It’s really not surprising that jackasses like Tate and the Crying Canadian have purchase. They “tell it like it is” aka tell kids what certain boys want to hear. If I got on TV and said “bed time is oppressing you” I bet I could get some kids to think I’m some kind of intellectual too. Kids are gullible but they aren’t stupid. They can see that there’s problems in the world. What kids (and a lot of people) lack is the wisdom to understand that retreating to an imagined past or set of norms is never a solution. Even if their whole narrative of “the way things used to be” was true it doesn’t change the fact that the history proves that those preceding events got us to where we are now.

Even in societies that appeared to have long periods of stability or were static is a lie. The centuries of “pax romana” were punctuated with wars and rebellions. The millenia of Confucian stability of China was full of famines, uprisings, and dynasties faltering and being replaced. The Maya were never a unified empire - it was a collection of polities tied by shared culture and language that rose and fell over the course of hundreds of years, closer to the disunited city states of Mesopotamia than some kind of contiguous body. These are macro examples but I think they prove my point.

It is by viewing these things from an external position that people are able to mistake them as possessing a structure that they do not in fact have. It is similar to how a mountain is seen as a singular body from a distance but up close it is actually a collection of smaller stones.

These kids are only working with the tools that we equip them with. We are not equipping them with the tools necessary to understand and reject these grifters because we do not give them a materialist education. We allow snake oil salesmen to creep into their lives by abdicating our social role of educating children and allowing algorithms to guide their media consumption. We cannot consume our way out of this crisis, especially when that consumption is tied to the very worst metrics like outrage based engagement.

However there is a nugget of hope within the terrifying truth of the predatory nature of the manosphere. It relies of the undereducated and naive to propogate. It relies on ignorance and bias and a sense of aggrievement and a historical illiteracy. There are cures to these and we know what they are. Deradicalization is possible especially when it comes to kids because their toxicity has not fully calcified. What is quite evident, however, is that capitalism and neoliberalism have no solutions to these problems hence the hand wringing and hopelessness of the people who worry about these things publicly in their papers-of-record. The insufficiency of their solutions and motivation to address the problem are always at odds with the declared severity of the problem. If Tate is truly an existential threat to your world abduct him, [redacted] where the skull meets the spine, and be done with it.