I recently had a pub discussion with a young white Aussie. He was into something called "the black pill," on YouTube, with one non-white guru, whose face we never see in his videos, promoting "lookism," appearance is everything. This is all centred around picking up girls, known as "Pick Up Artists." However, unlike the usual scammers, which now include women acting a "wing girls," this guy was arguing that most men are ugly, and few will get a woman, in the great genetic lottery. I said in reply that this entire world view was flawed and degenerate, and the implications will be cultural collapse. He seems offended that I would critique his non-white guru, and if the conversation had proceeded longer, what should have been a meeting of the generations would have become a fist fight!
More than being immersed in the literature, these encounters indicate to me the profound level of cultural rot in modern society. And we are not even looking at this from a Christian perspective which would reject, rightly, the entire premise of fornication hunting, favouring sex in marriage only, for family and children. This is the social decay and rot in terms of basic Western civilisation values and the fall of manhood.
I've watched the world soften in ways I never thought possible. I don't say that with bitterness, but with the kind of clarity that only comes from age, work, and a lifetime of seeing the real thing — life, raw and unfiltered. Back in the 1960s, I remember men who laboured from dawn to dusk without complaint, just as their fathers had done. I did my share too, on the farm, under the sun, through blisters, dust, and bone-deep fatigue. That wasn't something special. It was just life. Then just as my dad had done, I too went off to war to fight, and sadly kill too.
But somewhere along the way, that toughness, that assumed necessity of effort, resilience, and true grit began to dissolve. What replaced it was comfort. Not earned comfort, but mass-produced, risk-managed, shrink-wrapped softness. A culture of weakness emerged, not because people were born weak, but because the world around them made strength unnecessary.
We paved over hardship. We medicated discomfort. We outsourced skill. We began to treat resilience as a trauma response and struggle as a design flaw. And so, we raised generations who couldn't hold a hammer, fix a fence, or think clearly without a mobile phone in their hand. Emotional fragility became a currency. People began talking more about what hurt them than what built them.
We used to forge men in fire. Now we apologise for lighting the stove; you know carbon emissions!
But comfort has a cost. Civilisation, for all its achievements, is still a fragile membrane. Its warmth can't last forever, not if the people inside it forget how to stand upright when it tears. The womb that coddles us can't protect us when the weather changes, when the power fails, when the system breaks.
And it will. History isn't gentle. Hard times come back, because soft men are creating the conditions for it.
When they do, what matters won't be how safe someone felt, or how inclusive the HR policy was. What will matter is whether there are still enough people left who remember how to build, lift, grow, defend, and endure.
That memory — that muscle — is fading. But it's not gone. Not yet. I still work. Still get my hands dirty. Still carry the lessons I learned on the farm, in a time when men didn't need to talk about masculinity, they just lived it.
Maybe that old world isn't dead. Maybe it's just sleeping. But if it doesn't wake up soon, neither will we.