Quit Bitching

A measured response to "The Lost Generation"

Clarification

John Tenniel, Alice Through the Looking Glass, 1871

Let’s get this out of the way: I am not suggesting that the issues raised in Jacob Savage’s Compact piece The Lost Generation are false, trivial, ineffectual, or the fault of White millennial men’s inadequacies. It is obviously the case that ill-defined diversity initiatives are designed to exclude younger White men from employment opportunities. This is not a novel discovery, even if it is just now becoming socially acceptable to utter.

The title of this piece instead is a response to the tearful self-pity dripping throughout Savage’s work. The prose reads as stoic and fatalistic at first blush, but beneath that facade is a barely-concealed melancholic hysteria. So many testimonies from men in media and academia, all saying the same thing. So many instances of magnanimity towards the people making these decisions (not to mention the deranged ideologues they end up hiring) leading to nothing but therapeutic massaging for the jilted young men shut out of their careers. There is no resolution offered, just the self-absorbed shock of a middle-aged millennial realizing far too late that meritocracy may not have ever truly existed in his lifetime.

Notice how I began the first paragraph: I began by making a structural claim and signaling an analytic critique of Savage’s treatment of it—but in the second paragraph, I go on to attack Savage’s temperament and the psychological tone of the piece. This is essentially what Savage does with his piece, albeit without any kind of righteous acridity toward anyone but older White men. While I stand by my character assassination, it is entirely beside the point. What follows is not a refutation of Savage’s structural claim, but a critique of what he does with it: after thousands of words documenting this systemic trend, he collapses analysis into temperament, offering no direction or politics. Instead, by withholding these conclusions, he subtly instructs the reader to catch “the vibe.” That, ultimately, is the whole point.

Holding Hands with Ghosts

There is an idea of a Patrick Bateman. Some kind of abstraction. But there is no real me. Only an entity. Something illusory. And though I can hide my cold gaze, and you can shake my hand and feel flesh gripping yours, and maybe you can even sense our lifestyles are probably comparable, I simply am not there.

By “grievance politics,” I refer to any political or ideological conclusions drawn from vague sentiments of unfair treatment. Even if the grievance is legitimate, creating a politics around it, consciously or unconsciously, does little to address the source of the grievance. Rather than generating strategy, institutions, and durable forms of power, leaning into grievance encourages reactivity and desire for catharsis. Validation, revenge, a return to a better time, these are reasonable desires when faced with real discrimination, but they are personal emotional reactions, even when shared by millions. Lacking a clear vision past the present, politics based around these emotions inevitably become superficial signifiers for the existing political system to exploit.

Exploiting “the vibe” well can get your podcast off the ground, or get your dumb friend into elected office. Doing it poorly can land you in jail or dead (not an exaggeration). The vibe may reflect something entirely real, but the vibe itself is a pure abstraction of that thing. It is filtered through so many competing personal interests, emotions, and worldviews that it is nearly impossible to ascertain which aspects of “the vibe” are real and which are not until the vibe in question has already passed. Right now, there appears to be a reckoning with the hiring practices which discriminate against White men. Is that reckoning real? No. Will it ever become real? Probably not. Will getting angrier or more woeful about that fact lead White men to “do something about it?” Not in any real sense.

It will encourage more limp-dicks to post about the inevitability of the Zoomerwaffen and will definitely lead to more mournful “thinkpieces” that can barely formulate a coherent thought, but it will never lead to anything real. There is no vision beyond the grievance, and to the extent that there is, that vision is usually born from the grievance in the first place. If anyone is to be truly radicalized in a way that affects the material world beyond “shifting the vibe,” it will be another schizo teenager killing a bunch of children because his 764 groupchat told him to. Even this is nothing but a spectacular tragedy set up by spooks to be exactly that, because it can do nothing else.

Conclusions

Francis Bacon, Study of a Head, 1952

One should be unafraid of the conclusions one comes to as a result of his observations. Savage (or his editor) is a coward for not including one. There have been, however, plenty of people filling in the conclusion for him, each of them more amped-up than the last.¹ I don’t blame them, though, really. It’s not their fault that they’re not cut out to compartmentalize and move on. Monkey see, monkey do.²

The conclusions I came to by the end of the piece are as follows:

1. There will be no return to meritocracy under liberalism.

2. The institutions Savage is worried about salvaging should be left to rot.

3. The disillusionment and underemployment of young White men is as much an economic problem as it is an ideological one.

4. This demographic is growing in size and will remain relevant even when the zeitgeist turns on their concerns again.

My justifications are as follows:

The manner in which these diversity programs have been pushed is a legal gray area, and straight White American men are the only group not protected under the Civil Rights Act. Diversified organizations are already expecting reprisals. They will double down on selecting for ideological and personal loyalty under the guise of selecting for “fit.” Expansion of the CRA would create a regulatory framework so onerous that hiring for actual competence becomes virtually impossible as any hiring decision could result in a lawsuit. Abolition of the CRA is preferable only in that it then becomes possible for parallel institutions to be created which are unhindered by concerns over “discrimination.”³ Still, we run into a similar problem: existing institutions will be able to discriminate against White men openly, more so than they already do. Continuing the status quo or relying on the courts to smooth things over will only lead to more of the same. This is the new normal, and you can’t have the old one back.

Given this, and given the stark decline of these institutions since their commitment to diversity, they should be left to their own devices. Let them choke on their own bile. That they went to such great lengths to expel White men rather than cleaning house in any other way means their run as Serious Institutions is over. There are many other indicators to suggest their legitimacy is evaporating (the literacy crisis among the most significant), so why would you want to be brought back in as they’re dying? Replacement institutions will have to be built regardless, premised around an entirely different political economic structure.⁴ This is exceedingly difficult to pull off, and necessary all the same.

Underemployment of a given demographic, even if primarily driven by ideological fervor, is an economic problem. Economic problems are spiritual problems as well. Everyone knows a capable White guy who’s completely given up. His depression, nihilism, and lack of will are the result of an economy that does not have secure, productive roles to offer him. In many cases, it’s not even that low-skill retail or food service are beneath him—those jobs aren’t open to him either. The only reason we have gotten to the point where diversity initiatives took precedence over real governance issues is because of how abstracted we are from real supply chains, real value production, real hierarchies of concepts, technical expertise, human capital. Our political economy is based on highly complex, interdependent systems of absolute horseshit. As immiserating as unemployment is, so is holding down a job (or three) you know provides no real value and won’t pay the bills. Either way, disillusionment is inevitable.

If you are an over-credentialed White man reading this, you may be asking “How does any of what you just said help me and my DOA career?” My advice to you is this: It’s over for you. You are not getting tenure. You will not be the next Atlantic editor.⁵ No one is coming to save you, and obviously no one cares about how that makes you feel. They will only want you back once they realize they could not actually function without you, and you still won’t be put into a position of real authority. Your job will be to clean up everyone else’s mess, then berated for jumping at the chance. Sometimes, that’s just how life is.

Acceptance is the first step. What follows next is reflection. What do you actually want out of life? What skills do you have that you could transfer to a career which would be less hostile to you? What skills would you be willing to learn to collect a steady paycheck and a tolerable standard of living? After reflection comes action: Make a plan, stick to it, get to where you need to be. Once you’ve resolved those material problems, only then can you begin to ask the bigger question, the one that grievance politics only appears to ask: What do I actually want from society, and what would need to be done in order to get it?

Society does not owe its subjects meaning or fairness. To believe otherwise is childish, naivete unbecoming of adult men. Expecting justice from society is no different than expecting physics to grant us teleportation. Society, like physics, must be understood as it is—both abstractly and intuitively—to be manipulated toward desired ends. We must be clear about what our ends are and why they are worth pursuing, and have the discipline to not let resentment, emotion, or circumstance substitute for careful thought.

1. Waking up to this was like watching a gaggle of meth addicts compulsively dig holes in the neighbor’s front yard—frantic activity mistaken for purpose.

2. My favorites are the poasters angry because they balk at Savage’s targeting of Gen X and Boomer White males. Clearly, these elders are a bug-bear for Savage—he keeps bringing up how they’re “still there” while he is not—and his critics mistake this fixation for a structural claim. In reality, they are not disputing his analysis so much as insisting he redirect his resentment toward their preferred object. None of this is useful, but it is entertaining.

3. The hiring process is inherently discriminatory—someone must be selected and dozens more will not be. The law bans discrimination based on all sorts of constructed identities and statuses, but unless bias is clearly and explicitly telegraphed, it is nearly impossible to determine if such discrimination actually occurred. Such determinations are left up to subjective judicial interpretation, producing endless edge cases. For all of them to clog up the courts is a massive waste of everyone’s time and money, rendering the law more opaque and selective while resolving nothing.

4. A major caveat: I am not talking about creating yet another guerrilla media clique in the already-oversaturated market. I am talking about altogether alternative political and economic structures, cobbled together through cumulative adaptations to and escalations through the new normal. Write, publish, do all of that if you have something to say, (after all, I’m doing it) but it isn’t a worthy goal in and of itself. If initially in service of grander plans, mission creep and incentive distortion can still set in.

5. By all means, don’t give up if this is truly your only dream, but if it is indeed your only dream, your life must be a fucking nightmare.