By Joe Zamboni

Definition: Hypergamy is a word that most men never heard of, but it is essential that all heterosexual men know not only what it is, but also how it works. The concept posits that that adult women are endlessly looking for the bigger-better-deal when it comes to men. They will abandon their husband, boyfriend, lover, friend, whoever the man is, if it means that they can hook-up with a more powerful, more famous, and/or richer man. Don’t think that just because you the man have done pretty well along these lines, that you are not subject to the instant departure of a woman who has been with you for a long time. Loyalty is nothing in comparison to the force of hypergamy. Words of commitment, diamond rings on their fingers, public promises for “better or worse,” all that means nothing. Their sense of self-interest and their looking to trade-up outweigh every other consideration.

Millions of years of evolutionary processes have brought this about. Women needed protection and resources, in order to be taken care of, and in order to make sure that their children were taken care of. The women who were successful with this strategy were the ones who got to reproduce and create the next generation. And they went on to teach their daughters how to use this same hypergamy strategy. Over time, women leveraged the notion of chivalry and got men to support new laws to facilitate this same strategy (no fault divorce laws for example). Hypergamy has for eons simply been a matter of survival. You the man can have your own reaction to that fact, including perhaps deluding yourself that you have found a “woman who is different.” But watch out, when the bigger-better-deal comes along, she may be out the door in a “New York minute.”

Differences: The classic philosophers like Aristotle and Locke — while brilliant and enlightened men — did not understand women. They appealed to conceptual ethics like fairness, honesty, loyalty, and truth. This is how men think and operate; these notions are what men use to make decisions. Men need to get that women don’t operate that way. Women are biologically and genetically programmed to go with the bigger-better-deal. Feminist rhetoric about equality is nothing in the face of hypergamy. Women act this way unconsciously; it is part of their most basic and fundamental makeup.

Women will take great care to make it seem as though they support their man’s values, but that is because they want to be part of the man’s winning team. But when the bigger-better-deal comes along, they will instantly change their values so that they can better merge with the new man’s scene. No matter how good things are for women, they will always be looking out for the more advantageous situation.

The speed with which women “change” can, and often does, shock their husbands. When these women ask for a divorce, many men are truly taken off guard. This is because they have been taken in by women’s representations that they share their man’s values. Be warned, this “alignment” of values is in most cases not the truth at all. In spite of what appearances may indicate, women did not change their values, they simply changed the man they were hooked-up with. If a particular woman truly shares a man’s values, she should have been acting in life the way he was before they met, and she should have been acting this same way while outside an intimate relationship. Be wary when a woman takes up a new interest in a cause or hobby at the same time she hooks-up with a particular man. She most likely is not genuinely interested in that cause or hobby, she is simply interested in hooking up with that man. Like a chameleon, she is simply adapting, simply making herself compatible with his winning world.

Denial: So many men delude themselves with the well-worn phrase “not all women are like that” (NAWALT). So for example you may say, “yes, many women are like that, but my woman is devoted and loyal.” But really, come on, what hard evidence is there that she demonstrably acted that way before you came along? And what prevents her from abandoning that value if and when the bigger-better-deal comes along? If you really get this, you will see that it is no mistake that 70% of American divorces are now initiated by women. Many of them are simply trading-up to the bigger-better-deal, or at least they hope to soon do so. And big daddy government with the welfare, child support, alimony, and other subsidies especially for women in many cases is the bigger-better-deal.

Most men (and women) don’t want to admit the operation of hypergamy, but it is absolutely critical that heterosexual men understand how women operate in this regard. It is especially important to get this before these men get married (note — this author is strongly discouraging marriage). Unless you the man have really gotten this point, you will be surprised and shocked, you will feel abandoned and disillusioned, and you will feel betrayed and conned. You need to get that the marriage vows “for better and for worse,” and “for richer and for poorer” — all that is bullshit. These words are words that the man must by law live by, not the woman. They are one-sided obligations; they are totally inconsistent with real-world women’s hypergamy-related behavior.

This is not a pleasant point to admit, but if heterosexual men operate in the dark on this point, they are severely disadvantaged, and they will accordingly most likely be exploited by women. Why do women love romance novels? It’s about the taming and submission of men, the getting of men to serve women’s interests. Romance novels are female porn. Because they are dreams of being protected and provided for, exactly the way they want to be — by rich, powerful, and famous men. Read a few of these romance novels to really understand this. You only need to read a few — they are pretty much all focused on different variations on this same hypergamy theme. One recent hit along these lines is Fifty Shades Of Grey, by E.L. James.

To the extent that men buy into the Hollywood romance bullshit, they operate in a fog of infatuation, and then they can be led to think that women share their values. Hollywood romance is about as far away from reality as you can get. Sure, happily ever after, fading into the sunset, that would be nice. But get men who have been married and divorced to honestly level with you, and they will tell you that the Hollywood romance story is total bullshit. It’s a society-supported con game that seeks to lure men into marriage. Women deeply believe that they need a man to take care of them. Women thus endlessly seek men who are going to provide and protect, no matter what the feminists tell them. A couple of decades of feminist indoctrination cannot overcome thousands of years of evolution.

The relationship between the sexes is and always has been by its very nature asymmetrical. What is expected of men is very different from and unequal to what is expected of women. More is being asked of men, and women know it. So there must be a protracted and drawn-out process of convincing the man to get married. In support of this process, women engage in all sorts of cons and deceits in order to convince the bigger-better-deal that they are the woman for him. This convincing process includes making the man believe that they view the world in the same way he does. Make-up, hair-color, push-up bras, breast augmentation surgery, and many other methods and devices are only more marketing and deceit on the part of women so that they can attract and land the bigger-better-deal. It’s a hunting process, and the men are the prey.

Intentions: From the female perspective, mating is fundamentally a search for security. That’s one big reason why women push for marriage. Marriage makes men responsible to protect and provide for a woman, in legal ways that he was not obligated to deliver up until that point. Marriage is the primary mechanism that women use to leverage themselves up the ladder, up to the next bigger-better-deal. Of course, even though they are no longer with the woman involved, the prior husbands are still expected to provide (less so protect these days since government is doing more of that).

The modern intention for American women is to get several asset splits with different men as a result of divorces, and add to that several income streams (primarily alimony and child support), ideally having all the income streams all going at the same time. It’s a pretty great deal if you can do it, and the most conniving and most attractive of women can pull it off. But that doesn’t stop the other women from attempting to pull off the same con job. The only thing standing in the way of this continued exploitation of men is men’s full awareness of the game.

Application: If you the man really understand hypergamy, then all sorts of social practices that previously had no logical explanation will all of sudden start to make sense. Why for example are men still expected to pay for dates? Of course, it is preparation for marriage, and the providing and protecting that men are supposed to be delivering within the institution of marriage. Paying for dates is a “shit test” that men have to put up with in order to “prove” themselves to women. If a particular man will pay for dates, then he will probably also later pay alimony and child support.

As a man, the best ways for you to protect yourself against this force of this evolutionary history, against the hypergamy push of heterosexual women, is to: (1) not have any children (“the snip” is strongly recommended), (2) not cohabitate with a woman, and (3) not get married. The justifying details behind these three recommendations are beyond the scope of this article, but if you simply remember these three recommendations, you are going to be far ahead of your exploited and conned brethren in the brotherhood of men.

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In the reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act, House Republicans removed parts of provisions granting immigrants who gain residence on the basis of marriage the right to claim abuse and then file for permanent residence status without cooperation from their spouses. Ordinarily, if you marry an American and want to become a resident, you have to go through a process that proves your marriage was not simply for the purposes of gaining residence, but actually a bona-fide marriage. The entire process takes a few years, and involves interviews, forms, and other bureaucratic hurdles. Your husband or wife has to cooperate, so if the marriage falls apart quickly, you could face loss of legal residence status and have to leave the US.

However, VAWA provides a loophole. A spouse can claim abuse, and if she has any evidence, such as a police report or medical records, she may be able to leave their husband and still become a permanent resident. Given how easy it is to have American men arrested (all it takes is a phone call and an allegation, and false accusations of domestic violence are rarely if ever punished), this provision is an invitation to make a creative accusation. Additionally, making a police report is a simple matter, and one can say just about anything to the cops. However, what makes it even worse is that the process is confidential. What this means is that a foreign wife can accuse the husband without him even knowing that she is doing so, leaving him no opportunity to defend himself. Furthermore, he cannot access any of the information submitted to the federal government in an effort to defend himself in civil or criminal court, nor can he submit evidence to the Department of Homeland Security, which leaves the alleged victim free to say whatever she wants, whether it is consistent with local court affidavits or not. This setup stacks the deck so heavily against the accused that it’s practically asking immigrant women to accuse their husbands of domestic violence.

Of course, MSM editorials have mainly weighed in against the proposed changes. From the LA Times:

Eliminating the confidentiality provision is one of several changes House Republicans would like to make to weaken the law. They argue that the changes are necessary to combat fraud, in which immigrants falsely claim to have been abused in order to obtain visas. But where are the data and studies that indicate that fraud is a problem? Immigrant victims who petition for visas under VAWA are already required to supply ample evidence of abuse, such as police reports or medical records. And applications undergo intense scrutiny. In fiscal 2011, immigration officials denied nearly a third of those petitions.

You’ve got to love the logic here. The writer says fraud must not be a problem, because one third of these petitions are denied!

Because the war on violence against women is such a high priority in our country and feminism has enormous political power, women are usually given the benefit of the doubt. Can anyone imagine what would happen if the local police stopped responding to domestic dispute calls without clear evidence? There’d be enormous outrage from the usual quarters. So, if a third of the women claiming to have been abused are facing rejection, it’s a pretty clear sign that there’s a lot of fraud going on. It means a whole lot of them are lying. Given the numbers, a whole lot of them must be getting away with it, too.

The Republicans are right to remove the confidentiality provisions, because it’s important for officials to hear both sides of the story, and the accused should always have the opportunity to defend themselves from being placed on a government blacklist. Neither men nor women have a monopoly on truth, but the VAWA confidentiality provision effectively grants just that to whichever spouse decides to file a petition. Removing it is a small, but helpful step in both family law and immigration reform.

Examples and more information about VAWA immigration fraud can be found here. For an example of a typical case, this story is a good read.

To put things in perspective, immigration fraud is not the usual outcome in international marriages, but it is enough of a problem to be worth dealing with.

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By Ethical

With the college year heading to a close, if you’re a young man in the graduating class of 2012 you’ll soon be heading out into the world to begin achieving your real life goals. Whatever those goals may be, your choice of career as well as the economic conditions affecting that career will help you achieve the financial well-being you need to get there. But chances are that right now you see these decisions ahead more as chores than life defining choices. Unlike earlier generations who expected a loyal relationship with their first employer for a lifetime, odds are you won’t stay at whatever job you choose for more than the current average of 4.4 years. However consider that this is longer than your entire college studies and that by the end of your first stretch of employment your career will largely be committed to a given industry, a given set of specialist skills, and a given market. Your salary and advancement prospects will be heavily determined by the health of that industry and the choice of skills you’ve decided to specialize in. That first employment contract while not drawn in blood, will nevertheless set your life irrevocably on some course you may not yet completely understand the implications of when you sign.

Your choice of career isn’t the only decision that’ll determine whether you’ll achieve the financial well being to realize your life goals. Regardless of what level of income you’re making, a number of other decisions you’ll soon start planning for are just as critically important to every young man:

Matt Richey – The Motley Fool

Deciding to be content: “Contentment isn’t a feeling or a mood; it’s a decision. Only by choosing to be content with what you already have can you accomplish your budget, saving, and investing goals. Without choosing contentment, you’ll be ensnared by a subtle but ever-expanding appetite for money and all the things it can purchase — and worst of all, it’s an appetite that’s never fulfilled”.

An Atlanta real estate agent

The decision to buy a home, and your choice of mortgage to finance it are some of the biggest financial decisions you’ll make in your lifetime.

Gambling vs. Investing, investopedia.com

Gambling is putting money at risk by betting on an uncertain outcome with the hope that you might win money. Investing involves performing a thorough analysis and committing capital only when there is a reasonable expectation of profit.

Peter Lynch, Research Consultant, Fidelity Investments: “An investment is simply a gamble in which you’ve managed to tilt the odds in your favor.”

Tax Planning, a financial planner

People completely forget about tax planning and strategizing, and instead just focus on investment returns. In all of personal finance I would say that tax planning is the most critical issue of all and ultimately has the biggest impact on your financial well-being.

Who You Marry, a financial planner

Savers have a tendency to become attracted to spenders but savers get annoyed with spenders and spenders get annoyed with savers. Attitude towards money is one of the top causes of divorce.

Bizarrely absent from anyone’s list is the decision to get married at all. Having just gone through a divorce myself and having read hundreds upon hundreds of other divorces cases, it came as a shock to learn that working hard in a well chosen career, being financially responsible, doing one’s best to chose a mate, being a good husband and father, and being quite successful at all these things for twenty or thirty years will not save a man from divorce hitting the reset button on his life and setting him back 10-20 yrs or more in terms of his financial well being.

She may leave at a whim and still get unfairly rewarded despite her having a good job, but it gets worse. When she gets the house in all likelihood she’ll get the contents of that house. Unless you have a notarized list of your property at marriage (you’d have one if you got a prenup and it wasn’t set aside by the judge as many are) this means she’ll get your stuff too. A man having to replace or to go without most or all of the possessions he’s acquired during his entire adult life will put him back even further. This not uncommon scenario also applies to those who decide to cohabit instead of marrying if you buy property in a jurisdiction where a woman will get half of your property if she just cohabits with you.

Of course all of these warnings will sound very impotent to young men just setting out to conquer the world. You haven’t yet lost the invincibility of boyhood so by this point in the article your eyes might have glazed over. Being a young man myself not too long ago I can empathize. A young man at the top of his game can still stop bullets, become invisible, and gain secret ninja powers just by drinking a glass of tequila. His quest to subdue the world naturally leaves no time to listen to old men whine about men’s lack of rights in divorce. But at the same time I hope you don’t fail to take note and remain open to learning a little about what you might be in for. Marriage may have been found to have health and economic benefits for the men who never get divorced, but divorce has devastating financial and health consequences and a significantly increased risk of depression and suicide for the larger percentage of men who do. Divorced men for example are six times more likely to commit suicide. Before entering into marriage men need to know the odds are so stacked against them in divorce that the failure of a marriage literally can kill a man.

Unfortunately you can’t predict whether your partner will change for the worse even if they seem like a good choice of partner now, and regardless of whether you find a “good” woman the virulently anti-male divorce laws still encourage her to take your shit and leave with the kids when it suits her, because after all she can. You can’t change these anti-male divorce laws on demand when your marriage is suddenly on the rocks, and even if divorce laws change on their own to be more fair for men you can’t predict they won’t change back against you. So if despite all these risks marriage is still one of your eventual goals it may be in your interest to reduce your financial exposure through the following steps:

1. Make sure she earns as much or more than you do and that she agrees to go back to work 3 to 6 months after having children. Mind you this promise bears no weight whatsoever in a divorce court. Divorce is no fault. She has the absolute right to change her mind or to falsely represent her intentions, and you have no right to withdraw from the marriage without penalty on the grounds that she lied. Unfortunately this artificially raises of the market value of the older, more educated, higher earning, and often far more unpleasant women you’ll be stuck with as opposed to the younger more attractive, more fertile, and more pleasantly compliant women you would otherwise prefer, and this is exactly what feminism wants. Chalk it up as a strategic loss.

2. Rent. Don’t buy a marital residence together. In most jurisdictions the marital residence is treated differently from other assets. Usually it’ll be split 50-50. Depending on the length of the marriage and your own investment this split might be ruinously unfair for you. You may been very proud of your home purchase, thinking you’d be getting a 35% return on your investment due to the increase in real estate values over the last ten years. Your investment will look more pitiful than Florida swampland after you give 50% of the worth of the house to your well-employed spouse who invested nothing. Also women get attached to houses, so even if you made sure that you both contributed equally to the mortgage, getting your share of the equity from her may take expensive litigation.

3. Seek a career with as much capacity for self-employment as possible. Becoming self-employed is the only way to avoid having your wages garnished if you’re hit with the grotesquely unfair child support or alimony payments that millions of men are punished with. These payments are by law supposed to be restricted to a certain percentage of your income. However judges can at whim assign you a fictitious income that you “should” be making and calculate support payments based on that. This may result in you having to pay over 100% of your entire salary in support unless you want to face garnishment or jail. Self-employment gives you some control.

4. If you feel you’re the type of man who’ll get very attached to any children make sure to spend 50% of time with them doing their homework or taking part in their activities so that after separation there’s a slightly better chance the courts won’t deny you any meaningful role in the children’s lives.  Even today custody goes to the mother in the vast majority of cases. For up to thirty percent of men the experience of being told by the court they have no value in their children’s lives makes fatherhood so painful and humiliating they end up withdrawing from their children’s lives entirely.

5. Live in a more modest neighborhood where you’ll be able to afford an apartment close to the marital home so you’ll still be able to get joint custody after divorce if you’re forced to leave the home. Otherwise you’ll effectively be paying her to deny you the opportunity to be a father.

This may seem like planning for divorce but in a very real way it’s planning for marriage success. A successful marriage for most men is one in which you get to keep your balls rather than face a lifetime of ridicule because you’ve become so spineless with your wife that you’ve grown the sopping wet mangina you now sport in place of men’s parts. Through your frustration at home you might even synch with your wife’s cycle and begin to develop “monthly feminine emotional issues” with your co-workers as you drag your ‘gina to work with you every day. Don’t believe you’re immune. Divorce today is so ruinous and so stacked in women’s favor it even warps the power dynamic within marriages, as every harsh word from your formerly soft spoken high school sweetheart becomes an unspoken threat to sodomize you in divorce court. As much of an all American stud as you may be, many a better man than you has found himself middle aged and pitifully emasculated by such an endlessly entitled and demanding princess twenty years down the road.

The “red pill” wisdom to avoid these pitfalls not only will help you avoid doing marriage badly, but it also might have a revolutionary impact on society as a whole in that it gives boys about to enter college unprecedented freedom to rethink their life path. Because if the whole modern marriage and family thing is such a losing proposition it makes sense for young men to reconsider their goals even before going into college. If marriage and family aren’t safe options because having his finances tied to the explosive temper of an entitled wife doesn’t sound like it’s for him then right from high school a young man’s goal entering college isn’t simply to earn more money to increase his value in the marriage market. Recognizing this so early and having enough GAME that he doesn’t have to rely on money to get tail frees boys to choose a more rewarding college program. High school boys will soon have to make decisions about what they’ll be doing next year. Many will find themselves contemplating that although the “College Years” can really be the best time of your life, it’s not only important for you to choose the right school to gain the most out of the experience, but also to consider that although choosing a program that will offer financial well being is important, what you need to keep a wife happy and what you need to pay your bills while you pursue your passion if you forego marriage are two different things.

I admit this kind of freedom isn’t for everyone. Not having to compromise for a woman means you have the absolute freedom to achieve as much as you set out to do, or as little as your faltering courage allows you to take on. So lose yourself in perfecting whatever craft you’ve devoted yourself to. Bet your entire prime years on some game changing idea. There’ll be no one to hold you back, but also no one to blame. You are living life at its most terrifying heights “without wires”.

I don’t caution you young men against marriage lightly. There are countless others who’ll tell you the same. It’s food for thought that feminized laws in virtually all western democracies have so changed marriage that “marriage strike” has become a common meme in the manosphere. Marriage is now only a contract where men’s responsibilities are concerned. Men are brutally penalized as being solely responsible for a marriage’s failure while women are absolved of all consequences for frivolously breaking their vows.

Though marriage unquestionably makes a better environment for raising kids deciding against marriage doesn’t mean deciding against children. In fact I hope my son gives me grandkids and I’d be crushed if he didn’t. But I’ve seen how abusive the courts are to men, and having been brutalized by the courts myself, being unable to help him escape some divorce court judge subjecting him to the same subhuman treatment would send me to an early grave. Even if his marriage lasts I pray I don’t have to spend my retirement years watching him be endlessly emasculated from fear of a reaming in divorce.  An ounce of prevention is in order. Marriage is now so dangerous for men that you need to think seriously about how to defuse the threat or seriously consider avoiding it. However for the many young men who’ll ignore this message of caution, though I’m deeply concerned I’m also hopeful because ignoring the words of past generations is what makes young men so inventive. I may be convinced that marriage today is nearly impossible for men to render harmless, but for every old man like myself who said “it couldn’t be done” there’s a young man busy being successful at doing it. So in the end many of you will focus only on earning to increase your value in the marriage market rather than worrying about mitigating risks of marriage itself. This has always been the way of men and I’ll be rooting that the dice roll your way. As you work tirelessly to achieve great success, perhaps even over extending yourself financially, you may be able to give your wife a big house, one or more nice cars, a nanny, maybe even a pool. But I’ve been around long enough to know that where there’s risk there are some who’ll pay consequences. So after the family court forces you out into a one bedroom apartment under the train tracks on the other side of town I’ll be no less sympathetic that you spent so much time at work the pool boy screwing her is the only one really enjoying your house with its big screen and hi-tech three hundred dollar remote.

Yes as a young man you’ll be tempted to ignore this hard dose of truth if it appears to be more whining coming from a bitter middle aged man. So the absolute last thing I’d want to tell you is that I’m bitter. Truth is I’ve escaped most of the above calamities. But I also have to be honest in saying that I can’t help resenting the older generation of men for not having given me this advice when I was younger, which is why I’m spreading the knowledge to you. Am I bitter about that the older generation of men didn’t talk more about the truth? Yes I am. But information is always empowering whenever it comes. You have the God given right to take what you will from this, figure out a strategy that works for YOU, and take no prisoners in your execution while getting yours. Whatever you decide  myself and many other “old guys” will be cheering you on. If we’re lucky YOU will take up the torch to blaze a new path and discover wisdom that will protect our own young sons in turn.

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Commenter Highwasp pointed to an article on Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin, who left the US for Singapore some time ago, and has formally renounced his citizenship, because it has become a hindrance in terms of doing business.

Saverin stresses that he has nothing against the US, and isn’t even trying to avoid taxes, but rather to avoid troublesome US regulations that require foreign banks to report on American citizens. One law he cited, the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA), has prompted a number of foreign banks to avoid American investors altogether.

Such rules have increasingly become the norm in the US, where the government has steadily ratcheted up regulations and controls on citizens. Many of these controls were pioneered with family law and child support laws, which then opened the door to further restrictions in other areas.

Some legislation appears to be aimed at preventing American citizens from leaving the country. For example, a recent bill proposed by California senators Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer would have those who owe taxes lose their passports, much as those who owe child support are not eligible to obtain a passport. The next step, in all likelihood, will be an effort to seize the passports of those who owe student loans. It is instructive that senators from California, a state that can’t balance its own budget, is turning the screws on all American citizens in an attempt to increase revenue.

As we saw in the case of the USSR and other Communist countries, however, these laws often tend to drive away the most talented and resourceful, who realize that living in a country that exerts such strict controls on citizens is not always worth the risk, while those left behind are the hapless and less productive. This tends to sap national wealth, leading to a downward spiral that eventually (in the better scenario) leads to reform and the reestablishment of personal liberty.

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The Book:  The Closing of the American Mind, by Allan Bloom.

Summary:  In this 25 year old book, Mr. Bloom, a former college professor at the University of Chicago, argued that the minds of Americans have become ‘closed’ by being indiscriminately open to all comers. He explains this initially contradictory claim by comparing the textbook definition of openness…the search for the good, the correct, and the banishing of ignorance by applying reason…with what has become the conventional definition of openness in modern discourse: the openness of an mind that accepts everything equally and refusing to employ (or even suppresses) reason’s power to judge ‘good’ and ‘bad’. In Bloom’s characterization, the Western mind has regressed to a pre-Western Civ state…a mind characterized by openness is ‘beyond good and evil’ (a concept found in Classical and older civilizations), and because the good life neither valued nor actively sought, ideas are given more or less equal weight when encountered. The American mind first spurned, then forgot its heritage and consequently floats along, adrift in a stream of values about which it no longer cares (or is permitted) to discriminate. Thus, virtue in the mind of the modern American is no longer found in being right or correct, or in correcting past mistakes, but in being open, tolerant, non-judgemental. The open-cum-closed mind does not look back to analyze the past, only forward to the next judgement-free encounter.

In openness-land, the only real vice is intolerance toward the new. Mr. Bloom worried about this new openness and what it means for American and Western culture when the received wisdom of tradition and the acquired wisdom of over a millennia of Scholasticism is rejected in favor of all kinds of men, credos, and lifestyles. As America from its inception was a radical experiment in natural rights and natural equality, it did not possess an aristocracy per se, an elite class where culture and wisdom were maintained and transmitted to the next generation for the entire people. Instead, the American anti-aristocratic model depended on the university to educate its citizens directly, regardless of social class, to inculcate a desire to seek virtue, and to motivate them toward seeking and living the “good life”. Instead, today, “men are [no longer] permitted to seek the natural human good and admire it when found”, for that is discriminatory and intolerant. Thus tradition and Western natural law are neutralized and the Western tradition of critical self-reflection, a tool unique to Western Civilization (other cultures and civilizations see no reason to test their cultures or their habits, their cultures are just fine, thank you very much) and a feature that enabled its greatness, is reduced to merely critique. Our past is shameful because it was so ‘closed’, our culture is flawed (because its past is flawed), and our beliefs are merely accidents of our place in the stream of time and as a result, our preferences are only that…accidents.

Similarly, not only is the American university adrift, but when young Americans arrive at university, they are vessels largely devoid of a sense of virtue or moral clarity. Their minds are tabulae rasa and, mirroring the decline in the universities–nobody believes the old books written by dead white men could contain any truth useful for us know-it-all moderns–the family has also retreated from its traditional role as the transmitter of knowledge and tradition. In its place enters media and the schools, as parents seem to

lack self-confidence as educators of their children, generously believing they will be better than their parents, not only in well-being, but in moral, bodily, and intellectual virtue. There is always a more or less open belief in progress, which means the past appears poor and contemptible. The future, which is open-ended, cannot be prescribed to by parents, and it eclipses the past which they know to be inferior [emphasis mine]

A moral education, which to be effective, according to Mr. Bloom, must present to the pupil “a vision of the moral universe, reward for good, punishment for evil, the drama of moral choices”, and a sense of the stakes involved in such choices. Mere ‘values education’ in the school system does not suffice, it is but the wind, with no anchor to hold it in place. Furthermore, Mr. Bloom argues that the lack of exposure to great literature from the past stunts the educated citizen’s ability to identify evil, as those who have not read the great books doubt evil’s existence, despite the fact that they witness horrible crimes and see many many more on the news. The citizen-student, open and adrift as he is, lacks an awareness of both the depths and the heights.

Mr. Bloom argued that this openness of indifference extends to human relationships as well. The American mind has become sharply egocentric, self-focused, defensive, and inwardly directed. Openness as the ultimate virtue drives a radical egalitarianism, with the result that the culture no longer recognizes no practical differentiation between any persons. When observable differences do surface, as they do most often with race, ethnicity and sex, they are denied, engineered away, or made taboo. Truth and reason are abused to maintain the openness-egalitarian narrative when the facts say otherwise–”the recalcitrant matter of the is gave way before the practical and philosophical ought to be“–resulting in racial and ethnic bribery for NAMs and sex-based set-asides for women. All in the name of forcing the unequal to be equal, an attempt to restore the equilibrium of sameness the closed mind seeks.

In addition, this openness-egalitarianism has wedged the sexes apart. Bloom wrote, channelling Socrates, that “equal treatment of women necessitates the removal of all the old kind of sexual relations…and a consequent loss of the human connections that resulted from them which [Socrates] replaces with the common good of a city”. Men and women are thus undifferentiated in custom and in law, sex loses much of its significance for men and women, except as a purely recreational activity, and a feminism takes root hat denies nature, denies the truth of sexual differentiation, homogenizes and suppresses relationships between the sexes.

In Bloom’s account, this closing of the American mind has a long and distinguished pedigree. He locates it in three events, the Enlightenment, the absolute defeat of Rousseauean philosophy in favor of the Lockean variety, and a misinterpretation and misapplication of Nietzschean philosophy. The Enlightenment dethroned God and promoted man and his ability to reason in its place. Religion, by definition virtue-prescriptive, was marginalized to the realm of opinion and myth and, because it is but one opinion or creed among others, it has little definitive knowledge to offer about the human condition and the soul. Locke advanced this ball further downfield, realigning virtue from the difficult task of loving one’s brother to ‘enlightened self interest’. No longer was agape a virtue, no longer was the man who cared for others virtuous, but instead the most virtuous man became he who cared for himself the most:

The old commandment that we love our brothers made impossible demands on us, demands against nature, while doing nothing to provide for real needs. What is required is not brotherly love or faith, hope, and charity, but self-interested rational labor. The man who contributes most to relieving human misery is the one who produces most, and the surest way of getting him to do so is not by exhorting him, but by rewarding him most handsomely to sacrifice present pleasure for the sake of future benefit, or so assure avoidance of pain.

Locke encouraged his fellow man to love life, liberty, and the pursuit of property above all other things. The protestations of his antithesis, Rousseau, that such a proto-utilitarian philosophy left man’s spiritual side unattended and bereft were largely ignored, leaving the modern man spiritually adrift, or as Mr. Bloom wrote, ‘flat-souled’. Into this nexus then came Nietzsche and other great German thinkers. Nietzsche recognized how Lockean philosophy stifled and hobbled man’s soul and encouraged him to become something bigger than a selfish economic agent. In writing about the new world that awaits the man that looses his spirit, Nietzsche wrote ” Gott ist tot ” in reference to the power that man has to shape his future were he to only will it so. Here, Mr. Bloom claims that Nietzsche’s prouncement was not so much a triumph, as is commonly thought, but was instead a lament…was this all there is? Bloom then asserts that the Enlightenment forces hostile to religion from the get-go seized upon this confirmation of God’s death and used that as the jumping off point for an aggressive religious and dogmatic atheism…thus transforming Nietzsche into a hero of the Left, where he would more properly be a Rightist. What started as an attempt to realize natural law, reason, ever the devil’s whore, slowly becomes an auto-immune disorder.

Enter now the Frankfurt School, a nihilistic leftist philosophic school that fled Germany in the 20s and 30s, ironically escaping an aggressive instantiation of their nihilistic and leftist philosophy. First coming to Columbia University, this cancer rapidly spread to the rest of the American academy, and the revolution that comes with the upending of one weltanschauung and installation of another came to a head in the 60s. In the 60s, American universities were experiencing the same turmoil and dismantling of the structure of rational inquiry as had the German university in the 30s. The result was the same however…a levelling of the populace, and the distinction between the educated and the uneducated, the diversity of many differing opinions, had given way to homogenization. No vision–or even competing visions–of what constituted an educated human was on offer, merely a keen focus on equality, which “…for us seems to culminate in the unwillingness and incapacity to make claims of superiority, particularly in the domains in which such claims have always been made–art, religion, philosophy. [Furthermore,] no one can say what “civilized” means, when there are said to be many civilizations that are all equal”. Thus did the American mind close, the effect of a nihilistic abandonment of the Western rational tradition, a tradition that made room for both the mind and the spirit. Victorious, reason-based radical egalitarianism found that it had to suppress reason to maintain the hegemony of radical egalitarianist philosophy.

Commentary

One thing that is obvious to readers of this book is the inherent structural bankruptcy of the philosophy of openness. For if we are not to think our way better than others, then what tools do we have to tell right from wrong? Some of us have religion, the remainder of the polity has merely the direction of the herd to shape their values and ethics. In other words, there is nothing but the mob. Perhaps this is the very point…how easy it is to shape the behavior and tastes of a mob, what with compulsory public schooling, an agenda-driving media selecting what issues are worth discussing and which are not, and advertising that teaches what goods are to be desired and which are not. Freethinking? I think not.

Something else, too: What chance does Western civilization have if it is peopled by those who either think Western civilization should be destroyed or those who think it gauche to think it preferable to other civilizations. I think this has profound implications for the West as we adapt to challenges from Islamic and Sinic civilizations, two civilizations who do not suffer from the profound self-loathing that the West seems to have at the moment. Will the West summon the will to carry on?

Additionally, being an MRA of sorts, I found what Mr. Bloom had to say wrt relations between the sexes of particular interest. Of the state of the male sex in an egalitarian society, he had this to say way back in 1987:

de Tocqueville describes the tip of the iceberg of advanced egalitarianism when he discusses the difficulty that a man without family lands, or a family tradition for whose continuation he is responsible, will have in avoiding individualism and seeing himself to be an integral part of a past and a future, rather than as an autonomous atom in a merely changing continuum

On this point, Mr. Bloom was very prescient. 1987 was just a few years after ‘peak divorce‘, the revolution that divested men from their families and initiated a self-reinforcing cycle of family breakup, made both men and women both think that the male is not a necessary component to the family, a nice-to-have luxury, certainly not essential. We see now, 25 years later, the effects of advanced egalitarianism, most notably in rising rates of commitment avoidance and rational slackerhood. I do not think most men really see themselves as part of a living society, with a past and certainly a future that he can be a part of. Instead, he lives only for himself, and is wary of the sort of social entanglements that his forefathers took for granted as part of the role of a patriarch.

I found myself also wondering if the increasing lack of substantive differentiation among men and women, legally and socially, is fuelling the rise in availability and acceptability of pornography both for men (visual) and for women (romance novellas). It seems that, since sex differences are denied except for when advantage can be accrued to the female, genuine sex itself loses its power among otherwise undifferentiated men and women. What remains of the sex act then is a hollow shell, the industrialized rubbing of genitalia, somewhat satisfying but yet still leaving the practitioner wondering if there was more, wondering why their forebears fussed so about sex and relationships, not missing what they don’t know. Furthermore, perhaps men and women are increasingly turning to porn in an unconscious effort to re-establish that differentiation, to regain what they don’t know in their head they’ve lost but their flesh still cries for nonetheless.

An another thought that came to mind while reading Mr. Bloom’s manuscript was how adopting the virtue of openness replaced the old, former sex-differentiated virtues for men and particularly for women,  responsibility and modesty, respectively. Instead of modesty, female sexuality is instead ubiquitous…it is nigh upon impossible for a man to walk down the street without individual women or advertisements featuring women attempting to manipulate him through displays of sexual imagery. What’s more, the culture is absolutely unable to resist this trend; slut-shaming is not very tolerant, ergo verboten, and ‘blaming the victim’ is an offense of a very high order. Similarly, although somewhat less so, virtue for men does not appreciably contain elements of responsibility; indeed, responsibility is something to be avoided when possible, viz., the rise in cohabitative unions, low and falling levels of male community engagement, working only enough to satisfy one’s individual needs, etc. While the old patriarchal society is no more, it was replaced by a functionally matriarchal one, and male responsibility, unlike female modesty, is still enforced vigorously by the State through chalimony, property division, and state transfer payments.

In conclusion, I found this a very worthwhile book, although the writing was at times very difficult to penetrate and could be much more compact. That said, the author did an outstanding job of imparting to the reader a sense of history, of a thread leading straight from the Enlightenment through the social contract theorists to German philosophers and forward to the Frankfurt School to the state of modern American academia.

About the author: EW is a well-trained monkey charged with operating heavier-than-air machinery. His interests outside of being an opinionated rabble-rouser are hunting, working out, motorcycling, spending time with his family, and flying. He is a father to three, a husband to one, and is a sometime contributor here at Spearhead. More of his intolerable drivel is available at the blog The Elusive Wapiti.

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I’ve never written anything here for Mother’s Day before, because I didn’t think it was all that relevant to the site. But we all have mothers, and for the most part we love them, and they love us.

So, in the spirit of Mother’s Day, I’ll write a few things I’m thankful for. Not too much, because mostly we appreciate our mothers privately, as the relationship between parent and child is intimate and deeply personal. But I do have to admit I got lucky. I’ve got a pretty good mom. Not all of my friends were so fortunate, but I sincerely hope more kids can say the same at some point in the future, despite how bleak it looks today.

So here goes…

Dear Mom,

Thanks for being an honorable woman. There’s little I appreciate about you more than your adherence to moral standards and your inherent sense of what’s right and wrong.

Thanks for being such a hard worker, and pulling us through some hard times. I know it wasn’t easy, and you deserve a lot of quality time in the garden and with the grandkids when you retire.

Thanks for staying healthy and setting a good example for me and my sister. We haven’t followed it perfectly, but it’s always been on our mind, and I’m convinced it’s helped prevent our habits from getting out of control.

Thank you for always being a great conversation partner. All those hours we’ve spent talking have enriched my life a great deal, and have given me the confidence and ability to stand up and speak my mind.

Thanks for never getting between me and my dad and his family. We all know he wasn’t perfect, but you let me love him and get to know him on my own terms, and you always treated him with humanity and decency, and I’ll be eternally grateful for that.

Finally, thanks for being an all-around decent person. Moms like you are a real treasure.

With gratitude

Your Son

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I thought you guys might appreciate a funny little story from Riga, so I’ll tell it.

It was late in the evening, and there was little to do besides watch CNN International. Although I was happy with Latvian food, I hadn’t stocked up sufficiently, and I wasn’t tired, so I thought I’d go see what a burger tasted like in the Baltic states.

First I went down to Hesburger, a Finnish burger chain that’s pretty popular in the region, but Hesburger was closed. Fortunately, there was a McDonald’s around the corner, so I started on my way there. McDonald’s in Riga is located right on the edge of the Old Town, which is the scenic core of Riga.

The Old Town is full of beautiful old buildings of the Hanseatic style, churches, narrow, winding alleys and, above all, bars and clubs. From Thursday through Saturday, it’s full of people and cheer every evening till daybreak. Groups of young men and women roam the streets from bar to bar, making noise and having fun. People come from the entire region to enjoy Riga’s Old Town, and I was lucky enough to be staying there. I met Norwegians, Russians, Swedes, Finns, English, Irish, Germans, Poles and more. Oddly, there were very few Americans. This being the case, people tended to assume I was Norwegian (thanks to my Norwegian grandmother and Anglo-Norman ancestry I look that way) until I opened my mouth.

As I slowly made my way to the McDonald’s, I was approached by a rather hefty young woman who began speaking to me in Russian. She could easily have passed for a suburban American girl, being rather on the large side, but not all that bad-looking overall. I soon told her in English that I couldn’t speak Russian, so she asked me whether I was British or Scandinavian.

“No, I’m American,” I responded.

She replied, saying “You don’t look like an American,” upon which I told her “America is a big country.”

She then said “you have such beautiful blue eyes,” asking “why don’t you buy me a drink?”

“I’m sorry,” I said “I’ve already got a woman.”

This rejection angered her, and she said something sharp in Russian, then told me to get rid of my beard. Before I knew what was happening, she pinched my beard and started yanking on it. Having made her point about the beard, she then reached for my collar and took hold of my chest hair, pulling it hard.

I was a bit shocked, but kept my composure. Somehow, I managed to avoid even wincing from the pain. I really had no idea what to say, so I told her “you are quite a strong woman.” Shortly thereafter, her embarrassed friend whisked her away, and I went on to order a burger and onion rings.

For the most part, women in the region are reserved, but apparently Russian ladies are a breed apart — especially when they’ve been drinking. I would advise the adventurous American traveler to keep this in mind while traveling in northern Europe, but not to let it frighten him too much. The key, I think, is to keep your cool.

Following is a video from a couple days ago at the exact spot and same McDonald’s where this hair-pulling incident occurred. A dustup between Russians results in some fisticuffs (one guy gets knocked out cold) and a contentious arrest. Note that it is 6AM and the parties to the scuffle had probably been up all night drinking:

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By Ethical

After reading hundreds upon hundreds of comments on both feminist sites and men’s rights sites like The Spearhead and A Voice for Men, I noticed the clear pattern that men and women argue differently. Men tend to try to understand what their opponent is saying in order to point out the flaws in his argument. Women on the other hand tend to try to show that nothing about their opponent’s argument is understandable at all. As soon as she determines a person’s argument is contrary to how she feels, rather than confront her opponent’s reasoning she’ll use ridicule or derision to dismiss the argument entirely.

The great many men visiting feminist blogs to confront what they see as faulty logic is proof men look to engage and attack any weakness in their opponent’s argument. It’s also apparent when the odd women shows up on a men’s forum. No matter how insulting or far off topic she is there’s always a surplus of men ready to engage.

On the other hand when men come to women’s forums to debate the issues they’re banned from commenting if they say anything the women don’t agree with. This is proof women look for reasons not to engage their opponents argument. Furthermore unlike the many men who troll feminist forums, women rarely show up to debate men’s rights with men, though this is no loss for them since women don’t need the opposition present to have a debate. Though they didn’t permit their opponent to make his argument they’ll agree amongst themselves on what he probably would have said and then ridicule that misrepresentation among themselves.

There are exceptions of course. Aside from the fact that his site is intentionally satirical, Manboobz relies on ridicule while refusing to address any relevant points, exactly like a woman. However I haven’t seen a picture of him so I’m still not convinced he isn’t one, in which case he’s not an exception. On the flip side I’ve also read at least one woman’s blog on men’s rights that was more methodically logical than most men’s writing. These exceptions are extremely uncommon.

It’s not surprising then that in the gender rights debate neither side is convincing the other even in the slightest, and that raises a good question: If men can never be convinced because women don’t engage men’s rational arguments, and women can never be convinced because men ignore their feelings and bully them with the excuse that their feelings aren’t rational, then how can the sexes ever compromise? Compromise relies on a belief in the “common good” and requires a common understanding of the issues. There’s no “common good” if both parties have conflicting agendas, and there’s no common understanding if both parties have different ways of reaching a conclusion.

I believe there may be a solution. To achieve compromise men may need to take the initiative and address arguments that make women feel differently about men being treated unequally; that is demonstrate that the devastating consequences of men being denied equal rights in areas like false accusations and family law will in the long run be more painful for the majority of women than individual women no longer being able to get away with as much when the systemic injustice against men is exposed. Whether false accusation, unfair child support or alimony, unfair division of property, or unfair custody and visitation, more women in the man’s family are hurt by an unjust court ruling than the single woman who benefits. The man’s mother, sisters, aunts, daughters, and new significant other may suffer terribly because he suffers, and because they’ll stop at nothing to support him.

Stop at nothing may be what they need to do because it’s clear that the battle to end discrimination against men can’t be won without their help. Men are designed for war against neighboring villages not for defending ourselves against our “helpless women” whom we find it difficult to hold to account for anything.

We can’t even learn from the hard lessons learned by other men because part of being “manly” is refusing to pay attention of common difficulties men face in our dealings with women. Consequently when men are confronted with gender inequity in divorce, false accusations etc. they’ll face it alone and lose. Being “manly” means he’ll take responsibility for his defeat in this system that’s so rigged winning is impossible. As a result he and other men will be ashamed to share their stories. With all the injustice so invisible he’ll get no sympathy from the legions of other men who haven’t had their eyes opened by their own struggles, and who haven’t taken the time to become informed. They’ll just look down on him as being weak for having lost. On top of this women will band together to heap on scorn and abuse for him defending himself against a woman. They won’t relent until the man is forced to accept his defeat. All this makes it difficult for men to come together to make a change. We men may have left our ancestral villages to conquer nations and may have subdued the unknown perils of the ocean to discover the new world, but facing the shaming circle of the village’s fishwives we have always conceded victory.

Surprisingly I agree women should continue to have the privileged social position this lopsided situation demonstrates. Men’s chivalry and protection of women has been around for much longer than feminism and will likely be around long after feminism is gone. Under most circumstances where men have some leadership role in the relationship both men and women feel positively about the man putting his duty to protect and provide for women and children before his own needs and safety. It’s probably a natural state of affairs because any society that did otherwise is extinct. But a man taking responsibility for putting women first goes with empowering men to disabuse themselves of women who behave badly or fail to support him. We ‘re at a warped point in history in which the feminist state has so deeply involved itself in relationships it has broken the contract between men and women. Where men would simply leave a bad wife, refuse to take responsibility for a loose woman’s child that in all probability wasn’t his, or ignore a woman who drunkenly agreed to sex and then cried rape the next day from shame and regret, men today are now completely blocked from acting in our own interests to solve our own problems. We’re forced to appeal to the feminist state which has effectively decreed men are always wrong in any dispute. We’ve become so disenfranchised that the rewards for taking on the chivalrous “leader and protector” roles men always aspired to are vanishing. In marriage for example the only recourse men have is to play the odds of getting reamed in divorce if it doesn’t work out, to endure a completely emasculating and unsatisfactory marriage, or to opt out of marriage or cohabitation altogether.

Societies still rely heavily on men, and no society can prosper if men are so disenfranchised. Men aren’t asking for special status as “victims”, we don’t need help, we just need the law to stop actively enslaving us to women. If weren’t so shackled by the law that we can’t act in our own self-interest we would’ve corrected feminism ourselves as we’ve always solved our own problems. But where we are now is needing women to allow the state to give us equal rights in our relationships with them. For that to happen we need to show women AND feminist men that allowing men equal rights is in women’s interest too.

This shouldn’t be a difficult argument to make because wherever one woman may benefit many more women on the man’s side suffer, and because even that single women who benefitted is being adversely impacted by anti-male laws. As an example, though women primarily benefit from no fault divorce that are commonly interpreted as “no fault” means “his fault” , it’s no fault divorce that’s reduced lifetime alimony and made being a homemaker such an uncertain occupation that women feel they have no other choice than to keep a career. Women openly acknowledge that as a result they now work too much, face criticism from all quarters for neglecting their husbands and families, complain their husbands don’t do enough at home, then divorce in greater numbers than ever to end up living life alone. Rather than being happier women are now unhappier than ever.

So the MRM may have started with the many well constructed points we men have gathered like big sharpened sticks for the coming gender war. But a great many women aren’t vulnerable to such hard logic. We have to broaden our strategy to include some carrots to lull them across enemy lines as in reality it’s less of a gender war we’re confronting than it is a challenge facing both men and women. We’ve always needed each other too much for complete victory in favor of either sex to lead anywhere but towards mutual destruction. Feminism is winning but it will be the end of marriage when men are forced to completely surrender and this is not a victory for women. The destruction of marriage will be followed by the destruction of innovation and economic prosperity as marriage is not only an incentive for men to pursue both, but it’s also the best environment to nurtures children to have these qualities. To avert the end, somehow we need to help women understand that women need men to have the right to be men for women to fully realize their right to be happy being women.

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I’m working on installing some membership/forum software to better handle comments, and it’s a bit tricky. Site may have some issues for a while. If there’s trouble accessing content, it can be read at: feeds.feedburner.com/thespearhead

If an installation fails and crashes the site and I can’t figure out why, I’m going to have to upload the backup, and that could take a long time. If I have to upload a database backup it will take even longer — this is a very large site by now.

So don’t worry if the site goes offline for a while. I’ve dealt with all the security issues and there are no problems with the host, so any downtime (hopefully very little if any) will simply be due to installing software or restoring the site if there’s a fatal problem during installation/configuration.

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I arrived home yesterday afternoon after a long journey, and despite what I’ve written recently concerning the problems in the states found myself happy to be here. I do love the weather, the scenery and the clean feeling of the Pacific Northwest. It’s quite literally a breath of fresh air.

However, I was soon a bit disappointed. While in Europe I lost about three kilograms – nearly seven pounds – without really trying. My long daily walks, daily climbs up many flights of stairs and healthier diet combined to help the weight fall right off me effortlessly. So, I decided that I’d try to keep this up while back home, and went to the grocery store with this in mind. Unfortunately, I found that healthy food is far more expensive than in Europe, while the junk is much cheaper. I wanted to buy a loaf of rye bread, some deli meats and cheese for snacks and lunch. All were expensive and of decidedly lower quality than in Europe. It dawned on me that the American lifestyle is not only pervasive, but for many of us nearly unavoidable without serious effort.

Additionally, you can’t just walk to the store here for daily essentials. Driving is necessary. So, once again I find myself seated more of the time. It seems to me that we went wrong somewhere along the line, and instead of simply adjusting to a healthier lifestyle we have to make extra effort and spend more to keep ourselves in decent shape.

Sure, you’ll see a lot of fit Americans, but they generally spend hours exercising every week. Instead of being a part of one’s daily routine, it is necessary here to schedule exercise, buy equipment, a gym membership, etc. What a disappointment.

Everything about the US in recent years seems to be a departure from nature. Instead of accommodating our lives to suit the natural world, we tend to fight it and compensate with more effort. Our politics are no different. Rather than adjusting to normal human nature, we create a police state to control every aspect of our relations with the opposite sex, our children, coworkers, and any other people we interact with.

This is unsustainable, and not only in the environmentalist sense of the word, but the human sense as well. People can only handle so much before things start to fall apart, and it seems to me that we are getting closer to the point of breakdown. I don’t envision some anarchic, Katrina-style armageddon, but rather a steady decline in function, much as a sick, aging patient slowly declines before finally succumbing. As I suggested a few posts back, I am a bit pessimistic about the hope for recovery. The structural problems are just too entrenched, and nobody will want to give an inch. Too much has been placed on the shoulders of the young, and those in power will continue to plunder the politically weak to suit their more powerful constituencies.

Finally, the people dominating the political debate are distracting us from the real problems with non-issues, such as gay marriage and contraception. As unemployment and underemployment continue along at unacceptable levels, our President and his rival can only talk about things that have the most minimal impact on the lives of ordinary Americans. Could it really be that the main issues of the campaign will be gay marriage and subsidized contraception? Are these more important than rising fatherlessness, the student debt crisis and stagnant wages?

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