So, I've had an axe to grind against this mentality for a while, but I've finally decided to address it.
I for one have never gotten this mentality much. I never bought much into machismo or any of that nonsense. It just comes off as a form of gaslighting. Like, in the form of the work environment, it's often used to bully and gaslight people into accepting difficult, unrewarding work that they hate, and then forcing them to suppress their emotions regarding it, which causes them to develop a form of bitterness that just leads to perpetuating these ideas and cycles. It's completely unhelpful.
Like, imagine you're a young adult or teenager. You don't want to join the work force or do certain jobs, but then you're told "BE A MAN", whatever that means. What are they saying really? "Real men" take whatever work is available to them. Never mind this basically undermines worker bargaining power. "Real men" will show up early and stay late. "Real men" will provide for their families, basically reducing men to being a giant piggybank for the rest of families, and reinforcing traditional gender roles. "Real men" won't complain about their work, or how difficult it is, as this makes them look weak. "Real men" will instead humble brag to other men about how hard their lives are, making it a competition as to who works harder, is more exploited, and constantly one up each other in the "misery olympics". And when other men refuse to engage in such behavior, "real men" will portray these people as weak "beta males" or "soy boys" or "cucks" while they're the strong and virile alpha male, thus gaslighting men into a culture of working hard and being miserable is desirable, and not doing so makes one less of a member of the male sex. And of course, if other men still refuse to participate, they will develop hostility toward such men, which seems to be based in pure bitterness in rage. People seem to justify their sense of self worth and their suffering in the shared company of others, and if people refuse to partake in such a toxic cult of masculinity, well, they might be shunned from the community.
One of the reasons I've brought this idea up is personal experience as someone who refuses to partake in these crappy attitudes, expressing what I really think about them. Part of it is because I've seen such attitudes used to try to bully and gaslight people in the work environment. Anyone who surfs anti work communities has probably seen the "help wanted" signs. "Looking for REAL MEN", blah blah blah. Want someone who WORKS HARD AND BLAH BLAH BLAH. Often times lamenting young peoples' (Millennials/Zoomers') work ethic while putting the boomer/gen X generations on a pedestal. Yeah, to some extent it does seem to be generational. With young people less likely to engage in such sentiments, and older people more likely. Not a perfect correlation as conservative millennials/zoomers will obviously engage in this behavior too and some boomers may or may not, but yeah, seems somewhat correlated by age. As if everyone should follow the toxic advice boomers seemed to have fallen into of marrying young, having kids, being forced to work hard jobs they hate to provide for their family, often times with them working to get away from their families (note: all the jokes about hating their wives). I mean, yeah, with such a not happy generation, why would young people ever decide to not live like that?
Another reason I want to bring it up is because of the supposed crisis of male meaning. We see this be a common topic on both sides these days, but generally more on the right than the left (because how dare the left ever deal with a topic involving "privileged" people?), but to be fair, Yang has discussed it a bit himself. Honestly, as someone who experiences this crisis but in a different way, I see it as anomie. A mismatch between the norms of society and the reality. Society normally gives simple answers to people as to what they're doing with their lives. Men are normally seen as providers and breadwinners. They are supposed to go out there, get jobs, work their butt off, and provide for their families. But, society is changing. Womens' liberation has made women more responsible for their own financial well being, and as Yang would point out, women tend to go to college and get educated more than men. While men tend to struggle with the job market and fall apart. I am technically one of these men who just became a societal drop out because life...fell apart. A lot of it was related to my deconversion from Christianity coming at the same time I entered the job market, and that not going well since I was a college grad who couldn't find a job in my field. And I just never got off of my feet and in my case, I kind of just learned to embrace the nihilism, since secular humanism as an inherent sense of purposelessness in it. I essentially went into the direction of absurdism with the idea of work being like sisyphus rolling the rock up the hill. Why do we do it? Why do we roll this fricking rock, man? it seems so pointless. And as such, I've learned to reject the rock. I don't WANT to roll the rock up the hill. And maybe life would be simpler if I was ignorant and just accepted the role society tries to impose on me...but I know it wouldn't make me happy. It didn't make the boomers happy, no matter what they claim. I already discussed their internalization of their misery. I'd rather have....liberation from this bad system. I'd rather remake societal norms around where we are now. If we really take the idea of human centered capitalism to its logical conclusions, society should revolve around people, it shouldnt force people into roles that they hate. A truly free system would be designed around people to let them reach their own highest good, whatever that is. An authoritarian and evil system would force people to bend to its will, not giving people a choice, and making them slaves to it. We live in a system that's the latter...hence my own stance on things. For me, the biggest issue is the system still tries to impose its ways on me, not allowing me to live as I am but become a wage slave in this unhappy economy. And there are real consequences to saying no. Poverty, social rejection and isolation, etc.
But for most people who are still in "plato's cave", the men who buy into the system, but the system fails them, the problem is a bit different. It's the idea that people can do everything right, and the system will still fail them. This is the source of a lot of misery in younger generations. The economy doesn't work for us like it used to. People can't get jobs like they used to. They can't raise families. Many in my age range have delayed or forgone the opportunity to start a family because they can't afford it. Even educated people. And for less educated people, well, many of them are screwed. In a sense, I can sympathize with this too. I mean, whatever my views are now, I was, at one point, the college student with a bright future ahead of them, but then reality slapped me in the face, and due to my education and existential angst, I was able to better understand the system. Most people would just be like "why doesnt this work?" or they would embrace their misery like many before them. But with me, I'm just like "this system doesnt work, it was never great, let's do something different, here are my suggested policy solutions." Which people reject because I essentially reject a lot of the underlying values and norms of the underlying system and generally have the mentality of "well if people drop these bad attitudes then this wouldn't be a problem." I mean, you can't fix this broken system. I don't want to see a return to the old system working and traditional values and blah blah blah. I want something different. But, most people will just stumble around in the dark looking for solutions that aren't there and won't be there until they change their mindset.
The problem IS this system of jobs and work and forcing people to work and this weird cult of masculinity to bully people into working. Work is the problem. Jobs are the problem. We're never going to provide a good job for every single american, and we shouldn't even bother trying. The free market won't provide them because "job creators" want to make jobs to get stuff done, none of that dignity of work stuff matters to them. That's just what we tell the plebs to make them content to suffer while being de facto slaves. It's the truth. No one owes you a job in capitalism, let alone one that pays well. And any attempt to reach this system where everyone has a job, let alone a good job that they like and pay they can live on, is a fool's errand. ANd most of our suffering is due to sticking to this system, while it fails us again and again.
Leftists might go on about the good old days of the 1950s and 1960s, but still, you cant make that work...attractive to me. it sucked. It always sucked. Maybe the system "worked", maybe it felt good, many people had meaning, but even then, people suffered, as they do today. We just tended to sweep it under the rug more. I dont want to go back to that.
And communists. I was reading tonight about Cuba and how people in communist countries have a "right to a job." This is something common on the left. But as always, the left kind of failed to achieve its promises, the work was never good, it didnt pay good, and people, like always, hate their lives. In Russia they drank their problems away. We can go on all day about Russian adages of "we pretend to work and they pretend to pay us." That's how I feel about capitalist work too, btw, but in Russia, yeah, this problem still existed.
Maybe the problem is work itself? For all the talk that it provides dignity and meaning and blah blah blah, it really comes off to me as these are the pleasant little lives we tell the slave class to make them want to be slaves. Just as we spew that toxic "be a man" crap too.
Honestly, instead of trying to gaslight and convince ourselves that this system is worth saving...maybe we should just admit that it isn't. This isn't to say I want a communist revolution or anything. That's the last thing I want, besides a fascist takeover at least. I want us to take the parts of the system that work, but then fix the broken stuff. UBI and my ideals are compatible with capitalism. And we could make a better form of capitalism where people are free to live as they want and forge their own visions of what they want in life, rather than have it imposed on them by an authoritarian system that forced them to participate in it whether they wanted to or not. And you know what? I bet if we did that, or moved in that direction, the sausage would still be made, and everyone would be happier and more free.
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