The conventional wisdom from the manosphere is that civilization is built on the backs of men who have families, and thus skin in the game to build up the civilization for future generations.

At the same time I've been thinking about what drives men to achieve greatness and wealth on a primal level. The obvious answer should be the desire to mate with more women. If you become a celebrity, an athlete, or a multimillionaire, you will get more women. Isn't that what drives men to excel?

What if the sexual benefits were taken away? If getting more status/wealth/etc didn't get you more pussy, would men still shoot for the moon?

Now consider a man who is locked down into a family (wife + kids) or LTR (potential future family). He might have secured a steady job that pays $100k/year. Having that family or potential future family will motivate him to keep working that $100k/year job, and even go for 20-50% raises with promotions.

But will a man in such a situation have the motivation to shoot for the moon? To increase his wealth by 10x or 100x through speculative investments? What would be the point of taking these risks if he cannot benefit from having more women, because he is already married with kids?

So when you think about it: individual men taking big risks to get big rewards is actually antithetical to civilized society. Civilized society requires men to stay in their place and become beasts of burden on whose backs the society continues, not extraordinary renaissance men who are able to reach the top 10% in multiple areas of life. Society does NOT want men to excel beyond becoming better beasts of burden on the plantation.

This is just another variation of the fundamental conflict between society and individual men, that tradcons who push marriage and family will not tell you, but MGTOWs should naturally recognize.