Esa's Notebook

I have recently watched Jordan Peterson’s YouTube-posts (https://www.youtube.com/@JordanBPeterson) with great interest. They repeatedly bring up the problems of men, the oppression of men, especially now in America. Personally, I think that the same thing applies to all Western civilization today. The lines below are mainly direct quotes from his podcast conversations with various experts.

Men are increasingly turning away from work and they’re increasingly turning away from education. Since 1965 in the United States there are 500% more able-bodied, working aged men who are out of the labor force, which means they are not even trying to look for a job. The number of men who are pursuing education both high school education and higher education is collapsing in the USA. It is 60:40 female to male enrollment in colleges. Globally, death by suicide occurred about 1.7 times more often among males than among females (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_differences_in_suicide). Men are more likely than women to use almost all types of illicit drugs (https://nida.nih.gov/publications/research-reports/substance-use-in-women/sex-gender-differences-in-substance-use).

One of the biggest challenges in society today is that men don’t often have a vision for their lives anymore as to what their lives could be. They’re told from time to time that they are part of the problem, that their attempt to exert any kind of leadership in any field or endeavor is equivalent to patriarchy, and that they contribute to the climate disaster as well as to the systemic injustices of America. This is now the constant message to men in the western world.

Instead of this, we should be saying to men that this country needs you, your families, your neighborhoods need you, and that you can make the world a better place. They just need encouragement or at least one person who isn’t actively telling them that every shred of ambition they might manifest is nothing but the pathology that drives tyranny and the raping force that destroys the planet.

What we need now is to send men a fundamentally different message which is that their lives matter, that the world will not be what it could be without them. That there are things that you can do and that if you don’t do them, they won’t happen. The world and the people around you, your family, your spouse, your children will be impoverished if you don’t shoulder the responsibility that you can shoulder.