Of Boys and Men

Understanding the difference between resilience and adaptation

One of the biggest lies ever told to me by professional school counselors and child psychologists was, "Don't worry, children are resilient." The context for this uttered fallacy was that fifteen years ago, I went through a particularly bad and unusually difficult child custody legal battle. It was bad because there was a terrible amount of child manipulation and then abandonment. It was unusual because I, the father, was granted full custody in a state where the legal system does everything within their power to favor mothers in custody disputes.

So, as you can imagine, once that horrific period in my children's lives was over, I set out to get them professional help so that they could put their traumatic young lives in context and start the healing process. Time after time, the professionals I sought told me not to worry, children are resilient and that my children will be okay. Even my own children thought that. To be sure, divorces were rather commonplace fifteen years ago and they had witnessed many a friend who was part of a divorced living arrangement. Mostly my children noticed that their friends in split custody situations had both parents attempt to quell their individual guilt for separating the family by buying their children's affection. Sadly, for my young ones, no such guilt and gifts materialized. All they got was confusion, pain, and rejection.

It was during this time of amends and reconciliation that I learned all the child "experts" were flat out wrong. Children in horribly disruptive divorce custody battles are not resilient, they simply adapt. Abused children are not resilient to hostile parenting, they adapt their behavior to fit into whatever space they perceive as safe or less hostile. If my children were truly resilient, they would have bounced back to a previously held place of joyful contentment and all the therapy sessions I sat through with them would have led to success. In our suffering through the child therapy process, I discovered that the "children are resilient" proclamation was an outright lie. As a result, I reversed course on therapy and stopped listening to the child "experts" and simply started listening to my children.

This brief story brings me to another, and more in the headlines, discussion on a new form of child abuse. The headlines of Substack are filled with topics like teaching men on how to be men, or like discussions on the difference between Alphas and Gammas. Further, authors produce posts asking why boys are not excelling in education? These posts all point to the problem of systematic suppression of masculinity in Western societies. And all the same "experts" are living in the illusion that society and education can outright abuse little boys and their "inherent" resilience will bring them through the ordeal unscathed. These forces seem to think that the concerted social manipulation that emasculates boys in their youth and in their education will suddenly and miraculously produce men once a lad reaches adulthood. Society does, after all, have a need for men to do men's work. Lugging eighty-pound rucksacks five miles to the frontline in a hot war is one such job that still requires men to perform.

What all these "Alpha vs. Gamma" and "What to do about boys falling behind in education and life" posts miss is that abused children are not resilient, they merely adapt. Young boys, marginalized or outright ignored by a social system that views them as "defective" girls, will adapt to the spaces they deem safe, or less hostile. This will not create a masculinity "bounce back" effect on men maturing into adulthood but an adaption or as our social "scientists" like to call it, an evolution.

Western societies are simply working through an evolutionary transition towards producing weak men. Full stop. What is becoming tedious to endure is why writers within these pages and the world at large keep asking, "Where are all the men?" The short answer is, "Gone." Because society does not get strong men by promoting weak boys. There are some quasi-strong men hold outs, but they are rare and aging out of our systems. True strong men in institutional environments would not have succumb to Covid induced tyranny. Strong men in these same institutions would not have bent the knee to WEF and their bevy of DEI initiatives. Strong men in our religious institutions would not have jettisoned God from the pulpit in favor of preaching the soft tyranny of social secularism. We must come to terms with the fact that the society of weak men we have is the one we wanted.

The question to all who ponder where the men are is, "Can we reverse the evolutionary process and get men back?" But, before we can answer that, we must first grapple with the question, "Does society even need or want men back?" Why bother answering the first question if the second is a hard, “NO.”

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