werther

I am getting a lot of responses to this doing the exact thing it is responding to, so maybe I should elaborate further. Nobody who could do anything about this is interested in understanding and taking it seriously, which is precisely why they are in danger: 

This is no hypothetical. Classes of left-wing revolutionaries turning their grievances into violence is actually something that has famously happened many, many times. My advice to reactionary governments in ALL those cases would be not to ignore potential revolutionary classes. 

Blacks committing crimes and LGBTs grooming kids indeed represent problem groups of people that shouldn't be ignored, shouldn't just be morally signaled about, but need to be dealt with. You can deal with BLM by being harder on crime, perverts by making laws against them. 

The problem of young men obviously does not work the same way, and does not have such an easy solution. The system can't even *recognize* it outside the framing of, "everything was going perfectly for everyone until con-men tricked them into thinking they were being wronged."

If you're right about that theory, then maybe just increasing censorship is all you need. But if you happen to be wrong, then you're ignoring what would be needed to placate that group at your own peril. This is an anthropological reality relevant to your own self-interest.

If I am advisor to the Tsar, "find a way to placate the intelligentsia and get them to accept your authority" is good advice if crushing them is not an option. "Actually the intelligentsia are among the most privileged people in Russia and don't deserve more" gets his family shot

It doesn't matter in the slightest that I don't like the ideas circulating among them or think their grievances are illegitimate if my goal is to avoid revolution. They exist, and I must anticipate the threat they pose to the regime through wise policy.

When a Luigi Mangione kills one guy, that's an individual, and you have the luxury in your discussions to focus on the moral qualities of the act. If an army of Luigis is executing CEOs daily, you are better off trying to placate them than telling them their grievances are wrong.

These people are so used to the left being the only serious entropic threat to regimes, that even the idea of being on the other side of a revolution that you *don't* morally agree with, and the considerations that would go into that, are alien and incomprehensible to them.

The bet the regime is making is that it can afford to do whatever it wants to its young men because they are sufficiently domesticated not to pose a physical threat to it - that the age of revolution was ended by porn, video games, and the Pax Americana.

Maybe they are right, but they are also missing something. These commenters take civilization for granted, as something that just happens automatically. To them it is the default, and anything that can't fight it poses no threat. They don't see it as actively held up by men.

The actual default human social arrangement more closely resembles that of the chimpanzee: tribal, anarchic, brutal.

Civilization is what happens when men collectively agree to a social contract where they follow the rules and contribute to society instead of tearing it down and taking what they can; in exchange for a reasonable expectation of security, monogamous equality, a place and purpose.

Modern society has torn up one side of the contract, deciding that it didn't matter and was restricting people's freedom, but still feels entitled to all the fruits of the other side. It is betting that men are domesticated enough now for this to work.

The system has its armies and flying death robots, and the would-be revolutionaries are soft, hedonically pacified, and removed from any capacity for unified military organization.

But in every other way, they can still decide that following the rules and agreed-upon norms and values, contributing to society, being responsible and making sacrifices to be a productive member of it isn't worth it anymore and has no payoff. They took away all the incentives.

And young men are indeed responding this way, in epidemic numbers that journalists have many ideologically-blinded opinions about. The regime is going to find that a society is only as strong as the majority of men that believe in it, contribute to it, and hold up its values.

Once a society stops being held up by its lifeblood, and they stop believing in it and stop having any incentive to participate, stop being willing to defend it, there are many diseases and other entropic forces it will fall to, gradually and then all at once.

Maybe it feels confident it is insured against organized violence. But there is also disorganized violence, social and political norms, and the basic structural fabric of the economy and society, among other things.

There are a lot of ways that civilization just starts to unravel once you pass that point where the builders, upholders, and defenders of civilization, who make all the imaginary norms and values and expectations and ways of life of a society *real* to people, stop believing.

And none of this requires any Bolshevik-style centralized party conspiracy to overthrow the government with weapons. Parts just keep breaking, independently.

And if you're freaking out about young boys being edgy online, resenting feminism, dropping out of the economy, or voting for Trump, I'm afraid to tell you that you really haven't seen anything yet.

And the more these unravel, the closer you get to the return of history, and those other assumptions about the regime's physical security no longer being true. Society gradually reverts to its default state, and so do people. And then one day you wake up and the regime is gone.