Dear Men, We Only Have Men to Blame

From what I understand of certain narratives our there, the decline of men in the workplace is because of the rise of women and immigrants. I’ve always known that to be bullshit, but it’s a simple story, and our innate bias in using observational data (I see brown people working where white people used to, etc.) acts as confirmation. It’s all wrong. Completely wrong.

So dear men, I wish to explain how we only have men to blame for our economic misfortune. And we share that misfortune with everyone you have been blaming. Women and minorities are not our enemies in this fight, they are the ones we should be allying with.

As I think about the future for my sons, who are now adults, on the cusp of their supposed independence with careers and stuff I realized a little while ago that men have mostly men to blame for their current straits.

Men at the top, always screwed over the men at the bottom. Even in the supposed preferred patriarchal model, where men work and women stay in the kitchen, the men at the top were trying to destroy that model as well.

Even that bullshit model of social structure was not actually wanted. Henry freaking Ford, noted racist and Nazi proved that higher wages led to more productivity, which in turn was good for business . He proved that paying well led to better business outcomes. He was an ironic exception to the pay them peanuts, and work them to the bone industrial model. But it worked.

It meant that a male could finish primary or high school, find a job, buy a house and a car, get married and raise a family. In other words, he could easily work to make a living. This is the world we look back at with fondness.

But that wasn’t good enough. To improve productivity, we turned to automation. It didn’t destroy the work force, but it changed the requirements. Now more and more males needed an education to work in the newly created knowledge jobs, in the knowledge economy.

This is where the relationship between worker and business owner started to break. There’s a fundamental problem here that we keep skipping over, and I recently realized it about myself as well, as I approach my 60th year on this planet.

Many men never wanted an education. An education went from a want to have to a need to have. Why? To get a well paying job. To keep you out of the factories and digging ditches. (The line I heard as a child all so often.)

You’re born into this world. You go to school to get the basics, reading, writing and arithmetic. Right? Your constantly told you need a good education to get a good job. Why?

So that you can earn a living.

This is where men screwed over men. See; if we actually cared about each other as men, we’d realize that we work to earn a living, we don’t live to work. Working and owning a business should be a symbiotic relationship if we want society to succeed, if we want fairness not just for men, but for everyone. But if you’re a man, and you think you’re being screwed over, I want you to think on this a bit more, and think about who you blame.

Our entire society is built around the notion that you are born so that you can be a productive member of society. I.e. You were born to work. That’s your reason for being.

The irony is that profit driven organizations keep trying to find ways to avoid paying people for work. They don’t care about earning a decent living, they care about shareholder value, which at the CEO level, is their own value.

As businesses kept chasing efficiency and automation, we have hit what is probably the inevitable conclusion of this type of reasoning…

Worried about losing your job? [Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas] wants you to see it as an opportunity. “People don’t enjoy their jobs” anyway, he assured the All-In Podcast last month. Not to mention everyone being thrown into unemployment can just start their “own mini-business” with the help of the very tools making them redundant.

“employers use AI as an excuse to get rid of workers they wanted to fire anyway …Humans are not being eliminated from much of this work; their roles are simply being transformed, hidden, and devalued — in the same way capitalists have been doing for hundreds of years.”

The gig economy, where Uber and DoorDash and others turn jobs into pay by contract, pay-by-piece work for as little money as possible, with no health benefits or employee rights protection was a step towards this.

And who has consistently and reliably tried to break the well paid low education job? Men. Wealthy Men. It has always been Men. And now we are actually at the cusp of Wealthy Men trying to break the “good education to get a good job” contract. They don’t want to pay us at all for anything. Get a good education to get a good job is now moving further away from a reality. So why are so many working so hard to get that education?

Going back to my point that an education went from a want to have to a need to have. We were told we needed an education. But you don’t need an education to have a happy and productive life. You need an education to be productive for someone else, and they might choose to reward you for it. And even that is being taken away from us.

Everything we were told from birth to career has been a lie. You’re not born to have a living, you’re not even born to work. You’re born to be used, abused and tossed aside.

That’s what men want. That’s what they want to do to you. These men don’t deserve our admiration, they deserve our scorn. They deserve to be toppled from their self-appointed pinnacles of power over us.

You want to blame someone for your place in the world? Look to the men that are at the top. They’re your enemy.