I was reading the comments over at Vox Day, which has the best comments section of any site I’ve yet read, and came across this:

If culture says “Men, you are responsible”, many will live up to it.

You’ve all read and mocked dozens of man-up screeds despairing at how young men are enjoying themselves rather than feeding themselves into the grinder.

As one recent example, at Sarah’s Daughter RLB has had an impressive streak of MGTOW shaming, catalogued by ar10308 here. To some degree I sympathize with RLB’s position, giving up and whining is not exactly a manly Christian response. On the other hand, deti’s response is rather on the nose, it is very hard for a young Christian man to find a virtuous wife.

Why do men act like children? Why do men not grow up? Why are men so adverse to taking responsibility? Where are all the good men? All these the so-cons and over-the-hill women ask.

I’ve already discussed the reason here, incentives. Essentially, there is increasingly less reason for the young man to try and increasingly more reason for him to be irresponsible.

While incentives is the primary driver it is not the only one. The lack of responsibility given young men is another.

Men need responsibility, they thrive on responsibility, and even if they don’t know it they crave responsibility.

Men are made, not born, and they are made through responsibility. There is nothing that makes a man, a man like responsibility.

You make a man by giving him his little area of life and telling him, ‘this is yours, you take care ot if, you are in charge of it, and you will reap the natural rewards and failures of your care of it.’

The man will rise to the challenge (or fail) and will be forged in the process.

This is man’s purpose, to have dominion.

You destroy a man and prevent him from being made by denying him this opportunity. He doesn’t even get the chance to fail, let alone succeed.

Guess which route today’s world takes with our young men-in-the-making?

Our young men are sent to school and university, where they are given no responsibility beyond handing in their work on time. For many men, even that is pushed on them by their helicopeter patents. The young men enter the workforce and are almost always put in low-level jobs where all their actions are dictated by corporate policy; there is no room for responsibility or personal judgment for the young man making his career. The average young man does not start a family until his late 20s, on average, and even then are no longer heads of their household, given responsibility over their family. Nowadays, a man can easily get into his 30s having borne no real responsibility for anything in his life.

How the hell are we as a society to expect young men to man-up and become men when there is almost no opportunity for a young to take responsibility.

We will not have men if we do not forge them.

Of course, once a man reaches his late-20s, the man-up rants come out. At this point, opinion leaders and women are more than happy to start demanding that men start taking responsibility (particularly by marrying that single-mother or aging ex-carousal rider).

But their definition of responsibility is a twisted and distorted one.

Under their perverted form of responsibility the man is given something, told to care for it, and told the penalties for failure will be levied against him should he not succeed. But, he is not given any power over the situation. He is cut off at the knees and his leadership is undermined, if not wholly denied. In addition, as my incentives post pointed out, he is not receiving the traditional, natural rewards of taking good care of his area of responsibility.

Society needs responsible men and men need responsibility. The obvious solution is for society to start giving young men responsibility, full responsibility. Give him his own part of life to have dominion over; give him a domain.

Demanding they man up is pointless. Demanding they feed themselves into the grinder is both sadistic and pointless. Making them accountable without giving them power is cruel and pointless, as is punishing failure, but not rewarding success.

Give men responsibility, then demand they be responsible, and let them know they will receive the natural rewards and/or penalties for their care of their area of responsibility, and you will get the men you want.

A man needs a domain of his own, any healthy society will ensure he has many opportunities to acquire one.