Interesting french article I've seen translated on 4chan. It's about France but it looks like it can be applied in Western Europe and in the whole world.
Paywall: https://www.lefigaro.fr/vox/societe...ls-en-trop-dans-la-societe-francaise-20210914
It's a major social fact, yet one that is hidden from view: several million young French men in great difficulty have placed themselves on the margins of our society. Yet they do not arouse any empathy and do not benefit from any solicitude, explains the academic, "normalien", "agrégé" (translation note: academically very successful) and doctor in history.
Author of many books noticed, Pierre Vermeren has in particular published La France qui déclasse. Les gilets jaunes, une jacquerie du XXIe siècle (Tallandier, 2019) and We broke the République. 150 years of history of the nation (Tallandier, 2020).
Millions of young men born in France in the 1990s and 2000s are adrift in our society, and this is by no means limited to the working classes. This human reality does not bode well for the future of the country as a free and sovereign nation, the foundation of our democracy. Certainly, France has never been stingy with the blood of its young men, as so many wars or social events have proven (the automobile has killed 600,000 Frenchmen during a large half-century of car accidents, from 1948 to 2015, the vast majority of them young men). But our long period of peace is giving birth to an unprecedented sacrificial mode for millions of young citizens. Where to start, as the elements of this crisis are proven, numerous and irrefutable if we observe them carefully?
Our elderly society - this is obvious from another continent - has chosen to ignore its young men, to ignore their future. Let's think about the Covid-19 crisis, which has aggravated their ills, notably the educational disengagement, while they have never been in mortal danger; about the school and university success of girls, who, in comparable situations, outperform boys everywhere, except in science (only this second subject is not taboo); to the decline of their traditional professional fields, handicrafts, industry, agriculture and the military; and, more generally, to the abandonment of productive activities, transferred abroad, in favor of services which are more favourable to women; finally, to the disintegration of the family as a structure of protection, cultural transmission, but also of responsibility and love. The list goes on.
It will be retorted in privileged circles that the grandes écoles are full of brilliant boys, that everyone knows a young engineer or a junior financier with a bright future, a promising young chef or an ambitious doctor, an enarque who will go far or a talented journalist! But these trees hide the forest.
A handful of ZEP (special classes for individuals from shitty suburbs) graduates and the reality of young women in great difficulty do not change this structural effect: the disqualification and sidelining of millions of young men in our society, even though there are fewer generations. This phenomenon has been exposed in Britain, where statistics reveal that young white working class men are, by virtue of their cultural and geographical remoteness, almost excluded from higher education (see, for example, Christopher Snowdon, The Lost Boys. The White Working Class Is Being Left Behind , The Spectator, July 18, 2020).
Our leaders have missed a mass phenomenon that is seriously compromising the country's future: the loss of confidence, esteem, motivation, in other words, the vital impulse, of millions of young men
France accepts, year after year, to live with 6 million unemployed, inactive all or part, and 2 million recipients of the RSA (a small part overlapping). The OECD has pointed out that there are 3 million young people in this country who are neither at university, nor in work, nor in training. The government rightly congratulates itself on the progress of apprenticeship, since 500,000 apprentices (16-29 years old) entered this field last year. This is all very well. But, while France is going through a period of high unemployment and underemployment, employers are waiting in vain for hundreds of thousands of workers and as many job offers remain unfilled.
The social and media disincentive to work, especially when it is physical, manual and demanding, has long discouraged millions of potential workers. The causes and justifications of this refusal to work are rationalized. Social incomes of all kinds allow people to live small, but quietly, outside the world of work; illegal work and the criminal economy employ many people; school, and then higher education, by misleading millions of young people, have left them with a poor image of themselves, inciting the most dynamic to leave (1 million young French people have left France in the last ten years, and not only brilliant graduates), and others to sink; The lack of paid work and internships in France makes it impossible to find a place to live in the metropolises, unless you juggle benefits, families or roommates, all of which are not easy to get out of. The lack of a workable workforce is the primary cause of immigration, with the upper classes taking refuge in the metropolises and needing men (and women) to do everything. Finally, we all have in mind the suicides of farmers or policemen, which reveals the poor condition offered to noble professions.
Lulled by the reassuring purr of a handful of media psychiatrists of the 1990s and 2000s, explaining to the boomers that young French people had never been so good in their heads - which the latter wanted to hear to attest to the virtues of their liberal-libertarian education -, our leaders have missed a mass phenomenon that is seriously compromising the country's future: the loss of confidence, esteem, motivation, in other words, the vital impulse, of millions of young men. It has been a long time since young Frenchmen won the Tour de France and our professional soccer teams are largely populated by young foreigners who are in charge of animating our stadiums. Our soccer clubs have often closed their training centers. But the evil is more serious.
As nature abhors a vacuum, these millions of young men have converted their life drive. The young Frenchmen of the last centuries were mostly farmers, sailors, soldiers or workers; they married young and founded a family that they had to feed. All this has become residual, our brilliant service economy having rendered millions of lives useless. The dignity of the peasant, the worker, the clergyman and the teacher having faded away, not every man being able to become an "intellectual", liberal capitalism has offered fields of action and substitution to reality. For not everyone can leave or disappear.
The Ministry of the Interior claims that 200,000 young people are enrolled in the active drug economy, a figure that makes this employment sector one of the first in the country (if one has any doubts, the film Bac Nord, currently on the screen, presents a dramatic illustration). But to whom is this drug sold and for what purposes? Our country has become the first European consumer of psychotropic drugs, cannabis in particular. Every day, 1.5 million regular users indulge in this drug "of cretinization" (tn: dumbness), which alters little by little the neuronal capacities and the will, "making its victims stagnate in the most modest statuses, even making them assisted for life", according to the terms of the "Open letter to the deputies at the origin of the report on the "recreational" cannabis" (an eponymous parliamentary mission was created in January 2020, Editor's note) from the president of the National Center for Prevention, Studies and Research on Addictions (CNPERT), May 17, 2021.
This supposedly banned drug is available to all at low cost. It is the return of L'Assommoir, in which Zola described the condition of 19th century Parisian workers who had fallen into alcoholism. Hundreds of thousands of young people see their mental health irremediably affected by cannabis, while the State is still reducing the number of psychiatric beds. Everyone can observe the young drug addicts on the street, often in groups with dogs, as France has 300,000 homeless people... the vast majority of them men.
Besides cannabis, there are two other technological facts that have the consequence of neutralizing the wills and keeping a high number of young men at home: online games and freely accessible pornography
There are two other technological facts that have the consequence of neutralizing the wills and keeping a high number of young men at home by occupying them at night. One is online games, of which France prides itself on being a champion in terms of creativity and production. Networked games certainly mobilize hundreds of thousands of young people, night and day, removed for an indefinite time from human exchanges "in person". Like drugs, games can become a source of ferocious addiction that wipes out everything in its path: emotional and marital life, work and social life, culture and education. This social risk, which is not incompatible with the use of psychotropic drugs, is only marginally taken into account by the public health system, which focuses on emergencies.
Smoking is stagnating in France (contraband compensating for the decrease in taxed revenues) and obesity is on the rise. They amplify the effects of the sedentary lifestyle and addictions that we have just mentioned. It would be naïve and wrong to believe that only poor young people are affected by these phenomena, because drugs and gambling sometimes require substantial material and intellectual resources.
Finally, all this is intertwined with freely available pornography, supplied in abundance by the United States, which disturbs or even replaces sexuality and the second sex. In spite of the attempts of restriction pushed by the French authorities for minors, the pressure of libertarian capitalism blows powerfully to keep these valves open.
Faced with so many dysfunctions, ... the whole society is shaken, weakened and threatened
To sum up, let us understand that there are in France perhaps 3 million young men, to take up the figure suggested by the OECD (that is to say twice the number of deaths in 1914-1918), who are locked in these new social facts and these addictive spirals; these men are cruelly and perhaps definitively missing for many in social, economic and democratic life. Because, between non-registration on the electoral lists, absence of participation in the city or political radicalism, the consequences are heavy.
The imbalance thus created in society compromises its future. For the last ten years, the proven drop in the birth rate (less than 100,000 babies in a decade) in France, despite a migratory overnatality that everything shows (such as the tripling in twenty years of Muslim first names given at birth, according to the Insee database), is an advanced indication. It will intensify with the progression of celibacy and childless couples encouraged by a radical trend of ecology. The collapse of French production, as revealed by our growing external deficit since 2000, is another indication of our paralysis: we must import more and more of what we no longer produce.
To compensate for these heavy trends, the French state is playing both sides of the fence: financing current expenditures by borrowing, with almost zero growth; and resorting to high immigration (especially of men), with the same result.
Faced with so many dysfunctions, which are not without affecting young women, who are often better educated, but confronted with the failure of so many men, the whole society is shaken, weakened and threatened. Our political society oscillates between two poles: the 17 million retired people, that is to say half of the French who vote - and who "make" the presidential elections -, which is why the candidates love them (the Belmondo generation); and the minority and supposedly rebellious youth of the metropolises (the Greta generation), who are praised, and who offer beautiful media images. Between the two, the working world and the downtrodden are asked to keep a low profile. At our peril.
Automatically translated using deepl, full paywall: https://paste2.org/ADxp0Eed
Paywall: https://www.lefigaro.fr/vox/societe...ls-en-trop-dans-la-societe-francaise-20210914
It's a major social fact, yet one that is hidden from view: several million young French men in great difficulty have placed themselves on the margins of our society. Yet they do not arouse any empathy and do not benefit from any solicitude, explains the academic, "normalien", "agrégé" (translation note: academically very successful) and doctor in history.
Author of many books noticed, Pierre Vermeren has in particular published La France qui déclasse. Les gilets jaunes, une jacquerie du XXIe siècle (Tallandier, 2019) and We broke the République. 150 years of history of the nation (Tallandier, 2020).
Millions of young men born in France in the 1990s and 2000s are adrift in our society, and this is by no means limited to the working classes. This human reality does not bode well for the future of the country as a free and sovereign nation, the foundation of our democracy. Certainly, France has never been stingy with the blood of its young men, as so many wars or social events have proven (the automobile has killed 600,000 Frenchmen during a large half-century of car accidents, from 1948 to 2015, the vast majority of them young men). But our long period of peace is giving birth to an unprecedented sacrificial mode for millions of young citizens. Where to start, as the elements of this crisis are proven, numerous and irrefutable if we observe them carefully?
Our elderly society - this is obvious from another continent - has chosen to ignore its young men, to ignore their future. Let's think about the Covid-19 crisis, which has aggravated their ills, notably the educational disengagement, while they have never been in mortal danger; about the school and university success of girls, who, in comparable situations, outperform boys everywhere, except in science (only this second subject is not taboo); to the decline of their traditional professional fields, handicrafts, industry, agriculture and the military; and, more generally, to the abandonment of productive activities, transferred abroad, in favor of services which are more favourable to women; finally, to the disintegration of the family as a structure of protection, cultural transmission, but also of responsibility and love. The list goes on.
It will be retorted in privileged circles that the grandes écoles are full of brilliant boys, that everyone knows a young engineer or a junior financier with a bright future, a promising young chef or an ambitious doctor, an enarque who will go far or a talented journalist! But these trees hide the forest.
A handful of ZEP (special classes for individuals from shitty suburbs) graduates and the reality of young women in great difficulty do not change this structural effect: the disqualification and sidelining of millions of young men in our society, even though there are fewer generations. This phenomenon has been exposed in Britain, where statistics reveal that young white working class men are, by virtue of their cultural and geographical remoteness, almost excluded from higher education (see, for example, Christopher Snowdon, The Lost Boys. The White Working Class Is Being Left Behind , The Spectator, July 18, 2020).
Our leaders have missed a mass phenomenon that is seriously compromising the country's future: the loss of confidence, esteem, motivation, in other words, the vital impulse, of millions of young men
France accepts, year after year, to live with 6 million unemployed, inactive all or part, and 2 million recipients of the RSA (a small part overlapping). The OECD has pointed out that there are 3 million young people in this country who are neither at university, nor in work, nor in training. The government rightly congratulates itself on the progress of apprenticeship, since 500,000 apprentices (16-29 years old) entered this field last year. This is all very well. But, while France is going through a period of high unemployment and underemployment, employers are waiting in vain for hundreds of thousands of workers and as many job offers remain unfilled.
The social and media disincentive to work, especially when it is physical, manual and demanding, has long discouraged millions of potential workers. The causes and justifications of this refusal to work are rationalized. Social incomes of all kinds allow people to live small, but quietly, outside the world of work; illegal work and the criminal economy employ many people; school, and then higher education, by misleading millions of young people, have left them with a poor image of themselves, inciting the most dynamic to leave (1 million young French people have left France in the last ten years, and not only brilliant graduates), and others to sink; The lack of paid work and internships in France makes it impossible to find a place to live in the metropolises, unless you juggle benefits, families or roommates, all of which are not easy to get out of. The lack of a workable workforce is the primary cause of immigration, with the upper classes taking refuge in the metropolises and needing men (and women) to do everything. Finally, we all have in mind the suicides of farmers or policemen, which reveals the poor condition offered to noble professions.
Lulled by the reassuring purr of a handful of media psychiatrists of the 1990s and 2000s, explaining to the boomers that young French people had never been so good in their heads - which the latter wanted to hear to attest to the virtues of their liberal-libertarian education -, our leaders have missed a mass phenomenon that is seriously compromising the country's future: the loss of confidence, esteem, motivation, in other words, the vital impulse, of millions of young men. It has been a long time since young Frenchmen won the Tour de France and our professional soccer teams are largely populated by young foreigners who are in charge of animating our stadiums. Our soccer clubs have often closed their training centers. But the evil is more serious.
As nature abhors a vacuum, these millions of young men have converted their life drive. The young Frenchmen of the last centuries were mostly farmers, sailors, soldiers or workers; they married young and founded a family that they had to feed. All this has become residual, our brilliant service economy having rendered millions of lives useless. The dignity of the peasant, the worker, the clergyman and the teacher having faded away, not every man being able to become an "intellectual", liberal capitalism has offered fields of action and substitution to reality. For not everyone can leave or disappear.
The Ministry of the Interior claims that 200,000 young people are enrolled in the active drug economy, a figure that makes this employment sector one of the first in the country (if one has any doubts, the film Bac Nord, currently on the screen, presents a dramatic illustration). But to whom is this drug sold and for what purposes? Our country has become the first European consumer of psychotropic drugs, cannabis in particular. Every day, 1.5 million regular users indulge in this drug "of cretinization" (tn: dumbness), which alters little by little the neuronal capacities and the will, "making its victims stagnate in the most modest statuses, even making them assisted for life", according to the terms of the "Open letter to the deputies at the origin of the report on the "recreational" cannabis" (an eponymous parliamentary mission was created in January 2020, Editor's note) from the president of the National Center for Prevention, Studies and Research on Addictions (CNPERT), May 17, 2021.
This supposedly banned drug is available to all at low cost. It is the return of L'Assommoir, in which Zola described the condition of 19th century Parisian workers who had fallen into alcoholism. Hundreds of thousands of young people see their mental health irremediably affected by cannabis, while the State is still reducing the number of psychiatric beds. Everyone can observe the young drug addicts on the street, often in groups with dogs, as France has 300,000 homeless people... the vast majority of them men.
Besides cannabis, there are two other technological facts that have the consequence of neutralizing the wills and keeping a high number of young men at home: online games and freely accessible pornography
There are two other technological facts that have the consequence of neutralizing the wills and keeping a high number of young men at home by occupying them at night. One is online games, of which France prides itself on being a champion in terms of creativity and production. Networked games certainly mobilize hundreds of thousands of young people, night and day, removed for an indefinite time from human exchanges "in person". Like drugs, games can become a source of ferocious addiction that wipes out everything in its path: emotional and marital life, work and social life, culture and education. This social risk, which is not incompatible with the use of psychotropic drugs, is only marginally taken into account by the public health system, which focuses on emergencies.
Smoking is stagnating in France (contraband compensating for the decrease in taxed revenues) and obesity is on the rise. They amplify the effects of the sedentary lifestyle and addictions that we have just mentioned. It would be naïve and wrong to believe that only poor young people are affected by these phenomena, because drugs and gambling sometimes require substantial material and intellectual resources.
Finally, all this is intertwined with freely available pornography, supplied in abundance by the United States, which disturbs or even replaces sexuality and the second sex. In spite of the attempts of restriction pushed by the French authorities for minors, the pressure of libertarian capitalism blows powerfully to keep these valves open.
Faced with so many dysfunctions, ... the whole society is shaken, weakened and threatened
To sum up, let us understand that there are in France perhaps 3 million young men, to take up the figure suggested by the OECD (that is to say twice the number of deaths in 1914-1918), who are locked in these new social facts and these addictive spirals; these men are cruelly and perhaps definitively missing for many in social, economic and democratic life. Because, between non-registration on the electoral lists, absence of participation in the city or political radicalism, the consequences are heavy.
The imbalance thus created in society compromises its future. For the last ten years, the proven drop in the birth rate (less than 100,000 babies in a decade) in France, despite a migratory overnatality that everything shows (such as the tripling in twenty years of Muslim first names given at birth, according to the Insee database), is an advanced indication. It will intensify with the progression of celibacy and childless couples encouraged by a radical trend of ecology. The collapse of French production, as revealed by our growing external deficit since 2000, is another indication of our paralysis: we must import more and more of what we no longer produce.
To compensate for these heavy trends, the French state is playing both sides of the fence: financing current expenditures by borrowing, with almost zero growth; and resorting to high immigration (especially of men), with the same result.
Faced with so many dysfunctions, which are not without affecting young women, who are often better educated, but confronted with the failure of so many men, the whole society is shaken, weakened and threatened. Our political society oscillates between two poles: the 17 million retired people, that is to say half of the French who vote - and who "make" the presidential elections -, which is why the candidates love them (the Belmondo generation); and the minority and supposedly rebellious youth of the metropolises (the Greta generation), who are praised, and who offer beautiful media images. Between the two, the working world and the downtrodden are asked to keep a low profile. At our peril.
Automatically translated using deepl, full paywall: https://paste2.org/ADxp0Eed
