Authored by Josh Stylman via The Brownstone Institute,
My father could disassemble and rebuild a car engine in our garage. I, like many of my generation, was steered toward the ‘civilized’ path – white collar work, climate-controlled offices, and an increasing detachment from the physical world. While I grew up loving sports, memorizing baseball stats with religious devotion, and finding genuine joy in the games, something fundamental has shifted in how men engage with athletics today.
In dimly lit rooms across the nation, millions of men gather every weekend, adorned in jerseys bearing other men’s names – not as a complement to their own achievements, but as a substitute for them. We’ve transformed from a nation of players to a nation of watchers.
Like Rome’s bread and circuses, this passive consumption serves to pacify rather than inspire.
The games themselves aren’t the problem – they can build character, teach discipline, and provide genuine entertainment. I still love sports, finding genuine joy in the games just as I did memorizing those baseball stats as a kid. But somewhere along the way, I grew up and realized they should complement life’s achievements, not substitute for them. The danger lies in what happens when grown men never make this transition.
A growing segment of young men face an even more insidious form of spectator culture. While their fathers at least watched real athletes achieve real things, many young people now idolize social media personalities and content creators – becoming passive observers of manufactured personas who achieved fame primarily by being watched. They can recite influencer dramas and gaming achievements but don’t know the stories of Solzhenitsyn or have ever built something with their own hands. The virtual has replaced the visceral; the parasocial has replaced the personal.
History shows us a recurring cycle: hard times create strong men, strong men create good times, good times create weak men, and weak men create hard times. We find ourselves now in the latter stages of this cycle, where comfort and convenience have bred a generation of observers rather than builders. Our sophisticated entertainment serves as a digital opiate, keeping the masses content while their capacity for meaningful action atrophies.
This transformation isn’t accidental. As I explored in my ‘Engineering Reality‘ series, the systematic reframing of physical fitness as problematic represents a calculated effort to weaken societal resilience. Major media outlets like the Atlantic and MSNBC have published pieces linking physical fitness to right-wing extremism, while academic institutions increasingly frame workout culture as problematic. Even gym ownership has been characterized as a potential indicator of radicalization. The message couldn’t be clearer: individual strength – both literal and metaphorical – threatens the prescribed order.
This erosion of self-reliance extends far beyond fitness. A friend who’s spent decades as an auto mechanic recently confided that he’s grateful to be nearing retirement. “These Teslas,” he told me, “they’re not even cars anymore – they’re computers on wheels. When something goes wrong, you don’t fix it; you just replace entire modules.” What was once a craft that any dedicated person could learn has become an exercise in supervised dependency. Even Klaus Schwab openly predicts that by 2030, Los Angeles will be “private car driven free” – just a fleet of self-driving Ubers. With this week’s devastating tunnel fire in LA leaving thousands stranded, one wonders if such ‘Build Back Better’ moments are exactly the opportunities needed to accelerate these transformations. The message becomes clearer: you won’t fix things anymore because you won’t own them.
The Covid response revealed this agenda with striking clarity. While liquor stores remained ‘essential businesses,’ authorities closed beaches, parks, and gyms – the very places where people might maintain their physical and mental health. They promoted isolation over community, compliance over resilience, and pharmaceutical dependency over natural immunity. This wasn’t just public health policy; it was a dress rehearsal for state dependency. The same institutions that discouraged basic health practices now champion policies that replace family authority with bureaucratic oversight. From school boards usurping parental rights to social services intervening in family decisions, we’re witnessing the systematic replacement of the capable father figure with an ever-expanding nanny state.
But true masculinity has never been solely about physical strength. History’s greatest exemplars of masculine virtue weren’t just men of action – they were men of principle, wisdom, and moral courage. From Marcus Aurelius to Omar Little, as I explored in my earlier writing, the common thread was having an unwavering code – the willingness to stand firm on conviction even when it carries personal cost.
Consider how many men today silently acquiesce to policies they know are wrong, embrace narratives they privately doubt, or submit to institutional pressures that violate their conscience. During Covid, we watched as men who understood the importance of natural immunity, outdoor exercise, and community bonds nevertheless enforced policies that harmed their neighborhoods and families. They chose institutional compliance over moral courage, career safety over civic duty, majority approval over personal conviction.
Real strength isn’t found in anonymous aggression or digital posturing. I learned this firsthand during Covid when I spoke out against vaccine mandates and became a pariah for defending personal choice and bodily autonomy. While numerous ‘brave’ keyboard warriors attacked me online, one incident stands out. A friend forwarded me a Reddit thread where someone had posted personal information about my family and me, hoping to incite harassment against me – all because I stood up for bodily autonomy and opposed arbitrary biomedical segregation. The initials gave it away – it was my own neighbor, someone I’d known for years.
When I confronted him in person, this digital lion transformed instantly into a cowering mouse. The same man who had boldly called for my destruction from behind his screen, believing he was anonymous, now stood physically trembling before me, his hands shaking, voice quivering, unable to even meet my gaze.
This spiritual and intellectual weakness poses a far greater threat than any decline in physical capability. A society of physically strong but morally compliant men is just as vulnerable as one of physically weak ones. True masculine strength requires the courage to think independently, to question authority when necessary, and to protect those who depend on you even when it carries risk. It demands the wisdom to distinguish between legitimate authority and manufactured consensus, between genuine expertise and institutional capture.
History offers a stark lesson: civilizations thrive when diverse virtues work in concert – builders and nurturers, protectors and healers, strength balanced with empathy. Today’s systematic erosion of both isn’t random but calculated. As men are steered toward passive consumption and women away from their intuitive wisdom, both are replaced by institutional authority – a nanny state that attempts to fill both roles while achieving neither.
Consider the machinery at work: government programs increasingly separate children from family influence at younger ages, while school curricula promote ideologies that deliberately blur biological realities. From preschool to college, institutions systematically distance children from their parents’ values. Like the fiat currency that replaced real money, we now have fiat relationships through social media, fiat achievements through gaming, and fiat experiences through the metaverse. Each substitution moves us further from authentic human experience toward engineered dependency. When children no longer understand what it means to be male or female, when they’re taught to look to institutions rather than parents for guidance, the state’s victory is nearly complete.
The result is a society of spectators rather than builders, of consumers rather than creators, of followers rather than leaders. A society where men trade real achievement for virtual entertainment and keyboard courage, while genuine feminine wisdom is replaced by corporate-approved stereotypes.
The state can only expand into the vacuum left by weakened men and disconnected women. It feeds on our engineered helplessness, growing stronger as we grow more dependent. Those who recognize this pattern face a simple choice: remain comfortable spectators in our own decline, or reclaim the authentic virtues that make us human.
Republished from the author’s Substack
