Canadian Cincinnatus

Stalin’s children: the descendants of murderers

There is a new documentary out about the lives of the direct descendants of prominent National Socialists and how they are addled with guilt about the sins committed by their parents and grandparents. I found these tidbits interesting:

“Rainer Hoess is not his grandfather, Rudolf Hoess, the commandant of Auschwitz. And yet, at the same time, Bettina's children would carry on Herman's genes--which is why, she explains, she and her brother both sterilized themselves.”

“The person in the film who seems to have made the most sustained effort to grapple with his Nazi heritage is, unsurprisingly, one with a very direct connection to that past. Niklas Frank, son of the Nazi Governor-General of Poland, Hans Frank, has spent much of his life researching and denouncing his father's crimes…. But he is spurned on by his loathing of his parents and of what they did …. As for his father, he says, through all his research, he kept hoping to find something, anything, good that he had ever done; some evidence that he tried to save at least one person, one time. But there was no such evidence.”

It seems that victory over National Socialism is now so complete that the children of prominent Nazis – who extolled eugenics and breeding a master race –voluntarily sterilize themselves so that their father’s genes would not propagate forward.

Were this also true for communism. Where are Mao and Pol Pot and Lenin and Stalin’s children? Where is the movie describing their guilt and self-sterilization? After all, while National Socialism killed 20 million, communism has killed 100 million world-wide. In Cambodia, Pol Pot killed 1/3 of all the people in his country in less than 5 years.

Instead we have proto-Stalin, Vladimir Putin, commemorating the 70^th anniversary of the Battle of Stalingrad by temporarily changing the name of Volgograd back to Stalingrad and painting Stalin’s visage on the side of municipal buses.

We need to be working for the day when Vladimir Putin’s children are so wracked with guilt that they neuter themselves so that the hated Putin gene is not propagated any further in the human gene pool.

Rob Long: “Stop Connecting” or why the British Empire was so efficient

Last week Rob Long wrote a Ricochet post quoting a Bain Consulting study that concluded that corporate managers are spending too much time ‘connecting’. Rob said:

“I've often wondered how much better some meetings would be if every laptop was shut and every phone switched off.”

This article triggered an idea that I have had for a while, that is best introduced by answering this question: why was the British Empire so efficient? For there is no doubt about it, it was. A mere thousand bureaucrats in the Colonial Office managed an empire so large that the sun never set on it, an empire that included a subcontinent. How was this possible?

One reason, I think, is that the colonies weren’t informatically connected. No phones, no text messages, no Skype, no e-mail, no conference calls, no webinars, no meetings. Therefore, no micromanagement. For reasons of necessity, all decisions had to be pushed down to the lowest possible levels. This not only had the effect of minimizing bureaucracy but it also meant that the character of the Empire’s decision makers was more solid.

Consider, say, the Governor of Tasmania. Halfway around the world, if there was a sudden insurrection or unexpected invasion, it would take two weeks for your urgent request for help reach Whitehall. That means that the soonest help could arrive is a month, assuming the government sends off reinforcements within a day, which it wouldn’t. So who would apply for such a job? Not a bureaucratic manager, content to transport papers from the inbox to the outbox and breath heavily at conference calls all day. But a bold leader, a man of action, might. Somebody, for whom, the lack of connections to the home country would be liberating not enervating.

The result was an efficient, adaptable and decisively run empire.

 

UPDATE: Thank's for the Instalanch Glenn!

For those of you who have been directed to this post for the first time by Glenn Reynolds, feel free to look around. And don't let the name fool you. I do talk a lot about American politics.

 

 

New York Times: Irony is antisocial

A very insightful article about the mentality of that most annoying of social groups, the hipsters, was published recently in the New York Times, and brought to my attention by the nice people at diehipster.com. Here are some excerpts:

“The hipster haunts every city street and university town. Manifesting a nostalgia for times he never lived himself, this contemporary urban harlequin appropriates outmoded fashions (the mustache, the tiny shorts), mechanisms (fixed-gear bicycles, portable record players) and hobbies (home brewing, playing trombone).”

“He is merely a symptom and the most extreme manifestation of ironic living.”

“How did this happen? It stems in part from the belief that this generation has little to offer in terms of culture, that everything has already been done, or that serious commitment to any belief will eventually be subsumed by an opposing belief, rendering the first laughable at best and contemptible at worst. This kind of defensive living works as a pre-emptive surrender and takes the form of reaction rather than action.”

“Our conduct is no longer governed by subtlety, finesse, grace and attention, all qualities more esteemed in earlier decades. Inwardness and narcissism now hold sway.”

“The ironic clique appears simply too comfortable, too brainlessly compliant. Ironic living is a first-world problem. For the relatively well educated and financially secure, irony functions as a kind of credit card you never have to pay back. In other words, the hipster can frivolously invest in sham social capital without ever paying back one sincere dime. He doesn’t own anything he possesses.”

“First, it signals a deep aversion to risk. As a function of fear and pre-emptive shame, ironic living bespeaks cultural numbness, resignation and defeat.”

“Throughout history, irony has served useful purposes, like providing a rhetorical outlet for unspoken societal tensions. But our contemporary ironic mode is somehow deeper; it has leaked from the realm of rhetoric into life itself. This ironic ethos can lead to a vacuity and vapidity of the individual and collective psyche. Historically, vacuums eventually have been filled by something — more often than not, a hazardous something. Fundamentalists are never ironists; dictators are never ironists; people who move things in the political landscape, regardless of the sides they choose, are never ironists. 

Where can we find other examples of nonironic living? What does it look like? Nonironic models include very young children, elderly people, deeply religious people, people with severe mental or physical disabilities, people who have suffered, and those from economically or politically challenged places where seriousness is the governing state of mind. My friend Robert Pogue Harrison put it this way in a recent conversation: ‘Wherever the real imposes itself, it tends to dissipate the fogs of irony.’”

“It is my firm conviction that this mode of living is not viable and conceals within it many social and political risks. For such a large segment of the population to forfeit its civic voice through the pattern of negation I’ve described is to siphon energy from the cultural reserves of the community at large. People may choose to continue hiding behind the ironic mantle, but this choice equals a surrender to commercial and political entities more than happy to act as parents for a self-infantilizing citizenry." 

Like the author of this piece, Christy Wampole, I believe that irony can serve “useful purposes, like providing a rhetorical outlet for unspoken societal tensions”. And like her, I think it has metastasized into a serious social disease. Though I am pretty sure we would disagree on which “commercial and political entities” are “more than happy to act as parents for a self-infantilizing citizenry”, she expresses the nature of the problem much better than I could have.

As Glenn Reynolds would say, read the whole thing.

Spree killings and moral relativism

Friday evening I watched the third of the great Peter Jackson Lord of the Rings films. Juxtaposing the film and the schoolhouse massacre in Connecticut, I reflected on one of the reasons J R R Tolkien’s masterpiece is one of great literary works of the 20^th century: unlike all the moral relativists making up the literary crowd in that blood-soaked century, Tolkien straightforwardly acknowledged the existence of good and evil.

This sentiment was echoed by J Christian Adam’s piece in PJ Media Saturday morning:

“Failing to name it evil lets evil flourish. If the sight of planes slamming into the World Trade Center towers wasn’t enough to comfortably believe in evil, maybe the horror in Connecticut will be.

Denial of conscious, deliberate evil makes it easier to deny the existence of conscious and deliberate good. If deliberate evil exists, then deliberate good must also. Otherwise human history would be one long ruinous loop of Stalin’s gulags and Pol Pot’s murder factories.”

It is natural after senseless massacres to ask, what went wrong? Or what can be done next? Particularly when the reasons are so seemingly random and the killer maddeningly untouchable by vengeance. Well here’s one reason about why it happened: all the people who fail to acknowledge the existence of evil in the world and deride talk of good and evil as simplistic.

In the good ol' days, there was a proven way of proactively dealing with suicidal maniacs. It was the systematic inculcation of the ideas of good and evil, as well as the idea of divine retribution. This was a project nearly everybody used to participate in. Potential suicide-murderers can be gotten to, but only by a society that is morally confident. In such a society, people are not left alienated.

A couple of weeks ago, Peter Robinson interviewed filmmaker Harry Shearer in his Uncommon Knowledge series. Shearer had just made a by-all-accounts excellent documentary about Hurricane Katrina.  Shearer is a liberal, but a reasonable liberal - at least he seemed to be for most of the interview. With one exception, he came across like the kind of guy I would like to have a beer with. The exception: his criticism of conservative politicians (like George W Bush) for using phrases like “bad guys” in a complex world, where many shades of gray exist.

Shearer thought that with that point, he had scored a point over conservatives. In reality, he only demonstrates perfectly the attitude that enables spree killers.

Scapegoat watch: Australian DJ edition

After viewing the promo pages (now taken down) of those now-infamous Australian DJ’s who played a practical joke on a hapless British nurse who subsequently killed herself, they look like just the kind of people I like to despise: pseudo-creative types who are forever demonstrating their iconoclastic individualism with ‘out-on-the-edge’ rebellious behaviour. In reality, they are marginally talented, fashion conscious sheep whose best effort is to merely be a copy of a copy of a copy of Howard Stern: annoying but generally harmless cookie-cutter pests who our society produces too much of these days.

Having said that, they deserve very little of the bile now being directed at them by the public at large. No reasonable person would conclude that duping a hospital functionary

into giving out confidential but harmless medical information by pretending to be the Queen and Prince Charles would result in that person’s suicide. It would be reasonable to assume that she would be reprimanded, but not that she would take her own life.

For this reason, I assume that there was something else going on in the nurse’s life; perhaps she was taking medication with unpleasant psychological side effects, or she had some deep personal problems that her co-workers are scarcely aware of. 

Unfortunately, the public dismisses such inconvenient details because it gets in the way of the natural human urge to find a scapegoat. However, natural or not, such desire indicates the uncharitable, hypocritical and vicious side of human nature.

The public’s reaction is ugly because the life of the nurse is not the only issue here. The careers of these Australian DJ’s also matter. It is safe to say that those are now completely over. While I am not averse to seeing them punished, I don’t think their intentions were malicious enough to justify destroy their careers. Remember, being shocking is what they were being paid to do, it is what their listeners expected from them, it is why they used to be popular, which is why the public condemnation now is so hypocritical. Telephone stunts have been the staple of shock jocks for years. On Toronto radio, I have listened to many such pranks, some more inspired than others, and all of these DJ’s have been celebrated and rewarded because of them.

But to me, what is worse than the unfair treatment those DJ’s are getting, is the idea being expressed by the public that people are so fragile that they can’t handle a bad joke. How did we in the West get so far that we consider our people to be so delicate that we believe pranksters should consider suicide to be a possible outcome of a crank call? In the old days, friends of the nurse would have admonished her to 'buck up' when they saw she was distraught by the incident.

Life isn’t fair and life isn’t always pleasant and safe, but that is not a reason to lower the speed limit to 20 miles and hour and mandate 10 feet of Styrofoam around every car. We should instead be inculcating a stiff-upper-lip stoicism in our citizenry.

Personally I am tired of shock jocks and their lame, unoriginal, obnoxious behaviour, but I am also afraid of the howling mob, demanding a sacrifice every time something bad happens, and am suspicious of nanny staters, who are always on the look-out for more reasons to ‘protect’ us. 

The Food Nazis now want warning labels on junk food

A week ago, the Ontario Medical Association (OMA) launched a campaign against junk food. According to the CBC, this is what the OMA has in mind:

“Unhealthy foods should be taxed the same way tobacco is as part of an effort to battle childhood obesity, Ontario doctors say.

The recommendation is part of an Ontario Medical Association (OMA) campaign launched Tuesday.”

“The group suggests that the province introduce policies including:

Increasing taxes on junk food and decreasing taxes on healthy foods.

Restricting marketing of fatty and sugary foods to children.

Placing graphic warning labels on pop and other high-calorie foods with little to no nutritional value.

Adding retail displays for high-sugar, high-fat foods that prominently advise consumers of the health risks.

Restricting the availability of sugary, low-nutritional value foods in sports and other recreational facilities frequented by young people.

Just as graphic images are required on cigarette packages, the doctors said, junk food such as french fries should come in packaging illustrating the toll obesity takes on the body. Potential images include a foot with an open wound meant to reflect on a problem that people with diabetes may suffer, or a liver riddled with fatty liver disease.”

Around 10 years ago, the far sighted among us warned the rest of us that as the anti-smoking campaign wound down (because of victory), the anti-smoking Nazi’s next target would be fast food. Most people tittered: surely, they wouldn’t attack Big Macs like cancer sticks?

We were wrong.

Speaking of the war on smoking, I have to say that even though I have never smoked a cigarette in my life, I increasingly find the whole exercise contemptible. It becomes more and more clear that it is not about public health at all, but is just a handy excuse for busy bodies to satisfy their inner petty tyrant.

If you think I am unfair by calling anti-smoking activists Nazis, let me remind you that the first anti-smoking Nazi was none other than Adolph Hitler himself; who made his generals stand outside the door of his East Prussian Wolf’s Lair bunker when they wanted to have a cigarette: a scene very familiar around the entrances and exits of 21^st century office buildings.

While the motivations of the individual participants are low, at an institutional level, the OMA’s motives can be summed up by one phrase: ‘mission creep’. If we had serious disease epidemics, the OMA wouldn’t have time for this nonsense, but we no longer have epidemics like we used to. People are no longer dropping by the thousands from TB and the Spanish flu; and hunger, a constant companion not that long ago, is history. As a result, human life expectancy statistics are breaking records every year (by seniors who all used to smoked), and public health officials have increasingly less to do.

As our lot in life improves, these people - anti-smoking Nazis, Mothers Against Drunk Driving, HR Department harpies, PC commissars at our Human Right’s Commissions, and now Ronald MacDonald haters - work ever more feverishly on ever more marginal threats to our well-being. The casualty? Liberty: one of the most precious gifts a political system can bestow on its citizens.

 

P.S. “A society of children cannot survive, no matter how all-embracing the government nanny.” Steyn, Mark.

Another attack on our most basic right: the right to self-defence

So just because Toronto Chinatown grocer David Chen is now a folk hero for inspiring the Citizen’s Arrest and Defence Act, it doesn’t mean that our right to defend ourselves is secure.

Take the recent case of Moses Mahilal. Peter Worthington explains the case:

Mahilal ... grabbed a knife from the kitchen and raced upstairs where he caught the guy, hiding and loaded with stolen property. Mahilal didn’t waste any time in attacking and stabbing the guy. The thief, Kino Johnson, 33, ran away with Mahilal after him. Johnson landed in hospital, and at his trial was sentenced to 20 months in jail and two years probation.

His record includes convictions for assault, robbery and theft, so clearly he’s a potentially dangerous guy. I doubt there’s a reasonable citizen in this country who doesn’t identify with Moses Mahilal’s reaction, and feels that anyone burglarizing a home takes his chances, and no tears wept if he’s caught and and manhandled.

Oh, Johnson is quoted in the Toronto Star that, with a knife wound in his chest he could’ve died. Few tears if this had been the case.

The problem is, Mahilal has now been charged with aggravated assault. 

I suppose the defenders of our criminal justice system would say that this is different. Mahilal attacked Johnson with a dangerous weapon (a knife). So are we only allowed to defend ourselves with our bare hands? To make it fair for the criminals who stalk law-abiding citizens?

And yes, he apparently knifed Johnson while Johnson was in the act of fleeing? OK, so it wasn’t strictly necessary, but as the police like to say in these cases, Mahilal was in ‘hot pursuit’. And as Worthington points out, Mahilal didn’t know if Johnson is packing a knife or a gun. He also doesn’t know what his criminal record is like. And by stopping Johnson, he took this dangerous predator off the streets. What about all the home invasions that Mahilal prevented with his act of ‘recklessness’?

It is obvious that our criminal justice system is biased against citizen’s defending themselves. Normally, I sympathize with crown prosecutors and cops because they are our first line of defense against criminals. Except that they aren’t really the first line of defence, we are.

And in cases like this, by enforcing the police’s use-of-force monopoly, they show where their true allegiance lies, with ‘the system’ and not with the citizenry.

Three heroes who weren’t feminists

One of the conspicuous facets of the Titanic tragedy was the universality of the women and children first ethos. At the drop of a hat, the men on the ship were ready to lay down their lives so that the women and children could go on. A revealing fact that you won’t learn from the James Cameron flick is that the survival rate for a woman in third class was greater than for a man in first class.

When feminists rail against male privilege in the old patriarchy, they conveniently forget that being a gentleman meant obligations as well as perks. As a result, the rise of feminism has tended to corrode the duties expected of a man as well as the rights he expected to enjoy.

It is therefore heartening to hear that in the Batman massacre, three men voluntarily laid down their lives to protect their girlfriends. From the New York Daily News:

“Three survivors of the Colorado movie-theater massacre escaped with minor wounds, but were left with broken hearts because their heroic boyfriends died saving them.

In final acts of valor, Jon Blunk, Matt McQuinn and Alex Teves used their bodies to shield their girlfriends as accused madman James Holmes turned the Aurora cineplex into a shooting gallery.”

Jon Blunk, Matt McQuinn and Alex Teves: these names deserve to be remembered for ever more.

 

The Batman shootout in Denver and its root causes

The shooting in Denver, coming so close after the Danzig St shootout in Toronto, provides us with an interesting if horrific contrast. As I wrote last Thursday, the key to understanding what happened on Danzig St. is one detail: that it occurred at a Monday night block party. In other words, it was exclusively a welfare phenomenon. Working people can’t tie one on on a Monday night. The solution is therefore obvious: put welfare people to work. 

Nevertheless, a small percentage of our murders are like the Batman massacre in Denver, premeditated spree killings done for no reason. While numerically small, these atrocities are the most horrific, not just because of the body count but also their randomness. You can avoid a Danzig St scenario simply by avoiding ‘blockos’, but spree killings can happen anywhere, especially where middle class people congregate, like movie theaters and schools.

It is important to understand that, unlike the Danzig St. shootout, spree killing is almost universally a middle-class phenomenon. I rarely find myself in agreement with that Marxist race-hustler Van Jones, but there was a lot of truth when he said:

You’ve never seen a Columbine done by a black child. Never. They always say, ‘We can’t believe it happened here. We can’t believe it’s these suburban white kids.’ It’s only them.

To be fair, Jones is wrong to say that spree killers are all white. The Virginia Tech killer was Korean. But he was right in that spree killing is a mostly middle class phenomenon. It is not something driven by need or profit or a primitive honour code. It is driven by alienation, which I define here as the feeling that there is no greater purpose in your life beyond yourself. Paradoxically, the disadvantaged poor boys who commit Danzig St-style shootouts do not suffer from this affliction. This is because they belong to a gang. Their higher purpose is gang loyalty. And since street gangs are a modern reincarnation of that most basic form of social organization, the hunter-gather tribe, the loyalty they find is deeply satisfying. The police, the military, the fire department and the night shift at the coal mine all employ the same all-male honour group loyalty mechanism. This is a powerful force: military history is replete with examples of perfectly ordinary men sacrificing their lives for their team. These men were not alienated.

I remember the moment in my life where I felt this tribal loyalty tugging at me the most intensely. It was several years ago at the funeral of a prominent member of the Toronto Estonian community who had died suddenly in his prime. The pews were filled with the who’s-who of the Toronto Estonian community, people I knew my whole life. As I looked around, I became consciously aware of the solidarity I felt in my heart. At that moment, I was content to sacrifice my life for them, with a song in my heart. I had a higher purpose (and still do). I was completely unalienated.

And yet, many suburban kids grow up never experiencing such a sense of purpose, without which true contentment in life is impossible. The fault lies with the parents. They tell their kids, “do whatever you feel is right,” which is about the worst piece of advice you could give your child. Paul Bernardo did what felt right to him, as did James Holmes, the Batman killer.

So the question now becomes, why do parents say these things? Why don’t they inculcate a set of values in their children that is greater than themselves? The root cause, in my opinion, goes all the way back to World War I and the crisis of confidence it spawned. European people went to war in 1914 believing in God and country right down to their bones, but the slaughter that ensued was so massive and so seemingly pointless that these concepts were fundamentally discredited. Religion and patriotism have made a comeback, but never completely. The residual void has been filled at various times by Bolshevism, National Socialism and much more quietly by existentialism (the belief that only personal feelings matter) and nihilism (the belief that the universe is meaningless). The Holocaust of World War II only punctuated this feeling. 

Like many bad trends in the 20^th century, existentialism and nihilism have its roots in the late German romantic philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche not only influenced Hitler, but the entire existentialist movement – philosophers such as Sartre and Heidegger, and artists such as Ingmar Bergmann, Samuel Becket (especially Waiting for Godot, which is probably the most succinct summary of nihilism yet produced) and most recently Lars von Trier. 

It is significant that James Holmes told the police that he is the Joker, as the Joker in the immediately preceding Batman film, The Dark Knight, is one of the most eloquent spokesmen for nihilism that can be found in popular culture. Which is not to say that The Dark Knight was not a moral film. It was, surprisingly so for a comic book flick. After all, the Joker was clearly portrayed as a villain. But for suburban kids who are taught to do what feels right and lack a higher code or a higher cause, the Joker can be a profoundly attractive character. From our hunter-gatherer days, we have been programmed to be attracted to charismatic, fearless leaders who work effectively and passionately towards their goals. And the Joker was all that. The real problem is the moral vacuum that many suburban kids grow up in which allows them to identify with the Joker’s primitive but attractive qualities rather than be repulsed by his evilness. 

I have long believed that conservatives are ham-fistedly incompetent in prosecuting the culture war. In this line, I expect somebody like Brent Bozell to demand violence in films to be toned down. Wrong. Won’t do a thing because that isn’t the problem. Banning portrayals of seductive villains like the Joker won’t work either, even if you could figure out a workable legal definition of what you mean. The problem lies deeper. Think of Lars von Trier and the pessimistic, head-in-the-oven films of Ingmar Bergmann. The Joker’s philosophy is just culturally downstream of films like The Seventh Seal, where a returning Crusader plays chess with the devil. And of course, The Seventh Seal is downstream from Waiting for Godot, which is downstream from Heidegger and Nietzsche.

If you want to really fix our society and make it truly healthy as opposed to merely create an outwardly conformist but ultimately shallow Stepford Wives world that the left imagines the 1950’s were, mere bans and prohibitions won’t do. You have to attack the problem at its roots. This means that we have to roll up our sleeves and demonstrate that the philosophical core of nihilism and existentialism is rotten and inferior to a belief in God and country, which is a prerequisite for a functioning society. Then, you have to inspire a whole new generation of artists with these ideas, who will in turn create art that glorifies and promotes Western civilization.

If this sounds like a lot of work, it is. But the first step is to point out the negative consequences of the left’s core philosophical principles when they manifest themselves, events like, say, the Batman massacre.

 

Middle aged women going crazy

A disturbing trend I have been noticing for a while among my circle of friends, acquaintances and coworkers is the break-up of a long-term marriage that is initiated by the wife, who then proceeds to cavort about like a teenage girl, quite often ending up with some tattooed scumbag several orders of magnitude lower on the socioeconomic ladder than the ‘good provider’ husband she just left. These divorces are almost always initiated by the woman and usually the husband is shell-shocked and says that he ‘didn’t know what hit him’.

The motivation of these late-blooming slatterns is easy to divine. Women in their early forties can still be fairly attractive if they are well preserved, but in a few short years, they are decisively into grandmother territory. By that point, their sexual appeal will be a distant memory and that can be hard to take. It is a regrettable fact that, sexually speaking, women hit a wall in their late thirties to mid forties that is fairly hard. Men, in contrast, can be desirable well into late middle age if they stay in reasonable shape, dress reasonably well and don’t lose their hair. But understandable or not, the popularity of ‘spiritual adultery’ among married women has serious consequences for our society. 

The obvious victims are the children. Instead of growing up in a stable home, secure in the knowledge that both of their parents will always be there for them, they have to make their own way through the wreckage of a broken home. 

Unfortunately, we as a society so obsessed with victimhood that we ignore other - possibly greater - damage that this sort of thing causes. Let me explain. It is a fact of human society that it is the job of women to select men and not the other way around. This is because men, by nature, are more wanton in their lust. Because women are the choosier sex, the type of men they tend to choose is a powerful normative force that shapes what is considered acceptable male behaviour. When women choose men on the basis of their ability to be a good provider, men will respond by working hard and being responsible. When women prefer the charismatic, bad-boy type, why make the effort to go to school and work hard? Just hang around, be an asshole and pick up the beta-male provider’s loopy wife (as well as his house, because the wife inevitably ends up with the matrimonial home). A lot easier to live the life of a Jersey Shore goon. 

Of late, there has been a lot of hand-wringing about what is wrong with today’s boys, in that, for the first time, girls outnumber boys in university. At the same time, it has also been noted that an alarming portion of young men today choose to be underachievers, content to play video games, drink beer and game women in bars. I think part of the reason women outnumber men in college campuses is because university attendance is too high. This makes a university degree less important and I think men are picking up on this fact better than women. Nevertheless, I also believe the rise of Generation Slacker and the renewed preference of women for charismatic love-em-and-leave-em types like Alex Rodriguez is not unrelated.

If you want to see the negative social consequences of a society where women prefer this sort of sexual partner, look at Africa. There, women do all the work, raise the children and bear all the responsibility. The men hang around, flex their muscles, drink and screw. The result: abject poverty, broken families and a background level of violence that is jacked through the roof. Not good.

Evolutionary psychology teaches us why women desire alpha male thugs. In the hunter-gatherer era where most of our DNA developed, mating with the leader of the pack was the best way a woman could ensure the survival of her children – and her. The further down the pecking order she had to go to find a mate, the worse it was for her in a harsh, unforgiving world.

Our social environment has changed considerably since those days so that such preferences have become a maladaption. In a civilized environment, it is much better for the well being of the woman - and society – if she chooses the conscientious beta male instead, the proverbial ‘good provider’. He would be low down on the pecking order of Genghis Khan’s hordes but is high up in the civilized world. Think Bill Gates and Steve Jobs.

For this reason, civilization has evolved over the centuries to strongly encourage women to select the beta-provider mate and shun the alpha-cad. In the West, Christianity has played a prominent role in this regard, but all advanced societies have independently developed customs and traditions that serve this purpose. If they hadn’t, they would have self-destructed.

Which brings us back to today’s society. In the sixties, the sexual structure of our society broke down as people rejected the traditional family in favour of sexual freedom. While my instincts run libertarian in most things, the freedom to shun the customs and traditions regulating human mating behaviour has huge externalities (to borrow the language of economists). Society restricts our freedom to steal a lollypop from a variety store because exercising this personal choice corrodes the institution of property without which organized society is impossible. Society used to restrict our freedom to commit adultery for the same reason: significant external costs born by everybody when the institution of marriage is broken.

Because it is permissible in the age of feminism to bash men, it remains socially acceptable to frown upon married men who indulge in the universal male desire for cheap, throw-away sex. This is good. Unfortunately, because of feminism, it is not socially acceptable to frown upon married women who exercise their equally primitive desire to fuck alpha males. If our society is to survive in the long-term, this must change.