Men are struggling, no one cares – a talk by Warren Farrell

    This commentary is more in response to the headline than the actual forementioned discussion, but yes, no one cares. Men don’t care because they’re too competitive. If some men fail, that’s not really our problem; if anything it’s to our advantage. Why care about your rivals if their failure removes them as rivals? And women don’t care, because women only have sympathy for other women and for children, or for someone who can present as a child, as helpless and threatened by predation. And men aren’t good at doing that.

    When they’re upset, men generally fall back on aggression and withdrawal, which makes them look like dangerous predators. And women are inherently suspicious of or dismissive of erratic, dangerous, and disorderly men. Women don’t like men who aren’t doing well and aren’t being productive and helpful and generous, unless they’re children.

    And men don’t like men who are doing well, because that’s a rival that might be a danger to you and your position. Allies and followers are useful, but it’s their responsibility to make themselves useful to you, not the other way round. If you can’t be bothered to be one or the other, then you’re either dangerous, or a rival, or a useless burden. And it’s hard enough to get things done and survive and succeed already, thanks. We don’t need any dead weight or potential enemies. So the sooner you can just go ahead and die off and stop endangering the rest of us, the better. 
    Women do have a greater sense of solidarity and beneficence, but it’s mostly for one another, and a large part of its purpose is to provide protection and solidarity and exclusion against low-value and dangerous men. Children, or people who can present as children, get a pass. They don’t get solidarity, they aren’t treated as responsible equals, but they get largesse and sympathy and kindness and protection. They get patronage. 

    But women don’t give $#@%all of that for a bunch of predators. If they’re failing and dying, good. Peg the patriarchy. Whatever doesn’t serve women’s security and wellbeing, or the security and wellbeing of their children, can go $#@% themselves, and hurry up too. Women can be just as merciless as men. They’re just differentially selective. And their confrontation and power structures are more subtle and covert. You might not even know that you’ve been cut out or cut off, if you aren’t paying proper attention, until you look down and suddenly notice that the locks have been changed or your arm’s come off. 

   This talk’s title is, of course, an exaggeration. Some people of both sexes clearly do care. The fact that this discussion is being had is proof of that. What is meant, I suppose, is that caring isn’t a broadly enforced cultural value. In a state of nature, or at least in the current cultural state of nature, it isn’t anyone’s natural instinct to care about this problem. It requires a special awareness or awakening of concern. It isn’t on most people’s minds, for the reasons stated. Men lack even the basic physical features that would help them command sympathy. They look far more like wolves than puppies. And they’re not great communicators. 

    And I could be entirely wrong, but it’s at least possible that part of the reason why upper class white women find it so easy to project childishness onto minorities (and so respond to them maternally) is that 1. Being less familiar and distinct as minorities, it is easier to project both positive and negative ideations onto them (which isn’t really anyone’s fault, it’s just how less familiar things are processed), and 2. Both maternalistic and paternalistic white people have trained black people in the role of inferior wards of a superior culture.

   Parental care isn’t necessarily a bad instinct, and it’s natural enough and perhaps sometimes even appropriate. But whereas the paternalistic condescension of slavery (in its more paternalistic forms) was more obviously exploitative, and the return demanded for care of their wards was labor and productivity, maternalistic condescension is just as determined to treat people as perpetual children, but with different aims.

    Rather than being a tyrannical father, white people now are more like a devouring mother. White people don’t want labor now, they want love. They want you to love them and listen to them and never leave the house or disagree with them or become independent. You belong to them, because of their love. You owe them your loyalty and to never leave. I think Shelby Steel, Jason Whitlock, John MacWhorter and many others have covered this topic fairly well. 

    Of course it’s not really fair to generalize that it was “white people” in some catchall sense that did such things. Slavery is hardly a new or unique idea. It was a human universal. The particular paternalism of some corners of American slavery was enacted particularly by a certain select group of Southerners, particularly the Cavalier culture. And parasitic maternalism has been the province of a select group of Northerners, particularly the liberal descendants of the Yankee Puritans. And it’s not surprise that black people, coming out of one system of care, fell into the opposing one. The Yankees were natural allies, after all. These allies just got a bit too addicted to their role.