I've been noticing a few posters that are still beating the "feminism horse," the "traditionalism horse", the "women under 40", the "modernity" horse, the "change in culture" horse, etc.

What a lot of men here don't realize is that nothing has really changed compared to what previous generations of men have gone through. In a lot of ways, men today have it MUCH better than men in previous generations except, perhaps, with respect to relations with women, but even there - things weren't all that rosy.

Take it from someone who grew up in the pre-Internet era and who witnessed how women operated in a traditionalist environment. They were still pretty much the same - deceptive, backbiting, beancounting, and mercenary. They just happened to be a bit thinner and put on a more pleasant persona on average, but for the most part - it was very difficult to find what some would consider a "good woman" even then.

When you read the course of history or think about the culture you descended from - you aren't getting the whole picture. You are reading stuff written by people and about people who were high enough in the dominance hierarchy to have their choices emulated or recorded.

Culture itself, to the extent it's passed on, has to go through a Darwinian selection process - so you never see how a lot of men lived their lives, suffered, and were beat down in the game for status and reproduction. History didn't care about those men. Their choices never make it into the genetic/epigenetic pool or the Jungian collective unconscious or cultural memes.

Things have NEVER been that good for the vast majority of men and even the VAST MAJORITY OF MALES FOR MOST DIMORPHIC SPECIES. Even in the case of my own grandparents and parents, who had successful marriages that lasted many decades, I'm not seeing THE picture, I'm seeing THEIR picture - a small fraction of the successes compared to all the male/female interactions that were toxic and failed.

Nostalgia is great, and I experience it all the time - but it's tempered with knowing that I don't see all the badness that didn't get written about and the suffering that men prior to me experienced.

And this is precisely my issue with people like Peterson - a Jungian who looks to archetypes embedded in the Collective Unconscious to prescribe certain lifestyle choices to men. Yes, those choices were passed on before - but not necessarily because they were the best choices.

No one knows - perhaps the choices and circumstances that are "good" have very little to do with reproduction and survival unless you identify those things as the highest good. And even if you do make them the foundation of a moral system, there's no guarantee that what got passed on before will work in the future or even that what got passed on before was tightly correlated with selection success. It could have just been luckily along for the ride, coincident with some other latent third factor.

To me, what I see in the MGTOW community is men putting things together in a way that perhaps only the anonymity of the internet can facilitate. The "men at screens" phenomenon that Angry Harry hinted at many years ago - a place where men can speak their personal truths to each other without the automatic software of body language, sexual shame, and dominance hierarchy expression silencing a voice like it would in real-time face to face contact.

What MGTOW men are doing, at least to me, is providing some much-needed counterweight to the natural Darwinian processes associated with culture making - the voices and wisdom of men that would have been silenced by selection in previous generations.

And if a MGTOW looks around and sees men eating a shit sandwich today, rest assured - that most men were eating a shit sandwich earlier, too - but those guys died building the Pyramids, the Great Wall - slave for some high-status rent-seeker who was slaying a bunch of pussy on the backs of the guys beneath him.

Don't fall for the trap that things were all that great once upon a time - they weren't. You just aren't thinking about the men who suffered and the ways in which their lives totally sucked. Men dream that women were better once upon a time, but they weren't - they really weren't. It's just been business as usual.

Men like Peterson can't even figure out what MGTOW is because to him - if someone isn't a hero, he's a coward. If someone in 1930s Germany wasn't a Nazi, he was either a collaborator or a victim. In one of his lectures - he tells his students that those are their choices - tyrant, collaborator, or victim.

Those aren't the only choices. There is disassociation. The refusal to identify with the prevailing culture. The refusal to participate and sanction other people's values, norms, or goals. Certain men have always done this, but usually they didn't make up a critical mass to have their choices passed on in the culture or the gene pool.

Many men today are looking at the world and deciding it's not for them, and if they are lost and adrift (as men like Peterson say they are), in my opinion - the Jungian archetypes and the Hero's Journey probably aren't going to provide them with direction - because those stories necessarily come with selection bias. Perhaps men today, to the extent that it's possible, need to reinvent the perspectives on life that previous men had that DIDN'T necessarily make it into the Jungian Collective Unconscious.

By this I mean the stuff that tends towards the male spirit and what sustains it apart from the female material instincts. Granted, it may not be pleasant or possible in all cases, but that's the project - and it steps completely outside of the Jungian or Darwinian framework as someone like Peterson would understand it.