A large supply of men who DGAF and don't have much holding them down is how you get really serious social instability.
They might not be beating their wives but let it roll unchecked for 20yr and it gets bad.
They might not be beating their wives but let it roll unchecked for 20yr and it gets bad.
When you are born and live in poverty, hold jobs that amount to minimum wage or tiny bits above it, have no way to *see* a future of any sort of success; happiness, alcohol, drugs, and sex are the primary forms of feeling good or not feeling pain....
Yeah, you're going to have massive problems at a societal scale.
The elites of this country, along with governments bribed, gerrymandered, and installed by said elites made the volitional changes to social programs that keep people down in poverty. And we're living with those changes since Reagan went off about that "black welfare fraud woman". That was the start of poverty-austerity movement: the idea that cutting off most/all funding would get them to not be lazy.
The credit system instituted in the late 80's only has further cemented the idea that "if you were poor now, you'll still be poor and we wont help you". And housing has gone stratospheric, as have all other bills. And insert homeless numbers talk here - homeless are used as a tool of the elites to show what happens if you don't play along monetarily.
I'm honestly surprised that the political elites haven't instituted ST:DS9's "Sanctuary Districts" (https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Sanctuary_District) . Out of sight, out of mind.
Maybe it's wrong and I'd love to know if that's the case but from personal experience the only way I've seen out of poverty is interest in an in demand field leading to the building and maintenance of marketable skills that allow you to earn a living sufficient to attain economic escape velocity. That seems to me to be a whole lot do with luck at the ground floor. And fiscal and social policy can be as much of a burden as it is a boon all the way along the pipeline.
That said, that escape velocity was directly mediated by both the tax burden of the jurisdiction coupled with the economic opportunities of the jurisdiction and at the end of the day it meant the correct choice was to leave for greener pastures, both lowering the necessary target for escape velocity as well as reducing economic drag getting there.
In the meantime all those kids I knew back in the old neighbourhood are still there, mostly on subsistence handouts, firmly in poverty, and show no signs of that changing.
Would be interested to see any studies that indicate conclusively that any of this stuff does any good, rather than just making those who are politically aligned with it feel good, for anybody reading this that knows, not necessarily just the respondent.
I'm sorry but that is just an asinine thing to say and a textbook case of solving "my pet issue will fix the world" thinking.
Inter-generational poverty was the norm until the industrial revolution. While it certainly sucked for the people living it and we should definitively be taking steps to reduce it it is demonstrably tangential to societal stability.
It seems easy to say that societal stability isn't dependent on social mobility until the lower class decides that it's time to bring out the guillotines.
And yes, it is somewhat ironic society is making the exact same mistakes it has before: forgetting how destructive a large population of uninterested young men is towards society, without ever having to be violent.
What historical events are you referring to?
I consider myself a disaffected male, and am curious to understand my situation from a historical perspective.
I remember (and therefore don't have a source for) users on the web claiming the rise of fascism was enabled partly by strongman leaders engaging all of the disaffected men en masse to serve said strongman's agenda by offering them the things they wanted (respect, status, stability).
If my tripping of Godwin's Law is on the right track, then the GP may be referring to Weimar Germany where Hitler was able to take control over a very quick timeframe, starting with disaffected men and eventually spreading the message to the general populace, taking over the country's government sans violence (though there was certainly violence and intimidation near the end of the Weimar government and probably before then that I am unaware of).
Or, much more likely, the GP meant something else entirely, and I am Wrong On The Internet!
It all has to do with incentives and the role of men in societies which to some degree still apply today. Stop giving men incentives to have families or any other reason to care about younger generations, and they stop having a reason to care for the future. Don't give them an incentive to care about the now (wives, partners, comrades), and they stop having a reason to care about the now.
Not having people care for the future is a great way to make them live their lives as short-sighted and hedonistic* as possible, which further affects their reason to care about the now beyond themselves. Not having people care for the now is a great way to incentivize inner conflict and have a party rise to fill the gap.
*: Hedonism on its own has a whole slew of other problems I'd rather not get into detail with, but for the sake of comparison, online dating apps' meat market approach hasn't exactly helped younger people obtain more satisfying relationships.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Societal_collapse#Examples_of_...
Societal collapse is probably something most people desire to avoid, and if the large numbers of disaffected men are the 'canary in the coal mine' and symptomatic of a weakened society, then we as a society also want to come up with solutions to ameliorate that particular suffering as a part of strengthening society as a whole
To quote Bill Burr "There are no feminists in a house fire"
too many soldiers
too many men, not enough solders
too many immigrants
not enough immigrants
immigrants didn't integrate
immigrants integrated too much
not enough defense spending
recession from too much defense spending
lack of scientific knowledge
proto-technocracy instead of realpolitik
too much like today
not enough like today
the worst thing to happen to civilization
not actually that badMost people interpret inflation as obvious government mismanagement, I interpret it as an inevitability because of the inherent conflict between medium of exchange and store of value caused by using gold as currency.
Saved money that is used as a store of value interrupts the circulation of money which then stops the payment of taxes which then forces the government to find a substitute for the loss of tax revenue. The answer is to separate the medium of exchange and store of value function into two separate "institutions". Cash is not a store of value, banks delegate the store of value by giving loans to producers of value i.e. companies and entrepreneurs. If you just save cash/gold, there is no guarantee anyone is going to produce value in the future. You are basically speculating that there are going to be people in the future that will gladly take your gold and then people act betrayed when that speculation didn't pan out.
not enough crypto