Family instability fuels rising nihilism among young men
city-journal.org
city-journal.org
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.
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.
Are you saying it's bad to point out that it's good to have both parents around?
> 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'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.
You're casting a pretty wide net there.
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.
I never said anything contradicting that
That illustrates that in america, mentionning truth instead of ideology is risky.
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.
https://fathers.com/statistics-and-research/the-consequences...
I heartily recommend all three things to anyone who felt the original article resonated.
Fraternal organizations, hell, that's what they're for! Men of 30 and up to get together and drink beer and tell war stories.
It's not weird and anachronistic at all!
"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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_Biological_Laboratorie...
Though not perfect, it's a good starting point along the lines you're talking about.
I think they have sign ups in a few weeks.
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.
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 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.
Most of the men who fit the article's profile I know have never left hometown.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Keep at it; I've only just now started to make a few really great ones.
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.
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
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
http://dx.doi.org/10.1136/ip.2008.021162 ^^ DOI for the SciHub folks
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.
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’.
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.
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.
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?
"Having two parents" isn't what's generating the effect.
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.
All are white, apparently from families that had a substantial amount of wealth.
I totally agree with the author, broken families lead to broken lives. Broken families aren't necessarily broke.
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.
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.
it takes graphic imagery to bring it out. Trump saying a statistic is far more likely to evoke a response than someone reading it in a book.
Even if statistically poverty is less and crime is less and abuses are less, if people don't SEE that, is it actually real?
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.
https://www.tampabay.com/opinion/columns/Column-Why-being-a-...
I guess this was in-between the baseball bat wielding wildings...
What browser are you using?
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.
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.
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.
It's interesting to read these bad hot takes on why while plugging your ears
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.
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.
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.
Yes, but HN is not a good representation of society at large.
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 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.
Have you spent time with kids? They love kicking eachother in the balls well past the age of toddler.
Things that seem obvious to adults are not obvious at all to 16 year olds, and often even counterintuitive.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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"
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 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.
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.
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.
And on the other hand society expects the military to fill the ranks of infantry and enlisted sailors, including the reserves.
From at least some perspectives this is confusing: we're all only here because our, overwhelmingly male, ancestors went to war and won.
Conjecture: a society that doesn't foster risk-taking behaviour in young males may soon find itself extinct.
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.
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.