Jordan Peterson has spoken at length about the threat of civilizational collapse, the idea of our society crumbling like ancient Rome’s. For this to occur, humans must turn their backs on traditional values, including courtship, marriage, and the creation of nuclear families.
The crises playing out in the United States and beyond involve both men and women. The collapse of civilization involves a change in attitudes—more specifically, a change in attitude toward childbearing and childrearing. Women, more so than men, appear to be less interested in the preservation of traditional values.
What’s going on here?
Of course, swipe culture has made things considerably worse. Today, people are less likely to seek out love in bars and clubs. Instead, they’re more likely to seek it out online, especially via dating apps. This is true in China, it’s true in South Korea, and it’s most definitely true in the United States.
The stereotype of men having lower standards for prospective mates, and women being pickier is a tired one. However, it also happens to be true.
On Tinder, as Gerrard notes, what we’re left with “is a large number of men fighting over a comparably small pool of women, which allows women to choose potential matches very carefully.” It’s “Hunger Games” meets Darwin meets wholly unrealistic expectations. It’s a brutal system, where only the strongest and most aesthetically pleasing of men can survive.
“Since the early 70s, western Gynocentrism has systematically gelded and demasculinized men,” Tomassi said.
As “the pre-established feminist concept of an oppressive patriarchy became a much easier sell,” women were given “unilateral control of the birthing process.” Hormonal birth control for women, ostensibly “the holy grail of human ingenuity,” has played a key role in the disempowerment and disenfranchisement of men.
Some will find Tomassi’s comments objectionable. The 53-year-old has been called every name imaginable. Is he a misogynist? He’s not. Having read a couple of books of his, I say this with complete certainty. An unapologetic realist, Tomassi is like a cross between Peterson and Hunter S. Thompson—entertaining and enlightening, in equal measures. Married for a quarter of a century, Tomassi is a father and, by all accounts, a man who loves his family dearly.
He said if we “flash forward to 2022,” masculinity is now officially “toxic.” The death of what it means to be a man—a husband, a father, and so forth—didn’t occur overnight. It has been occurring for decades, death by a thousand cuts.
Four generations of men “have been systematically isolated from one another because fraternity and male space has been effectively demonized in the 21st century,” according to Tomassi. An argument that carries a great deal of weight, I believe. Human beings, he said—again, rather accurately—“are innately tribalistic.” Although globalization has made our “world even smaller, the human machine doesn’t really change.”
Across the country, men “kill themselves between 3.5 to five times as often as women,” according to Tomassi.
“Most of these suicides are ‘deaths of despair’ among men ages 45–65,” he said.
Tomassi, in his work, refers to this phenomenon as getting “Zeroed Out.”
“These men lose everything in some way–a job, a wife, their kids, etc.—and the world they were told would have their backs never really existed,” he said. “Valueless men are pathetic men, and four generations of isolating and demonizing masculine influence leaves the Zeroed Out two options: Rebuild yourself or delete yourself.”
