Clown Car: 6/28/23
Inez joins me one day early this week, as she’s traveling on Thursday.
We talk about the coming decision in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, wondering what the more moderate decisions of the Court over this term imply for what it will do about affirmative action. The way I see it, the previous cases indicate that either the justices have been chastened by Dobbs or that they’re building good will to finally strike down affirmative action.
The second half of the podcast revolves around unlovable men, and how hard life is for them. Inez and I seem to agree a good bit on sex roles, male/female differences, and where society has gone wrong. I talk about the shift from PUA to incels in our culture, and how that reflects a more general increase in mental illness over the last decade and a half. I also express my discomfort with the idea of turning low status men into a new identity group that we need to have compassion towards. Conservatives usually understand how self-defeating and limiting such an approach can be in other contexts. We get into the pluses and minuses of putting the focus on individuals changing their behavior versus more systematic efforts. I recommend people here read my article How I Overcame Anxiety if you haven’t already.
Listen here or watch on YouTube.
Links:
Me, thread on the impacts of getting rid of affirmative action in California and Michigan
SCOTUS getting its liberal rulings out of the way?
William Deresiewicz, “Unfuckable Hate Nerds” (Tablet)
Clown Car: 6/28/23
My guess is that in California state schools ban on affirmative action for admissions is enforced. And the admission stats prove it. For UC Berkeley for incoming class in 2022, here are the stats:
White (30%), Black (3.2%), Asian ( 52%) , Latino (20%).
https://opa.berkeley.edu/uc-berkeley-fall-enrollment-data-new-undergraduates
Due to statistical measures in admissions, Affirmative action ban can be enforced. However, in faculty hiring it is easier to force diversity but not undergrad admissions as the number is quite large and statistics can prove that colleges practice affirmative action.
PUA content was pretty clearly toxic if taken 100% at face value. Nevertheless it 180'd my life, starting with "Jonny Magic and the Card Shark Kids" (I played Magic borderline obsessively) which referenced some portion of "The Game" and started me in that direction. It was such a striking moment that I remember the plane ride where I read the first book nearly 20 years ago. "The Game" is the book I tell people that changed my life.
I never started approaching women aggressively, like they teach. Instead I worked on becoming more confident, extroverted, interesting, and better dressed. I'm not going to claim I became some Casanova, but it took me from maybe the 95th percentile of "social" to maybe something like the 30th. It turns out, if you have school/career success and some money, that's enough to do pretty well.
The PUA scene was never really accepted as legitimate self-help that I could tell, probably because of the more toxic aspects of it. Also Mystery was a freak that no one wanted to actually become. And Style was by definition impossible to emulate as a semi-famous guy that he claims originally had crippling shyness or something. They had a reality show for a season, but it seemed like we were supposed to laugh at them (and definitely laugh at the "contestants"/"students") rather than learn from them.
The incel community is really sad. If I'd been born 5-10 years later that's probably the rabbit hole I'd have fallen into instead. You threw around some theories in this podcast, but I actually think Reddit is responsible. It allowed young men to build a community around a shared experience, whereas I was out on my own at the time. Perpetual victimhood and demonization and pulling your comrades farther into darkness. But I look around these days and I don't see an obvious alternate community that's telling people "you can improve." At least not to young, unconfident, men. The few who are - and I'm happy you named Jordan Peterson because he's probably the best example - are vilified. Often specifically because of who their audience is - young men. How are you supposed to improve the situation of young men if you can't target them for advice? It's along the lines of CRT, in that it invokes feelings of victimhood but also takes away your agency to improve yourself to overcome the situation.
I think the comments about monogamy are exactly right. Society is safer and happier when it's 1-to-1 with men and women in relationships. And dating apps have made the situation worse overall, as does the increasing divide on college campuses in favor of women. Only the top men are happier when women outnumber men. The top men get an unhappy harem and the bottom men get nothing and become angry. (To say nothing of the dynamic of women preferring to marry more-successful men, which I don't think you mentioned but is 100% a thing.) We're also living in a no-war situation in the West (for the most part, for now) where men don't disproportionately die. It's difficult for a society to accommodate a large unhappy young male demographic. It's dangerous to let this potential domestic threat fester, and I say that as a recovering almost-incel. The answer is self-help outreach, if society will allow it.