America’s Broken Because Americans Have Broken Values
Show me what a nation values most and I'll show you what they are
So, let’s start out with a few disparate concepts and then pull them all together. First off, Asian memes are a not-so-guilty pleasure of mine. I love them so much I’ve thought about doing a whole article about them. Every group in America should aspire to have memes like this made about them.
Now let’s pivot from there to roughly 15 years ago, when pick-up artistry rose to become a significant sub-culture in America. Most people then and now have a negative view of pick-up artists, but I didn’t look at it that way. I viewed most of the “experts” as guys trying to be real-life versions of Will Smith’s character in “Hitch.”
In fact, I actually helped Wayne Elise, who was a prominent pick-up artist back in the day, set up a seminar at CPAC where he talked about conservative dating. It was a lot of fun, the room was packed and quite frankly, it was probably more intriguing to people than 95% of the events that happened that year. I particularly liked Wayne’s style because so much of what he focused on was helping guys become higher-value males so they could get the women they wanted. To me, that seemed very healthy.
With that in mind, why did so many people hate pick-up artistry? A big part of it was because it seemed “fake” to a lot of people. They viewed it as basically teaching men to be something they weren’t, which would give them a chance to “trick” women into bed. Admittedly, some of that did happen and it could be taken to extremes. For example, I once remember reading a pick-up artist who said that he took every woman on EXACTLY the same first date. By that, I mean, he went to the SAME local restaurant for drinks, took them back to his apartment, watched the SAME movie, spat out the SAME lines, and made the SAME moves. Even if you succeed with that tactic, there’s just something incredibly insincere and creepy about it, right?
Now, last but not least, consider Belle Delphine, who is arguably the world’s most successful camgirl. Supposedly, Belle Delphine is worth more than 2 million dollars and is making millions of dollars every year. She’s also certainly attractive, seems to be talented, and whoever does her marketing, which could be her for all I know, is absolutely a genius. Additionally, she’s “Internet famous” and has 1.5 million Twitter followers along with 743,000 Instagram followers. Of course, there are downsides as well.
She is doing pornography now and when I was looking for a picture of her to use with this article, among other things, I ran across a snap of her covered with male bodily fluids and another that, I kid-you-not, featured her with a fidget spinner shoved where the sun doesn’t shine that she spun around for the camera.
On that note, you might say, “Okay, that’s enough of these ‘disparate concepts,’ bro. What are you driving at?”
It’s pretty simple actually.
Although we pretend otherwise because to our modern ears, it sounds too much like being “judgy,” different values produce different results. Consider kids raised in something approximating the “Asian memes” household above or kids who have their parents telling them that every problem they have is the result of some “ism,” and ask yourself which children are more likely to be successful. It’s not a crapshoot, it’s not random – we all know which kids are much more likely to be successful and which kids are much more likely to be failures in that situation.
Whatever you think of pick-up artistry, we all know that the approach to it matters. If one PUA is explaining to guys how to talk to girls and encouraging them to improve themselves while the other is explaining to guys how to lie to women and run heavily scripted encounters designed to get them in bed and dump them, we can understand that one of them is likely to make the world a better place and one isn’t.
By the standards with which most people seem to judge the world today, Belle Delphine is a tremendous success. She’s beautiful, she’s wealthy, and she’s famous. If she were guaranteed the same success, would you want your daughter to follow the same path? My guess is that the vast majority of people reading this would say, “No.” But, is that the message that our society is sending to young Americans, or are we telling them to do whatever it takes to become wealthy and famous?
National values, especially somewhere as large and amorphous as America, are going to be a bit of a mixed bag. A bit different in different places, but we can still make some sweeping judgments about what Americans value most by looking at behavior. What are we willing to pay for? Who are our celebrities? Who do we admire? What actions do we celebrate and what actions draw little attention?
Unfortunately, a lot of those values that we celebrate today are either not very healthy in and of themselves or lead to a lot of bad outcomes for the people pursuing them. What are some of the unhealthy things America puts a high value on?
Wealth at any cost. Celebrity at any cost. Power at any cost. Attention. Victimhood. Being a master of cutting remarks. Being constantly entertained. Eloquence. Consumerism. Hyper-individualism.
At first glance, some of these might not seem so bad or might even seem good. For example, what’s wrong with being eloquent? Nothing per se. The problem is that Americans have come to value eloquence for its own sake, instead of asking if there’s any track record or wisdom associated with it. Similarly, Americans insist on everything being entertaining these days, which is a big part of why politics and the media are crap. Being entertained and informed aren’t the same things and if your priority is always on being entertained, it’s going to make you a little stupid.
We can go on with this. What’s wrong with consumerism? It prioritizes having the latest “stuff,” but puts a low priority on saving money and investing for your future. We pour money, attention, and pity on victims in America, which is why it seems like everyone is both looking for a chance to claim that they’ve been victimized and are accusing other people of being “oppressors.” There’s certainly nothing wrong with shining a spotlight on people doing good things, but if you reward people with attention for acting like idiots, that’s how you end up with high school students spending hours preparing the “perfect” 60-second TikTok lecture that explains their supposedly unique gender identity. Individualism is a core part of what has made Americans successful, but people have taken it to such an extreme that they’ve started to believe their wants and needs of the moment are orders of magnitude more important than the impact of their actions on their community and the nation. As to cutting remarks, not only is that the sort of thing you see on Twitter and in breathless media updates about people supposedly being “destroyed” by some quip, it has even become how we decide our PRESIDENTIAL DEBATES. The substance of what each candidate says and their policies are considered trivial compared to some great line they got off attacking the other candidate that will be replayed endlessly on the news.
Last but not least, there’s nothing wrong with being wealthy (love of money is the root of all evil, not money), powerful, or famous in and of itself. However, how you get there matters. Is Al Capone someone people should emulate? Jeffrey Skilling? Jeffrey Epstein? Harvey Weinstein? Stepping down a level, are Jake Paul, Charlie Sheen, RuPaul, Britney Spears, Howard Stern role models? The real answer to this question in America today is “yes,” but we’d have a much better, healthier society if the answer was, “no.”
Americans are horrified by the bad behavior we see all around us. Politicians lying to us and behaving like fascists. Selfishness. Lawlessness. Rioting. Weirdos everywhere. Gender confusion. Narcissistic, borderline sociopathic indifference to other human beings -- but what we don’t see is how WE contribute to it even if we don’t behave that way ourselves. On an intellectual level, we all understand that different values produce different results, but we don’t ever ask what role we play and how we can change it. If all of us looked back through the social media posts we liked, the articles we clicked on, the shows we rewarded with our viewership, and the places we put our money, there would be very few of us (me included) with perfectly clean hands when it comes to our culture. The way we change it is not by saying, “Gee, I wish the world wasn’t such a mess,” it’s by changing our behavior and attitudes. That’s one of the reasons I strongly supported Donald Trump’s pushback against the NFL flag protests. If you want to change the culture, you have to change what gets rewarded and what gets punished. That is a long, lonely, difficult road to go down and it ultimately begins not with grand gestures by politicians, but with ordinary, decent people changing their day-to-day behaviors to align with their healthy values. If we want to change America for the better, we have to change how we behave for the better so that we can ultimately change this country’s values for the better.
Words of wisdom - insight by the gazillion. 🤗
Good essay, one that gets to the very core of what men like MLK were saying. Stop rewarding bad behavior. I see an obnoxious headline on Google that says; "white men outraged by Biden's plan to select black woman to fill Breyer's seat," completely mischaracterizing the fact that it's pure racism to select someone based on skin color, not the best person for the job. All it does it perpetuates identity politics and racial division, instead of helping to fix things...