the idea that you can change your life, your profession, your circumstances, even your gender as you change as a human is something they find repellent. if you don't live by The Script (whatever that may be) you're doing it wrong, in their eyes
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part of what's happening right now is that the old forms (the scripts) are being degraded but the new forms either don't exist or to the extent that they do are unavailable to most. what you're left with is a society that increasingly prizes atomization but without the concept of self-creation
what this looks like functionally is the get-rich crypto or gambling scheme. the reasoning goes: society will not afford me any opportunities. thus, no one is for me unless i am for myself. and therefore anything i can do to get ahead i should do.
versions of this exist at the elite level too in finance and tech. those aren't any more pro-social, but they are more accepted; the old forms still have some sway in the sense that you gotta pay the rent. but for the men under discussion here those avenues are largely inaccessible for class reasons
so, we have a large population that demands "scripts" to live by, but the material foundations that once supported those scripts are cracking. whoops got contradictions in my mode of production again! anyway this all produces a huge amount of psychological stress in many people
this hits working-class men particularly hard because the social prescriptions they are handed out are so at odds with what's actually possible. this isn't to say that they have it "harder" than women, it's just that the delta between what they're told to do and what the world allows is higher
i don't know what the solution here is other than to mandate that everyone read richard rorty and erich fromm in schools. we're in a transitional period and maybe the solution here is just for millenials to raise their kids better than gen x has (def part of it)
i think a lot of it is the appeal of the gamble: big risk but big reward. getting a higher education is a slog; it's also one of the "scripts" that people had been taught in the past but now feel like they don't deliver
I think that *is* how it cashes out at the elite levels though because at that class position you simply have a wider awareness of the world. that's why crypto (on the bagholding side, rather than on the "generating" side) is largely a phenomenon of the lower-middle and working class
sure, I'm not disputing that, it's more that I think there are large-scale societal forces that explain this shift, rather than some essential male nature
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