This Might Make Some People Mad

Why everything sucks and how to pass the test

I think I’ve written previously that my wife gets mad at me for saying, very often, “everything sucks.”

What I mean by that is everything is getting worse. Software is, in general, less reliable, less usable, and less satisfying than it was in 2014, which was probably its peak. (See Crowdstrike.) The hardware devices software powers is worse. My iPhone 15’s ergonomics lead to about 4 user errors per hour of use compared to the iPhone 4 which clocked only one user error per 12 hours of use. (I measure such things as part of my job.) On my first “smart” phone, the T-Mobile Dash, with its excellent physical keyboard, I could type 34 error-free words per minute. On my iPhone, I can type about 12. I haven’t lost any typing skills—the device is just inferior for typing.

Airlines are less reliable than they were in 2010, and flights are far more miserable. And flying in 2010 was a worse experience than in 2000. (I’ve travelled a lot on business since the 1990s.)

Some products or categories of products have improved in the past 24 years, I’m sure, but most categories have become worse in the last four. Combined with insanely higher prices, the bang per buck is at an all-time low, at least as far back as I can remember, and I can remember Nixon’s first inauguration. (Barely. But I remember being perplexed that President Johnson wasn’t going to be president any longer, and my mom trying to explain to me why that was a good thing.)

This relates to a conversation I had with my old boss before he retired in about 2015. I asked him why our company seemed unable to solve problems everyone agreed were problems. He attributed our rigidness to the retirement of the “World War II guys.” He explained that the WWII generation of leaders had sent men to their death and realized business was pretty insignificant by comparison. They made decisions quickly, relying more on someone’s track record than on “data.” When problems arose, they told one person to “fix it.” But, once they were gone, problems lingered as senior executives demanded more “data” and formed committees and wrung their hands. Everything since the World War II guys retired is like a bad production of Hamlet.

We see this at every level of life. Problems get worse despite spending billions of dollars studying them. Society becomes more divided despite hordes of psychologists and counsellors making $500 an hour to consult on team building. Each graduating class from every level of schooling knows less than the class before despite per-pupil spending at 12x the level of our peak of knowledge in the 1960s.

When I say, “everything sucks,” I mean, everything sucks.

But why?

My old boss was right. It’s the loss of World War II guys.

Those guys were all what we now (erroneously) call “alpha males.” The pop-sociologists claim a culture can tolerate only about 1 alpha per 100 people, which is based on their observation of modern life. But in the 1950s and 1960s, we had about 20-30 alphas for every 100 workers because most workers were men and most men had been in the service in World War II or Korea (or, in the case of my father and most of friends, both.) The presence of so many alphas didn’t cause some social breakdown from constant fights to lead the pack, either. One thing war teaches is how to appreciate the strengths of others and how to protect the pack from weaknesses. (Watch Band of Brothers and how they dealt with Russ Nixon’s drinking.)

But in the 1970s and beyond, we tried to neuter the alphas and reduce them to 1 per 100. Then, in this century, we decided to eliminate alphas altogether. The result?

Everything sucks.

Last night, someone posted a brilliant explanation for this. It’s just a short forum post from a Brit (I assume by the flag in the bio) that tries to explain why Western societies are about to disappear from the face of the earth. I’m going to post the screenshot downloaded from the X post, but I’m also posting the text itself, because it’s that important.

The anonymous post was published on 01 February 2021, just after Joe Biden took office. (Could be 02 January 2021, but I am guessing the author was a Brit and, therefore, uses logical date order instead of the convoluted American structure.)

And the text:

People who can't defend themselves physically (women and low T men) parse information through a consensus filter as a safety mechanism. They literally do not ask "is this true", they ask "will others be OK with me thinking this is true". This makes them very malleable to brute force manufactured consensus; if every screen they look at says the same thing they will adopt that position because their brain interprets it as everyone in the tribe believing it.

Only high T alpha males and aneurotypical people (hey autists!) are actually free to parse new information with an objective "is this true?" filter.

This is why a Republic of high status males is best for decision making. Democratic, but a democracy only for those who are free to think.

How could someone explain so much in so few words?

I want you to read that post three times and think about what frustrates you about the world today. Think about the pandemic lockdowns and why people went along with idiotic, tyrannical “rules” about masks and social distancing and hand-washing and no handshaking and no hugging and no large gatherings and no Christmas or Thanksgiving.

Think about the “consensus” that the unvaccinated should be taken out and shot. And the consensus that MAGA is evil, that Ukraine must defended at cost of our own freedom, that affirming transgender psychosis is love.

Everything sucks because we’ve become a society that lives on consensus without any questioning of what is true or what is just or what is right.

As Margaret Thatcher said 40 years ago, “consensus is the absence of leadership.” When she said that, the World War II generation was still mostly running things. Ronald Reagan was President of the United States, she was Prime Minister of Great Britain, Helmut Kohl was Chancellor of West Germany. But the multi-colored constrictor called “consensus” was beginning to coil itself around the world’s institutions, demanding ever more committees and task forces and “democratic” processes to arrive at decisions that dissatisfied all parties equally and without ever addressing the problem they were commissioned to solve. By the time George H. W. Bush succeeded Reagan, and that wimpy second-husband-looking dude replaced Thatcher, leadership had succumbed to 1,000 points of light and a new world order under the thumb of that colossus of consensus, the United Nations.

And here we are.

The college-educated, suburban women problem that vexes Republican candidates at every level is the epitome of this fact of biology: women and low-testosterone men filter everything through a consensus lens without regard for truth. They don’t even care if it’s good for them or their children, only what the majority of people like them and people they need to encounter will consider acceptable. Good ideas get trampled under the stampede to be seen as agreeing with the majority who espouse error. In game theory, this called the “common knowledge game,” and it is the primary determinant of stock prices, bond prices, and rates of savings and investments. We act in accordance with the way we believe others expect us to act regardless of the logic or consequences. It’s peer pressure at the cultural level.

Like or not, we have allowed the female knee-jerk to rule the world, and it’s going to get us all killed. Men gravitate to dangerous, physical things because we are biologically required to kill for food and safety. Women gravitate to consensus because they are less able to kill. They huddle to protect the weakest—children and the elderly. The author of that post said it all in the first two sentences: those who cannot defend themselves physically do whatever is necessary to form into tight groups. Those who can physically defend themselves turn out to fight the monster head-on.

When Donald Trump rose from the deck before the referee counted ten, thrust a defiant fist in the air, and ordered his tribe to “fight,” millions of women in America nearly fainted in a swoon. As one 20-something former feminist wrote on X: “I’m voting for that.” I wrote about her last week:

That is the World War II guy, the alpha, the biologically necessary “man.” That is who Trump has always been. It’s why he accomplished what he did in life.

In another era—any other era in human history—Trump would have been king. Humans were once good at identifying and elevating the bravest among them, as Tucker Carlson discussed in his brilliant talk at the RNC convention.

We, as a nation and as a culture, have tried to “rise above” our biology to replace leadership with consensus, and it has failed miserably.

“But I want you to understand that Christ is the head of every man, and the man is the head of a woman, and God is the head of Christ.” (1 Cor. 11:3).

The need for men to be men and for society to, not just accept it but demand it is not just biological, of course, but divine. Our biology was ordered by God and attempts to violate His order will always end in tears. God gave us biology to make this distinction easy to understand, but in our hedonistic hubris we close our eyes and try to violate both God and nature. To our own demise.

This election is probably our final test. It’s the make-up exam for the final we tanked last time. It is altogether fitting and proper that God and nature and the heads of the DNC have ordained that we should choose between an alpha male and a nincompoop. A simple multiple choice question with only two options upon which the fate of the entire Western world depends.

Don’t screw this up.