Before men were lonely, there were places.
Places where men showed up without an agenda. Where conversation happened sideways, not face-to-face. Where no one asked men to perform vulnerability, explain themselves, or justify their presence.
Those places didn’t disappear because men rejected connection. They disappeared because our culture decided male-only spaces were no longer acceptable. And once they were gone, men were told that their resulting loneliness was a personal failure.
There has been a noticeable shift in recent months. A growing number of articles now
acknowledge male loneliness and even gesture toward men’s emotional needs. On the surface, this looks like progress — and in one narrow sense, it is. For decades, male loneliness was either ignored or mocked.But many of these pieces commit the same quiet betrayal.
After briefly acknowledging that men are lonely, many articles abandon subtlety altogether and place responsibility squarely on men themselves. Men don’t open up enough. Men don’t try hard enough. Men don’t build friendships properly. Men resist emotional growth.
What is missing is the most obvious factor of all: our culture systematically dismantled the spaces where men and boys once formed friendships.
Men Did Not “Forget” How to Connect, They Lost the Places Where Connection Happened
Male friendships have never primarily formed through structured emotional disclosure. They formed through shoulder to shoulder shared activity, regular presence, and low-pressure companionship. Men bonded by working alongside one another, not by facing one another across a table and “processing”.
For generations, this happened naturally in male-only spaces:
- Service clubs
- Fraternal organizations
- Trade guilds and apprenticeships
- Male sports leagues
- Scout troops
- Men’s religious groups
- Informal gathering places like barbershops and workshops
These environments weren’t about exclusion. They were containers — places where boys learned how to be men from men, and where adult men maintained connection without self-consciousness or surveillance.
Now consider what has happened.
- Barbershops are co-ed and transactional.
- Service clubs are now largely co-ed, and the informal freedoms that supported male bonding in male-only environments have largely disappeared.
- Community sports are co-ed or heavily regulated.
- Even the Boy Scouts are co-ed.
One by one, male spaces disappeared — not because men abandoned them, but because our culture increasingly viewed male-only environments as suspicious, outdated, or morally problematic.
The Asymmetry No One Wants to Name
At the same time male spaces were dismantled, female-only spaces proliferated.
- Women-only gyms are accepted.
- Women-only scholarships are celebrated.
- Women-only commissions exist at every level of government.
- Women-only networking events, parking, subway cars, retreats, and support groups are commonplace.
“Women-only” is understood as necessary, protective, and empowering.
“Men-only”, by contrast, is treated as exclusionary at best and dangerous at worst.
The result is an unspoken rule that everyone knows but few admit:
Women may gather without men. Men may not gather without women.
This is not equality. It is a double standard — and it has consequences.
Tom Golden, “The Quiet Lie Behind Male Loneliness”, Men Are Good, 2026-01-05.
May 7, 2026
QotD: The loss of male spaces led to today’s epidemic of male loneliness
May 4, 2026
Our genetic heritage and our culture
On Substack, Helen Dale and Lorenzo Warby look at our genetic inheritance and how it continues to shape our culture:
From Wikipedia:
The Neolithic Y-chromosome bottleneck refers to a period around 5000 BC where the diversity in the male y-chromosome dropped precipitously across Africa, Europe and Asia, to a level equivalent to reproduction occurring with a ratio between men and women of 1:17. Discovered in 2015, the research suggests that the reason for the bottleneck may not be a reduction in the number of males, but a drastic decrease in the percentage of males with reproductive success in Neolithic agropastoralist cultures, compared to the previous hunter gatherers.
The development of farming and then animal herding greatly increased the number of humans — which continued to have evolutionary consequences for our species — and created productive assets (farms and animal herds) worth fighting over. Successful male teams (typically organised as clans) wiped out unsuccessful male teams and took their women as spoils.
Hence, there is a dramatic bottleneck in male lineages but not in female lineages. This pattern stopped with the development of chiefdoms and especially states, though not so much on the Steppes, whose states were more like super-chiefdoms and where intense competition over resources (and women) continued.1
This had consequences. A major one is that the male expression of human genes became dramatically better at forming and maintaining teams — as there was drastic selection pressure for that — but the female expression of human genes did not.
This is why young schoolboy sporting teams regularly crush adult women’s national teams in team sports such as soccer. It is not that schoolboys have the strength advantage over women associated with adult men (they are often not particularly advantaged around age 14-15). It’s simply that human males are much more likely to “get” teamwork at a visceral level.
At least some of the differences in the statistical distribution of cognitive traits between men and women comes from this genetic bottleneck’s intense selection pressure differences. This is particularly clear in social patterns. For instance, men readily form hierarchies — often using physical cues such as height to do so.
Men focus on roles, suppressing or otherwise managing their emotions to do so. They regularly test each other — hence ragging each other, making appalling jokes, etc. Such mechanisms generate trust, as they test whether you will fold under pressure, whether one can say outrageous things and still get support. Hence the popular quip:
Men insult each other but they don’t mean it. Women compliment each other but they also don’t mean it.
Men roast each other as tests because so much male interaction is about teamwork, and the roles and reliability that requires, while women typically look to emotional connection. Given that the latter requires a lot of interaction to build up trust, yes, female friendships can be quite intense, but relations between human females can also be viciously unstable and fissile.
These differences have other social consequences. Men are notably more positive about free speech than women, because men often see speech as a test while women are more likely to see it as a threat. As universities have feminised, the male-female differences on free speech among students have become more pronounced. Men are systematically more tolerant of alternative points of view than are women.
Orwell’s famous comment in his novel 1984:
It was always the women, and above all the young ones, who were the most bigoted adherents of the Party, the swallowers of slogans, the amateur spies and nosers-out of unorthodoxy.
Was a great novelist doing what great novelists do: noticing.
As part of the teamwork focus, men tend to be the social solidarity sex while women are not. Women are much less likely to have friends of lower socio-economic status than are men. For women, such friends are much less likely to be worth the emotional investment. For men, they may be useful members of a future team.
As institutions, occupations and public discourse become more feminised, there has been a shift in patterns of language. A massive study of patterns of language use found a dramatic shift since the 1980s, such that:
our results suggest that over the past decades, there has been a marked shift in public interest from the collective to the individual, and from rationality toward emotion.
All this means that male-dominated institutions and spaces will be generally better, often much better, at generating and managing feedback than female-dominated spaces. When people note that feminising institutions and occupations have a strong tendency to become less functional, it is precisely because they are worse at generating and managing feedback, and at generating and maintaining trust.
- This paper attempts to explain the extreme narrowing of surviving male lineages by the adoption of patrilineal systems and polygyny. While the shift to patrilineal systems in itself does increase unequal lineage success—as does polygyny—much of the point of the shift to patrilineality was precisely that warriors who grow up together are better warrior teams.
Moreover, there is considerable evidence of violence after the shrinkage of male lineages dramatically slowed — and then reversed — with the development of chiefdoms, and especially states. These suppressed violence, but not patrilineality or polygyny. In many societies, polygyny actually intensified with the rise of states.
The bottleneck effects continued to echo down populations. The extraordinary reproductive success of particular male lineages is associated either with pastoralist violence and conquest and/or early state creation. Further, the notion that the majority of male lineages just passively accepted their reproductive exclusion flies in the face of a huge amount of evidence — especially as the examples of very successful pastoral lineages occurred in societies with notoriously high levels of violence, including as raiders, such as across the Steppes and in Ireland.
Moreover, polygyny is associated with higher rates of violence, single-spouse marriage with higher social cohesion. Nor was the creation and maintenance of states typically a peaceful process: periodic violent peaks in Chinese history, for example, were extraordinary. It was precisely the creation of a reproductively-excluded underclass that provided so much of the impetus for the banditry and mass peasant revolts that are such a feature of Chinese history. So, while patrilineality and polygyny were definitely factors in the wildly differentiated success rates of male lineages, considerable levels of violence and contestation over resources and women — that selected in favour of male teamwork — were clearly also very much in play.
May 3, 2026
Reasons people romanticize their college experience
On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Devon Eriksen responds to comments about people wanting the world to be like they remember their time at college:
People romanticize college because for four years of their lives they:
1. Had all the rights of adults but none of the responsibilities.
2. Lived in a closed community with sealed borders that kept out low IQs and anti-socials.
3. Were young, energetic, healthy, and attractive.
4. Were thrown together with a bunch of similar people who had no predefined power- or need-based relationship with them, which is how friendships form.
This last is the important one, especially as fertility rates decline.
People with children transition to making friends with other parents of children in the same age group, because events and networks centered around those children throw them together with other parents in the same way.
But childless people have few or no opportunities to make friends after college. So they are left with a slow dwindling circle of college based relationships, remembering the days when it was all easy, and they weren’t so isolated, and they didn’t have to work so hard.
Couple that with having to complete with infinity immigrants in the job market, so they can pay taxes to support infinity boomers and government bureaucrats, while being passed over for the best jobs and careers in favor of infinity DEI incompetents, who they also have to support …
Well, for a lot of people born into what was once the American middle class, college was their first and last experience of an adult life wherein they weren’t being systematically and deliberately routed into the formation of a new underclass.
A special form of underclass who are still expected to be productive enough to materially support all the non-producing people who were positioned as their social superiors despite being their intellectual inferiors.
So, yeah, they wish they could go back to college.
Is anyone surprised by this?
April 20, 2026
Civilization-building is gendered, sorry ladies
On Substack, Janice Fiamengo explains why the very different strengths and weaknesses of men and women will always lead to what appear to be unequal results, and fighting against biology is always a bad idea:
Even if the numbers don’t back it up, women feel that this is so true.
Social psychologist Roy Baumeister explored the relevant research in Is There Anything Good About Men (2010), a cautiously non-feminist book in which the author readily asserted that he, like most everyone else, prefers women to men. Women are more lovable, he claimed, and more pleasant to be around.
But he was not quite willing to accept the now-mainstream thesis that women can replace men in all areas of society.
His thesis is summed up in the book’s sub-title: How Cultures Flourish By Exploiting Men. Men are the foot soldiers of civilization as well as its leaders. They are the ones who make things work or make new things.
Men are the ones who must prove their utility to society. Their drive to be useful has powered centuries of back-breaking work, risk-taking, tool-building, self-sacrifice, and outstanding performance of a sort that has never been expected of women (and still isn’t).
Women in the main tend not to work as hard as men to succeed because they don’t have to. Women developed different strengths and tendencies.
Women’s strength, for good and ill, is in the inter-personal arena: not only in caring for those who are weaker but also in being cared for by those who are stronger. Women are good at reading people’s emotions and desires, and at expressing their own.
Men are not rewarded for expressing emotions and desires; men are oriented to acting, often under pressure to perform competently, in large groups and systems.
“The female brain,” according to Baumeister, “tends to be geared toward empathy, which includes emotional sensitivity to other people and deep interest in understanding them and their feelings. In contrast, the male brain is oriented toward understanding systems, which means figuring out general principles of how things operate and function together, and this applies to inanimate objects as much as social systems” (p. 85).
Baumeister supports his argument in a book-length exploration of men’s system-building. He shows how men are driven to work with, and in competition with, other men to make it possible for large numbers of human beings to live together in complex, efficient networks. The large social institutions that have characterized western cultures, from the army to churches, from corporations to unions, and from market places to police forces, give evidence of men’s system-building.
Women can work well within the systems that men devise, but they rarely devise new systems on their own. This is not because women are, on average, less intelligent than men (except at the very highest levels). It is because women’s motivations and sources of satisfaction are generally different from men’s.
Women’s contribution to culture in nurturing children, providing companionship, and looking after the family home has been a crucial one. But it does not drive innovation or invent new technologies.
Even the most intelligent women are rarely compelled, as highly intelligent men often are, to pursue scientific and other breakthroughs with the single-minded focus necessary for greatness. Often, as in the case involving Matt Taylor discussed above, many women do not seem to value or understand the nature and importance of such breakthroughs.
Women’s main contribution in the male civilizational sphere has been to lobby for admission and then to complain about, and work to undermine, the male culture of competitive excellence.
April 16, 2026
QotD: Resentment
Because resentment has certain sour satisfactions, it is one of the few emotions that can persist unabated for years: indeed, it tends to increase, because it exists in a mental echo-chamber. One such sour satisfaction is that it allows the one who feels it to think himself morally superior to the world as it is at present constituted, even if he has done nothing to improve it, or done something to make it a little worse. And where resentment leads to action rather than to passivity, it is almost always action that is destructive rather than constructive. It leads also to a considerable quantity of humbug, insofar as it primes people to look for new justifications for their dissatisfactions, and to claim that they cannot be happy until there is no more unhappiness caused by injustice in the world.
Theodore Dalrymple, “Against History-as-Nightmare”, Law & Liberty, 2020-08-11.
April 13, 2026
QotD: Cognitive Bias
Why do we have cognitive biases? They seem like a colossal failure of the evolution of the human brain. But the more we learn about them, the better we understand their purposes. One is that they save us time and effort — the frugal reasoning argument. Suppose we go into the supermarket to buy cereal. You carefully read all the boxes, figuring out whether the All-Bran or the Just Right gives you the best nutritional balance and value in dollars per kilogram or pound. I grab a box because I like the colour or because it has a sponsorship deal with my football team. You make the more rational choice, but I spend much less of my life in the cereal aisle at the supermarket and more doing other things. It’s easy to see how the same logic gets applied to, for example, voting. Assuming that the consequences of voting the “wrong” way don’t cause me to lose as much time and effort as I would have given up to carefully select the right candidate, I come out ahead in the end.
And then there’s the prospect that cognitive biases could simply be side-effects of useful and valuable short-cuts our brains have developed. Our tendency to see patterns in randomness leads to the spread of conspiracy theories. Our ability to generalise from a few points of information leads to prejudice. The knee-jerk reactions to danger which kept our ancestors from being eaten by sabre-tooth tigers can also lead to irrational decisions in the face of more abstract threats like crime, terrorism, natural disasters, or stock-market crashes. And finally, shared beliefs, even incorrect beliefs, might promote group cohesion. Our brains are imperfect at reasoning, but they may be so for good reason.
Adam Wakeling, “George Orwell and the Struggle against Inevitable Bias”, Quillette, 2020-08-08.
April 8, 2026
QotD: Without You, There is No Us, by Suki Kim
Also note the passages about Her Relationship. That’s how she refers to the poor bastard. It’s something along those lines, I forget — maybe it’s “My Ex” — but either way, he never even gets the goddamn common courtesy of being referred to by name … because to Mx. Kim, he really doesn’t have one. He’s just another interchangeable character in the all-encompassing soap opera that is her life.
Severian, “Recommended Reading”, Founding Questions, 2022-06-09.
April 7, 2026
NATO’s sudden-onset existential crisis
On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, John Konrad explains that the sudden crisis facing the European NATO allies has been building un-noticed for decades:
NATO is in far bigger danger than anyone realizes. And the reason has nothing to do with defense budgets.
The real danger is psychological. It’s cultural.
Europeans didn’t just free-ride on American security for 80 years. They built an entire identity around the idea that they evolved past the Americans protecting them.
That identity is now the single biggest obstacle to Western survival. And the darkest irony is: we helped build it. After World War II, Europe wasn’t just economically shattered. Its culture was in ruins. The cities, the universities, the concert halls, the museums. Rubble.
The Marshall Plan rebuilt the economy. But culture wasn’t a priority. Not at first. Then the Iron Curtain dropped. And suddenly culture became a weapon.
American diplomats, academics, artists & scholars flooded Western Europe. We funded their universities. Supported their orchestras. Rebuilt their museums. Promoted their intellectual life.
Not because European culture needed saving for its own sake.Because Eastern Europeans were struggling for Maslow’s mist basic needs.
We needed the view from the other side of that Wall to be intoxicating.
So America built Western Europe into a showcase of self-actualization. Art. Philosophy. Cafe culture. Long vacations. Universities where people studied literature instead of surviving. We were manufacturing jealousy.
And it worked. The Wall came down.
But here’s what no one accounted for.
When you give a society self-actualization on someone else’s tab long enough, they forget it was a gift. They start believing it was organically theirs.
And when they look at the country that funded it all, a country busy building aircraft carriers and semiconductor fabs and shale fields instead of reaching the Maslow’s pinnacle.
An overweight American in a ball cap who can’t tell Monet from Pissarro. Who eats fast food. Who drives a truck. Who builds strip malls instead of piazzas.
And to a culture trained in aesthetics but stripped of strategic awareness, that American looks uncivilized.
So the arrogance takes root. And once a culture decides another is beneath them, they stop listening.
Americans say wars are sometimes necessary: crude.
Oil is the backbone of prosperity: unsophisticated.
Kids build companies in garages that reshape the planet: crass.
Wall Street finances the global economy: vulgar.
Europe has no world-class technology sector. No military capable of strong defense. No energy independence. No AI capacity.
What Europe has is culture. The culture we paid for at the expense of us reaching Maslow’s pinnacle.
For decades that was fine. We funded the museums, protected the sea lanes, and tolerated the sneering because the arrangement worked.
Then Europeans stopped keeping the contempt private. They started saying it to our faces. In their media. In their parliaments. At every international forum. “Americans are stupid. Americans are violent. Americans are a threat to democracy.”
We could have moved the Louvre to NY. We could have built a Venice here. We could have stolen your best artists, designers, philosophers and more … like your conquering armies did for centuries.
Instead we funded them. And all we asked for in return was to let us visit.
You don’t have the military to defend your borders. You don’t have the technology to compete. You don’t have the energy to heat your homes without begging dictators.
What you have is an 80-year superiority complex FUNDED BY AMERICANS, protected by American soldiers, and built on the false belief that self-actualization is civilization.
It isn’t. Civilization is the ability to sustain itself. By that measure, Europe isn’t a civilization at all. It’s a dependency with better wine.
That’s not a threat. It’s a weather report.
Build a Navy. Or don’t. But stop lecturing the people who made you “better than us”
Our “crudeness” our “stunted liberal education” our “ugly strip malls” are because we sacrificed our culture to support yours.
From the comments on that post:
Larry Correia chimes in:
Update, 8 April: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.
QotD: Advice for foreign leaders trying to deal with Donald Trump
I do not say this as meaningless praise, just to say, oh, he’s not a corrupt scumbag. I say it with a very specific meaning.
To understand Trump, you must purge yourself of all expectations you have learned from watching politicians, include the assumptions you are not even aware you are making.
Trump is a completely different animal.
Trump is a businessman, and while there are many sorts of businessman, he is of a very specific type. He rose to wealth and prominence by doing two things very well:
1. Brand reputation building.
2. Negotiation.#1 forms the basis of how he deals with voters.
#2 forms the basis of how he deals with other power blocs within the US, and with other nations.
You see, the true love of Donald Trump’s life is bargaining. He is a business deal sperg. And he’s very, very good at it, because the actual process is his idea of fun, and winning at it is definition of pure satisfaction and joy.
He’s never made uncomfortable by the play of offer and counteroffer, or by butting heads and seeing who blinks first. That is, instead, his happy place. This means that not only is he totally at peace in the moment, he’s also practiced a lot.
When he called his book The Art of the Deal, it wasn’t just because he wants to think he’s good at this, it’s because this is the meaning of his life. The man finds meaning in haggling the way Musk finds meaning in building technologies, or the way I find meaning in explaining things to an audience.
So when Trump is dealing with others, from political office, he’s negotiating as if it were his money. Because that’s just how he ticks.
Now, the ground rule of global politics for the past 100+ years is that no matter who you are, you are allowed to rob American taxpayers and voters, so long as you pay American politicians for the privilege of doing so.
All of us, even democrat voters who don’t want to think about it, know what 10 percent for the big guy meant, and who the particular big guy was.
For all that time, global politics amounted to treating America as a giant cash pinata, and the deals had only two guardrails on them.
1. You must pay American politicians a large enough sum, in a subtle enough manner.
2. You can’t buy anything that your paid-off politicians won’t be able to hide their personal connection to.That’s it.
Everything else was on the table.
Trump isn’t like that. He can’t be bought.
Not because he’s some kind of saint, which he isn’t, nor because corrupt-politician money is loose change compared to Donald Trump money, which it is.
But because Trump can’t stand to deliberately lose a negotiation for a bribe, any more than Floyd Mayweather wants to throw a match to get paid off by bookies.
And this is how Trump became involved in politics in the first place. He was a standard New York City rich moderate democrat. Believed in the Postwar Dream, bought into the raceblind thing, was all in favor of exporting democracy, and taxed capitalism paying for a moderate amount of welfare state. But as he realized the political machines were selling out America, he got personally offended.
Not because he was principled and deeply cared about middle America. Perhaps a little because selling out America was hurting his real estate interests.
But mostly because bad business deals give Donald Trump the ick.
Trump seems like a loose cannon to a lot of people, because they don’t what he’ll do next. And they don’t know that because they don’t understand what motivates him.
Trump wants America to make better deals and stop being taken advantage of. And to make those better deals, he has to demonstrate to the people who are used to buying American politicians that the rules in play have changed.
So what’s the deal with Venezuela and Maduro?
Simple. If you ride the NYC subway enough, it’s pretty likely that eventually a bum will come up to you, whip out his dick, and piss on your shoes.
Why? Because he wants to feel powerful. Because his day isn’t going well, and so he wants to ruin yours. Because he’s crazy. Because who the fuck cares?
But most of all, because he can. Because NYC is run by out of touch commie liberals, and he knows that if he is arrested, he’ll be fed and let out in the morning, but if you punch him in the teeth, your life will be ruined.
So when things change, people need to be put on notice. The bums aren’t going to read a sign that says “this subway now functions under Tennessee rules”, and if they do read it, they aren’t going to believe it. They’ve heard it all before as a bluff.
You have to actually punch someone in mouth and knock some teeth out. And then have the Tennessee cops show up and say, so what, you shouldn’t have pissed on his shoes, dumbass.
It is beyond the shadow of a doubt that Maduro was offered plenty of gentle offramps which would have preserved his dignity, lifestyle, etc, if not his pride.
But he didn’t take them, because everything is a bluff … until it isn’t.
Maduro is a head on a spike. A signal that the ground truth of how to deal with America has changed.
A signal that both violence, and personal consequences, are no longer off the table.
Because the whole reason for the existence of governments is to wield organized violence instead of the disorganized kind.
Other nations will now be coming to the negotiating table with this example in mind.
America is tired of being your ATM.
Devon Eriksen, The social media site formerly known as Twitter, 2025-01-06.
Update, 8 April: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.
April 6, 2026
QotD: Taylorism
Taylor was unpopular in his own day and is even less popular today, because his particular brand of optimization of the great living machine was all about stripping autonomy (or as Marx would say, “control and conscious direction“) from workers. But the particular kind of optimization he advocated is less important than the conceptual breakthrough that while a nail factory and a car factory might look very different on the surface, they are both governed by the same set of abstract laws: laws of time and motion, concurrency, bottlenecks, worker motivation and so on. A master of those laws could optimize a nail factory, and then go on to optimize a car factory, and could do both without knowing very much at all about nails or cars.
Who could have a problem with that? Even I don’t think it’s entirely wrong — I may have misgivings about the sheer volume of people going into fields like management consulting, but I’ll admit that there remains alpha in asking a smart and incisive outsider to take a look at your operation and tell you what seems crazy. The trouble comes with confusing that sporadic, occasional sanity-check with the actual business of leading a team of people who are working together to achieve an objective. Because, get this, it’s impossible to lead such a team without a deep understanding of the details of every person’s tasks.
It’s surreal to me that this point has to be made, yet somehow it does. If the team you lead makes nails, you need to know everything there is to know about making nails. If the team you lead operates a restaurant, you need to be an expert, not in “management”, but in restaurants. If the team you lead sells mortgage-backed derivatives, you better know a heck of a lot about finance in general, mortgages in particular, the art of sales, and the specific world of selling financial instruments. There are a thousand reasons why this is true, but consider just one: a subordinate is failing at a task, and tells you that it isn’t because he’s lazy or unqualified but because the task is unexpectedly difficult. How on earth can a manager evaluate this claim without being able to do the job himself?
There’s another, very different reason managers need to be experts in whatever it is their team is doing, and it has to do with morale. A subordinate in any sort of hierarchical organization needs to see that his superior can do his own job as well or better than he can. Almost everybody gets this. In a high-pressure commercial kitchen, if a chef or sous-chef doesn’t like the performance of one of their line cooks, they will often leap in, take over that cook’s station, and begin “expediting.” This has a dual purpose: it both relieves a genuine production bottleneck, and also acts as a showy demonstration of prowess, reminding everybody that they got to be the boss through excellence. At the better tech companies, those managing software engineers are always former engineers themselves, and often the very best of the lot. Just like a chef would do, an engineering manager needs to be able to seize a computer and begin expediting under pressure, both to solve a real problem and as a dominance display. But it’s not just about keeping the troops in line, it’s about inspiring them. Nothing motivates a soldier like seeing his commander leading the charge, weapon in hand.1
John Psmith, “REVIEW: Scaling People by Claire Hughes Johnson”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2023-08-28.
- This shows up in places you wouldn’t expect to. I was once cast in a show, and quickly came to understand that our director could (and often did) leap onto the stage, snatch a script out of somebody’s hand, and play their part better than they could. For any part. Before he did this to me, I found him annoying and bossy. Afterwards, I would follow him into the Somme.
Update, 7 April: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.
April 4, 2026
Be on the lookout for “toxic confidence”
Freddie deBoer disagrees with a recent New York Times piece which proclaims that “toxic confidence” is the current psychological tic of choice:
[…] But then, the whole theatrical embrace of imposter syndrome wasn’t really about a sincere belief that they didn’t belong in the program, that they had gotten in through some mistake. It was, instead, an expression of a very weird element of Millennial culture, which is the embrace of insecurity as a means of belonging.
Which brings me to Savannah Sobrevilla and her recent trend piece, destined to be a New York Times classic, “Toxic Confidence Has Taken Over”. You can already guess the argument here, but I’ll give you the nut anyway:
… it used to be that “impostor syndrome” dominated conversations, the anxious stance of millennials with adult responsibilities and women leading corporate workplaces trying not to rankle. Even if you felt deserving of accolades, the social graces of the time required the expression of modesty.
Now, in an era of aggressively handsome incels and macho political posturing, cultivated humility feels trite. A younger generation, coming out of high school and college in Covid lockdown, feels less beholden to dampening their light. Who has time for affected meekness when playing the braggart not only tickles the soul, but has the potential to convince others of one’s own greatness?
The phrase itself, “toxic confidence”, is doing a lot of work in this essay, and I can just imagine an NYT editor reading the pitch, seeing that phrase, and salivating. But there’s not a lot there, really. Strip away the arch tone and the carefully curated examples (reality-television grifters, Trump-administration blusterers) and what you’re left with is a fairly straightforward complaint: some people believe in themselves too much, and it’s making a certain kind of person uncomfortable. Of course, there’s always been braggarts and narcissists and perennially self-impressed people around us, in any era, and that they’re annoying is not generally considered newsworthy. What makes this a classic NYT trend piece is that it makes an observation that’s comprehensible only to a certain strata of reader — middle aged or younger, culturally savvy, educated, urban in ethos if not necessarily in geography, too online. These people aren’t experiencing the age-old frustration with the conventionally overconfident, but are facing (if Sobrevilla is to be believed) the demise of a recent generational embrace of performative insecurity, which makes them uncomfortable. That discomfort is worth examining, because it reveals less about a cultural pathology than about whose neuroses we’ve decided to normalize.
As usual, I blame my own generation. For roughly fifteen years, Millennial culture ran a remarkable experiment: it rebranded anxiety, self-doubt, and chronic insecurity as virtues. This is certainly connected to the phenomenon of illness as identity and disorder as fashion I’m always complaining about […] but is, I think, a distinct phenomenon, the rearrangement of healthy confidence into pathology and pathological self-doubt into virtue. The weird affordances of social media gave certain culturally and socially influential people the ability to imprint their own neuroses onto the wider culture, recasting that neuroses as a sort of down-to-earth norm. In that context, impostor syndrome ceased to be something to overcome and became a membership card. Everybody started bragging about their social anxiety; people gleefully declared their FOGO; “I’m the worst”, said with the right ironic lilt, became fodder for bonding. Vulnerability, performed on cue, was currency. The implicit agreement was powerful and, when you examine it, fairly cruel: if you seemed too assured, too unbothered by your own inadequacy, you were either deluded or dangerous. The rules had been rewritten by indoor kids, the chronic overthinkers, the people who had built entire identities around their relationship with self-doubt, and the rules said confidence was suspect.
What Sobrevilla calls “toxic confidence” is largely just the renegotiation of those rules, an attempt to cast an incipient reclamation of basic, uncomplicated self-assurance as some sort of aggressive masculinist cult. A couple of examples that Sobrevilla calls out specifically include Olympic free skier Eileen Gu and actor Timothée Chalamet; I’m afraid these examples just make Sobrevilla seem afraid of excellence. When Gu — an Olympic gold medalist, a celebrity, a Stanford student, and a burgeoning entrepreneur — says that being inside her own head is “not a bad place to be”, that isn’t pathology; it’s the statement of a young woman who has done the work and is honest about it. (And wouldn’t we prefer for everyone to feel like insider their own head is a nice place to be?) Maybe Gu is a genuinely awful human being, I don’t know, but nothing Sobrevilla references rises to the level of narcissism or whatever other pseudo-medical accusation we’re throwing around these days. I find Chalamet a little aggravating, but when he says that he aspires to be considered among the great actors of his time, when all is said and done, that’s not a statement of Trumpian bellicosity but instead a reflection of honest, healthy ambition. We’ve been so conditioned to expect performative self-deprecation that accurate self-assessment reads as arrogance.
April 2, 2026
QotD: Growing up behind the Iron Curtain
Which makes sense if you think about it. When everybody’s snitching on everybody else, shameless is the only way to live. Everybody’s guilty of something, so own it — being, of course, perpetually prepared to snitch anyone and everyone else at a moment’s notice if someone drops the dime on you. Also, if you have to stand in line six hours to maybe get a few potatoes, damn it, you’re gonna get those potatoes. It doesn’t matter if you like potatoes, or have any possible use for potatoes at the present time. You’re going to take every single spud you can get your hands on, plus steal anything that isn’t nailed down, because you never know when you’ll get another chance.
As it turns out, overabundance creates the same conditions. When you’ve been standing in line for six hours with 1,000 of your new best friends just to get some tampons — and you’re a guy, you don’t need tampons, but you can always barter them for something — you’re not going to scruple to do anything and everything to get them. Indeed you want people to know Ivan’s got some tampons, because that’s how the black market works …
… anyway, as I say, we’re not in line for six hours, but we are perpetually at least under the threat of surveillance. And not from the Feds — just as Ivan’s not worried about the KGB, but rather his neighbors, so we don’t have to worry about the Feebs monitoring us. Instead, it’s that Basic College Girl with the iPhone. She’s not filming you, of course, she’s filming herself, but there you are anyway, in the background, doing whatever. Under those conditions — and when everyone’s volunteering the most intimate details of their lives on Fakebook and Twatter — shameless is the only way to live.
In other words, thanks to constant social media “surveillance”, it has gone in the blink of an eye from “It didn’t happen unless someone caught it on film” to “It’s all on film anyway, so fuck it, I’m gonna get mine”. I used to see this all the time in class. Basic College Girls will lie straight to your face, for any reason or no reason. They’ll do it on spec, just to see if you bite. More importantly, they’ll tell you such obvious, easily disproven whoppers that you start wondering if they’re having a schizoid break. You have to know I know you’re lying, right? That Dead Grandma Story is very sad, but you have pictures of yourself all over Twitter drunk at the sorority formal, when you told me you were at Nana’s funeral.
It’s not that they don’t know. It’s that they don’t care. Because somehow I’m the asshole for not believing them, despite the evidence of my own lying eyes.
Severian, “Friday Male Bag”, Founding Questions, 2022-06-03.
April 1, 2026
“Facilitated Communication (FC) is a discredited technique that should not be used”
Perhaps it’s just me, but I read Freddie deBoer‘s refutation of Facilitated Communication with a kind of rising horror, that a parent or trusted adult could so take advantage of a disabled person to commit this kind of fraud:
“Facilitated Communication” by Faure P, Legou T and Gepner B is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0 
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Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: The New York Times has again casually endorsed facilitated communication, or FC, a relentlessly-discredited practice that plays on the desperation and credulousness of parents of severely disabled children. As in the past, they’ve done this while barely seeming to understand that they’re doing something controversial at all. The culprit this time is a review of the new novel Upward Bound “by” Woody Brown, a man with severe autism who has been nonverbal his entire life and dictated his book through FC, which is also the means through which he earned a masters degree and other remarkable feats. Brown, like so many others who have been “saved” through FC, was found to have all manner of remarkable intellectual abilities once someone else was “facilitating” his communication.
The review describes Brown “tapping letters on a board” while his mother interprets and voices the words. That is the textbook structure of FC: a disabled person who cannot otherwise communicate produces output while a facilitator mediates, guides, or stabilizes the process. Or so proponents claim. Without the facilitator, the disabled person is mute; with their guidance, they suddenly become remarkably verbally proficient, often learned and verbose. If you’re new to the FC debate, you should trust your skepticism: the fact that the mother has to be present and participating, the fact that Brown cannot manipulate the board without the mother’s involvement, the fact that he has never been subject to rigorous research that involves “message-passing” or “double-blind” tests … This is the inconvenient, damning reality.
Message passing, or double-blind, tests are simple and remarkably effective. Information is provided to both the disabled person and the facilitator, often in the form of pictures or individual words, with both the facilitator and the test subject receiving the same information some times and discordant information other times. That is to say, the disabled person and the facilitator will sometimes both be shown a star or a watermelon or a flower or a bird, while at other times one might get the star picture while the other gets the bird, etc. If the disabled person genuinely crafts their responses, this should be a trivially easy test to pass: the facilitated communication will produce the information that the disabled subject received. And yet very close to literally 100% of the time in rigorous research, across dozens of studies with thousands of combined attempts, interactions produce the information the facilitator received and not the information the disabled person received. Surveying the literature, the consistency of this finding is remarkable — and there is no coherent explanation for how this could happen if indeed FC results in messages being sent from a conscious and alert test subject. Instead, these findings are perfectly consistent with Occam’s razor and the assumption that the facilitator is the one speaking.
Thanks to this overwhelming body of research literature, professional societies have tended to be unusually blunt about FC. The American Speech-Language-Hearing Association, the leading professional body in this field, states unequivocally: “Facilitated Communication (FC) is a discredited technique that should not be used”. It continues: “There is no scientific evidence of the validity of FC, and there is extensive scientific evidence … that messages are authored by the ‘facilitator’ rather than the person with a disability”. This is not a marginal view; it reflects decades of careful studies across multiple countries. There are many other statements from relevant medical organizations and expert bodies that reach the same conclusion, which is to be expected, considering that the evidence points in only one direction. Are the facilitators deliberately engaging in fraud? No, it’s very likely that they’re being sincere, at least in the large majority of cases. The explanation is the ideomotor effect, the same unconscious motor influence that drives Ouija boards. The facilitator is not deliberately faking communication but unknowingly producing it, usually to satisfy their own desperate longing to connect with the disabled person.
So how did we get here? I guess the Times feels like it’s fine to smuggle in flagrant pseudoscience under the guise of a book review. Hey, it’s just a book review! But I’m afraid that claims of fact that appear in the paper’s pages are the paper’s responsibility, and this review represents a profound journalistic failure. The review treats FC as valid, when in fact FC has been exhaustively discredited for decades. In doing so, it does something worse than merely misinform; it participates in a harmful fiction that exploits vulnerable families and misrepresents disabled individuals. As I’ve said before, this issue is difficult to address in part because the families who fall for FC are so sympathetic. And the FC community goes to great lengths to enable this form of wishful thinking; they’ve created a number of superficially-different approaches to avoid scrutiny and defy the debunkings of the past, including avoiding the term “facilitated communication” itself. They now tend endorse tools like letter boards and techniques like “spelling”, which they claim are fundamentally different. But it’s all still FC, all still a matter of a verbal and cognitively-unimpaired adult “interpreting” the language of a severely disabled person and producing language that they’re consistently and conspicuously incapable of producing on their own.
March 31, 2026
QotD: Slavery
It is impolite to say of one’s spouse or one’s debtor that they are part of one’s property. With slaves, politeness is unnecessary. (Slavery and Social Death, P.22)
What makes a slave different from a wife, professional player or even a serf is that a slave is in a state of social death: they have no claims of social connection that their master (or anyone else) need pay attention to beyond that to the master.
This is not to say slaves have no legal personality — all slave systems are very well aware that slaves are people. Rather, the relationship of exclusive domination was such that they had no connections that anyone had any obligation to respect other than to their master.
Other individuals might be in relationships of servitude under a master but still retained connections with others subject to presumptive respect. This was true even of serfs and is what distinguishes various forms of serfdom from slavery. Even under Russian serfdom, a serf marriage was a legally recognised marriage; a serf father had legally recognised authority over his family; a serf could legally own property. Once somebody had suffered the social death of slavery, they were utterly bereft of any such connections.
Both serf and slave lacked any choice of master or about the nature and content of that mastery: that is what makes both forms of labour bondage. Nevertheless, a serf had legally recognised relationships, and choices about them, that a slave simply did not.
Slaves are violently dominated: the whip or equivalent has been a control device in every known system of slavery. They are natally alienated: both from from any (positive) standing from their ancestors or claims over their descendants. They are culturally degraded: whether in naming, clothing, hair style, marks on the body or required acts.
All this serves to establish, mark and reinforce the relationship of domination. For that level of domination is required to turn one human into the possession, and so the property, of another. (Karl Marx’s talk of “wage slave” is not only rhetorical excess, it is contemptible rhetorical excess: a manifestation of his comprehensive mischaracterisation of commerce.)
None of these key features of domination require the acknowledgement of the wider society. There are likely slaves in every major city in the world, even in economically highly developed democracies with the rule of law.
While it can be helpful to have your relationship of domination over a slave recognised by others, the crucial thing is the acknowledgment by the slave. Slavery is a relationship between people about an owned thing, where the slave acknowledges that they are the owned thing. This is a key element in the humiliation of slavery.
The mechanisms of domination are, however, obviously much more powerful if they are embedded in wider institutional acceptance of slavery. Where there is no such wider acknowledgement, then even greater isolation from the wider society is required to establish and maintain the relationship of domination.
In social systems that openly incorporate slaveholding, a slave’s state of domination, of the social nullity of no independent connection, normally meant that they could not be a formally recognised owner of property: that they could not be a legal owner of property, not a person who could have property. They lacked the sort of legal standing that could legally own things.
To do so would require the slave to have social and legal connections, beyond the claims and decisions of their master, that others are bound to accept or respect, and that is precisely what slavery, as a structure of domination of one by other, denies. The Ahaggar Tuaregs express this feature of slavery very directly, holding that:
without the master the slave does not exist, and he is only socializable through his master. (Slavery and Social Death, P.4.)
Slavery is, always and everywhere, a created relationship of dominion. As the Kel Gress group of the Tuareg say:
All persons are created by God, the slave is created by the Tuareg. (Slavery and Social Death, P.4)
In a society that accepts slavery, the conventions of acknowledged possession will operate for the master about the slave in a far more complete way than any other claim of property in another human. If other mechanisms of delegated control were sufficiently absent or attenuated, then slaves became preferred agents. The use of slaves as commercial agents was surprisingly common.
In societies dominated by kin-groups, slaves could make preferred warriors or officials precisely because they had no other connection entitled to presumptive respect than that to their master — hence the slave warriors of Greater Middle Eastern (Morocco to Pakistan) Islam.
The danger of kin-groups is that they readily colonise social institutions — rulers come and go, the kin-group is forever. Slave warriors and officials were a solution to that problem in societies where suppression of kin-groups was not a practicable option.
Imperial China found kin-groups useful for economising on administrative costs and Emperors used distance — officials could not be assigned to their home counties — and rotation of officials to inhibit kin-group colonisation of their administrations. Even so, much of the appeal of eunuchs to Emperors was precisely the presumed severing of kin-group ties. (They also had the advantage of being the only males, other than the Emperor, permitted overnight residence in the imperial palace.)
Nevertheless, slavery can exist without such wider acknowledgement by laws. For turning someone into a slave requires forcing them to acknowledge the relationship of domination to the point of being a possession of another.
So, slavery is not, at its core, a matter of property but of domination. Domination to the extent that the conventions of acknowledged possession can apply to slaves entire. Slaves can be turned into property without any other connections with presumptive respect or standing. Yet, even a slave could be a beneficial participant in the conventions of acknowledged possession.
For, so powerfully useful are the conventions of acknowledged possession, that masters have, surprisingly often, allowed slaves to also be accepted beneficiaries of the conventions of acknowledged possession. To be owners of property in practice, if not in law. This was done to lessen the burdens of control, the cost of subsistence or to enable the slave to buy their freedom. The Romans acknowledged this through the concept of peculium.
The Romans, being relentlessly logical in such matters, held a slave to be an owned animal. That is, a human on which such a comprehensive social death has been imposed that they are the legal equivalent of a domesticated animal. (Yet, somewhat awkwardly, still people.)
Just as you can geld an animal, you can castrate a slave. Despite the Islamic slave trade being on a comparable scale to, and lasting centuries longer than, the Transatlantic slave trade, there is no ex-slave diaspora within Islam, unlike the Americas. All children of a Muslim father are members of the Muslim community while so many of the male slaves were castrated.
The Roman concept of property as dominium, as absolute ownership of a thing, may have transferred the domination of slavery into a more general conception of property so as to absolutely separate slave (who suffers dominium) from citizen (who possesses it). Rome ran one of the most open slave systems in human history, such that a freed slave could become a citizen. This necessitated particularly sharp legal delineation of the difference between slave and citizen.
Such dominion is not a relationship between a person and thing (despite claims to the contrary) for it is still setting up a relationship with others regarding what is owned, remembering that the crucial thing in property is not mine! but yours!: the acknowledgement by others of possession and so the right-to-decide. Hence the importance of the signals of possession for slavery.
The Greeks also had citizenship and — particularly in the case of Athens — mass slavery. Greek citizenship was, however, far more exclusive than Roman citizenship and the existence of metis, resident non-citizens, further separated citizen from slave. The Greek city-states also operated much more convention-based, and distinctly less developed, laws than did Rome. If law is a matter of such abstraction as is needed to establish functional differences, and no more, the Romans perhaps felt more need to establish that a citizen could possess dominion.
Conversely, as Romans were not moral universalists, they felt no need to generate some justificatory abstraction about slavery: a slave was simply a loser. If a slave later became a Roman citizen, then, congratulations to them, they had become a winner (and few cultures have worshipped success quite as relentlessly as did the Romans). Hence freedmen would put their status as freedman on their tombstones.
Aristotle — as his moral theory did tend towards moral universalism — came up with a clumsy justificatory abstraction (natural slaves) as to why slaves could be morally degraded. Indeed, the combination of moral universalism and slavery invariably led to justifications that held some essential flaw in the slave justified their domination by others. A process much easier to manage if slaves were from a different continental region, so with distinguishing physical markers of their continental origin.
The Romans had no need of such Just-So stories to justify slavery and did not generate them. Muslims and Christians are moral universalists and so did manifest the need to tell such Just-So stories about enslaved groups: why children of God were being enslaved. (Because that is what they were fit for, clearly.)
Islamic writers generated the first major discourses of skin-colour racism, applying them to the populations they enslaved. In their case, generating both anti-black and anti-white racism, as they systematically enslaved both Sub-Saharan Africans and Europeans, particularly Eastern Europeans. It also led to some awkward rationalisations as to why the inhabitants of South Asia could have dark skins but not suffer from any deemed inherent inferiority.
Just as slavery continues, modern totalitarian Party-States have used forced labour — labour bondage — on massive scales, starting with the Soviet Union and then wartime Nazi Germany. Such continues to the present day in CCP China — infamously of the Uyghurs — and the Kim Family Regime of North Korea. From 1940 to 1956, the Soviet Union banned workers moving jobs without the permission of their existing workforce, the key element of serfdom.
Lorenzo Warby, “Owning people, owning animals, controlling attributes”, Lorenzo from Oz, 2025-12-25.
March 29, 2026
Women’s highly specific expectations for males showing emotion
An older post from Rohan Ghostwind but still fully relevant:
… or, why they have such a hard time sharing their feelings, the same way that women do.
Biological reasons aside, for most men, the answer to this is obvious: They’ve attempted to open up to someone in the past, and had it backfire so spectacularly that they realized they should probably never do it again.
Specifically, a lot of young men realize that in order to be a functional participant in society, it requires them to regularly stuff down their emotions and carry on with the tasks of their daily lives.
Much of the rhetoric around wanting more emotionally vulnerable men therefore comes across as vacuous, because many men subconsciously realize that people (both men and women) only want these emotions at specific times, and in specific contexts.
Women want to see the man who cries at the end of the Disney movie, not the man who’s so depressed that he’s in bed for 18 hours a day. Obviously this is an extreme case, but it’s something that pretty much every man has experienced to some degree or another.
But this hides the fact that women themselves are just as responsible for creating this incentive structure, if not more. For as much as women want a guy who opens up and shares his feelings, this usually comes after the man has developed some degree of competency in all the other relevant domains of life — education, career, finances, looks, etc.
Again, many men have to learn this lesson the hard way; they have indeed attempted to open up, only to find that it hurt their relationship prospects, or otherwise made them less attractive to women. As such, he realizes he has to “win” the game of the patriarchy before he’s given the opportunity of subverting the rules of the game.
In other words, emotions are reserved for the elite — for the rest of us low human capital™, we need to shut the fuck up and get good at tensorflow and B2B sales before we even think about having a hard time.
