflation destroyed many poorer families, and created a new class of hyper-corporate ‘yuppies’ that took their place. While apologists will tend to say that the yuppies were just ‘better’ than the people who came before them, in reality they were just better at getting the freshly-printed greenbacks than their more sluggish brothers and sisters.

The post-1970s showed that hard work does not pay, because property rights are not secure. What does pay is to be a corrupt oligarch, to divorce using lawyers to loot your family, or to be a canny speculator.

Due to continual inflation, workers lose out in a systematic way to capital, who have superior social and financial connection to the apparatus that creates new money. Merit in actual market production becomes socially déclassé, because, in nominal terms, it is much less valuable than finagling access to unlimited credit or speculating based on superior access to information and superior execution speed on the markets.

America is not a good place to build a factory because property rights for factory owners are insecure. If you build a factory, dozens of investigators will descend upon your operation, guided by a domestic intelligence agency called a newspaper, to impede your ability to run your business.

In China, by contrast, property rights may be contingent upon approval by the state, but it is a clearer binary. If you cease to be protected by a political master, you will be executed. It is a more clear cut and honest tyranny. There is the Party and the military, and perhaps some informal crime, but it is at least a little more predictable.

In the United States, you can be looted by a panoply of government agencies, ‘nonprofits,’ legal firms, angry business associates, employees, and wives. The ever expanding legal code provides infinite pretexts for depriving you of your property.

It is for this reason, perhaps, that social trust has declined as each of the new (still-living) generations has come of age:

To maintain large institutions of any kind, social trust is crucial. It’s common to read comments and blog posts by dissatisfied employees who no longer trust their bosses, and by bosses who do not believe that their employees are trustworthy.

A large part of this owes to diversity of gender, race, and religion: it is not even really possible for people from foreign cultures to partake in social trust building rituals that are culture-bound properly.

Asians and Europeans don’t drink the same kinds of alcohol and have wildly differing tolerance levels. They do not have the same mannerisms even after a generation of Westernization. Indians have a complex set of relations to one another that are completely opaque to Europeans who aren’t steeped in their culture. A competent manager at handling Indian teams going to struggle in leading Europeans, even if he’s de-racinated.

This is something openly acknowledged even in publications like the Harvard Business Review: there is no human resources department on the planet that will not say that ‘diversity is a challenge.’ They will not acknowledge, however, that it is a cost that tends to have questionable benefits, and usually results in increased risks of project failures. The biggest diversity problem of all is the mixture of men and women within companies: women simply do not have the same social incentive structure as men do. Attempting to integrate the genders has resulted in an unprecedented drop in the male labor force participation rate.

While the statistics are undisputed by the ‘responsible’ experts, there is almost no acknowledgment in the respectable press of the obvious solution to this social problem. This makes the educated consensus a brittle one. America’s elite class can either accept Soviet-level stagnation and the humiliation that comes with that, or they can capitulate to reality. It is clear that, at present, they prefer to maintain the lies at enormous cost to the general public.

Pew attempts to spin the declining trust in saying that Millenials are also far more ‘optimistic’ about the future. However, without trust, there is no future worth living in.

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A Popped Culture

Modern democratic culture is continually self-referential in a short time frame. Each work refers to something that came immediately before it, taking care to avoid alluding to something that the audience might not be familiar with.

It is this way because the writers and production staff, even those that certainly had some required courses in the classics and the canon, know that their characters are speaking to an audience that isn’t familiar with those or the bible.

Christopher Hitchens hoped that organized atheism could replace religion as a source of morality with literature. But literature, as even the dead Hitchens brother admitted, is rooted in religious practice. It makes sense to conflate literature with religion, but it makes no sense at all to pretend that one can exist without another.

As religious practice has become illegal in the West through the back door of anti-discrimination law, and pressures that are political, financial, and social have come to bear, literature too has become a ‘gritty’ husk that does little but revel in depravity and place hope in imaginary supercreatures to rescue a hopelessly degenerate civilization from a obfuscated existential threat.

The libertarian in me wants to make a point about how interest rates are really important and that this is just the sort of thing that happens when you suppress them through state policy. This is true. But the culture that wants to do those things is the prime mover in this.

Culture continues to become shallower and shallower over time as it becomes more impossible to build social walls that exclude, that permit quiet, and prevent interference from political commissars (which is what professors and journalists have become).

Without a meaningful cultural and artistic tradition, the democratic West is killing itself: indeed, most modern literature consists of extended odes to suicide and self-annihilation, especially those of the 20th century. Let no one say that writers have no influence! They have had a baleful one!

Modern movies cost more to make in nominal terms than ever before, but are remembered for shorter and shorter periods of time. They are shown in more movie theaters to more people in more countries than ever before, but are more forgettable than ever. Will historians even be able to pick out which ‘Spider-Man’ reboot was which? It’s not likely.

We have constructed a rapidly perishable culture of spoiled, unhealthy people that use advanced technology to avoid understanding their own weakness and depravity. It is impossible to speak about the most dire issues in public using honest terms without provoking the shrill rage of the ‘disabled’ masses, each of whom has a special list of ‘illnesses’ and traits for which xe is oppressed.

It is a culture that is sliding happily into Soviet-level mediocrity, too terrified to make any changes that might offend a sacred group, at a time when the academy invents a new sacred group every other week.

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