Young Men

Disposable or the key to a livable future?

Photo by Patrick Fore on Unsplash

My daughter decided she wanted to raise some goats as part of a 4-H project a few years ago. She also loves animals and the goats are pretty cute. We got a momma goat from a friend up the street who raises goats, and one of her male cousins to keep her company. The boy goat was gelded, so we sent momma off for a “date” last winter and in the Spring she gave birth to two healthy baby boys.

If you look into raising goats, you may come across a harsh truth that we did. One of the books we read recommended keeping a bucket of warm water next to the mother when she gives birth. The water is for drowning any male goals that are born. I guess it’s better than cold water.

Young male goats aren’t worth much. They can’t have babies to keep the species alive and they can’t provide milk. They are seen as nearly worthless. Baby boy goats grow up to be adult male goats and can get aggressive and smell bad. Because the male goats are only needed once or twice a year for mating and when they aren’t mating can be an unwanted cost to a farm and can be destructive, many goat owners see them as disposable.

After a few months with mom, we found the boys two good homes last spring, but that is often the exception to the rule.

The dilemma for young men.

Any society has a similar question to answer. What do we do with our young men? If left to their own devices they can be rude, badly behaved, smelly and as all around unpleasant as an unwanted buck on a farm.

We feed them, educate them and then let them loose into the world, hopefully to make that world a better place. Since World War II, in the Western world, we have largely fed and educated young men and placed them as a cog in our capitalist machine to keep the system moving, keep the economy growing.

But that has started to break down. World economies are struggling to grow, and the growth that we do see is destroying our natural world, confronting young men with a damned if you do, damned if you don’t prospect. Keep trudging along to help grow the economy, at the expense of destroying the planet, or step off of the capitalism treadmill and risk being left behind as the world economy grows on without you.

A few years ago I remember reading an opinion piece by NYU professor Scott Galloway. The title of the piece was, “The most dangerous person in the world: A young man who is broke and alone.” Galloway worried that men who fail to attach to partners, careers or society are more likely to be bitter and susceptible to fringe-theories and misinformation.

Let’s look at some stats from Galloway’s article:

• Men now account for 41% of college enrollments, down from nearly 60% in 1970.

• Men are twice as likely to overdose, three and a half times more likely to commit suicide and are more than nine times more likely to be incarcerated.

• Recent studies reveal that more than nine in 10 of mass violent attackers were male, and more than two thirds of them were under the age of 35.

Young men see that the deck is stacked against them as never before. They see that theirs is the first generation in America that will be worse off than their parents. They see that they can’t buy a home, as their fathers could at their ages.

They see the world slipping away from them. So it is not surprising that more and more of them are looking for easy answers to the complex question of “why am I failing?”

Our society tells young men that they need to be strong and achieve great things in order to be successful. Young men learn that success is achieved through physical strength and wealth. It is of course fine to have those things, but those things don’t make you a man. The man who is physically strong and wealthy but destroys his society is less of a man than someone who is not physically gifted or wealthy but helps his community in the banal act of simply continuing on being a community.

The former is what we have now. The latter is what we need more of.

We are in a place in human history where the ground under our feet is unstable. What young men do as a collective in the coming years will determine where we go as a society. Do we go to war with ourselves as resources become scarcer and our world breaks down, or do we come together as resources become scarcer and our world breaks down?

Young men are the cannon fodder of any cause.

Military deaths (almost all young men) from World War II totaled about 21 - 25 million people. But that is only about 1/3 of the total deaths from the war or about 70 - 85 billion. During WWII, Earth lost about 3% of its human population.

But the war wouldn’t have been possible without young men. Those ⅔ of the deaths from WWII that came from the civilian populations were only possible because young men were thrown into the meat grinder.

If we are entering a world of increased conflict, young men will play a leading role in bringing about the violence that accompanies such conflict, but it will be everyone else that suffers more.

Young men know they are expendable. They see what is happening and they are scared. They are in the position of the male baby goat after it is born, but they are cursed with the self awareness that the world as we have structured it increasingly doesn’t value them.

Scapegoat.

In the 2020 US presidential election, Donald Trump lost young men 18 - 29 by a margin of 15 points (56% - 41%). In 2024, he won that demographic 49% - 48%.

Trump offered young men easy answers to complex questions. The answer from Trump would never be; “Well for the last 50 years or so in America the top 1% has stolen 1 Trillion dollars from the 99% by rigging the system in their favor.” He simply said, “It’s DEI.” Woman, black people, trans people are taking things from you including jobs and the dignity that goes along with them.

Trump’s team ran a great campaign. They got him on podcasts and other venues that were heavily skewed to young men. Closing that 15 point gap with young men likely won him the election.

Young men, what are you going to do?

We are entering the most turbulent time in human history. Climate change and ecological collapse will strain our societies in ways we haven’t imagined. The prosperity that capitalism promised will continue to move further and further out of reach as the physical world breaks down. Our institutions will continue to fail us and our social bonds will become more strained. There will be more conflict, more poverty, more famine, and more destruction of the world we have built.

And what will young men make of this world? Will they be convinced to join the fight against their fellow man in order to gain precious resources to advance the fairy tale of a world that can grow forever? Or will they become leaders in their communities, protect their families and loved ones, and help shepherd humanity through the calamities to come until we can get to a post-growth world and establish a global well-being economy?

And what will the world make of young men? Will it see them as an indispensable resource and invest in them, and make sure they are safe until they can make others safe? Or in a world in perpetual decline, will young men increasingly be seen as disposable?

The system we have now and the story we tell ourselves now of a capitalist society that must grow forever, sees young men as fuel to keep the fire burning so the growth can continue. Currently, young men are expendable.

A degrowth world sees young men as vital for changing the way we live. We need them to restore nature, to build their communities, to do the banal work of just keeping the world going.

In a world where we chose the degrowth path, they are indispensable.