From Alexander Cortes email list. Worth signing up for the free emails, I also bought his Wolverine program and really like it. Anyways.
I've been reflecting on the Fatherhood convention from last week, and looking ahead to the next ones.
The concept is basic: men getting together to learn how to be Men.
But the need is what I wonder about; how did society get to this point?
The usual culprits are something about feminism, something about soft parenting, something about life is easy today.
Loud but ultimately shallow observations I find. There is no depth to them.
There has been an idea I have been thinking about, since reading C.S. Lewis and Tolkien again
And I admit this is very rough, and could be substantiated more, but I'd like to hear your feedback on it, as I need to think on it further
A Million Men, A 100 Years, and so it is we find ourselves
Britain during World War I lost about 700,000 men, but of those men lost, a very high number were upper class educated men and officers. The loss of these men resulted in Britain losing its "best and brightest", and the subsequent intellectual and masculine void would only be worsened during WWII.
Britain was not the only country to lose its "best" men, as the same situation was repeated across both sides of the conflict, France lost over a million men, as did Imperial Russia.
It was over ten milllion dead by the time the war ended, and the post WWI generation was the original "Lost generation". The 1920s was a decadent time where the roots perhaps of a selfish society took hold, but this was inoculated out of them in the Great Depression that followed.
This resultant loss of the "Brave" ones may have been recoverable, but WWII 20 years later led to another generational loss.
And I do not think Western society recovered from this precisely. Certainly not in Europe.
The Greatest Generation and the Silent Generation built the modern world we live in today in the United States: the infrastructure, the institutions, the idea of the a "Great Society" that moved towards progress.
But those men are long since dead.
And while the United States flourished, Britain and the rest of Europe did not.
The outcome of two world wars was that bravest and best educated of men were sacrificed in these wars, and if one considers Men to be the stewards, protectors, educators of the society's they live in, losing your finest men will consequently degrade the sense of strength, courage, mastery, and honor.
With that loss of men, there was also the loss of classical Western education; grammar, logic, rhetoric, the study of latin and greek classics, mathematics and music.
Quite plainly, the education of a 100 years ago produced a far sharper mind, and level of vocabulary is FAR beyond that of modern education. We say people don't talk that way now, but how we talk now is far far far less educated than how the educated talked then.
With the loss of those Men, there was lost two generations of men who would have been educators and leaders. And with the loss of those men, there came the rise of all the older men, the not so brave men, who had sent them all to die, or profited off the war,
and there arose what we call today the Military-Industrial Complex, ala the "Deep State". An entrenched political class of elites who would never fight, lawmakers who operate for profit, and an entire industry of capitalized politics that operate according to what serves the market and who pays the most to have a byline written into law.
The greatest generation is dead now. The boomers were the ascendant generation after them. Capitalism as morality and profit as an ethic is an entrenched and untouchable idea. Everything that can be profitized will be profitized (public education amongst those things)
Now, here's the thing about this idea: I cannot prove this, nor will any evidence I produce ever be truly substantial. Its a hypothesis that will never be any better than hypothesis.
I could argue against it, but I don't think its wrong. Its hindsight bias, without question, but the lesson of the Past is that no lessons are ever learned from the past anyways.
I think about this because I entertain this question often
Where have all the good men gone though?
I wonder this sincerely. Maybe my retrospecting is purely romanticizing. Or maybe something really was lost 100 years ago, and it was never regained.
Maybe the reality that there is an entire generation of Lost boys and lost girls who didnt have strong father figures and cannot identify what makes a man GOOD, maybe thats a third order consequence of something.
Maybe the fact that the world is run by technocrats who believe coding makes them gods and that all the words problems can be solved with an app, maybe those people are not as intelligent or as educated as they'd like to believe.
Maybe the reality that there is a growing alternative movement online that demands truth and despises the leadership of the world, and that elites have sold out their people in many western countries
Maybe thats not random,
and maybe at the root, there is a void that no one today anywhere can point to ANY Man in modern society as a leader who was/is morally upstanding and was a steward of his people, and maybe that expectation is not so idealized, and there really have been Men like that, but not in a very long time.
Maybe thats why myself and my fellow men have hundreds of thousands of men that follow us and consider us their older brothers and fathers and role models. Because I get the message every day, multiple times a day, and each passing day I get it more and more.
Maybe Im not the Man to even speak of these things. But then I wonder who it is who will speak of them, and I shudder to think that men of relative values and "progressive" beliefs are the ones who might make themselves out to be role models.
Someone should ask the questions, if nothing else.
Let me know your thoughts on the above
Love you all,
talk again
Alexander