‘Adolescence’ and the Demonisation of Working-Class Males

I tend to read the ‘Guardian‘ out of some macabre self hate, fear and loathing. A kind of mental self harming. You keep thinking ‘how do they get away with this drivel’? Yet the anti-white working class hate fest is on overdrive. The worst thing about ‘Men Hate’ however, is that it is never based on facts and figures. It is merely a long list of ‘assumptions’ and ‘non sequiturs’ by middle class women from Brahmin-like privileged backgrounds, exhausted about the price of avocadoes in Sainsburys and of course ….’Adolescence‘. The new Netflix bore fest ticks all the boxes for them. No need to read the difficult work of economists such as Piketty, or understand deindustrialisation, or the conscious discrimination against white working-class males in state funded sectors such as Education or the Civil Service. No, lets base our brainwashed angst on a TV show.

A famous study (overlooked by The Guardian) shows that white working-class males are the least likely to go to University. I highlighted the situation in an earlier article when I recounted a visit back to the LSE a few years ago. It was no short of a type of ethnic cleansing. The overwhelming fee paying students are Asian. There wasn’t a white working-class student anywhere.

Figures from the Department of Education study show the scale of the tragedy:

‘Data released by the Department of Education (DfE) last year showed less than 0.5% of state school students on free school meals gained a place at Oxbridge in 2013/14, and only 5% of those students gained a place at a Russell Group University’.

Publications like The Guardian are only interested in the effect on women; or what they perceive to be a hatred towards women. There is no evidence for this. This fixation on ‘gender’ clouds out the real problem. However, it suits the divisive liberal agenda put forward by Critical Theory and the obsession with race and ‘gender’. It is pushed by the usual mainstream culprits: The BBC, The Guardian and Sky. Yet Dr Lee Elliot Major, of the Sutton Trust, designed to improving social mobility through education, outlines the core problem ignored by the new woke suffragettes:

‘The poor academic performance of disadvantaged boys, especially those from white working-class backgrounds, is a tragic waste of talent with a significant economic cost’.

There’s the rub. For it shouldn’t be about a Netflix soap opera, but based on the hard facts of the deculturisation and deindustrialisation of the UK. By this I mean a conscious attempt to belittle and remove the group they fear most on the crusade to the multi-cultural heaven: white working-class males. It removes the real reasons behind working-class exclusion and they have nothing to do with race. Or women. The real reasons behind social exclusion are well-documented. They are economic and cultural. On the economic level, the exporting of industry to China etc is the structural cause. The ill-fated deindustrialisation of Britain: the west handing over ownership to developing nations at the expense of the indigenous white working-class. The free trade EU model exacerbated this, allowing immigration to lower wages and supplant the ‘telos’ of existence from the working-class male. As Piketty noted the rate of return on profit constantly seeks new markets to increase returns. Over time inequalities, in free markets, become exponential. Hence the current antagonisms between generations: ‘Boomers have all the wealth’ and ‘Gen Z can’t buy a house’.

‘The inequality r > g (rate of return on profit is greater than social income) implies that wealth accumulated in the past grows more rapidly than output and wages. This inequality expresses a fundamental logical contradiction. The entrepreneur inevitably tends to become a rentier, more and more dominant over those who own nothing but their labour. Once constituted, capital reproduces itself faster than output increases. The past devours the future.’

Hence the turn to protectionism in Trump’s America. An attempt to clawback ownership; to give jobs back to the rust belt. Europe, on the other hand, has hung its workers out to dry. Sourcing industry and goods from China and spending the windfall on indolent civil service employees, and public -private extraction (corruption). Tech and automation will only add more pain for ordinary people. To maximise profit, automation, robots etc will replace workers. However, there is a fundamental contradiction. Capitalism is based on the ‘Consumer’. Society creates endless needs, what Marxists called ‘commodity fetishism’. An endless cycle. Yet what happens when the consumers disappear? Robots don’t buy things.

Hence the second cultural strand regarding exclusion. The need now to demonise the section of society who speak up against the madness. The bureaucratic class need to keep their hegemony; hence the divisive media hunt. The summer riots, draconian sentences, hate laws. Starmer and the Politburo of ‘trahison des clercs‘ need a scapegoat. White working-class people have no stake in this society. Yet the enigma is they cannot be replaced – only by immigration. An example of the hysteria is Martha Gill’s article in the Guardian:

‘Adolescence reveals a terrifying truth: smartphones are poison for boys’ minds’.

It says online influencers can turn boys into killers. No mention of girls. This TV drama ‘has the power to change things’. Men’s Rights activists are called MRAs. Does that include men who have lost any contact with their children? Or those campaigning for a level playing field in the courts. And when the working-class white male protested the killer in Southport, they were sentenced to ridiculous bird time. Starmer has been watching the programme – so the problem needs to be tackled. Imagine how shallow a government is that bases its legislation on ‘Netflix’. Of course, all this will be forgotten when they realise that there is a real threat, one that is far more existential. That is foreign affairs, as Britain and Europe, with decades of waste, creating a bloated civil service in the UK, and neglecting national security. Lammy believes the ‘Suwalki Gap’ is next to Watford. That Libya is next to Syria. Yet the penny hasn’t dropped for Britain; and those awful white working-class people will be asked to step up once more to the breach:

‘Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more;

Or close the wall up with our English dead.

In peace there’s nothing so becomes a man

As modest stillness and humility:

But when the blast of war blows in our ears,

Then imitate the action of the tiger;

Stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood,

Disguise fair nature with hard-favour’d rage.’

Those ‘angry young men’, those MRAs, those soldiers, the white working-class ennobled by fathers and grandfathers in war, will now equivocate and ask – who are we fighting for?

Brian Patrick Bolger LSE, University of Liverpool. He has taught political philosophy and applied linguistics in universities across Europe. His articles have appeared in the US, the UK, Italy, Canada and Germany in magazines such as ‘The Spectator’  ‘The Times’, ‘Takimag’, ‘The American Spectator’, ‘Asian Affairs’, ‘Deliberatio’, ‘L’Indro Quotidiano Indipendente di Geopolitica’,  ’The National Interest’, ‘GeoPolitical Monitor’, ‘Merion West’, ‘Voegelin View’, ‘The Montreal Review’, ’The European Conservative’, ‘Visegrad Insight’, The Hungarian Review’ ,’The Salisbury Review’,  ‘New English Review’, ,  ‘American Thinker’, ‘Indian Strategic Studies’,  ‘Philosophy News’. His new book- ‘Nowhere Fast: Democracy and Identity in the Twenty First Century’ is published now by Ethics International Press. He is an adviser to several Think Tanks and Corporates on Geopolitical Issues.

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