Guest Post by Jim Kunstler
Is it possible that we Americans only pretend not to notice the conditions that produce an epidemic of school shootings, or is the public just too dumbed-down to connect the dots?
Look at the schools themselves. We called them “facilities” because they hardly qualify as buildings: sprawling, one-story, tilt-up, flat-roofed boxes isolated among the parking lagoons out on the six-lane highway strip, disconnected from anything civic, isolated archipelagoes where inchoate teenage emotion festers and rules while the few adults on the scene are regarded as impotent clowns representing a bewildering clown culture wrapped in a Potemkin economy that has nothing to offer young people except a lifetime of debt and “bullshit jobs” — to borrow a phrase from David Graeber.
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The world of teens has been exquisitely engineered to steal every opportunity for colonizing the chemical reward centers of their brains to provoke endorphin hits, especially the cell-phone realm of social media, which is almost entirely about status competition, much of which revolves around the wild hormonal promptings of teen sexual development — at the same time they are bombarded with commercial messages designed to prey on their fantasies, longings, and perceived inadequacies. All of this produces immersive and incessant melodrama along with untold grievance, envy, frustration, confusion, and rage. And, of course, where the cell-phone universe leaves off, the world of video games begins, so that boys (especially) get to act-out in “play” the extermination of their competitors and foes.
I will venture to say — against the tide of current sexual politics — that adolescence is much tougher for boys these days than it is for girls. Every boy in one way or another faces his archetypal hero’s journey, the hard-wired seeking to become powerful in one way or another, to prevail over adversaries, to win the goodies of life. This country used to be a place where young men had many useful and practical paths to follow in enacting that eternal script.
That has changed utterly in a couple of generations. Young men are being out-competed by young women who enjoy the advantage of being hard-wired to cooperate with others in the hive-like corporate workplaces that require tractable drones who will just follow instructions. The smart ones can easily avoid pregnancy, too, and still enjoy sex and all the exciting games it entails.
For young men, beyond the repellent corporate world of work lie only fantasies about triumphing in pro sports, show business, or the drug trade. With pornography and masturbation in place of the tension-filled process of mate-seeking. There is also plenty of opportunity these days for archetypal acting-out in warfare, but our wars lately are devoid of valorous story-lines, and instead of dying nobly for a cause, our soldiers are more likely to come home with shattered brains and bodies from campaigns of no discernable meaning.
And so high school is the launching pad for all that, though in this era of protracted adolescence, mass murders also take place on college campuses. The part of the forebrain that regulates judgment generally doesn’t complete its development in young men until sometime in their early twenties. And college is swiftly becoming as meaningless as high school, given the economic landscape, and the debt racketeering now deeply associated with higher education.
It’s all part-and-parcel with an American way-of-life that is not what it advertises itself to be. It’s become a cruel hologram of a distant memory of a land that sold its soul for a few decades of comfort and convenience, and ended up in a wilderness of addiction to cheap hits of pleasure. Pleasure is not happiness and the constant seeking to satisfy pleasures is not a journey to meaning. The catch is that this toxic way of life has poor prospects for continuing as a practical matter. History is catching up with our foolishness and history will prove to be even more wrathful than a lonely, confused, seventeen-year-old boy with a pistol and shotgun.
Nope, it’s all about the parents. Anyone who wears a full length trench coat in the summer in Houston obviously needs psychiatric assistance suggested.
You’re the fashion arbiter?
You know mouse, you do occasionally wander off the rails. Perhaps it revolves around your medication cycle – much like these school shooters. It’s not about fashion. It’s about identifying school shooters before they shoot and then sending them to China for some musloid re-education. I am willing to bet that a year of smackdown would have driven some reality into the heads of all of these morons. But you have to find them first and a black trench coat in texas is pretty much a dead giveaway. A point that you obviously missed.
IMO it revolves around 2 aspects. The first being government’s unholy alliance with big pharma to ply the American people with these poisonous psychiatric substances to reap unconscionably huge profits. The second being government’s wish to destroy the moral and social fabric of a once free and independent people.
Kuntsler, once a middle of the road liberal Democrat, has morphed into Jordan Peterson. Welcome, Jim.
BTW, Peterson was once a socialist.
While I agree with the sentiment, the serious malfunctioning is happening at the very edge of the bell curve. Most young men are appropriately adapting and adjusting to a society that is allowing itself to be hostile to men (and men to be). These men are NOT getting married, NOT having children, NOT having sex with women, NOT indebting themselves, NOT attending church, etc. The extreme outliers might commit heinous acts of violence. The rest will sit back and allow the women in this society to reap what they are sowing. My suggestion: quit focusing on what men (and boys) aren’t and fix the women. Do that and I think society will right itself.
They’ve gone MGTOW and left the plantation.
I don’t think they’re coming back.
Women aren’t the problem, men are. Women have very little agency, they’re basically children in adult bodies. Men allowed women to have “rights” they never earned and this is the result.
Honestly, if women were denied the right to vote tomorrow, what would happen? There would be “outrage” and a few minor riots that would end as soon as men in riot gear showed up. Women wouldn’t “take up arms” or do anything other than pout and whine. “Women and children” are in the same category for a reason.
It is a tough time for boys, that is for sure. Granted, it was some years ago,
but I didn’t allow my boys any video game access until the younger boy was
14.
JHK makes good points, as have the commenters. Lackadaisical parenting and
the fallacy of 12 years of “school” are destroying our precious boys. Many people
put more energy into faking prosperity than they put into their children. Further,
parents are quick to fall into line with the medical lobotomizing of our children
for the phony ADD bullshit. The powers rejoice in tormenting and ruining our
children. Fight back!
It’s to late for any of the well meaning cures to work .As I have said before this Nation is going burn like no other in history.I blame Stucky and his Godless world view.
I agree with BB. It’s all Stucky’s fault. After all, he hasn’t killed anybody that we know of…yet.
Why …. THANK YOU bb !!!
I had no idea I wielded that kind of POWER.
You’re a dangerous man.
I believe that the parents bear a lot of responsibility for these problems, too. I was raised in the 50’s and 60’s,a time unburdened by many of today’s dysfunctions, and my parents still took pains to protect us from the worst that world offered. They did not let us see every movie we wanted to see, and limited our exposure to television. I believe there was still the notion that children should be protected until they reached a certain age, and then they should be gradually brought into the adult world. Today, they are looked upon as miniature adults. I am amazed at the parents who bring young children to movie I think are often gratuitously violent, or exceedingly vulgar.
In their defense, the parents have to deal with the internet,cell phones, and non-stop advertising, which make makes their job more difficult. Even so, they bear some responsibility. I just read that 1/3 of American babies handle cell phones before they can walk or talk. That is totally on the parents.
Our parents lived in a serious society. If you fooled around and got a girl pregnant, THAT WAS A PROBLEM, for her and for you. If you messed around with drugs and got addicted, YOU WERE LIKELY TO GO TO JAIL and that was a problem for you and your parents. If you acted like an idiot and did really stupid things, YOU DIED and that was the END of your problems.
Our society is not serious. If you get a girl pregnant, she can get an abortion right up until birth, brag about it on social media and adopt it away if she doesn’t want the “burden”. If you mess around with drugs and get addicted, treatment programs are a phone call away and you can go right back and get addicted again, or try another drug, assuming you don’t overdose. If you do really stupid things (and don’t die immediately), you become an internet / instagram / social media celebrity and other idiots will try to imitate (Tide pods) or exceed you.
ALL THIS is possible because people are ridiculously rich, idle and bored. If you are working part-time before and after a full school day, you don’t have time to be bored, idle or foolish. If you are supporting aged grandparents, siblings or other family members you aren’t mindlessly empty, narcissistic or vain. If you are FULFILLED you don’t need empty sex, entertainments or diversions. Once the Crunch comes (loss of FAITH in currency) then the paper needed to support idleness, boredom and foolishness will disappear. The real measure of a man (or woman) is how they respond to adversity – and plenty of adversity is headed this way, like it or not.
Waiting.
I totally agree. We cannot expect immature brains to handle adult themes, whatever they may be. My parents also did not allow us to watch whatever we wanted. In 1977 they saw Star Wars first, to be sure my brother and I could handle this movie and THEN took us to see it.
We were not allowed, under any circumstances, to watch rated R movies. I remember sneaking into “The Fly” (Jeff Goldblum version). This was 1986 and I was 14. A very sheltered 14. I was horrified and regretted it afterwards, had nightmares about it for weeks. 14 year-olds today are having sex, doing drugs and drinking, and exposed to the hardest, hard-core porn imaginable just a few clicks away on their phones.
THIS is what is messing kids up. A complete overload to stimulus and images they cannot possibly hope to process with their very young, immature minds.
My son is 26, soon to be 27, and it was hard enough when he was younger. The internet was not what it was today, access to cell phones was more limited and not as advanced, and yet still my curious son was caught multiple times trying to log on to our dial-up to look at porn. This was a natural curiosity but we took it seriously and made every effort to stop it.
I paid attention to who his friends were. Where he was after school. He couldn’t just go off willy-nilly into the day with no supervision.
Thankfully he was never into the violent games like Grand Theft auto, but so many of his peers were.
I never could understand how a parent could allow their son to play a game where raping a prostitute was rewarded and encouraged? Why would a grown man play this game?
I never allowed my under-18 son to have girls over unsupervised. Sure, he still tried, haven’t we all? But the point was I gave a shit and knew that it would lead to trouble.
Knowing your kids are going to test boundaries, think they are ready for things they absolutely are not, and being a parent and not their friend is the right way to go.
Sadly, you are in the minority.
It is about guns. TPTP crave Absolute Tyrannical Control of the Sheeple but first they need to take our guns by hook or crook. They use our children as sitting ducks to be slaughtered (just collateral damage) by godless Dumbed Down Marxist Mancurian Candidate students in Gun Free Zones. Then they constantly tug our pity strings on TV, with candles, protests, political speeches, and new laws until the next unbelievable assault weapons massacre; then wash and rinse cycle more new 2nd Amend restrictive gun laws that have no bearing on gun crimes. If you are a Useful Idiot, please Wake Up: Their Ultimate Target Is You!
Kunstler’s best article in years.
my thoughts exactly.
Kunstler is about to cross that line. You will know when he does for the libbies will absolutely savage him and big shot MSM outlets will go out of their way to say bad things about him. I think he would like playing the role of the new notorious bastard of the elites, and he could produce some pretty good writing after he has this falling out with his fellow Northern leftists.
Good followup to HSF’s article about the student loan girl.
HSF, how far are we from a natural life? I should see if the Amish will take me in.
If we can’t define and agree on what ails us, then we’ll never even get to the discussion of a cure. Sadly, I kind of agree with BB and think the cure may be found in the sifted ashes after we burn it down. Stucky, IMO provides juice to this place and without him the only time I’d smile is on Friday.
Penforce
Thank you for the kind words. Really. You are the anti-bb …. kind, encouraging, and Most Wise.
Greetings,
They outlawed the advertising of cigarettes. They told us that under no circumstances could cigarettes be advertised because all it takes is just one glance at a cigarette ad and children will immediately begin smoking. Monkey see, monkey do.
These same arguments have been made with regards to child obesity and the advertising of sugary breakfast cereals. After all, there is an indisputable connection between how many tv commercials a kid sees about cereal and obesity. Monkey see, monkey do.
Now, if seeing an image of a camel smoking is all it takes to get a kid to smoke and seeing other kids on tv eating sugar bombs is all it takes to make a kid into a land whale then what does all the violence on tv and in video games produce? Also, these schools all have “resource” officers itching to beat the crap out of some kid that steps out of line and does nothing but teach these kids that all problems should be handled the way adults handle them – with violence. This message is supported by the media that bombards them 24/7.
“For young men, ….. With pornography and masturbation in place of the tension-filled process of mate-seeking.” ——— article
Also works well for old men.
Reminds me of a comment by one of married friends, ” It all comes down to how complicated do you want to make a cum shot.”
I’ll give that a thumbs up fer sher.
Great article. Even better comments. What a relief it is to come to TBP and mingle with smart and sane people.
People forget (I think) that many moons ago Television was regulated in terms of how much violence can be shown to kids … even cartoons. Even what you could sell to kids was regulated, specifically, in terms of food ….. especially sugary shitfuk cereals.
Not that I am a fan of excessive government interference in every nook and cranny of our lives. However, it DOES point to something, doesn’t it? I think it says that at one time …. people COULD connect the dots. People understood the role of parents, and the bad effects of watching endless violence (and that was before shitfuk video games), and the effect on good nutrition on behavior, and many other basic common sense stuff. Where did that common sense go?
What is the answer today? Well, the knee-jerk spasmodic Left will, as surely as dawn precedes dusk, scream out “MOAR GUN CONTROL!!!!! ARGHHHH!!!!” The Right isn’t all that much better — “Arm teachers!! Install metal detectors!!”. Both sides egregiously mistaken in their belief that the question can be reduced to Just One Big Thing.
And the correct answer is totally lost; culture, parents, nutrition, accountability, and yes, even God. Well, lost except to the fine commenters and readers here on TBP. And as much as I love this place, that’s a damned shame … that so few people in America know the truth.
Greetings,
I was forced to spend one semester in an inner city elementary school as part of my degree program in education. I had never in all of my life experienced the pandemonium that greeted me as I walked into that school. The children appeared to be possessed by demons.
This is what was happening: The mothers (there were few fathers) were giving these children a Red Bull and Donuts before sending their children to school for their free breakfast (lunch was free as well). Children given Red Bull and Donuts will appear to be suffering from ADD/ADHD and getting this designation brought in “moar munny” to both the parent and the school. After all, both are now dealing with a “disabled” child and require more taxpayer money to cope with the issue. Also, this disabled child was no longer counted in the already abysmal testing scheme used by the state to rank our schools.
That the parent and the school would conspire in such a way was shocking to me. It still haunts me.
My ex-wife taught in the Fort Wayne (IN) inner city school system for several years. I was horrified by the shit she told me, and that she endured … and that was back in the early 1980s. I know it’s much much worse today.
Once she caught the scabies from some beloved little nig child. Her itching and scratching were relentless. As soon as I found out I slept in a separate bedroom until I was convinced it was completely gone. I think it took about 3 months. Really. It was at this time that I perfected the Art of Choking The Chicken.
“It was at this time I remembered that at the age of 12 I had perfected the art of choking the chicken”
– FIFY
Agreed. This is the best post by the Kunt-man, ever. If even the sodomite, Kunstler, is starting to ‘get it’ then we are truly in the End Times.
I always laugh at the idiots who call themselves ‘preppers’. They are paranoid of some kind of future cataclysmic collapse of society, oblivious to the reality that they are already in the midst of the ‘collapse’ they are ‘prepping’ for.
We are not oblivious, at all. We are “woke” to the schemes, plots and stupidity that surrounds us, as few are – and we are doing something about it. Do you have food, water and medical supplies to last more than a few days in your house? If the stores went empty next week how long would it take you to starve?
My house could hold out quite a while – and since I live among a bunch of Mormons, the whole community could probably hold out a long, long time. Everything from toilet paper to seeds, the Mormons are advised (lectured) to be capable of living without external aid for a year.
How is it at your house? Could you hold out a year if the just-in-time deliveries of groceries to stores, coal to power plants and water from your faucet were interrupted?
We do not laugh at you – but when so many live paycheck-to-paycheck as well as just-in-time delivery to just-in-time delivery, who can afford to be laughing at anyone?
Point taken, and your criticism is spot-on because I failed to expound. I’m a big proponent of ‘prepping’. I was attempting to remind people of the bigger picture. My comment was based on my own jaded view of ‘preppers’ from my own experience. There are many dumbshits and mentally-ill people who fail to see the proverbial ‘forest for the trees’. My point is: THIS IS THE COLLAPSE, RIGHT HERE AND RIGHT NOW.
MinThe schools should shoulder just as much of the blame as the parents, considering the government forces the parents to send them to school on threat of fine and arrest.
Think about how much time the average PUBLIC school child is at the facility compared with time with their parents.
The policies being adopted by schools in California like restorative justice, in school suspensions and slaps on wrists for daily defiance and intimidation along with teachers training ARE conditioning and priming these students to be victims and use their power in such a role with focus on their identities instead of the doing, the hard work, AP classes being the exception, but still along the lines of the caste system being created and as Charlotte Iserbyt wrote in her book the Deliberate Dumbing Down of America!!
Problem, Reaction, Solution
Problem: student behaviors in classroom, bullying (and bullying campaigns that actually have opposite effect they were designed to do), school shootings…
Get DESIRED REACTION:
Public outrage
SOLUTION:
Take the guns and put cameras in the classrooms.
Mark my words! Cameras in the classroom will be the death nail in any future freedom of thought and dissent….you think people think inside their boxes now! Just wait until the time comes when every situation, action, or word said by the teacher is analyzed, scrutinized and criticized in real time!!
James Johnson is right, but I would suggest that it really isn’t all that much about how many weeks of beans you have stored in your basement. It’s more about what HSF preaches. You need to know how to live on your own and that means feeding yourself every day and having water to drink, and having a way to defend both of those things. You need to know how to grow food, and you need to know how to save it so you don’t just eat in the summer time.
Hey, if your lucky you will never need to know this shit, but if you do need to know it, and you don’t, then your name is going to be in the “dead” column.
Agree Hollywood Johnson, but there’s one more thing we must do to make it worthwhile. We must bring others with us, even some of those that aren’t prepared. Not being able to predict future events, though not a crime or a sin, will kill even the saints among us. I’m so-so prepared for the first several months and my skills, tools, seeds, weapons, and other accumulations can ensure the survival of more than me and mine. I won’t yearn for a pack or a tribe, I’ll want a community of diverse thought. Otherwise what’s the purpose. I live, only to be bored to death? Survival may be a short term event, but living a meaningful, interesting life takes a longer view. If only people like me survive, who will I laugh at, make fun of, or ridicule? If everyone was like me, then everyone would rather talk to their tomato plants than to another person. I’m aware, I’m prepared and mostly an invisible senior that picks up his junk mail every day. I complain if there’s mail, I complain if there’s not. My car is twelve years old, my pickup seventeen years old. I drink good whiskey, listen to music that I like and grow stuff to eat. I have arrived at a place where I don’t care about politics, am annoyed at stupidity. Since politics is all stupid, I care just enough to observe the stupidity. I substitute taught at the local high school for the last few years. It was interesting. That’s all I can say about it. If you’d like me to say I was smarter, I won’t. I will admit to having an unconfused, duck and pheasant hunting and fishing childhood. I will admit to purchasing multiple houses for $20,000. I drove great cars and smoked a cigarette that was five miles long. John Prine. My whole life has been paid for on my dime. I’m prepared for the future only because I tried to be prepared for everything that life threw at me. Was my life easy? No, because I worked hard at making a life. I worked weekends, I missed things that I still regret. I missed some things because I loved to work. I don’t have any hate in me. I don’t care about Jews or Muslims. I had an Iranian friend once. He was the most honest person I’ve ever known. My Iranian friend also had a wonderful sense of humor. He told me of his faith, he had no hate in him either. I consider going dark, but then what? I think we will only figure this thing out once we decide where we want to be, who we want to be. Until then I remain comfortably numb, annoyingly skeptical.
Excellent and true article,and even better comments. The title however should have been. “What fifty plus years of Liberal Progressive policies have done to the country” Can’t blame that one on Stucky.
Thanks boomers! The Wonder Years were paid for with the blood of your grandchildren. My only solace is that social security won’t last another decade. Time to reap what you’ve sown.
“Thanks boomers!” ——– Mr Frosty
Three Latin words —- argumentum ad absurdum.
Look it up.
You sound like Hillary. She’s still not over it. Or, a kneegrow … they blame everyone else also.
(Full Disclosure: I am a shitfuk Boomer. But, I’ve gotten over it.)
The kids are not all right and we have no one to blame but ourselves for tolerating liberal nonsense verses common sense adult parenting .
We made a decision as parents to hold out on cable TV until our daughter was in high school . She whined and complained and while many in our family struggle to get by she struggles with higher education that places her in an advantages medical field that is already paying her and she still has one more year to complete her degree .
We parented her and paid tuition for private school and college (no debt) yes our gift to her , for her ! We lived well but within our means and invested carefully and frugally .
That’s why we know our governments are setting us up in our old age to rob pillage and plunder us to death so the big “THEY” can piss it away on the free shit army !
I hope at some point I can effectively block the move by government to some degree but it will be in vain . I suppose my one hope is to stop a few badge wearing minions just doing their job before we are out in the street or dead but I doubt that too .
The old can’t make them do it but I can make a few wish they had …?