Men Need Not Apply

Introduction

“If you speak the truth, have a foot in the stirrup.” — Opening quotation

KMOHello, and welcome to another installment of the C-Realm Podcast. I’m your host, KMO, and this is episode number 571, Men Need Not Apply. Prepared for release onto the World Wide Web on Saturday, May 8th, 2021. In this episode of the podcast, I’m going to play a conversation that I recorded a few weeks ago with First of Incelmatics. First was here on the podcast about a year ago, I think. And he and I rendezvoused on Zoom to talk about this blog post that he sent me like a month and a half ago now. And the recording to that conversation has gone AWOL. So he kindly reconvened with me and we did the conversation you’re about to hear is the first hour of a three hour live stream that we did together for his channel Incelmatics on YouTube.

So if by the end of this, you want more, well, I’ll post a link to it in the show notes for this episode, which you can find on C-Realm.com. But to get us started: the blog post that he originally sent to me, and which was the basis for our conversation, is on a blog called Face to Face — or, you know, the URL is Akinokure, which is Japanese for face-to-face — face-to-face.blogspot.com. And if you don’t know how to spell Akinokure, well, I’ll post a link to it in the show notes for this episode. But you could probably find it just by doing a search for “subcultures are dead.” And the full title of this blog post — and this is from February 27th, 2021, on the Face to Face blog — is “Subcultures are dead as straight guys drop out and cocoon online after the Great Financial Crisis.” And it begins as follows.

What really stands out about the so-called subcultures today is the total absence of guys in general, and straight guys specifically. It’s 99% girls, whether straight, bi, lesbian, or otherwise. There are a few token gay guys and trannies, but even those demos are mostly absent. Actual straight guys, though, have totally checked out of subcultural communities. It’s revealing that the labels for today’s main subcultures contain the word girls. E-girls and alt-girls. That’s no accident. There’s no such thing as e-boys or alt-boys. Before, subcultures had gender-neutral names because their membership included both in roughly equal numbers. Scene, emo, goth, grunge, punk, wave, new wave, metal, disco, etc.

So I won’t read any further. I think you get the gist of it there. I mean, from the headline in particular, straight guys just aren’t going out into the world and engaging with women. They are staying home and they’re living their lives online, you know, such as they are. So that’s the seed of the conversation that you’re about to hear with First.

Program identification: “You’re listening to the C-Realm Podcast. C stands for consciousness.”

Subcultures are dead

FirstSo I sent you this because it seemed to be out of the ordinary for [wording unclear; heard “Kana”] to cover at this point of the game. You’ve kind of been going from the doomer sphere to kind of like the, I guess, just political-reality kind of sphere — everything [wording unclear; heard “results based”] that I seem to be going on as well. But yeah, and I think you’ve covered many different countercultures on your podcast throughout the years. So this is just — the thing is the author. I think he’s a boomer male, you know, by reading. It’s kind of hard to find, but if you click around on different articles that he’s posted previously, you are able to find kind of the clues, because you said you saw one of his recent articles.

KMOYeah, I’m on his blog. And before we started talking I was reading his most recent articles, which are all about mask-wearing. But you know he talks about — and even in this “Subcultures are dead” piece — you know, he’s talking as if he has first-hand experience with subcultures from the aughts and the ’90s and even the ’80s, and he’d have to be at least my age to have been a participant in subcultures from the ’80s. You know, to know anything about grunge or punk — I mean, punk is even a little before my time. So I don’t know how seriously to take this guy. Like, he also toots his own horn a lot about how good-looking he is and how he’s out in the world with cute girls coming up to him like in secondhand shops, and women coming in and displaying themselves for him. I just don’t know how seriously to take all this.

FirstSo recently I was — you know, BuzzFeed’s not a good source, but I guess it’s a good source just to hear someone going through there and seeing what people say. So there was a popular, a viral Reddit “for the day” thread, and it asked: teachers, do you see any subcultures? What are the subcultures in your classrooms? And a lot of teachers didn’t have much to say, but there were some prevalent ones. There was K-pop, there was the stonks, which is just guys that go out at lunch and discuss stocks and stuff like that, which is funny for kids that are elementary, middle-school age. And then — but everyone they talked about — it was either no, there’s nothing really going on, or there’s like the typical gamer one, or yeah.

Everything they talked about was very gender-segregated. And when I sent you this, I said, you know, I have a different idea as to why there’s no straight males in subcultures nowadays. And the ones he discusses — like e-girls, LGBTQ is probably the biggest one — and you can’t be a straight male really there, unless, if you are, you’re called an ally. So you’re not part of the clique. You’re just, yeah, you’re already cast out. So yeah, the subcultures that exist today — the guy that’s writing this, his observation is completely correct, in my view — is that the ones that exist today, they’re not organic. I wouldn’t say they’re very product-based, like we no longer have real communities. We have like the Star Wars community. Then we have, like maybe we have a baseball community — like, it’s all very —

It depends on a larger market. So it’s very — every single one is consumerist, and people will get into ideological fights on the internet over their consumerist brand. The most infamous one was probably back in the PS3–Xbox days. Like on the internet there were large flame wars. And then you have the Apple versus Samsung. You have all these things, people standing behind the product. That’s their new identity.

KMOA long-standing variation on that is when you’ll find in rural America it’s the Ford versus Chevy pickup-truck dynamic. Like, I drove a Ford Ranger for years and it was giving me trouble at one point and somebody looked at it — “So I see what’s wrong with it: it’s the blue oval on the front,” which is to say the Ford badge or logo. She thought she was being funny.

FirstYeah. So getting into the meat of the article, it is very true. The current culture as I see it today — his arguments — and it’s like many arguments in the media as to why men aren’t in the labor force, why men aren’t participating in greater culture. Men are dropping out of college at greater rates. It’s 70% of valedictorians in high school are now girls, and that can even increase. I mean, that was an old stat that was talked about by Andrew Yang on one of his podcasts that he does. And even Andrew Yang on one of his podcasts had a thing — I forgot the guy that he interviewed — but he talked about men falling behind, young men falling behind on every front. And that is particularly true today. And they’re not only falling out of financial achievements, academic achievements — they’re falling out of even, like, cultural achievements, where that thing shouldn’t matter.

Right — the hippies — it was anti-consumerist supposedly at the start. You know, same with like grunge and, you know, punk, all that type of stuff. But now you can’t even participate in the subcultures as a, you know, as a straight young male, and that is particularly true. But what he — what, you know, Face to Face — argues is that it’s a result of just laziness, of kind of like malaise; it’s not induced by anything else. And you know, to me — he has observations correct, 100. But to me, young men have been pushed out of even participating in subcultures. And you know, these subcultures mainly exist online to this day — you could go on Twitter, you know, anywhere — and yeah, it is obvious, and they’re very gender-segregated too. And you know the importance of this.

Why I brought it up to you is because we know the mechanisms the elite is using to distract the mass of the working class from getting together. And when you have older generations talk about, kind of like, the issues of today, they talk it from like a different perspective than a young man would see himself in that story. So, kind of like most stories — if you watch like Richard Wolff on the left, or you watch like a guy like George Gammon on the right, they’re both, like they both do economic shows. What’s the message there? It’s the antagonism between the top and the bottom, right — the top one percent, you know, versus the 99. That’s kind of evident both in left and right economic spheres. You know, they — but they have different.

You know, they have different reasons as to why in almost any case. And then you have the blue and red tribers, and then their antagonist is, like, the politicians of the other tribe. You know, if a red triber is the president, the blue will divert their attention onto, you know, smearing him. And then as soon as a blue-tribe president gets in, the red tribe will focus their attention, their media, everything on smearing him. So that’s kind of like the two things going on in like contemporary, I guess, politic discussion, like legacy. But for the Zoomers and the late millennials, what I see is that there’s a big gender war — there’s a big gender war, there’s a big gender divide — and what better thing for the elites to have? Like, race is one thing, but a complete gender war — that’s a more balanced population — that’s like that can go on forever. That’s like the perfect formula to keep like a working class distracted and divided.

KMOYeah. I hear what you’re saying. Let me read something from this blog. Three short paragraphs here. He writes.

Female sexuality is malleable, is more malleable than male sexuality. So perhaps the drying up of guys who are willing to show up has led to a lot of girls to adapt their attraction to those who actually do show up, namely their fellow girls. You don’t get rewarded for hiding yourself, ignoring the opposite sex and taking zero risks, insulated by porn girls who trick you into thinking you’ve already got sexual options. It’s their fellow girls who are willing to put themselves out there, take the risk of rejection and show some attention to the other attendees of public spaces. Then it’s their fellow girls who will get the reward.

So, you know, what he’s saying here is that women are actually participating in these subcultures out in the real world and guys are just staying home and staying online. Does that ring true to you? I mean, do you agree with that observation?

FirstYeah, that’s a, you know, that’s a hundred percent observation. But the thing is that you can’t show up as an unannounced young guy. You cannot break into these circles, because women hold all the power now in the online social-media sphere. They hold all the power. They’re most of the influencers. They’re the people who have the most interactions — that is, likes, shares, replies, comments. I mean, there’s many memes like a guy’s Facebook page versus a girl’s, and it shows like one notification for the guy versus the girl — it’s like 50 friend requests, 100 messages, stuff like that. So there’s a great divide on social attention. So it goes down to the woman to kind of invite these males, and you cannot just show up unannounced — you cannot break yourself in. That’s harassment.

That’s the thing — that’s why I say we young men as a whole have been cast out of these groups. They do not hold any of the power. Like, if we had a patriarchy back in the day, now it’s just switched — it’s online in the social-media sphere. I’m not talking about the real world; that’s — the real world is debatable, except now it’s becoming not. But it is a young woman’s game, due to just our innate biology. You know, a woman is worth way more and she gets a lot more eyes. You know, it’s visual platforms, all of these. So yeah, that’s why in the real world what we see is the women kind of choose the men they want around, you know, and they don’t choose many men. They choose — you know, it’s very — it’s kind of like the principle — I’m not saying it’s exactly this, but it’s the 20 percent of men getting 80 of the action.

It’s a very imbalanced system. It’s a very polygynous system — which there’s evidence that’s how humanity, pre-civilization, came about. And I’m gonna put up what I did after you covered this — you know, you gave your opinion, you gave what you thought about this on the C-Realm, and then you did it partly on the live stream too. I, you know, I connected this guy’s observation to the data we have, like, you know, mass data. And this is from the Intelligencer article: “Men and women have never been more politically divided,” if you want to go on that one, and that’s some very interesting graphs.

KMOYeah, you know, I live in Vermont because I moved here, you know, with a woman. I was living with her in New York City and she sold her apartment to come here and, you know, lock in the gains of the increased price of the real estate — you know, the value of the condo — and turn it into a house here in Vermont. And then we got here and then broke up. So you know, I live in an apartment by myself here — not a place I was really ever, you know, ambitious to move to. But here I am. And we had opposite politics from the beginning, really. It’s just that in a new romance you’re willing to set all that stuff aside. But then, you know, when the newness of it wears off, well, then it comes to the fore.

And in New York City, you know, it’s a very liberal place, but even so I could find — we went to parties and I could find people that I could talk to. But here in Vermont it’s a much older sort of hippie-liberal crowd, and I really don’t click with them at all. But the other faction here — the uneducated blue-collar young men who define their self-worth, I think, through the amount of noise they can coax out of their vehicles — and there’s just active, you know, hostility when I pass those guys on the street. I mean, particularly if I open my mouth and I say something that clearly identifies me as having, you know, the diction of an educated person, man, I’m suddenly, you know, they just stare daggers at me.

They, you know, it’s like they would like to see me dead. So I’m looking to get out of this place. But you know, all of the cultural hostilities that I’ve — you know, I’ve been aware of them for a while — they’re really cranked up right now. So I’m not, you know, a witness to the scene, you know, the interactions between young men and women in their 20s. I just don’t have any around me except for Colin, but I’m sure it’s intense right now because everything’s intense.

FirstThat’s funny you say there’s none around you, because America is facing its own demographic challenges. I mean, there’s not enough of young men and women born, and you know, COVID has turned, you know, this situation into a complete baby bust. That doesn’t seem to be recovering, because the same people who said this is going to recover said there’s going to be a baby boom — because they’re outdated, they’re boomers. They’re a boomer — when I say it, it’s not an age; in our community it’s kind of a mindset. You could be a 25-year-old guy and if you espouse old ideas like, oh, just you know, go to the steel mill and shake the manager’s hand, you’ll have a house and two cars in two years — no, the steel mill is in China. The thing is that the same people who espoused the idea that our current situation would cause a huge baby boom because people were locked up inside —

It’s like, well, people have to be coupled in the first place, and a lot of men can’t get coupled at all. So that’s the situation you have. If a man can’t get a text back, then how are they supposed to have a baby? And what happened is — you know, they were completely wrong. There’s a complete other baby bust. So they were predicting, you know, a 500,000 increase in births, and it’s actually like more than a 500,000 decrease — or it’s even more now because this situation keeps going on — and they say, oh, don’t worry, it’s going to recover. And you know, I say no. I say that’s going to be the new trend of demographic decline, and you’re going to have situations, like you say, where in your locality you’re not going to find young people. And we’re already seeing that in America.

I mean, we have to import a lot of young people anyways through the college system just to keep that afloat. So there’s — yeah — America’s demographic situation is a pretty bad one. If you take away the immigration, it would be a very terrible one. And you know that goes back to the situation with men and women. If they can’t pair up, you’re not going to have a young population to grow out of that, no matter economics aside, job market aside, even housing market aside — and all those are working against us anyways. But yeah, that’s the thing. Another problem you bring up is that there is going to be a lack of young people. There already really is. I mean, most of this country is kind of like dominated by a boomer population.

Gen Z is relatively small, because it’s more — it’s mostly kids of the Gen Xers, which is a smaller generation itself than even millennials, and millennials don’t seem to be having kids or getting married. So yeah — but yeah — you’re that with the situation you find yourself in and you’re trying to leave. You know, I find myself in it too, besides like a social circle from high school and college, and many do. It’s kind of like the book we talked about in the podcast, Bowling Alone, which you said — there’s an update to it which I’ll have to check out. It’s a case study of bowling leagues by Robert Putnam. Yeah, basically the disappearance of bowling leagues, and that just — that’s kind of like the stage for it. But there’s many other things. There’s church activity, there’s all these. And so what happened is that social circles have not disappeared.

Subcultures have not entirely disappeared. It’s gone online. You know, it’s just gone online, and online there’s a different power dynamic between the genders. Women hold all the power, and we have hard metrics for this. When you make a fresh profile as a woman online, you get hit up by so many men — and not only men. You know, as the article points out, as the Face to Face blog points out, is that the women are malleable in their sexuality to kind of date other women. That’s completely true for Gen Z women. In the Intelligencer article, near the bottom, there’s a blue and orange dotted chart, and it shows: the blue dots are the straight males from 18 to 88, and then the orange is straight females, 18 to 88. And look what happens from 28 to 18.

There’s a precipitous drop in straight women — it’s extreme. It goes from 85 to 65%. We’re living in an age now where only 65% of women would identify as straight, while for men it’s kind of steady. It’s at 85. It hasn’t jumped so much. There’s not such a — the delta wouldn’t be as high. You know, the delta for, you know, the straight-female decrease is very high. So putting the observation to political reality: yeah, his observation is completely correct. It’s just that the media will spin different narratives to say why this is happening, just like anything that happens with the labor market, any political event. We see the same thing, but the interpretations can just greatly be different. And I don’t know if you want to comment anything on this.

Cocooning after 2008?

KMOWell, my comment was really a question, I guess, to you. The Akinokure or face-to-face blogger, I think he goes by Agnostic. That’s what he calls himself in the comments. You know, Agnostic explanation for this is that young men are basically cocooning at home, online, I think because they’re still in shell shock from the economic fallout of the 2008 housing crash, which seems pretty remote. I mean, if you’re 20 years old, that was 12 years ago or more.

FirstNo, it’s going like 14 years ago.

KMOYou were just a kid then. So that seems like a pretty distant event at this point.

FirstYeah, and it’s not relevant because you have to be in a housing market to kind of you know, men are struggling to get their first jobs. Even they’re struggling to even go out, they’re struggling to like do one semester of college. That’s the data we have is that there’s a participative, there’s a precipitous drop in male participation and even due in academics. It’s very nasty and it’s just it’s not talked about. There’s a guy who wrote: men without work — America’s invisible crisis. Have you ever heard about this book?

KMOWho’s the author?

FirstNicholas Eberstadt.

KMOI am not familiar with him.

FirstSo, yeah, it’s America’s invisible crisis: men without work — and it’s in 20s, yeah, 2016. So he’s actually talked to — I’ve watched some of his lectures. He’s actually talked to like 50 different senators, congressmen, about this issue, about the precipitous drop in male engagement, employment, and he calls it an invisible crisis. What does that tell you? That tells you that when he said that whenever he talked about this issue, he had very hard figures, he had very good data and the thing is there’ll be no response to it, there’d be no care about it. There’d be, like, you know, it wasn’t you. You know, after he talked about, he got access to the like you know, the political people, but they gave no mind. And that’s why he started saying that this is really invisible.

You know this million man, you know tens of millions of men dropping out of society, of labor, really like, and it being invisible, like really tells you about the average male’s value in this society, especially the younger or male. So you know, that’s another just evidence piece of where we seem to be going as we get more online, as we get towards kind of like a neo-feudalist system and we get like a post labor system. You know, the number one goal of the elites was to decouple themselves on being reliant on the labor of the majority. Right, because that’s the only check and balance system there was is that, hey, there’s a lot more of us than there is of you, and that doesn’t seem to be a check and balance that’s going to be working anymore.

With ramping on automation, globalization, I mean it’s hard for people to riot and get together in a union when they’re doing remote work all over the world, when one guy’s in Singapore, one guy’s in India, one guy’s in Laos, you know that’s not going to work. Automation, same thing, you know. And yeah, I mean there’s so many tangents to this, but I can move on to a different point if you’d like.

Invisible men

KMOWell, I do have one observation on that point: Young men who were never working, you know, who aren’t unemployed because they lost a job, who just didn’t go to school and never really got a job, they don’t count as unemployed in the way that you know, unemployment is calculated, speculated. Also, guys in prison don’t count as unemployed. So, you know, guys who are just online, sitting at home, not showing up in the real world, not going to school and not working, they’re not a problem for politicians and they’re not a problem for the oligarchs. Those guys have taken themselves out of the picture, which is very convenient for, you know, the ownership class or the elite class. That’s fine, I mean, as long as they’re not going to be, you know, marching in the streets or in making a big stink or, you know, making a lot of noise about it.

If they’re just going to slink away and sort of wither on the vine at home and, just you know, live their lives on the internet, that’s not going. I mean, that’s just not a problem for, you know, the political establishment, that’s their desired outcome. I mean the. The best outcome would be if they all, just you know, stopped eating and just died but this is the second best outcome. You know, they just sit at home and do nothing and don’t complain. That’s a dream come true for the oligarch class.

FirstAnd it’s very interesting that in the 20th century it would be. That would be a nightmare for the oligarch class. In the 20th century, what was the goal of the powers, let’s say, in World War II? It was to mobilize as many men to be participant in either the production cycle or the war cycle of your economy. Right, having a bunch of men drop out and play chess in their basements would be just, you know, catastrophic. That’s it, and you know the policies of these 20th century. You know, the ideological juggernauts at that time that were fighting it out, everyone you know, sought to empower kind of male participation, and also female participation too. Let’s add that into the broader economy. In the war effort, and even prior to the 20th century the goal of most elites was to increase their population by any means necessary and to expand and to keep that population fed, of course as well.

You know, because the more excess population you have, the more colonization you can do, the more you can send to fight for the distant lands, the more you can conduct warfare, the more you can produce, you know, goods. You know, it’s obvious. And now it’s flipped in the 21st century as to because what? What is what if? What do excess population produce? Now it produces a bunch of unemployed people that could potentially go out and break the system. That’s the thing. That’s when, I, when we.

Occupy Wall Street

FirstWe talk about the incel crisis and men hating women and women hating men, and there’s all these bait issues that are going on. If you look at what happened during Occupy Wall Street in 2008. No, that was like 2000. That was later a bit, but anyway, it was 2011. 2012. Yeah, so it’s post 2008. What happened is after that. What you had the media do is they ramped up so many articles about critical theory, about LGBTQ, about race issues. It just if you look at the analytics for it just skyrocketed. And then, when there’s a picture like 2010 versus 20, or 2011 versus 2016, and in 2011, it’s all these people like every sign is yellow and it says you know, put the bankers to jail Occupy Wall Street, etc. It’s all in unison. And then the next one in 2016.

It’s a float sponsored by JP Morgan Chase and it’s an LGBTQ flow. You know, and that’s on. It’s on the same Wall Street, it’s in the same street in New York City and it’s very telling of what happened is that Occupy Wall Street really scared the elite into, you know, a working class uniting, and there’s even participants of the original protest. You know, down in ground zero of where they took place. That said that, yeah, we had these things, you know, we were all unison. Then there’s these people that came in university educated and they started grabbing the megaphone and saying: you know, there’s rules. There’s rules to this now. The rule is that if you’re a white type of guy, you speak last because you have the most privilege. The progressive stack they called it.

KMOI actually went to Zuccotti Park in 2011. So I was a witness to it firsthand. And yeah, in the early days of Occupy Wall Street, a lot of the public sector unions in New York City were participants. And then when the anarchists and the proto-woke folk showed up and said, okay, now we’re doing this according to the progressive stack and white people have to sit down, men, straight men have to sit down and stand back and we’re going to privilege people of color and sexual minorities. That’s when the unions, I mean, the actual organized labor, the people who actually get stuff done in the real world said, we’re done. We’re out. Y’all have fun with that. We have jobs. We can’t sit here on the pavement for three months. We needed to do something effective immediately.

And the thing with the stack and the human megaphone and the all-day meetings, it sucks up your time. I mean, the whole purpose of that style of group chat, except in real life, is to make sure that it proceeds as slowly as possible and nothing gets done. And, you know, people with jobs can’t participate in that. You know, people who are actually in the economy, people who are workers to be organized, they have to go to work. They can’t sit there on the pavement of Zuccotti Park for months on end and do nothing. And that’s what that whole progressive stack, human megaphone, you know, style of interaction leads to. It leads to people sitting, doing nothing and just preening about their, you know, their victimhood status.

FirstYeah, and it’s been success. It’s basically a subversion of the working class getting together and the war didn’t just. It’s funny because this, at that time you were participating in this, I only got to you from like a tv screen in like high school or something it was. It was being played on the media. It was a big event. And what’s cool, it was mostly a non-violent event and it wasn’t riots, it was just, it was legitimate protests. Yeah, you know, anarchists come in and break some windows, sure, but for the most part, I don’t remember. You know they’re that’s because when you have left and right, that’s when the Antifa shows up with their guns and Proud Boys come up with their gun. That’s like all right, someone might get shot today, but you know, I don’t remember.

You know occupied Wall Street isn’t known as it doesn’t have a body count to it, doesn’t have you know names that are. You know it’s a. You know it was out of everything. It was a. You know it was a positive event in, you know, people’s reaction to what was happening with the bailout packages, with the financial system at that point. And, yeah, and it got subverted. It got completely subverted. And you know the subverted didn’t just happen on the ground, which is interesting. It happened online too. Online, the working class has like zero representation. There is like all like who owns, like Washington Post? Now it’s Jeff Bezos these type of things and that’s what happened. Online is they ramped up them out of articles about race relations — LGBTQ, it just went up, skyrocketed it’s sky, it was so it was.

You know anybody looking at the analytics now, you know hindsight is 20/20, but now we have the data set to look 10 years back. It’s obvious what happened during. You know there’s a well, what’s going on here? And ever since then it’s been. You know, ever since 2012, I — I call it like the minds — have been right because everyone tells me in my in young people — you know this is going to be mostly young men disenfranchised — they tell that 2012 was really like. That was kind of like the changeover, because you know things like Instagram and Tinder came about, which really made the gender relations really worse, and you know all the all these things. That’s when you know 2012, that’s what that’s basically, when Wall Street occupied, Wall Street was defeated and you know we got a neoliberal president re-elected and we kind of just, you know, went on.

So yeah, you know, it seems like the Mayans were right in a way, when their calendar ended. It’s kind of like a almost end of history. You know, we were just in a boring dystopia.

Atomized young men

FirstBut you know, moving on to why I brought up these like critical issues is that mass shootings seem to be on the minds of many Americans right now. And we talked about — do you remember the you know Chad Hill from — he goes by Chad C. Mulligan now on substack. Yeah, well, he had a blog called Hipcrime Vocab. Remember when he had he basically said that you know, most of these incel guys seem to be really right wing, and they seem to be. They seem to support the people that make the situation worse for them. And you know, being put in this community speaking to about, you know, not a thousand quite yet, but a thousand you know, of the men in this type of situation already, that’s like the furthest from the truth.

You know the truth for somewhere in the middle, you know it’s when you put up all the voices and the rhetoric together. It’s, it might lean a bit lefty, but it’s. It’s probably in the center due to all the different people. But, yeah, it’s definitely not a right-wing powerhouse. The figures that are detested most are like Jordan Peterson and like: what’s that big? Prager, you like? Those are the two. Like, just like. This is ridiculous? I think so. It’s not. This sphere does not attack like anything from the left mainly, except like, maybe, the ideology. But the figures that are most attested are kind of like the traditionalists, because they’re out of touch with reality. A young man cannot do what they prescribe. A young man should. You know, here’s your right, life’s awful. But you know, your PragerU, you just focus on you know, keeping your nose to the grindstone and you know, that’s all.

It’s all gonna work out. You know, espouse these protestant ideals and just follow that and it’s all gonna. You know the things are bad because it’s degeneracy of the masses, you know, which isn’t the case at all. So when we, when you invited me to speak like to provide a different narrative what I said, you know what was the kid’s name that? He took a gun to like a protest and like killed two and then injured one other. He was 17. I forgot his name.

KMOI make a point of not learning the names of the mass shooters.

FirstYeah, that’s a good idea, because you don’t want to — you know, the more they get known, the more infamous they get, the more people try to follow as copycats. Anyways, what happened there is — although somebody in the chat has provided the answer, it’s Kyle Rittenhouse — thank you, [commenter’s name unclear; heard “based that”]. So, and at that time, Kyle Rittenhouse was kind of like — he was emblematic of kind of like the divide getting out of control between the left and right with this, with the protest. And what I said there is — this was maybe nine months ago — I said, you know, get ready for more of this, unfortunately, get ready for more of this. And what have we had? 21-year-old in Atlanta, 21-year-old in Colorado, 19-year-old now.

Now we’ve spoken about this issue. Then the Zoom recording went its way, but then since then, there’s been a 19-year-old shooter at a FedEx facility. You know, and these are all young men. And if some of the people’s investigation on this is, yeah, all these guys were critically atomized, they were romantically frustrated, you know they, and I mean to take yourself out in a that matter at 19 and 21. That’s just, you know that’s ending your life here very brutally very infamously and very early on. But, like right now, there’s been graph came out that said: what are Americans must stress most about? Right now it’s number one’s: the pandemic. But I think mass shootings are number three. And the thing is that as males get more atomized, you know 99 of them aren’t gonna do these types of events, but there’s gonna be that one percent that’s gonna act out.

KMOOh, I’d say it’s much less than one percent.

FirstYeah, it’s even less than one percent and this is what this is gonna be. The consequences in saying that, oh, it’s an issue of them having access to these things, which you know most, you know deaths of these type of weapons are only three percent. You know it’s mostly handguns death and like gang situations. It’s that’s the consequences that we’re gonna face for having an atomized male population. It’s gonna get a lot more violent here’s, you know. You know gun violence has gone up by like 60 since 2014 and most of that is not mass shootings. Mass shootings in 2020 were like 546 people, I think, that got killed in a mass shooting, so, statistically irrelevant when it comes to the total number of dead. Yeah, what’s increasing is, you know, a lot of a lot, violence that doesn’t qualify like as a mass shooting and doesn’t get — or if it does, it doesn’t get — a lot of viewership, but it’s still driven by young men being socially atomized.

Relation, family relationships going awry. You know, romantic relationships going awry. That’s a big one. It’s still increasing. It’s still. The fact is that we are on a scale it might not affect most people, but we are going to have to live with a more violent society and the media is going to, you know, milk this to oblivion, to remove the gun rights of the working class, that’s. That’s the thing. Is we, if we don’t tackle this issue, if it’s not talked about, if it’s not, it doesn’t have to be remedied, because this is a very hard thing to remedy. I mean, this is just the, it’s a like we’re at an unknown time and event of human psychology. You know, we don’t, we still don’t know the full effects of social media, rapid internet, all this stuff on the human brain yet, but it’s looking that it’s not good.

Program identification: “You’re listening to the C-Realm Podcast with your host, KMO.”

FirstWhat do you think of that long tangent I just put on?

Porn, apps and power online

KMOI think that we’ve covered it in previous conversations, but in this one we really skipped over the effect of technology — and yeah, I think information technology, ubiquitous porn, has really harmed young men’s abilities and their motivation to get out there and mix it up with women. And there was porn in my day, but it was on VHS tapes, you know, and not everybody had a VHS player and most people didn’t have a private place in which to watch. You know, porn in my — you know, when I was a teenager — was magazines mostly, and you know they were kind of hard to come by.

FirstYeah, I don’t watch it anymore. You know, I’ve taken a — you know, after finding out, like for the second time, like how bad this is, and saying, yeah, you know, I seem to be more depressed when using this stuff. Yeah, I definitely — that. I think the porn usage comes because these men have been pushed out. I mean, that’s the thing. We see, you know, that’s where the black pill and the incel [wording unclear; heard “series”] about is — about that we have hard data that proves that women do not want to get with most men — young women, that is — and they’d rather go LGBTQ — as we have the big data on too — than even interact with men of their peer. So that’s the problem: that men are kind of — they’re kind of pushed to toxic, they’re pushed to be demoralized.

They’re pushed to be in toxic activities, basically. And this is something — it’s a great inequality online. If you’re a woman, you have all the options. You know, dating apps are 75 to 90 percent male. You know, if you look at any data set, there are usually 75 to 90 percent male on any dating app. So it’s a woman’s — you know, she just has pick of the litter. You know, she might complain about her options on there, but she still has options, whereas the average guy — you don’t have any options. You don’t have any options to romantically fulfill yourself as a young man. And we’re seeing that. You know, 51% of men, according to Pew Research — 51% of men 18 to 29 — are single. Wow. It’s only like 32% for a woman. And actually, you’d think it would get better for men as they get older, and it certainly doesn’t.

The divide actually increases the older you get, as more women get married away. So that’s, you know — we talk about all these inequalities, but when it comes to the difference between young men and young women, there’s this big romantic accessibility gap. And you know, now it’s like the data’s coming out, but then now we’re being gaslit saying, oh, that’s not important and it’s kind of silly at this point. And when you’re like a young man stuck in this reality where you don’t have something, you don’t have any chance to get it, other things suck in your life and you’re just socially isolated — but you’re told: you know, don’t worry about that stuff, you know, it’s all on you, we have a just world — you know, that drives — no wonder we’re driving a small percent of men crazy to do insane things.

You know, and I’m surprised this doesn’t get addressed. And that’s a difference I see with those — an older generation that have their own podcasts, that have their own political shows — is that this is a topic that doesn’t even grace, you know, that doesn’t even scratch the surface or anything, but for young people, it’s a big deal. Men and women, the two genders, are very antagonistic to each other now. Like MGTOW content, basically — like woman’s critique of men and men’s critique of women — has exploded in popularity online, and it seems to just be dividing a greater rift, which is just a thing for the elites to exploit. So that’s the problem. I don’t think that things like pornography and video games are — I don’t think men are choosing that. They’re pushed to cope with the reality they’re in. They pick these things to just cope with the reality of what they don’t have.

KMOAlso with the dating apps, you know, like Tinder is basically just the straight version of Grindr. You know, Grindr’s a gay dating app, and you know it’s a great time to be a gay man if, you know, if what you’re looking for is casual sex, because man, the apps just deliver it right to you. But you know that’s not going to work for heterosexual pairings. That same interface is just not designed to — it’s not optimized to put men and women together. And you know, as you say, particularly men. But what’s worse, I think, is that it also has made — it has normalized this expectation that you’re not allowed to try to approach a woman or to make a connection with a woman outside of the app. You know, and as you say, the app is where she has absolute —

You know, the power imbalance is just insane on the app. And you know, if you’re not allowed to actually talk to somebody, you know, about anything except like an exchange, like at a cash register or something — if just walking up and starting a conversation with somebody is considered harassment — well then, you know, there goes all the motivation for polishing one’s social skills. Because I’m basically, you know, an introvert. But when I was, you know, when I was in my 20s, I studied NLP. I took a speed-seduction seminar with Ross Jeffries — you know, this famous speed-seduction coach — and I put all that stuff to use and I pushed it too hard and too far, to the point where, if I behave today the way I did then, I would definitely be in trouble. But back then boldness was still rewarded.

So yeah, I see the situation as being pretty bad. And as I’ve mentioned many times in the past — not on this conversation, though — I have two sons. One’s 20, the other is 16, and I just don’t envy them their position in history, really.

FirstYeah, it’s a tough position to be in. Yeah. Going — the first thing you brought up is dating apps. Yeah, so, 2008, I think, Grindr came around, and in 2012 Tinder was just a straight-up copy of Grindr. That — yeah — the swiping apps that have like infiltrated, kind of like saying like, oh, this is the way you date, which is statistically not really — but you know it’s a system that absolutely, like you said, does not work for heterosexuality. We see that it’s alienated the interaction between heterosexuals — just poisoned the well. You know, Tinder is about 10 years old now. It’s not as used as much. People — it’s become infamous, really, for — you know, young people discuss it. Tinder is now like an infamous thing that it’s kind of nasty, it’s kind of gross.

You know the App Store — someone just told me it’s a three-star review on the App Store, which is — that’s pretty terrible. So it’s known as — it’s actually the app that made the most revenue out of any app ever, if you look on the Apple Store, something like that. So yeah, it’s a very toxic platform. And the thing is that — so what’s the alternative between these online interactions? Because they’re a no-go for men at this point. We have the data. We just have — we have the big data on it. We have huge sample sizes. You know, in a documentary we made for this channel, it was the largest sample size I’ve seen. It was like 18 million people that this marketing agency had access to, and they checked the demographics — like they discovered, whoa, Tinder’s 90 percent male.

You know, Bumble’s 80 percent male. You know, Match is like 75 percent male. So it was just — you know, it was a catastrophe on that scale if you’re a guy using these things. But going back to what you talked about — what’s the alternative is to go out in real public, real life. So I’ve been looking a long time on subreddits like r/datingover30. All these different things are forums that are neutral ground for men and women to discuss their difficulties and their views on dating. And overall, it’s like so common that women say I do not want to be approached. I do not want to be approached, I’m going about my life, I’m busy, I have school, I have work. You know, women are much more engaged in academics and work than men are.

They do not want to be bothered when they go out. That’s why there’s a term called the resting bitch face. They want to — you know, they want to basically project that, hey, I’m not in the mood, please don’t do that. And yeah, and then when asked, you know, women do not want to meet a man through being cold-approached. You know, women want to verify that the man is, you know, not a serial killer, not this, not that. There’s different things they say, but overall, women — like, that’s not an option basically for men to conduct themselves in the public sphere, to approach women. That’s something that will get you like police called on you. That’s something that will get — like, it’s just a no-go in 2021, especially with the pandemic, you know.

I mean, if anything, what’s happening now has solidified that. But overall, young women, when they’re surveyed, when they talk about their situation, they don’t want to get approached. That’s one of their fears. That’s not how they want to conduct themselves. The strange thing is that in the past with the boomers, it’s thought to be that, oh, it’s the men that did the choosing, if you did end up there.

KMOIt’s always been the women who’ve done the choosing.

FirstYes, exactly, and it’s not known, unfortunately, but I think you did the NLP course, you did like the social. You kind of know that because I was watching this NLP thing and I was like — and I think that the lecture said, you know, 80% of their interactions — romantic interaction between the woman and men — are really like, they’re really started covertly by the woman. And I agree with that. That’s how, if I ask, like, how most of my relationships came into play, or my friends’ relationships came to play — it’s really like the woman. They open the door and it’s up to the man to go through. They’re not going to say, hey, let’s go bang, hey, let’s go on a date, let’s go this, but they make it very dead obvious to a man.

KMOYeah, they’ll show interest.

FirstYeah, exactly, and that’s how it really works. So these perversions of “I need to cold approach, I need to warm approach, I need to DM” — all these are perversions of like a sexuality that’s not really there, and it’s no wonder women are getting alienated and they’re choosing to date other women or they don’t want to be cold-approached. So it’s a very terrible scenario. And it’s a perfect scenario if you want to reduce the base amount of population. I mean, it’s just — you know, the first thing you got to do is not discuss it. That’d be step one. You don’t want — if you have this perfect system going on, you have this — you know, you’re reducing your population, you’re reducing family structure, you’re reducing cohesiveness of a society. You know, you have this working model.

You don’t want this. That’s the number one thing. Step one is to not have that leak out. You know, and I think these dating apps, these social media apps, they reinforce these things. One of the things I talk about is TikTok. TikTok is a Chinese app that a lot of countries banned. India banned it a year ago; Pakistan has just banned it, and they say the same thing: it’s degenerate, it produces social instability — you know, these more cohesive governments. But here, you know, Donald Trump tried to ban it and it went nowhere. You know, Microsoft immediately said: we’ll buy that up from you. But you know the arguments they said is we can’t let this go.

Machines that don’t need young men

KMOYeah, exactly. Are you familiar with a book called The Pentagon’s Brain: An Uncensored History of DARPA, America’s Top Secret Military Research Agency? It’s by Annie Jacobsen, and I know it seems a stretch, but you know we were talking earlier — you mentioned that. But in previous centuries countries would be really — and leaders of countries would be really concerned if they thought their birth rate was low, because they knew that their rivals might have a higher birth rate and that would lead to the military advantage shifting to the country with the higher birth rate and the more fecund population. And something that Annie Jacobsen mentions in this book — and there’s a good talk at Google that you can hear by her — the Pentagon is pushing really hard for autonomous weapon systems, to develop them as quickly as possible.

Because you know, one, they’re a heck of a lot cheaper. Like there are already autonomous naval vessels that have no humans on them at all, and they cost like $17,000 a day, you know, to run it, whereas a ship with hundreds of actual military personnel on board costs tens of millions of dollars per day to operate. So they’re cheaper. If you have, you say, drone combat — two drones are fighting one another — if one is controlled remotely by a guy in a trailer in Nevada, and the other one is autonomous, the autonomous one, there’s not that slow human in the loop. It’s going to have the advantage. And if you don’t need a human operator for every drone, you can make lots and lots of them, and so there’ll be a numerical advantage. So the Pentagon has strong motivation to push hard to take the humans out of the equation in terms of global military capability and strike capability. And so that’s one more reason why you just don’t need a lot of young men.

If women are more compliant workers, if women make better students, if women are just more useful to the rulership class in the workplace — and men are troublesome, you really don’t want them. I mean, if you don’t need them for military service and you don’t need them for heavy manual labor, if most of the labor is cognitive labor, women are better employees from the perspective of maintaining control. So, yeah, I mean there’s just strong motivation to not have so many volatile young men around.

FirstYeah, and what unfortunately for the elites is human birth rates greatly favor the male. So you know, it’s like for every young female born, it’s 1.10 males.¹ In places like China, India, where they have selective births, they have a situation where they created too many men. In the United States we actually have a male surplus of our own problem. That’s not really talked about at all, but it’s there in a census, if anybody wants to look. The thing is that — so the last point you made — there was a documentary in China talking about automation, and it was this factory owner and he was like, yeah, just, I try not to hire men anymore because of the demographic situation of China. Men — there’s not a lot of women to access and there’s a lot of —

That’s why they have a housing bubble — there’s all these things going on. He said, yeah, men are the ones — they’ll try to hit a woman, they’ll fight each other, they’re very aggressive, they’re very stressed out. I don’t hire men anymore. The women there — they showed like a lunchroom — they’re all happy, they’re all kind of satiated, they’re not volatile as men. And he says — and he straight up said: you know, I’m trying to automate so I don’t have this issue anymore. I don’t have this issue where I have to deal with like young men. I don’t remember what the — but you know, in China they don’t have the same kind of — they don’t try to layer a cake with frosting like we do here. They’re just like, straight up, yeah, I don’t want men here.

They’re too — you know, they’re too volatile. And you know, they’re volatile due to, you know, China’s situation. You know, we have a similar situation here. On the topic of drones and war getting more mobile — like more motivated move on to like the next stage of warfare, which is like drone warfare, AI, all these autonomous systems.

Morale and Afghanistan

FirstHere’s the thing: a good case study is Afghanistan. If you look at the trajectory, there’s some bumps in there, but if you look at our trajectory of how we succeed — like our war in Afghanistan — basically, who held most of the territory? Everything — the more technologically advanced America got, generally the worse the war got in terms of successes. In 2001, when Afghanistan — like the Taliban — were almost wiped out, when the Americans, with few special forces, like on horseback and like the Northern Alliance — it was like fully manned. In 2001 there wasn’t the technology we have today. But now, in 2020–2021, when America is basically defeated and pulling out of there and you know, letting 5,000 Taliban prisoners go for a thousand, you know, of Afghan National Army — like it’s —

You can tell by those numbers who really has the advantage. And the Taliban have waged a relatively low-tech warfare against NATO forces, while NATO has completely ramped up more autonomous systems, more AI, more everything, more higher-end systems. And if you look at something like the Afghan Papers you’ll see in the numbers that it’s terrible — our record of kill-death ratios, our record of gaining ground is worse than the Soviets. I mean, it’s really — you know, Afghan Papers, if you guys want to look that up. And it’s gotten, you know, it’s gotten progressively into an unwinnable war. And the thing about Afghanistan: it’s never been really defeated. The British Empire, the Soviet Empire, and now us have all — it’s a graveyard of empires. But if you notice, it’s probably the most patriarchal country out there.

It’s a country that the young men — they really do have a purpose. It’s not a good system at all. You know, the Taliban are very extreme, they have an extreme ideology, but still it gives the young men there a lot of morale. Well, when — on some forum, I remember seeing that there was a military psychologist. He was deployed to Afghanistan and he said: you know, the number one problem I see is that these men, they come here and their relationships they have back home — those relationships always fall apart, almost always. They said like you have like an 80% chance of divorce or an 80% chance of your relationship failing if you’re a deployed soldier or marine or military personnel across the, you know, across the world. And he said, you know, these guys, they go out and then they have these problems at home they have to deal with, usually with the wife, usually losing custody of their kids, and it’s like, well, how can those guys focus and not walk into a landmine?

How can those guys like focus and not have, like, you know, not get too angry and shoot a civilian or something? Not that that’s justified, but it can — the occurrence is greater when you have a demoralized soldiering force. And I think that these elites want to bring these autonomous systems and everything, but I think, like, human culture and how cohesive your society is — that will win in the end. You might take more casualties or something — yeah, it might look bad — but I think Afghanistan is a great case study as to — you know, technology is not going to win war by itself, and morale is definitely, as it always was, probably the number one influencer of who’s going to win. You know, and our morale has been worse and worse. As — you know, my friend in the military, he recently got out.

He said, if you want to — he’s like, you know, you talk about this incel stuff, but if you want to see the worst case of incel, don’t go to a military base, because there’s guys swiping on dating apps that we know don’t work for heterosexuals, and they’re swiping like almost nothing because they’re in the middle of nowhere and they have, you know — so they don’t have any like romantic prospects or anything. That’s a challenging situation. It’s no wonder they want to get rid of soldiering and they want to get rid of stuff like that, because, yeah — but the demoralized situation at home — it’s not effective to have, like, to project force with a bunch of men across the — you know, they might mutiny. That’s not happened, but still it’s happened before in history.

But yeah, I don’t think that’s going to be just a one-and-done solution — just automate everything. I think, you know, as we see with the Taliban, it’s basically a very good victory for them. What they have, you know — the prisoner exchange, the numbers, the casualties they’re inflicting on the Afghan National Army — it’s looking like we’re, yeah, we’re defeated, all of NATO pulling out. So that’s my perspective on it, and I take most of that from the Afghan Papers that were leaked about the numbers and statistics and how everything was lied to the American public.

Program identification: “On the C-Realm Podcast: a mind that is stretched by a new experience can never go back to its old dimensions.”

After the conversation: morale

KMOAll right, that was First of Incelmatics. Again, if you want to hear more of that conversation, there’s another two hours, and it can be found on YouTube. There will be a link in the show notes for this episode that you can find on C-Realm.com. I will also post it to my Patreon page, Patreon.com slash KMO. All righty, you know, one of the last things that First mentioned there is the topic of morale. Now, I know the word morale from playing war games, you know, tabletop war games in the 80s. And, you know, armies on the field of battle, they don’t fight to the last man. They don’t stand there and, you know, hack and slash and shoot at each other until everybody on one side is dead. At some point, one side or the other is going to lose their nerve and they’re going to stop fighting and they’re just going to try to get away.

When that happens, their morale has failed. And morale doesn’t always — there’s not always a one-to-one correlation to your actual strength. You know, the morale for a strong unit which could continue to fight might be subject to factors which weaken its morale and its morale breaks early. So what’s the definition of morale? I knew what it was, you know, just from the wargaming context, but the definition is the confidence, enthusiasm, and discipline of a person or group at a particular time. And it is that morale which is referenced in the word demoralized. If something has degraded your morale or the morale of your group, you have been demoralized. And I know that demoralized is a word that Jim Kunstler uses a lot to describe the state of the culture right now, to describe the populace.

You know, if you’re an oligarch, or if you work within the penumbra of the oligarchs, your morale may be quite high right now, but I think for a great many people, their morale is very low. And one of the great many reasons, I think, that the Pentagon is pushing as hard as it can to take humans out of the loop, to remove humans as a necessary component in its global strike capacity is that robots don’t have any morale. You don’t have to worry about robot morale. You have to worry about them getting hacked. You have to worry about them behaving in unexpected ways, but you don’t have to worry about them being demoralized. And, you know, one of the last things that First was talking about in our conversation is the morale of young men in general in this society.

I mean, they go into their military experience with a very low base morale. Now I know some of you listening — and if you’re still listening and you fall into this category, well, good on you, you know, for pushing on — maybe, you know, your hands weren’t free and it wasn’t convenient to turn off the podcast, but you really disagree with this whole line of thought, particularly if you’re a woman who’s my age or older. The whole idea that the power balance is tilted in favor of women these days, you know, in the younger generations — it’s probably just offensive to you because it is so contrary to your own experience as a young woman. And yet, you know, one of the things that Jon Ronson described quite well in his book So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed is that online, the balance of power shifts very quickly.

And a person who was seen as a victimizer because they said something which could be characterized as something victimizers would say, or oppressors would say, you know, when thousands of people that they don’t know are suddenly showering them with opprobrium and disapproval, the balance has shifted. We live in a fluid world. There’s a lot of people. Technology is disrupting, you know, technology has been disrupting familiar modes of living for my whole life. You know, I was born in 1968. Computers were the size of rooms when I was born and they’ve been getting smaller, cheaper, and more powerful my entire life. But it seems like we don’t even have time to settle into the new normal before it’s disrupted. We’re in a constant state of social disruption now. And our morale, I can’t say it’s never been lower, but in my lifetime, from my perspective, it seems as though it’s never been lower.

For some reason, I’m a party to a discussion, an incel discussion on Discord, and my phone chirps every time there’s a new message. And I’m sure I could find a way to, you know, remove myself from that discussion because I’m not participating in it. I am just a spectator. But a lot of the guys, you know, who are talking to one another, I mean, demoralized is just the perfect adjective to describe their psychological state. Many of them have swallowed the black pill and they’re very cynical and they have no hope whatsoever. I remember, you know, I’m a Gen Xer. I was a teenager and a young adult in the 80s. And to the Gen Z guys now, I mean, I come from the land of, or the time anyway, of milk and honey. I come from that magical period, you know, when men and women got together pretty easily and they got along better than they do now.

I mean, there’s always been tough, but not like now. But I remember, you know, when I think back now on my twenties, I think, well, that’s the time I was having the best sex of my life and lots of it. But I also remember in those periods when I didn’t have a girlfriend and I was involuntarily celibate. I was absolutely miserable, but I was never in a position where I thought, oh, I will never have sex. I will never have the opportunity to have sex. I have no experience with that sort of fatalism, that sort of, you know, just ironclad pessimism about my future prospects. I always knew that the dry spell would end, but even so, they were miserable times. And I don’t, I’m not going to go on a long tangent about this, but this does relate strongly.

And First was bringing this up. A country, a society with a low birth rate is essentially a society with low morale. It is not a thriving society. And across the so-called first world and, you know, in Russia as well, birth rates are low. And, you know, when young people are surveyed, they say they would like to get married. They would like to have children, but they just don’t think they can afford it. They don’t think they — you know, they don’t have their own place to live. A lot of them, a lot of the young men don’t have jobs. They would like to have — you know, they would like to engage in family formation — and they just don’t think that they can. And the age at which people are starting families is going up. And I heard a historical argument the other day, and I’m afraid I can’t remember the source right now, but saying basically when family formation starts at age 28, that’s when you have a revolution.

There’s never been a society where it got pushed beyond that — that’s just not a sustainable prospect. And right now, at least in the U.S., the average age of family formation is 27. This can’t continue indefinitely, but it can continue for what will seem like a subjective eternity to the people living through it.

Oligarchs and the climate conversation

KMOWhich all kind of brings me back to what has become — you know, what has emerged as a perennial theme on the C-Realm Podcast. The idea of a fast collapse was a romantic fantasy. You know, everybody suffers in the fast collapse. When, in fact, the oligarchs are going to continue to do not only just fine, but they’re going to continue to capture increasingly large percentages of wealth. The continual disruption of familiar modes of life through technology benefits them, and they will continue to subsidize and propagate messages — you know, cultural messages about how terrible working-class people are, how the environmental crisis is because we just have too many people. We need fewer people. They need to live, you know, in urban centers and with high density. And we can’t have all this, you know, cheap, ubiquitous air travel for the normal people — they just need to be locked in place.

Air travel should be reserved for the elite. The environmental arguments right now seem mostly cast in a way that, to the extent people take them seriously, reinforce the legitimacy of the elite and the class of opinion makers that authors like Joel Kotkin call the clerisy. You know, the mainstream corporate media, university professors, the opinion makers — you know, the people who articulate the acceptable worldview, the worldview that you are allowed to articulate if you work in a place like Facebook or Google or in a university. But — and you know this is something else I take from Joel Kotkin, whose audiobook — what is it? The Coming Neo-Feudalism, The Coming Age of Neo-Feudalism, I think the title is.² I was just listening or re-listening to it earlier today, and you know he’s talking about how more and more people, as they reject the claims to legitimacy and authority of the oligarchs, are also rejecting concerns about climate catastrophe or just environmental concerns generally, because they have been so tightly coupled to the power, the privilege, and the legitimacy of the oligarchs.

And for those of you who tuned into my live stream that I did on Tuesday of this past week, I was talking with Brent Ragsdale [spelling unverified] about climate issues. And Brent is very concerned with climate, and you know I articulated a frustrated point of view that was saying: until we get the oligarch problem taken care of, I don’t think there’s any productive conversation to be had about mitigating climate change, because the only solutions they can offer up right now are the ones that further, you know, further exacerbate the wealth and opportunity gap and which cement their power, their authority. And as long as any acceptable action on climate involves the strengthening of this, you know, unofficial ruling class, I’m not interested in having those conversations. So we got to fix the socio-political problem first, and then, when we have institutions that the vast majority of people consider to be legitimate and on our collective side, then we can address these large-scale problems.

But until then, I mean I’m not saying it isn’t a problem, I’m not saying it isn’t an issue, but I am saying I’m not interested in talking about climate change. We’re not at a place where we can meaningfully address that in a way that is just and equitable. The pandemic has illustrated so clearly: They will never let a good crisis go to waste. And wow, climate change is the ultimate crisis. It is the ultimate opportunity for profit taking and for setting themselves up to be the monitors of everything we do and the ultimate rent collectors.

Closing

KMOAll right. Well, I said I wasn’t going to rant. That’s kind of getting ranty. So I’ll stop there. But those of you who like to hear me rant, I do a lot more of it on the C-Realm Vault podcast. You can subscribe to the C-Realm Vault podcast through my Patreon. And I put up a lot of stuff on my Patreon page that is not behind the paywall. Anybody who goes there can look at it. Again, it’s Patreon.com slash KMO. All right, everybody, that is all for this episode of the C-Realm Podcast. Thanks for listening. I will talk to you again soon. Stay well.

Editorial notes

1. As spoken. The natural sex ratio at birth is usually given as about 105 boys per 100 girls (about 1.05), not 1.10. ↩

2. Joel Kotkin’s book is The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class (2020). ↩