I spent several years of my life raising someone else's son "out of wedlock" with great care and devotion, while his other male family members have so much family values they have been married several times, but couldn't bother to show up. We are on good terms, and in spite of his having a "single mother" he survived to adulthood, and without the criminal record the author warns of as a consequence.
This publisher is operated by a conservative think tank. I am not surprised that they claim that civic unrest following police executions is the result of "out of wedlock" parenting by the poor, but it is paternalistic, condescending, self-serving, personally insulting to myself, and most importantly, totally unsupported by any provided evidence.
This is hacker news. What is a hacker if not someone who does what works because it's works, even when it's not
conventional, and even when authority figures tell you not to because it's naughty?
This article furnishes no evidence that being married forces poor people to be good parents, nor do all the downvotes in world.
But if you (partly) raised him does that still make him "raised by single mother"?
Because I think any male role model invested in a kid will do, it doesn't have to be a biological parent.
In my country, despite all government intervention, the strongest statistical correlation whether someone becomes "successful" later on in life is whether they have a male father figure growing up, or not.
This is treacherous discussion. Broaching the idea that there's any biological basis for parenting, child development, etc. is pretty much verboten since it runs askew of idealism.
I get the sense most progressives, at least in the US, would be uncomfortable with/hostile to someone saying:
> the strongest statistical correlation whether someone becomes "successful" later on in life is whether they have a male father figure growing up, or not
since it implies that there's something intrinsic/fundamental about men(and a nuclear family more generally) being needed for healthy child development
honestly even mentioning statistics around a social issue is risky
I intentionally put quotes around successful because successful means different things to different people. But, yeah, the strongest indicator for whether you will grow up successful or not seems to be whether your father is in the picture growing up.
I'm not saying it's causal. And I'm sure many grow up fine with just a mother, but it's very strongly correlated in my country.
Data is data, feel free to present it. And if there is a demonstrable statistical correlation, great. People should still have the freedom to marry someone of the same gender. Single parents should still be allowed to stay single.
> This publisher is operated by a conservative think tank
Ok so I'm glad we're engaging the article on the surface.
> This article furnishes no evidence that being married forces poor people to be good parents
I'm not sure that was ever said. What they're arguing is about how societal institutions like marriage have largely declined and it's happening along with other large changes in society: lack of trust, friends, etc.
And clearly from what you've said, the legal distinctions of marriage are far less important than whether there's two adults in a family raising children.
I agree that it's important to have stable responsible male role models. I object to the state preventing abandoned parents from getting divorced, and treating them with them various other forms of animus -- something that is advocated for by conservative think tanks like the one that payed for this article, and had negative consequences for people I care about.
The sociological data regarding being raised by a single parent is out there. It is extremely clear that it correlates with a number of negative outcomes. You being offended by this doesn't change the statistical reality of the situation.
As a man in my late 30s, I began to see older male relatives of my own and of friends dying of the usual things like cancer and some even of opioids, but the thing that struck me was how many of them depended on hiring the funeral home staff as fill-in pallbearers. I made it a priority to be sure that however things go, I'd like to be able to convene a party of six. One of the things I did was get involved with a fraternal organization, as weird and anachronistic as that sounds, it has been very rewarding, and you get to see what a mixed bag other guys at different ages really are and how you are both similar and different. Another was setting better personal boundaries and committing to owning and prioritizing my own social life in romantic relationships, and made a commitment to a set of long term hobbies that I should be able to do until I am completely incapacitated.
I heartily recommend all three things to anyone who felt the original article resonated.
There used to be 'sportsman's' clubs, ham radio clubs, sailing clubs, hiking clubs, bowling leagues, search-and-rescue, jeep clubs etc that have to an unfortunate degree just faded away only to be replaced by meetup groups that just seem to be trying a little...too...hard....
Fraternal organizations, hell, that's what they're for! Men of 30 and up to get together and drink beer and tell war stories.
My nostalgia is for Ed Ricketts' version of that at Pacific Biological Laboratories in Monterey. Sort of a low-brow early California take on it.
"The lab became a meeting place for intellectuals, artists, and writers, including Bruce Ariss, Joseph Campbell, Henry Miller, John Steinbeck, Lincoln Steffens, and Francis Whitaker."
If you ever make it to the Monterey Bay aquarium they have Ed Ricketts' bookshelf, including a copy of A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake.
Funny, I already do most of these things in addition to some others. Adding solitary self improvement skills are a necessary start, and friendships are indeed often the effect of being useful at something. Some gaps are astronomy, which I planned to pick up as part of celestial navigation cert for sailing, and the gardening bit, as I just bailed on doing a vegetable garden.
I've seen a few of these efforts over the years, and good on them, but it's like they're trying to reconstruct Freemasonry, which already exists everywhere in the world and it is there for guys who are looking.
This post resonates with me, but I definitely don't think it's hopeless. I'm in my early 30s, and have "no friends". There are people I would consider my friends, but as we grew up, we got adult responsiblities like jobs and family, most moved to different states for work, so I haven't actually been able to see them for years.
Recently I've been working to improve my life, so I've been going out for walks around my neighborhood more. Just by leaving my house more often, I think I've talked to my neighbors more in the past 2 months than I have in the 10 prior years I've lived here. Now they ask me to get their mail when they're out of town, they ask if I need any help after my wife's surgery, etc. When I go out, I rarely see anyone else my age, it's normally older people out doing things around the neighborhood. I say older, but I'm not exactly young; I was starting high school when my parents were my age. I really believe that the "loneliness epidemic" is a product of a generation that socializes almost completely online, and has no connection with their community. That's how I used to be, and I realize now how shallow and fake online relationships are.
> I really believe that the "loneliness epidemic" is a product of a generation that socializes almost completely online, and has no connection with their community.
I agree about "connection with their community" but I'm less sure that socializing online is the root cause, though I agree it almost certainly a contributing factor at this point.
I live in a developing country which has substantially more street life, community, know your neighbors, etc than most places US/Australia/Europe. And a lot of it is simply due to the quality of housing.
When you've got 6 family members living in a house that might only be 300 square feet and there's no air conditioning...there's little surprise that in the evening so many people are sitting outside where natural interactions happen.
I can't find a reference now but I saw an academic article showing the same effect in the US South. There used to be a "porch culture" where in the evenings people would sit outside on their porches. This made it much easier for neighbors to interact. Then with the rise of air conditioning, suddenly being inside was noticeably more comfortable than being outside.
And it isn't just air conditioning. Consider all of the other changes in the past -- I dunno, 30 years? -- that have made "being inside" much more comfortable.
When I was a kid it was pretty common for kids to share bedrooms, for a house to have only a single television, there were only three TV stations anyway, definitely no handheld gaming/video watching/etc...all of those things were factors that would push you to go outside.
I think another thing could be how easy it is to only interact with people who share your interests when you were raised doing it mainly online. Older coworkers have said that before the Internet became widely used, being able to find common ground with your neighbors and coworkers was the only way to have any social interaction. Now though, it's so easy to find an online group with common interests that it can seem like a chore to talk to someone who doesn't share a lot of things in common. Even when people do go out in social situations, it's not uncommon to see a lot of people sitting on their phones.
Like you said, air conditioning made it so you didn't have to interact as much if you didn't want to. Now with the Internet, you can sit in the AC all day and think you are being social because you're talking to likeminded people online, even though you likely aren't making meaningful connections.
As an aside, my wife is from the US South, and what you read is spot on. Even if it wasn't sitting on the porch, it might be going to a local creek or lake to cool off. Even now with AC, it's not uncommon for friends or family to be driving by the house and decide to stop by and talk just because it's part of the culture now.
We embrace isolation and anomie as we have more disposable income. It's our choice because we find value in comfort and privacy. The best argument to be made that this is a poor choice is that we discount the work needed to maintain social relationships, and chase after bright shiny things at the loss of something more valuable.
You could also say that we discount the discomfort of living close to others after we have achieved some separation. I definitely think being poor is romanticized by some strains of thought.
I think a desire for authentic community is a mark of material affluence, and should not be seen as a regression. The community we desire is not actually authentic. We don't want to be around poverty or dysfunction or addiction, which are all elements of authentic communities. We want a sanitized community. It's just the next ask after air conditioning.
I think this experience is surprisingly common. Modern society affords us a lot of mobility, but I don't think we realise how much it costs us in terms of stable friendships.
I have a young kid, and he's still too young to really have "friends" (when you're young enough, any stranger is a friend), but eventually we'll either have to decide to live in the same place for a long time, or he's going to have get used to constantly switching friends.
I think you're right. Not building meaningful relationships with friends, family, and neighbors, is one of my biggest regrets of my 20s. It adds a lot of stress thinking how small my support system is, which prevents me from wanting to take risks that could further my career or life goals. It reminds me of the African proverb "If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together."
It probably depends a lot on where you're from. I would be amiss to forget that this hasn't changed for a lot of people, probably the overwhelming majority of people.
However, for people who work in the tertiary sector of the economy (ala the three-sector model of economics) this is fairly common. Most of the people on this forum would fall there, and that sector has been growing.
Hot take: Maybe this is less about modern society and more about what stage of life you're in? I think that urban professionals have been moving around a lot for decades and that settling down in a community as you get older is the pervasive norm.
>Many pundits and commentators focus on economic deprivation or sociocultural factors—above all, racism—to explain the recent wave of urban anger, triggered by Floyd’s awful death. But the data show that American society has fewer people in poverty and less bigotry compared with decades past; and police use of force is far less pervasive than it was during higher-crime periods
This I think is a really bad argument to disregard those causes. What's relevant for discontent is not deprivation in absolute terms, but treatment in relationship to expectations.
Yes, racism is arguably not as bad as it was decades ago, but the expectation of how to be treated, and the voice that common people have now, is much, much larger.
The clearest example of this is the MeToo movement. Women obviously have gained a lot of rights and are in many ways much better off than they were merely a few decades ago. But that does not mean progress has been made as fast as people think it should have, and that's what matters, together with the capacity to speak up.
> In 1960, the out-of-wedlock birthrate in the U.S. was 3 percent. In 2000, it was about 30 percent. Today, it is 40 percent.
No matter how you feel about it, it’s got to be said that change thing large has to have some sort of affect on the population. And those effects are still quite unknown.
Yes, adolescent behaviour is a consequence of parenting.
Marriage is not a guarantee of good parenting. It's just a legal status that may or may not indicate a capacity and readiness to perform good parenting.
So, what is good parenting, and how does it work?
It is an inter-generational positive feedback system. All mammals have it. The human parenting lifecycle is longer than most.
Securely attached parents have higher baseline oxytocin (OT) and a more pronounced OT response to interactions with their children. OT augments the mesolimbic DA system response to visual child stimuli, enhancing their reward value. It also inhibits AMY and augments anterior insula (AI) responses to infant-cry stimuli, facilitating a more empathic reaction. OTmay also modulate prefrontal cortex activity to suppress negative emotional reactions to infant crying.
These neurobiological influences promote responsive, affectionate caregiving, which in turn promotes OT activity in children, along with child attachment behaviors that further engage parental brain systems, resulting in a positive feedback cycle that culminates in a mentally healthy, securely attached child.
Genetic influences of the child can also either support or interfere with child attachment behaviors and parent-offspring bonding. OFC, orbitofrontal cortex; PFC, prefrontal cortex.
The biology of mammalian parenting and its effect on offspring social development
James K. Rilling1, and Larry J. Young
I agree, marriage isn’t a requirement for a stable and long term relationship. That being said, it’s a pretty good indicator, or at least it used to be, and a shift of 36% is very significant.
All of the stats he cites outside of the suicide stuff don't differentiate between men and women. They indicate that everyone (men and women) feels like trash these days.
Unless every Ken Burns doc I've ever watched was a deepfake, the overwhelming majority of cannon fodder in major conflict in recent human history has been young men, so maybe there is something to the young men break stuff idea. However, there are plenty of women toting AK-47s in the YPG, so I'm not sure the degree to which this is a cultural thing.
As for the suicide stats, I believe that men tend to use guns, and guns are one of the gold standards for this sort of thing. Men are exposed to guns more as a cultural thing, and may feel more confident/comfortable in their ability to commit suicide with one.
Characteristics of adult male and female firearm suicide decedents: findings from the National Violent Death Reporting System - BMJ Injury Prevention
Here are some graphs this nonprofit made from CDC data that help build the idea that women try to kill themselves more than men, but men are more successful at it.
Impactful article that sums up something I think a (very comparatively young) friend of mine is going through following a divorce just before COVID hit
Except does the title perhaps mean “melancholy” because I’m having a hard time finding the intrinsic nihilism as offered by the depictions within the piece. It simply labels unfortunate outcomes of certain elements of our modern experience as such and offers no epistemology or substantive thoughts for how the author arrived at such.
As presented, I think ‘melancholy’ is far more appropriate of an adjective here versus something as layered as ‘nihilism’.
Headlines need to be hyperbolic nowadays to maximize clicks, and 'rising [sadness] among young men' doesn't sound nearly as dangerous as 'rising nihilism among young men'.
I think the writer of the headline thinks that most of his or her readers are unaware of or uninterested in the philosophical connotations of 'nihilism'; to them it means 'without an enduring source of meaning', 'without enduring emotional connections' or more frighteningly 'without moral compass'.
Here is a societal process (family instability), the headline wants to imply, that makes our country more dangerous.
Hello! Your point is well met. However, I would challenge this:
I think the writer of the headline thinks that most of his or her readers are unaware of or uninterested in the philosophical connotations of 'nihilism'; to them it means 'without an enduring source of meaning', 'without enduring emotional connections' or more frighteningly 'without moral compass'.
While respecting that the English language is, and forever shall be fluid and dynamic given the particular zeitgeist a speaker inhabits--rhetorical evolution as an indicator of societal-change is not rhetorical refabrication as a device to give authority to an individualized degree of authorial intent.
Which IMO contributes to a real misunderstanding to the beautiful nuance that exists within the various schools of nihilistic study; as I don't know of many that would justly simplify nihilism down to "without a[...]source of meaning' or even 'without moral compass'. We have perfectly cromulent and appropriate terminology existing already that encapsulates these things. At least not any that aren't preoccupied with merely the surface of whatever branch of 'nihilism' the author is supposing lies at the root of their thesis here.
I still think 'melancholy' is a far more direct and appropriate description of the machinations that bring about such a sensation of existential malaise, far more than anything that approaches nihilism.
THEN AGAIN...
I am reminded that Sartre had a lot to say about the duality of meaning between what a thing presents itself to be on the surface, and what a thing is ("Being and Nothingness", Ch1. 'The Pursuit of Being') and this 'rhetorical refabrication' has a long history of precedent in such high falutin studies.
The author brings up an interesting point of discussion that can be unpacked in a myriad of ways, I'm just not sure about the one that was chosen.
Mistrust indeed. I won't even tell you all what I think on here. Too personal.
Edit: that aside, there's not really that much meat to this article. It's more like "We were sad once, and we blame our families." That's not new. What's the solution?
If we break out children who lost a parent to catastrophe vs children who lost a parent to that parent's decision to leave, do they have the same crime rates?
"Having two parents" isn't what's generating the effect.
And children who lost a parent to the criminal justice system...which is highly predictive of coming from an over policed community where the child will be targeted by law enforcement and the judicial system.
Broken families and single parents are two separate issues. There are data showing children of single mothers by spousal death do better on lots of metrics. This is likely because the remaining parent arent antagonistic towards the deceased. No matter how you slice or dice it antagonism is necessary in a divorce.
Even when controlled for income? I'd imagine single parent households are strongly correlated with lower socioeconomic status, as is antisocial behaviour.
No, having two parents Living at home reduces the probability that you will be Arrested for a crime.
You are implying causality, when much of that correlation is because single parent homes are affected by the same policies of over policing of vulnerable communities twice. Once with a parent and once with a child.
I would say that plenty of kids break windows, even good kids from good homes.
Kids just have a thing for breaking windows. Sounds like somebody needs to give these kids some dirtbikes to burn off that energy.
Driving blackout on the freeway with a blindfold, shooting airsoft guns at pedestrians, a 17 year-old with a handgun in his room? That is some broken home stuff.
This entire thing is based off the ridiculous premise that the "family life" used to be some universal great bedrock. Have you ever talked to your parents generation about their family life? It often seems pretty shitty too, even if the accident of their birth forced a marriage.
Then provide some compelling non-anecdotal evidence supporting your claim. Out of wedlock births seems like a poor measure, and it's the only one presented in the article. "Common sense" sounds like something you believe without evidence to me.
Heh. Growing up with a rough relationship to some of my family, I was always told that I would eventually not feel the way I did. I found it ironic at the time, as both my father and stepmother were estranged from at least one of their parents and siblings and generally did not talk well of them.
> But the data show that American society has fewer people in poverty and less bigotry compared with decades past; and police use of force is far less pervasive than it was during higher-crime periods.
Nonetheless, it could very well be that poverty, bigotry, and excessive force are still high enough to remain a threat to social stability.
And that threat is certainly increased by ubiquitious video evidence of bigotry and excessive use of force which didn't exist in decades past.
A lackluster opinion piece that is attempting to disguise as an essay.
The thesis of the article [0] is unsupported by any of its content.
Statistics for the number of friends people have are adjacent to statistics about suicides, implying a causal connection, but no statistics about the number of friends that suicide victims have are presented.
[0] -
>The lack of stable families has contributed to the widespread mistrust of others and lack of social relationships among young people. It has, I believe, given rise to a sense of nihilism even in an era of relative material abundance, which has characterized some of the violent upheavals.
At least that one is obviously just an opinion piece. I donno how they arrived at the conclusion that having a stable family made him conservative, but that's his business and that's fine. I'm pretty sure both sides of the aisle are aware of the value of a stable family.
Your point is well made in David Bahnsen's book, Crisis of Responsibility, where he cites multiple studies indicating that higher education and income levels correlate with stable families on the right or left of the political spectrum. I assume that would also hold true for libertarian/independent/3rd party types as well.
It’s as if we as humans adapted to a certain way of organizing ourselves and now that way is deemed “bigoted” and “old fashioned”
Who would have thought that nature designed a better social system than we could.
Not related to the content of the article, but that has to be the worst page scrolling experience I've ever come across. Something steals focus and scrolling breaks until you click on the page.
> This is how my friends and I treated one another, and others. There were other examples of stupidity. Taking baseball bats to taillights in parking lots. Driving around town shooting pedestrians and bicyclists with airsoft guns. Getting blackout drunk and racing down the freeway wearing a blindfold.
At no point in my life have I ever wanted to damage someone else or their property for the fun of it, and I wouldn’t call the acts above an example of stupidity. This is just bad parenting or hanging around people with bad parenting.
And my parents worked 24/7 trying to survive with their small business and trying to learn English. But I don’t think I had to be told not to go around breaking people’s tail lights. I saw how hard they worked to put food on the table, it would feel disgusting to me to throw all that effort away doing things to harm others for no reason.
I think you're the exception, not the rule. I've never done anything like what the author wrote, but being involved in mischief is something every male I know did. You can even see it in animals, where the young males try to push boundries with authority figures.
My point was those examples weren’t mischief. Waking up their friend with firecrackers is mischief. Shooting people with airsoft guns and driving blackout drunk easily putting them in harms way is not mischief, at least not in the “kids will be kids” way.
What the author is describing are felonies. I don't think most kids around the country are out doing things this extreme, or it would have made the news.
Smoking pot and shooting out the occasional window in a house under construction with a BB gun, hell yes there are kids all over the place doing that.
I remember how 'jenkem' got thrown all over the news (which maybe like 3 people in the US tried, ever), and if kids were weaving around freeways blackout and shooting pedestrians with airsoft guns on any sort of an appreciable scale, I think we would have read about it in the news by now.
I think this kid just grew up in a poorly-supervised household around some really sketchy kids. Glad to see he's doing better, and I hope he finally apologized to Seth. Notice there isn't a shred of remorse in his description of locking his buddy in a room and giving him possibly severe burns.
Maybe it's a difference in location, that quote was all stuff myself and my shitty friends did growing up, and most other people I went to school with. Also in a large midwest city.
It's interesting to read these bad hot takes on why while plugging your ears
That's not the 'why' though. Plenty of people across the world grow up in similar situations as kids in the Midwest and they don't go around destroying other people's property.
I honestly think there's something really messed up about American culture. I believe you can draw a direct correlation between what I think it is - people being indoctrinated into selfishness from an early age - and behavior like that.
For context, my wife grew up in a small town in the Midwest. She used to tell me horror stories about high school and I used to dismiss them as maybe be it just being her experience and nobody else's. I changed my mind when one day we went to the wedding of a high school friend and we were sat on the same table with some people who were 'popular' in high school. Their recollection of those years were as bad as my wife's. One woman, when asked about her experience literally told me 'honestly, I try not to think about that time'.
These people grew up in a location that was by far better than my own upbringing in every possible metric: affluent town, very low crime, infinite resources when compared with my developing country schools, access to studying abroad, etc... And they fucking hated high school. That blew my mind.
But did their parents consistently love them and have a stable relationship with each other? It's well known that lack of those factors causes lifelong psychological problems in children which manifests as criminal behavior, teen pregnancy, drug abuse, and suicide, as well as perpetuating the problem to the next generation.
As you can imagine, my wife and me have had several conversations about how different our experiences going through school were. I've spotted a couple of things in particular that couldn't be more different:
1) Kids in the US tend to move around a lot
2) Schools classes are designed so that kids are with different groups every year/subject
3) Kids who want to go to college are under a lot of pressure from age 14 or so to perform flawlessly or risk their whole live plans being derailed
4) The obsession with popularity ('Prom King/Queen', etc.)
I think all of those lead to very poor bonding between kids. Sure, here and there you'll have kids that'll become life-long friends, but the vast majority of Americans I've met barely talk to high-school friends (they tend to form long-term bonds in college).
I have a theory that's one of the reasons school bullying is so prevalent in the US. Don't get me wrong, there were bullies in my school in South America too, but they were few and far apart and they usually grew out of it by 6th grade. It's easy for a bully to pick individual victims out of a school full of individuals... it's not the same when the kid they try to pick on has been friends for years with the same 10 to 15 people.
In any case, the conclusion we've come to is we don't want our kids to go through the American school system.
I grew up right in the middle of a very large American city. Did plenty of stupid shit like smoke cigarettes on subway trains, go to parties in abandoned buildings in sketchy neighborhoods, threw up on the sidewalk. Never once have I decided to commit property or violent crimes.
You’ve never once decided to murder anyone either, but around 500k happen per year around the world.
I’m not sure why it’s worth pointing out that few of us have done what the author describes, but it’s probably not uncommon. Some kids egged my car at highway speeds, which could’ve cracked the windshield or caused an accident. Not too much difference between that and baseball bat + tail light.
I understood your question to be around the potentially commonly held belief (read: what I've heard) that city folk are generally brought up with less responsibility bestowed upon them than rural folks (and the scale that exists between those two extremes).
Maybe not entirely "responsibility bestowed" but also the behavioural differences (distractions available, ability to deal with boredom) that come with the density difference of both things and people and space.
Edit: replaced the word "fact" for a more appropriate description of the truthiness of the situation.
Hm. My experience is exactly the opposite. Shooting a sign with buckshot or taking out a mailbox are completely unthinkable in my city neighborhood, but totally normal back home.
I think that's a fair comment. The unfortunate thing is the majority of shouty over-sensitive parent-types have been given media attention to their "holier than thou" and generally in-theory-only opinions about what makes good and bad parenting.
It's actually interesting the effect this has had in society shows how lacking in confidence many parents are, such that they will actually change their parenting behaviours based on such media-guilt-shame fluff. This highlights to me a woefully under-served market in "parenting instruction".
I've smacked my kids when they deserved it, when verbal doesn't work. It was a rare occurrence, but undeniably effective. My kids are great. Flipside: They're still a long way from adulthood and "proving me right", and they're also a single data point in both parenting choices and genetics.
Exactly which society is that? There's a middle ground between a grown ass man telling his child to cut a switch off a tree only to beat them with it repeatedly and "doing whatever they want".
I don't understand the point of this comment other than to virtue signal that you're better than a bunch of teenagers from a decade ago. Whoop-de-fucking do, aren't you special.
The point is to illustrate that those 'freewheeling actions' are not normal and not just part of 'teenage rebellion'.
All of them could cause major harm to oneself or others that's not normal, signs of serious underlying problems.
'BASE jumping' or 'stunt plane piloting' is dangerous but that's something altogether different than 'driving down the freeway blindfolded' - which is quasi suicidal and very dangerous to others.
So you believe doing bad things is bad, and things that bad are not things that you would ever do, as you are normal. Interesting. I had never considered it that way before.
The point of the comment is it’s not run of the mill stupidity, contrary to what the author implies.
Is it controversial that people who don’t race drunk and blindfolded are better than people who do? Just because they are teenagers doesn’t mean there are zero standards.
> At no point in my life have I ever wanted to damage someone else or their property for the fun of it
Their examples are extreme. I'm not sure if they did it on purpose.
But change it to throwing eggs at people, to baseball batting letter boxes and drink driving going home once or twice from a party and lighting fires for fun, and it'd be considered normal.
The point is young men see the value of the prank and the value of risk to them to exceed the damage to random people.
It's takes a long time to understand what the value of a letterbox might be to some people, that's very complex knowledge. Or how easily a fire gets out of control, or an egg can blind someone when thrown from a car.
The alternative to learning these things is an authoritarian rote learning rules. Free thinking societies have costs, we can try to minimise the costs but we also need to understand that is hard.
> It's takes a long time to understand what the value of a letterbox might be to some people, that'd very complex knowledge.
It’s not as soon as they are forced to earn and pay or work to reinstall one. And I guess I hung around exceptional people, but I didn’t think it takes genius to recognize the value of a life or limb, especially someone else’s. Anyone past toddler years should be able to comprehend that if they don’t want random violence inflicted on them, they shouldn’t do it to others.
Yes I have, and I remember kicking each other in the balls too. But kicking each other in the balls does not have a high probability of life long or any major injury (as a small child).
My original point is still that a twisted nipple or graffiti or egging a house is not in the same class as racing black out drunk and shooting pellets at people on bicycles.
I don't want to snipe but sometimes it's irresistible.
The Golden Rule should be abandoned as an ideal. It's a Christian ideal, it's a Western ideal - I support the general effort but I think we've made a mistake. It is the sort of heuristic that works well in a smaller society but does not scale.
People treat themselves badly all the time don't they. If they are motivated to do this it puts a big hole in lots of social ideas about how humans work. .
The drive to set rules to govern behaviour might be because people are control freaks - or it might be the rules are made by people to moderate their own actions because they correctly believe they can't control them otherwise. A high agency society doesn't need rules - they are developed for low agency societies.
This is another version of why political Liberalism seems to be getting unhealthy in the United States and the United Kingdom - the assertion all equal before the law would have better results in a homogeneously high agency society.
> People treat themselves badly all the time don't they.
Are we thinking of the same Golden Rule? In the more archaic form: "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you." It says nothing about how an individual treats himself or herself. It therefore is sensible for both narcissistic and self-loathing individuals. Perhaps the rule is a little odd for masochists, but that's hardly disqualifying as a fraction of the population.
> It is the sort of heuristic that works well in a smaller society but does not scale.
The scalability is perfect in the version that I know: For everyone with which you personally interact, the overhead is like the amount of time spent with your personal circle. This is fundamentally limited to 24 hours/day of treating people in any way no matter how outgoing the individual. For everyone else, endeavor for universally applicable policies under which you would want to live.
Perhaps the breakdown that you are pointing out is that it is difficult to craft Golden-Rule-compliant policies suitable for massive nations posessing many, many unique individuals each with unique needs. I agree there, and I have my own take on how to address it. Largely, my take is how I wish others would address that particular challenge for me (ducks). Now, my policy preferences could be awful in another's eyes. But, no one must agree with my preferences as far as the rule is concerned.
> The drive to set rules to govern behaviour might be because people are control freaks.
This Golden Rule only acts from within the adherent. It is not enforced directly by any government or culture of which I know. Rather, it is about governing one's self accordingly.
I'm a bit tired RhysU - so I might take back some of this later.
We are - you can read the Golden Rule as an ideal to aspire to as you are doing. There is nothing wrong with that - as I mentioned I'm with the general thrust of the idea - but I still contain doubts about it. It can be warped.
The person is intended to ponder the consequences of their behaviour onto other people - to place themselves in another's shoes. This is an appeal to self interest and use of self control by means of empathy. This is sense - if you have agency - this is understood to be an ideal.
Suppose though - the person thinks ill of themselves. They are in a bad place and hate themselves. You mentioned masochistic behaviour as jarring - but it doesn't have to have this specific ritualized sexual nature. You have heard of suicide by cop. Some of these shooting videos are kabuki. If people are tearing their hair out - they may be in a state of self harm and to be harmed by others in response to their provocations may be an informal request to society from something primal deep inside their minds.
This is common with low agency people and locations with low agency people. I would go so far as to say some people and some groups of people are constantly sending out signals to the society that they want to be attacked. That is their ideal. That is their ideal. I don't have an origin explanation but it's there.
This is a weird place in the human psychology but it is not rare. Even this morning I read an adult dating advert where a woman wanted to be sexually assaulted and then implied she'd provide her daughter for the same - age unknown - but a troubling impulse - and not the first time I've heard of this. I once saw a man advertising he had HIV and wouldn't use protection but it got weird when other people subscribed to his meetups for... reasons. On the internet it is difficult to discern what is real here but I think most of us have seen enough pornography that it is obvious there is a demand for harm - sure this is legal pornography but this is something different and darker to the idealization of sexuality the feminists use as a foil - but it is an idealization.
> Largely, my take is how I wish others would address that particular challenge for me (ducks).
This is where I come to also. You might mean in jest - but I mean it seriously. It's not my job to solve another communities problems. It might be my job to get out of the way - but that's it.
I think there exist instances the endeavor for universally applicable policies under which you would want to live is a failed project.
It looks to me as if some parts of Chicago are informally monomachy - that is young men dueling over mates, power, money. I say informally in the sense the government could step in with soldiers and kill a lot of them - who I'm sure would go out of their way to get themselves killed - to restore a universal order. It is easier to let them kill themselves chaotically - I'm certain the police came to the conclusion if two assholes subtract each other from the system - who cares, nobody to blame but themselves.
Official recognition of an underpolicing policy with this intended affect will never happen because the Liberal (R+D) faction has a strong desire to not send in soldiers - admitting policy failure and also has a strong desire to punish those who don't conform to universal norms - so informal monomachy it becomes.
The honest answer might be formal monomachy - which was used to regulate some medieval societies and I feel it likely it would be instantly embraced by the culture to solve the problem within itself even as it would be declared immortality by Democrats and Republicans.
In China they are using Social Credit. As they see it - if you break the rules, they begin subtracting off your privileges. Western Liberals are correct this could be abused - no doubt - but are much more reluctant to admit that offering equality under law to all is using as cover by violent criminals.
In my country we used to have outlaws or those beyond the pale. The idea is there were people who broke the law but were still on board with the society. Then there were another category who broke the law but also rejected the society - and for these the protections of the law were removed. If they rejected the premise of the society - it was not economical to continue for the government to pretend they were citizens.
I don't want to claim I know the answers either - but I think this is the conversation we should be having. I seem to be in a minority of agreeing that the BLM sentiments are real but also that it's a problem they're going to have to fix themselves and by that I mean something much more than the nonsense of getting rid of the police or having black police officers. This is repeating the same process and ridiculous soul searching for why it doesn't work. This means you go deeper - and ask yourself if the laws should be the same.
This would be upsetting but it would present a clear choice. Opt into the Liberal Western society with its norms and rules - or don't and make a different choice - then live with this choice. It might have a better equilibrium or it could blow up - it's really not the responsibility of other Americans to convince blacks what road to take - it has to be their own or there is no agency. Agency means giving your citizens the ability to become ex-citizens - maybe.
America is a big space - you can cede some territory for separatists to break off into. I'm sure that sounds crazy to 90% of United States citizens but it's starting to sound less crazy than putting up with the threat of insurrections and everybody gaslighting each other.
I appreciate the thoughtfulness of your response. I hear and appreciate both your points and also the obviously long and uncomfortable, reflective path it has taken for you to write them down so clearly. I will reread this for a long time to come. Please be well and reach out if you would like to talk further on any of these topics.
I think the comments here reflect a crowd that doesn’t see the reality of this world. For those without purpose, or those that don’t feel the love from society or that they’re creating value for society, these types of scenarios definitely take place. And then these young people are given records and never get the opportunities that others have because once you have a record that’s the end of everything. And it stems from the lack of exposure to the infinite possibilities life provides that a good parent or mentor could foster. Try to put yourself in the shoes of these people for a second and stop judging. This judgement leads to the punishment vs rehabilitation we take towards these people when we lock them up in the US. Understand the root cause...to some people who’d read this (apparently not on hn) this is quite normal. Instead of criticizing, the better questions would be how to solve challenges like these that are rampant.
Oh yea, I used to live int he bay with some programmers who were paid hundreds of thousands a year. Every Friday night they would come home with red bull and jager and get hammered. These were guys in their 30s. And needless to say, they would do some pretty destructive stuff without fail...years later, one of them told me, I’m bored with my job, I feel like I want to contribute - no shit...
I don't see the "downfall" narrative in real life. It seems like it's meant to provoke a defensive response from people the same way certain political language does. I, as a stereotypical guy, have more freedom now than ever to do what I want. No doors have been closed on me by recent societal changes.
Yes, maybe cultural attention is elsewhere but that doesn't mean that anything has really changed. In fact the relationships described in this article with kids pulling dangerous pranks on each other sounds more old school than anything I've experienced in my life.
Of course you don't. Rome never fell that's why the czars of russia were named for caesar. The roman empire never fell by all estimations. It just kinda... Went away.
I have a few questions out of curiosity:
what is your age? What is your income? and where do you live? A 35 year old making 350k in the bay area is not prone to the nihilistic struggle that fuels many young men
> The deconstruction of the male's role in society will contribute to the downfall of the west, and that's coming from one of these mistrusting, nihilistic, 4chan contributing males
You should get off 4chan if you actually think any part of what you stated here is real. You are stuck in an echo chamber but those beliefs are by no means universal.
I would say that there is copious evidence of the effort by some to degrade the role of white men in society today, often simply in the name of diversity. The relegation of high achieving men is a hallmark of foundering societies.
"What has been getting far worse, however, is family life. Stable families have been in free fall over the last few decades. In 1960, the out-of-wedlock birthrate in the U.S. was 3 percent. In 2000, it was about 30 percent. Today, it is 40 percent. (This figure obscures class divisions: for college graduates, only one out of ten children is born out of wedlock. For those with only a high school diploma, six out of ten are born to unmarried parents.) The lack of stable families has contributed to the widespread mistrust of others and lack of social relationships among young people."
It is certainly a preciuos story that lack of trust amongst children is caused by lack of marriage amongst parrents, but the author has not furnished evidence that this is a causal relationship.
"We didn’t really believe that the adults in our lives cared about what we did. Seth got thrown out of his house and wouldn’t tell us why. Josh and Brandon’s dad had been divorced five times, and he was always traveling for work. My adoptive mother had recently moved to another town."
I know many adults today who had abusive or indifferent parents that did all of these things _while married_.
The factual claims in this article are not supported by the text. City Journal is operated by Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, a conservative 501(c)(3) tax exempt think tank. They seem to be more interested in promoting their values than showing their work.
> Still, we had food and cheap cell phones and cheap beer—and we had one another, unlike today’s friendless millennials.
What the hell kind of judgemental piece of bullshit is this?
> The lack of stable families has contributed to the widespread mistrust of others and lack of social relationships among young people.
The whole piece is like this - quote some unrelated stats ("suicides up" - even though they are less than the late 90's, and "out of wedlock births are up" - even though the 40% for "now" means those kids are zero years old so unlikely to be rioting) and then use them to support some blanket social statement unrelated to the "evidence" other than "oh this sounds bad"
I expected some level of hand-wringing here in response to this article. Maybe it's something in the water in rural America, but none of this is unusual or extreme, and if this behavior is foreign to you, then you and I grew up in different circumstances.
Getting together with the boys and breaking the law, pushing each other to go a little further each time, is a rite of passage all over the world. Maybe it's practice for the kinds of risks adults sometimes have to take to survive. A life without these formative experiences sounds dull and sterile to me. I sometimes wonder whether the outrage and histrionics people sometimes get into over seemingly trivial stimuli aren't caused by a lack of exposure to games with real stakes.
I grew up in a rural area around some sketchy people too, but this stuff seems a little extreme.
I grew up around kids who drank and did stupid stuff, but driving blackout drunk down a freeway blindfolded and shooting at pedestrians with airsoft guns?
I don't think that's a rite of passage. Growing up, even the kids whose brothers were on meth weren't doing stuff that extreme, usually they caught a charge on something way before they got to that point.
Breaking your wrist on a dirtbike? Sure. Catching a juvenile possession charge? Sure. Shooting out windows with a BB gun? Sure. Ghostriding in a parking lot? Sure. Yelling obscenities at people out of a passing car window? Sure.
> Maybe it's practice for the kinds of risks adults sometimes have to take to survive.
Shooting pellets at unsuspecting drivers and bicyclists and racing blackout drunk in large vehicles are not risks that one needs to take to survive. They’re not even risks, they’re just blatant acts of disregard for others.
I hope my kids don’t live in a community where people routinely break laws that kill people.
This doesn't make sense. The losers of those wars were risk takers as well - and they lost.
In fact, for an EXISTING nation, risk taking males are more of a threat to social order. Risk taking, non-conformist males make terrible infantrymen - that's why they beat out the risk taker and make you follow orders. The military doesn't want a cosplaying rambo cocking everything up.
> In fact, for an EXISTING nation, risk taking males are more of a threat to social order. Risk taking, non-conformist males make terrible infantrymen - that's why they beat out the risk taker and make you follow orders.
That's 100% wrong. One of the main advantages of western militaries is that they encourage independent thinking. In the Marines, one of the things leaders are told is that they should tell their troops what needs to be done, and let them decide how to get it done.
No one commands you to raise and aim your weapon every time - that doesn't mean western military forces are a bastion of free thinking. They're reliant on chain of command and soldiers acting on their own is not good for an military.
Honestly everyone I know that was like that, that broke the law when they were young, turned out to be unsuccessful. Many are addicted to opiates. Very few have real jobs. None of them are educated beyond high school. Frankly, they're all harshly considered "losers."
It doesn't surprise me these things happen in rural America. Small towns, your dad knows the local sheriff, you doing something "illegal" and getting arrested is them taking you to your dad.
It's not just rural towns. My dad grew up in the suburbs outside a major city, and he has similar stories of people getting drunk and destroying property in high school. The cops were just as lenient as well. He told me one time he was drinking with some friends and they got pulled over, and the cop just told them to drive straight home because it was the middle of the night and he didn't want to deal with a bunch of drunk teenagers.
That roughly sums up my feelings and experience as well. I found it curious that another commenter suggested such behavior is unique to America, which I strongly doubt.
This publisher is operated by a conservative think tank. I am not surprised that they claim that civic unrest following police executions is the result of "out of wedlock" parenting by the poor, but it is paternalistic, condescending, self-serving, personally insulting to myself, and most importantly, totally unsupported by any provided evidence.
This is hacker news. What is a hacker if not someone who does what works because it's works, even when it's not conventional, and even when authority figures tell you not to because it's naughty?
This article furnishes no evidence that being married forces poor people to be good parents, nor do all the downvotes in world.