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I think the post fails to make the case that male behavior (or the culture that induces male behavior) is the root cause of divorce rates. - The rise in impris

I think the post fails to make the case that male behavior (or the culture that induces male behavior) is the root cause of divorce rates. - The rise in imprisonment is basically entirely a result of the War on Drugs, aka carceral slavery. - The problems with employment are that unions have disappeared, jobs are hyperexploitative (a better measure than the unemployment rate here is the Social Security Disability rate), and real wages have stagnated. - Middle-class divorce rates (different than what the author references, which is not-getting-married rates) have only started to decline over the last decade or so. The link between middle-class families--where the author writes "Poor and working-class people follow suit"--is totally unsubstantiated by his sources. - I've not read this book, but looking at a synopsis [0], it's unclear to me how you could take a book clearly about women (162 of them!) and walk away with the conclusion that the root problem is no one expects men to stick around. It feels to me like more of a character study of broken systems (again War on Drugs, income inequality, etc.) - The paper referenced at the end [1] is junk? Contains a lot of self-cites and no original research? I can't dig into the secondary sources, but the amount of editorializing makes me skeptical of the foundations here. It also seems at odds with the rest of the post: if men will do whatever it takes for sex, it seems like they should be working hard to stay out of prison? Or to hold down a job? Is the argument that women should be more discerning? I'll also say I keep seeing this weird line from conservative or conservative-ish posts about people on the left not speaking up for marriage. I'm super left and that's not my experience or anyone else's I know? I mean, we're very in favor of gay marriage, and everyone I know acknowledges the research is pretty unequivocal in favor of two-parent households, so I think there's some nuance missing from this conversation. --- Broadly though, I do 100% agree our society is busted, and not just for systemic reasons (though those are big pieces). Many of us have lost a sense of community and place we once had. I don't know what about our culture has done this, but it's bad. [0]: https://searchworks.stanford.edu/view/13738165 https://searchworks.stanford.edu/view/13738165 [1]: https://carlsonschool.umn.edu/sites/carlsonschool.umn.edu/files/2019-04/baumeister_vohs_society_2012_0.pdf https://carlsonschool.umn.edu/sites/carlsonschool.umn.edu/fi...

nitrogen 5y ago
Many of us have lost a sense of community and place we once had. I don't know what about our culture has done this, but it's bad. The marketing, political, religious, and cultural industries that divide and conquer us into ever finer slices of demographic identities to sell us things have convinced everyone that they can only be themselves by emphasizing their irreconcilable differences with others. In doing so they have robbed us of any sense of common identity. It's no longer acceptable to be thought of as part of broad category A where everyone has different interests and affinities. Instead now, we have to be exclusively XYZ and W, and nobody else could possibly understand the XYZW perspective.
- camgunz 5y ago
  I agree retrenching pluralism is necessary, but it's a long road to hoe. I've been reflecting lately on my day to day, how even before the pandemic I never knew my neighbors or anyone in my neighborhood, had a low-key resentment towards any forced or incidental social interaction where I'm not 100% in control of my experience, sometimes I load up HN and high-road people for an hour or two or some online dating app, blah. It's like, no wonder things are depressing, and I'm super privileged. Mostly what I'm running up against is existential and abstract. It's hard for me to even imagine working gig jobs or being back in tech support. Maybe this is just rehashing what you're saying, but I find modern life intensely dehumanizing. There's so much space between us--on purpose--that we're just adrift. My brother and I were talking with an older guy a couple years ago, and he pinned the blame for this on garages. Time was you parked in your driveway and had a neighbor interaction, but with the garage, you just slipped in and no interaction. Was it always an awesome neighbor interaction? Definitely not, but it had a cohering effect. I think he's wrong in the micro, but it does to me ring true in the macro, where we have so much more control over our interactions that we just don't get the incidental mixing. Then again lots of people in our society have tons of unwanted interactions (e.g. women) so dunno if this is at all right. IDK this was weirdly personal and whiny, but I don't know how else to really get at what I've been thinking for a while.
homonculus1 5y ago
>Many of us have lost a sense of community and place we once had. I don't know what about our culture has done this, but it's bad. Every community is a social organism fighting uphill on an energetic gradient. Therefore in order to survive a community always has to have a boundary. If you cannot delineate "These people are Us and those people are Not Us" then you cannot store energy in social bonds. People watch their cultural and societal investments get cracked open and poured out for the benefit of outsiders. Then they stop investing and turn to rationalized materialist systems that are more reliable. And then you do not have a community. Here's an effective strategy if you're part of a materialist system: at every turn, make a moral argument for why the investments inside a target community are actually evil and must be cracked open. Mount a massive and continuous campaign to redefine the core concept of community (loyal in-group preferentialism) as an exploitive world-historic injustice. Then coordinate this as a basis for reward and punishment at scale. Now you can watch people trip over themselves to leave their community and seek material protection inside your system. Rinse and repeat et voila, you've perfected technological metabolism of human culture. Bye bye, sense of community!
purplerabbit 5y ago
> The rise in imprisonment is basically entirely a result of the War on Drugs, aka carceral slavery. Pretty sure this is false, unless I’m really out of touch with the statistics

nitrogen 5y ago

Many of us have lost a sense of community and place we once had. I don't know what about our culture has done this, but it's bad. The marketing, political, religious, and cultural industries that divide and conquer us into ever finer slices of demographic identities to sell us things have convinced everyone that they can only be themselves by emphasizing their irreconcilable differences with others. In doing so they have robbed us of any sense of common identity. It's no longer acceptable to be thought of as part of broad category A where everyone has different interests and affinities. Instead now, we have to be exclusively XYZ and W, and nobody else could possibly understand the XYZW perspective.

camgunz 5y ago
I agree retrenching pluralism is necessary, but it's a long road to hoe. I've been reflecting lately on my day to day, how even before the pandemic I never knew my neighbors or anyone in my neighborhood, had a low-key resentment towards any forced or incidental social interaction where I'm not 100% in control of my experience, sometimes I load up HN and high-road people for an hour or two or some online dating app, blah. It's like, no wonder things are depressing, and I'm super privileged. Mostly what I'm running up against is existential and abstract. It's hard for me to even imagine working gig jobs or being back in tech support. Maybe this is just rehashing what you're saying, but I find modern life intensely dehumanizing. There's so much space between us--on purpose--that we're just adrift. My brother and I were talking with an older guy a couple years ago, and he pinned the blame for this on garages. Time was you parked in your driveway and had a neighbor interaction, but with the garage, you just slipped in and no interaction. Was it always an awesome neighbor interaction? Definitely not, but it had a cohering effect. I think he's wrong in the micro, but it does to me ring true in the macro, where we have so much more control over our interactions that we just don't get the incidental mixing. Then again lots of people in our society have tons of unwanted interactions (e.g. women) so dunno if this is at all right. IDK this was weirdly personal and whiny, but I don't know how else to really get at what I've been thinking for a while.

homonculus1 5y ago

>Many of us have lost a sense of community and place we once had. I don't know what about our culture has done this, but it's bad. Every community is a social organism fighting uphill on an energetic gradient. Therefore in order to survive a community always has to have a boundary. If you cannot delineate "These people are Us and those people are Not Us" then you cannot store energy in social bonds. People watch their cultural and societal investments get cracked open and poured out for the benefit of outsiders. Then they stop investing and turn to rationalized materialist systems that are more reliable. And then you do not have a community. Here's an effective strategy if you're part of a materialist system: at every turn, make a moral argument for why the investments inside a target community are actually evil and must be cracked open. Mount a massive and continuous campaign to redefine the core concept of community (loyal in-group preferentialism) as an exploitive world-historic injustice. Then coordinate this as a basis for reward and punishment at scale. Now you can watch people trip over themselves to leave their community and seek material protection inside your system. Rinse and repeat et voila, you've perfected technological metabolism of human culture. Bye bye, sense of community!

purplerabbit 5y ago

> The rise in imprisonment is basically entirely a result of the War on Drugs, aka carceral slavery. Pretty sure this is false, unless I’m really out of touch with the statistics