You need a different red pill
Stephen Graham co-wrote quite a good drama series for Netflix, which I binge-watched the other night. The aim of Adolescence, according to Graham, was to get a conversation going about the epidemic of stabbings in Britain, and how that might be related to certain Internet-based cultures that are apparently radicalising a significant number of young men. A few of us did actually wind up having conversations about it down the pub, because we're of an older generation that wonders how knife crime became so pervasive. I tried articulating what I thought the Adolescence storyline was getting at: Many young men became resentful because they have problems forming relationships with women, and they find a simulacrum of community around certain unhealthy beliefs. The resentment is exacerbated by the disparity between their lives and the lifestyles presented to them by popular culture.
And, just a few days before, I came across an opinion piece in The Guardian, discussing a report published by the Centre for Social Justice, titled 'Lost Boys'. Several problems were identified in the report:
'[...] the secure, well-paid and meaningful jobs that used to be available to non-university educated young men are increasingly unavailable. Research consistently finds that men being unemployed or earning relatively less than women has a significant impact on both partnersā mental health and marriageability.'
'Boys are twice as likely to be in the growing number of school exclusions than girls. And polling suggests that 41 per cent of sixth-form boys and girls have been taught in school lessons that boys are a problem for society.'
'Fatherlessness in childhood also has a particularly stark impact on the mental health of young men, yet boys are more likely now to own a smartphone than to live with their dad.'
'Knife and gang crime in this country are increasing and primarily impacting on the lives of young men and boys. In 2022/23, boys accounted for 87 per cent of homicide victims aged 16 to 24 and nine in ten victims of teenage violence were male. Men made up over 90 per cent of hospital admission for knife crime.'
'They are much more likely to be engaging with AI than girls, many of whom will be ājust chattingā, āseeking adviceā or even going to AI for āemotional support / therapy".'
If you are a young man reading this, it's important to know that the situation was very much the same for previous generations. Back in the 1990s, many of us were misfits and dropouts in school, all of us were continually told that girls were intrinsically better than boys, many of us grew up without fathers or role models, many of us carried folding knives (which is actually legal) but stabbings were almost unheard of, and we kept our problems to ourselves. Nobody really got laid until their 20s, despite whatever our peers were claiming. We just accepted all that as the way things were.
What has changed?
The first thing that should be said - and this is bleeding obvious - is that young people today do have it much harder, and I attribute most of that to successive governments' commitment to Thatcherism (or 'neoliberalism', if you're American). What's basically happening is the super-wealthy are getting richer, buying up more resources, and leaving 99.99% of people with diminishing returns. Younger generations are being asset-stripped, essentially. If someone's bought into an 'equity release' scheme, their children are being asset stripped. If you're investing in some useless bullshit 'cryptocurrency', you're being asset stripped by the wealthy, who themselves are buying up real assets. I cannot sell my assets without being part of that and leaving my inheritors with less.
That's why we're getting more 'austerity' every year, under both Tory and Labour governments, why it's getting increasingly harder to afford basic things, and why the government's answer to economic problems is typically to make further cuts to the welfare system instead of taxing the super wealthy by an extra 1%.
And it's why Britain has a housing crisis, which is only beginning to be tentatively addressed. The aspirations and self-worth of young men rests on the ability to afford a home, and then on having adequate career and housing security. It used to be the case that a house costed three times the average salary, and that we didn't need to worry so much about our careers being derailed because of micro-fluctuations in the economy. People on average salaries didn't need to 'hustle' to afford the basics.
The lifestyles being presented to us on 'social' media by grifters and influencers are lifestyles they know are unattainable, and that's the point. Most the influencers themselves are heavily in debt trying to LARP as millionaires, when they're not pretending some Ikea showroom is a part of a mansion they supposedly own.
Is there an answer to all this? I believe there is. Currently the mainstream political system has stagnated into something called the 'centre-left'/'centre-right', and Reform UK is seen as the only alternative to that. There was a young man on ITV News the other week, telling an interviewer how Reform UK was a source of hope. Opting for Reform UK might work as a protest vote, but that comes with a considerable risk of draging the other parties further to the right, eventually leaving everyone worse off.
I believe that opting for the Liberal Democrats is just as effective as a protest vote, and has a much greater chance of improving living standards. In their manifesto, they do state their intention of establishing a much fairer tax system, laws that would give renters the stability they currently don't have, and a programme for increasing the supply of social housing.