Forty-nine percent of the men and women in the United States are not married. This is an all-time high – or perhaps I mean low. I wouldn’t be surprised if it hits 50% or even a little higher. This is a bad development. When I write “bad,” I do mean bad. There is no good to it. None whatsoever, contrary to the hallucinations of the fuzzy-minded chattering classes, who are – let’s face it – worse than worthless. They’re dangerous. While there are always a certain number of people who do not want to be married and have children, I can’t imagine it being 49% of the population. Why so many? Ultimately, it’s because of the interference of the State in the relationships between men and women. When the State interferes in what is none of its business, it always damages and sometimes destroys. This is the same story over and over, throughout history, and the stupid never learn until it is too late. Then, unfortunately, sometimes, they take the smart down with them.
When the government goes beyond protecting life, liberty and property, then it turns into what philosophers and economists from Franz Oppenheimer to Ludwig von Mises to Albert Jay Nock have called “the State.” Being based on coercion and force and not persuasion and freedom, the State always damages or destroys. It never heals or creates.
John Locke, the English philosopher, wrote the function of government was to protect “life, liberty and property.” His phrase made it into the Declaration of Independence as “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” “Pursuit of happiness” is better translated as “well-being” or, best, “flourishing.” It’s a translation of the Greek word eudemonia, and you get it through arête, or excellence.
Gaining happiness and satisfaction means to fulfill all your talents, and as the philosopher Brand Blanshard has written, you do the most for yourself and society by developing yourself to the best of your abilities (Spinoza, hundreds of years before, said essentially the same thing). You can only do that by having the liberty to do so – which means free from the destructive meddling of the State.
Damaging and destroying is what forty-plus years of the immensely destructive influence of leftist/lesbian feminism, enshrined in law, have done – it has benefited educated high-IQ women but damaged similar men. And it has led women to believe all their problems are caused by men and society, rather than their own personal shortcomings.
Let’s break all this down by categories. Men will always dominate in dirty, dangerous professions. They will always be the coal miners, the oil rig workers, the garbage men, the loggers. Women will never be in these professions; in fact they don’t want to be in them. They want cushy highly-paid indoor jobs.
These men in those dirty and dangerous professions can usually find women in their class to marry them. So there is not much of a problem, except these men are never going to be acceptable to almost all educated high-IQ women (the reason I say “high-IQ” is because I don’t use the description “smart’ – because they’re not).
Men will also always dominate in STEM – science, technology, engineering, math. In these fields there will be a very small minority of women, but overwhelmingly, say 98%, it will be men. This shortage of women is not due to “discrimination” or “prejudice” – men’s and women’s brains are wired differently.
These STEM guys might have problems finding wives. Dilbert comes to mind, who as an engineer had chronic problems finding a girlfriend. As far as I know, Wally never had one.
These kinds of men are never going to make women swoon. A lot of them are, painfully and unfairly, tagged as nerds/geeks/dorks. Even though these are the men who overwhelmingly advance society, for which they receive no credit or gratitude, just insults and degradation.
A lot of these men are not going to be acceptable to many educated women.
Curiously enough, the indispensible men are the least popular, and the most irrelevant, childish and disturbed – musicians, actors, athletes – are the most popular (I am reminded of what the actor William Macy said: “No one becomes an actor because they had a happy childhood”). To me, it’s sometimes amazing the human race has even survived.
I mentioned the law currently benefits educated women over educated men. These women, who are now lawyers, CEOs, CPAs, MBAs, doctors, veterinarians, etc., generally (but of course not always) want to marry men who are in the same socioeconomic class they are – if not higher.
They want men who are taller, who make as much money if not more, who are as good-looking if not better-looking, and who also want to marry them, have children, be loyal…and also support their wives’ careers. These women want all the advantages of men and women and none of the responsibilities.
Unfortunately for all, the law is now keeping men out of that socioeconomic class (Affirmative Action means “White Men Need Not Apply”). And this is why so many of these women are not married – and are not going to get married and have children. These women are eradicating their entire genetic lines, to the consternation of many of them.
This eradication has caused many women to end up as hostile cat-owning, apartment-dwelling spinsters on psychiatric drugs – and I have seen more than one of these hysterical, irrational women. Several, in fact. They almost always blame their self-created problems on innocent men.
I also mentioned the law benefits educated women. It does not benefit uneducated women, for example the ones who work in nursing homes for $9 an hour. Since they cannot live on that kind of money, the State gives them and their children food cards, subsidized housing, and medical cards. Now while they are benefited in that way, they are not benefited by making a living wage.
These lower-class below-average IQ women might get married – then divorced, then married again. They end up with two or three kids by different men, then living with one who isn’t the father of any of them. Often, in a trailer.
There is no reason for any of these women to stay married – or even get married - since for all practical purposes they can marry the State and be supported by the taxpayers.
So what we have are women at the top of the socioeconomic scale, and at the bottom, who end up unmarried. The ones at the top claim they can’t find any acceptable men and therefore don’t have children, and the ones at the bottom have too many, none of whom they can support.
Some women will decide to have children on their own, without being married. There is a big problem with this, and all I will say is that the word “bastard” means a cruel heartless man…and a boy with a mother and no father.
There is also the added social and personal burden of men having no incentive to get married. The State can now take their kids from them and give them to the mothers if the couple gets divorced, and make the father support them and the mother. There is an overwhelming economic incentive for men to not get married and have children.
Now we turn to what has traditionally been considered the middle class. They are being destroyed.
Wages stopped going up in 1973, for several reasons. For one, Richard Nixon went off of the gold standard in 1971, allowing the thoroughly unconstitutional Federal Reserve Bank to destroy the dollar by inflating the paper money (sic) supply. Inflation, as always, transfers wealth from everyone to the wealthy, since the wealthy get the money first and can buy up everything.
Crushing government regulations – and massive growth in government (which now takes up about one-third of the economy) – also severely damaged growth rates. In the 1950s the growth rate was about 4% a year. Last year, it was a pathetic 2.25%. Had it remained at 4% for the past 50 years, the average salary would be $100,000 a year.
Hard to believe, isn’t it? Do the math and you’ll find out it’s true.
Let’s do a thought experiment. Imagine if men stopped doing the dangerous, dirty jobs. Imagine if they stopped doing the STEM jobs, too. What would happen?
There would be no civilization.
I’ve pointed this out before: the humorist P.J. O’Rourke wrote, quite correctly, that without men civilization would last until the next oil change. And as Camille Paglia put it, without men, women would still be living in grass huts.
Many women of course will not believe this. It intrudes on the endless-loop Groovy Movie playing in their heads. They’ll quote that 40-plus years of leftist lies/propaganda about “patriarchy” and “oppression of women”….fantasies completely unhinged from reality. Here’s what I have to say about that nonsense: I expect women to become coal miners, loggers…and engineers and mathematicians. Not a few of them, but enough to support society.
It’ll never happen.
Incidentally, it was Aristotle who made the distinction between “dialectic” and “rhetoric.” Dialectic is based on reasonable discussion and an attempt to discover the truth; rhetoric is based on emotion and logical fallacies. Almost all of the “intellectual” chattering classes – surprise, surprise – fall for rhetoric, lies and propaganda and are in fact incapable of reasonable discussion. That’s why they’ve gone far beyond the boundary of worthless into dangerous territory.
Too bad the State ever got involved in these things. It should get out. And it will. When it does, things will repair themselves. It always takes a while, but it happens. So if you want the bad things I’ve just written about to get better, then remove the State and its damaging interference.
As I said, I won’t be surprised if the unmarried percentage rate reaches 50%. Will it get worse? I don’t know, but it if does, I don’t think it will get much worse. There is always that tipping point, which is coming. When it does, things change. Unfortunately, it will be gut-wrenching until we reach that point.