Everest in Easy Stages

Why Did Men Stop Being Ambitious?

Because They totally 

All just STABBED CEASAR.

So, in the... in The Arab-world, 

broadly-speaking, The Arab-world 

produces about as much as Spain --

Okay, well why...?

Well, part of The Reason 

is The Men don't Work --

Why Did Men Stop Being Ambitious?

i saw hypothetically an increased war on male play and interest preferences that made itself manifest I would say with the hyper feminization of the school system And then as well the there there was the communicated insistence that male ambition was toxic that competitive games were bad and that you know to the degree that the patriarchy is a corrupt institution that any sign of that demand for victory let's say a competitive m victory on the male front was actually a sign of psychopathology So I think part of the reason that the boys have been demoralized or h no are are failing to participate is because they've been demoralized and that that's provided them also with an excuse to be irresponsible Look na said you're best punished for your virtues So the conclusion is is if you're going to be punished for being ambitious and goal directed then that's going to be very effective as a punishment but it also gives you every reason to you know to bow out and to be irresponsible So I don't know what you think about that in in combination with the things that you're seeing on the you know the more specifically technological front Yeah Well so the boy's story is different from the girl story and it's a story of checking out of the real world and I draw from this in part on Richard Reeves who's a wonderful book of boys and men He points out that you know boys and men used to dominate the economy and society in many ways Um but beginning in the 70s we get the transition away from physical work and long shoremen and strength and to a service economy Um and we get uh as uh and girls are rising which is great Um but as girls are rising boys are not rising too In some ways they're falling And uh by 1980 I think it is most half of college students were female Now it's 60% are female Um so boys have been kind of checking out of school checking out of the workplace The electronic world the online world's gotten better and better more and more attractive for boys They're spending more time on video games So it is a story of male achievement male motives being kind of hijacked or turned towards trivial pointless pursuits that don't add up to anything Um and so I would agree with you um about the discouragement of of male ego ambition desire to be great uh the subversion of that into just wanting to do you know higher up on a on a video game leaderboard I suppose But you know I'd love to ask you Yeah you know because I've been I I've only really I I only really began turning to the boy story about three three years three or four years ago when I began working on the book You've been talking to young men for a long time now What do what do you see when you look at the Moles among young men I mean part of what you just said about but but just what's your diagnosis about um about what's what's happening to young men Is it depression anxiety Is it hopelessness What what do you see happening

Well a huge part of it fractured demoralization Like one of the things I've really noticed this it's quite the stunning and horrifying thing to see You know I think the biggest impact what I've said on young men has been my drawing of a relationship between meaning adventure and responsibility It's like well and you know you touch on this in your book like one of the things you point out so let let me take a bit of a sideways route here When the big five theorists were laying out the uh semantic webs associated with negative emotion neuroticism --

McCrae um in particular with uh with the Neo Big-Five noticed that self-consciousness and neuroticism were so tightly associated semantically that they were indistinguishable So here's the rule This is the rule and you allude to this If you think about yourself you are going to be anxious and miserable Those are the same thing And you know that when you're possessed by a bout of self-consciousness it's not pleasant Okay So then you might say well what do you do about that And one answer would be well don't focus on yourself But you can't not focus on yourself You have to focus on something else Okay So what do you focus on if you're male Well you focus on responsible service to the future and others Well why Well because that gives you what you described as that slow dopamine kick It's like that's where and that's not happiness It's meaning Those are very different things Happiness is that like hedonistic kick that can be hijacked by the AI machines meaning is s more s less intense but more sustaining Okay So where do you find that And that's simple You find that in the adoption of maximal responsibility That that's burden That's challenge That's play if you do it right That's also the sacrifice that civilization is founded on And one of the things that we might note Jonathan is that the default man is useless 

Right 

So so for example....

I'm going to get myself in Trouble 

here, but I don't really care  --

So, in the... in The Arab-world, 

broadly-speaking, The Arab-world 

produces about as much as Spain --

Okay, well why...?

Well, part of the reason 

is The Men don't Work --

 Now that's not surprising;

What's surprising is,
that any man ever work; 

because Work is difficult 

and it requires sacrifice -- 

And so The Question is, and 

this is the anthropological question, 

the question of Initiation --

How do you socialise and civilise men because the default is going to be trivial hedonism Of course it is because it's easier Of course it's going to be the default The default's always what's simpler and more fragmented 

Well you tell them a story of heroic responsibility and you draw even more importantly you draw a connection between responsibility and adventure you know and so it's so interesting because so many men have reflected this back to me and I literally mean thousands because I've I've said you know what you do is you look for the maximum burden and you note that in service to that you find meaning And so you can do that with truth You can do it with responsibility And the young men will come up to me and they do this daily I would say and say you know 5 years ago I decided I was going to start taking responsibility for myself and tell the truth And like everything's changed in consequence everything And so what what we're do we're doing this bigotry of soft expectations with men And one of the things I got right right off at the beginning was see the mas the male attitude towards younger men isn't the feminine ethos of acceptance So the you could imagine the dynamic in a family is that --

this is a stereotype, but --

I'm going to go with it anyways; 

The Mother says to The Child, 

"You're lovely the way you are." 

And The Father says "You I kind of like you, 

but you could be a lot more." 

And those are good -- Those are really good together, 

you know, because when The Child goes out from the mother he's encouraged let's say by the masculine go out And then when he's exhausted or she's exhausted for that matter she can come back to the mother and be accepted And that's the standard pattern of you know security seeking and then exploration Now what I've been doing with young men is saying to them you could be a lot more than you are And that's it's an insult in a way because means you're not good enough now But it it prioritizes the optimized future self And that's actually hugely advantageous you know And so I think what we're doing that's wrong with young men well and I think we're doing it to young women too in a more subtle manner is not asking not requiring or even demanding nearly enough So they default to trivial hedonism Obviously [Music]

Baby, It’s Cold Outside

“In The Past, 

Politicians promised 

to create A Better World. 

They had Different Ways of achieving this, but

Their Power and Authority came 

from the optimistic Visions 

they offered to Their People. 

Those Dreams FAILED. 

And Today, People have 

Lost Faith in Ideologies. 

Increasingly, 

Politicians are seen simply 

as Managers of Public Life. 

But now, They have Discovered 

A NEW Role that restores 

Their Power and Authority. 

Instead of Delivering Dreams, Politicians now promise 

to Protect Us from  NIGHTMARES. 

They Say that 

They will rescue Us,

from dreadful Dangers 

that We cannot See and 

DO Not Understand. 

And The Great Danger of All — is

INTERNATIONAL TERRORISM.

The story begins in the summer of 1949... 

When a middle-aged school inspector from Egypt arrived at the small town of Greeley, in Colorado. His name was Sayyed Qutb. 

Qutb had been sent to the U.S. to study its educational system, and he enrolled in the local state college. His photographs appear in the college yearbook. 

But Qutb was destined to become much more than a school inspector. Out of his experiences of America that summer, Qutb was going to develop a powerful set of ideas that would directly inspire those who flew the planes on the attack of September the 11th. 

As he had traveled across the country, Qutb had become increasingly disenchanted with America. The very things that, on the surface, made the country look prosperous and happy, Qutb saw as signs of an inner corruption and decay.

JOHN CALVERT, Islamist historian: This was Truman’s America, and many Americans today regard it as a golden age of their civilization. But for Qutb, he saw a sinister side in this. All around him was crassness, corruption, vulgarity—talk centered on movie stars and automobile prices. 

He was also very concerned that the inhabitants of Greeley spent a lot of time in lawn care. Pruning their hedges, cutting their lawns. 

This, for Qutb, was indicative of the selfish and materialistic aspect of American life. Americans lived these isolated lives surrounded by their lawns. They lusted after material goods. And this, says Qutb quite succinctly, is the taste of America.

VO: What Qutb believed he was seeing was a hidden and dangerous reality underneath the surface of ordinary American life. One summer night, he went to a dance at a local church hall. He later wrote that what he saw that night crystallized his vision.

CALVERT: He talks about how the pastor played on the gramophone one of the big- band hits of the day, “Baby, It’s Cold Outside.” 

He dimmed the lights so as to create a dreamy, romantic effect. 

And then, Qutb says that “chests met chests, arms circled waists, and the hall was full of lust and love.”

VO: To most people watching this dance, it would have been an innocent picture of youthful happiness. 

But Qutb saw something else : the dancers in front of him were tragic lost souls. They believed that they were free. But in reality, they were trapped by their own selfish and greedy desires. American society was not going forwards; it was taking people backwards. 

They were becoming isolated beings, driven by primitive animal forces. Such creatures, Qutb believed, could corrode the very bonds that held society together. And he became determined that night to prevent this culture of selfish Individualism taking over his own country.