The Unclaimed Sons

Excess Men, Sedation, and the Fate of a Civilization

In a previous essay on the decline of literacy, I deliberately chose not to focus on boys and men, who show at the bottom of the stats. This was deliberate, as the general trend was true across sexes. The following, however, explicitly addresses the fate of men in the 21^st century. Much could be and has been written on the plight of women. If you were looking for balance, this wasn’t written for you.

The eternal problem for societies is this: every civilization produces more men than it can meaningfully place. White or brown, godly or atheist, left or right. This problem sits beneath culture, beneath economics, beneath ideologies. More men are born than there are positions of honor, land, reputation, and love for them to occupy. Ambition is a surplus while recognition is a scarcity. So, every society must decide what to do with the unclaimed sons.

Already, you might be thinking—isn’t this all a little outdated? Honor—in 2025?

If you read this publication at all, you’ll already know my position—these things are eternal, whether we wish them to be or not, whether we see ourselves cresting the progressive wave or falling into a regressive age.

But looking to the past is helpful. Some ages gave these young men crusades. They gave them monasteries. They were sent to war, to frontiers, or into the deep disciplines of the sacred.

We give them drugs, porn, and video games. But it was not always so.

I. The Old Structure: Too Many Sons for Too Little Land

For most of history, lineage and land were not evenly distributed—and it wasn’t limited to noble houses; even a farmhouse or a forge couldn’t support more than a few families. Feudal Europe solved the problem through primogeniture: the first son inherited the estate. The others were sent outward—to the sword or to the cloister.

The French historian Georges Duby, in The Three Orders (1980), described medieval society as ‘tripartite’: those who pray, those who fight, and those who work. Surplus sons were sent to the first two.

The crusades are a good case study, disproportionately made up of younger sons who had no secure inheritance at home. When Pope Urban II raised the flag, it wasn’t only a call for war; it was a mechanism of social integration. It gave the multitudes of prospectless men direction, brotherhood, heavenly salvation, and a chance at status.

Likewise, monastic orders were not retreats from life so much as institutions for unplaced male energy—a channeling of intensity into prayer, discipline, scholarship, fasting, silence, and the pursuit of union with God.

In both cases, surplus men were given something to suffer for.

II. The Industrial Revolution: A Brief Window of Equality

The Industrial Revolution changed the arithmetic of mating. Factory wages and mass employment meant that even ordinary men—without lineage, land, or inherited wealth—could support a household. Marriage became universally attainable.

In the U.S., data shows that between 1900-1960, 90-95% of men eventually married. Goldin and Katz in The Race Between Education and Technology (2010) show that rising wages outpaced productivity gains, allowing one-income families.

This produced one of the strangest and most stable periods in Western demographic history: men worked, and women kept households. The church expected marriage, and sex was strongly bound to long-term commitment. Tradition, albeit in tension with the industrial city and the burgeoning Great Society, found a kind of equilibrium.

In hindsight, rather than eternal, it appears this stability was only situational.

III. The Postwar Marriage Boom: Pairing by Absence

After World War II, millions of young men were dead. The sex ratio between men and women shifted modestly in favor of men. Marriage rates reached their historic peak in 1957 in the U.S. (CDC Statistics), and divorce rates remained low until the 1970s.

That generation had fewer men competing for women, which meant higher marriage rates, and another jolt of temporary social equilibrium. For society, it essentially meant that nearly every man who wanted a wife could find one.

Wage stagnation hadn’t fully kicked in yet, and the marriage compact that allowed women to stay at home still existed. Women could choose to work outside the home for a wage, but they didn’t need to.

That world is now gone.

IV. The Great Unraveling (1970s to the Present)

The postwar world was temporary. For a brief moment, the industrial order held—factories roared, churches were full, and nearly every man found a woman, a house, a place.

By the 70s, the West entered a slow cultural shift. Subtle, while under the guise of freedom, of progress, and economic streamlining. A new kind of liberalism took hold that took on board the lessons of the early 20^th century, or so the political leaders thought. A rising rationalism and atheism sought to remake how society viewed its people, from something sacred and meaning-making to a new homo economicus. We became universal and interchangeable units of GDP.

And so, the first fracture was economic.
In most Western countries, industry began unwinding. Some blame the excesses of unions, others the neoliberal hammer that crushed them. Either way, the dignified work that had once required the body—strength, competence, endurance—was offshored, automated, or priced out. The wage that once made family formation possible declined, even as the cost of living rose. British economist Gregory Clark calls this the end of the “commoner’s boom” in his book Research in Economic History (1997). A man’s labor could no longer guarantee his belonging.

The second fracture was educational.
The university became the new priesthood of legitimacy, and men began to falter inside it. Young women outperformed young men in reading, language, and discipline—skills that the new economy rewarded disproportionately. Today, women earn 60% of all university degrees. The places where male identity was once formed—apprenticeship, crew, field, forge—disappeared, and nothing rose to take its place.

Then came the sexual revolution.
The erotic was unbound from institution, responsibility, and future. This was sold as liberation—but in hindsight, it’s hard to say who benefited. Suffice it to say, it had unintended side effects. But crucially, when marriage is no longer the assumed horizon of adulthood, intimacy becomes a marketplace, not a covenant. And marketplaces do not distribute evenly; they stratify.

Women, now with greater autonomy, naturally selected upward—as evolutionary psychology and economic models have long predicted. Hypergamy is not a judgment; it is like gravity. The top men receive attention. The median men are ignored. The bottom men disappear.

This dynamic was then magnified by technology.

Dating apps—silent, frictionless, and hyper quantitative—turned desire into an auction. A study in PNAS (Bruch & Newman, 2019) shows the brutal truth: the top 10–15% of men receive the vast majority of female interest. To these men, the digital world appears as abundance. To many others, the world simply goes quiet.

And finally, the Church fell, or rather, the shared moral structure of adulthood dissolved. The institutions that once funneled young men—the parish, regiment, lodge, or guild—no longer facilitated the threshold between boyhood and manhood. There is no longer any socially recognized moment when a man is received by the world and told, “You belong. You have a role. You are needed.”

Without such rites, many men remain suspended. Mama’s boys, basement dwellers, incels—you know the epithets. But essentially, they are physically grown, but spiritually uninitiated.

The old equilibrium collapsed. Work no longer grants dignity; school no longer fits the boy; intimacy is no longer bound to commitment; community no longer calls men into brotherhood; and the myth that once told a man who he is has gone silent. The result is more than mere loneliness; it is unanchoring—a slow drifting of millions who do not know how to enter adult life because no one has welcomed them into it. These are men with no one to strive for, no one to guard, no one to answer to, and thus no one to become. They are not rejected, exactly—only unclaimed. And a civilization that does not claim its men does not endure.

This is a time bomb.

V. Sedation: The Modern Answer to the Male Surplus

When societies lose the ability to integrate young men into stable adult roles, the result is usually rebellion. Curiously, today what we see is more a withdrawal. The drives that once pushed men into work, courtship, family formation, and public life still exist—but today, they are increasingly redirected into digital or chemically managed substitutes.

Pornography provides the appearance of intimacy without requiring social skills, confidence, or vulnerability. Video games provide the experience of progress and achievement without risk or responsibility. Social media offers attention and identity without contribution or community. Cannabis, alcohol, and antidepressants provide emotional regulation without addressing the underlying causes of despair or stagnation.

None of these things is inherently “evil,” (pornography excepted.) The problem is scale and function: these systems now operate as mass coping mechanisms for men who cannot find a place in the real economy or social world.

I don’t think it’s coordinated. It is structural.
The market has simply discovered that it is profitable to comfort people who feel stuck, rather than to help them change the conditions that trap them.

But crucially, sedation solves the short-term political problem of millions of unmoored, frustrated young men. It creates a long-term problem, though: a society in which a large share of men have stopped trying. They never found an entry point into adulthood where effort reliably leads to recognition, belonging, and a future.

This is how our social decline looks in practice—there is not a violent collapse, only a slow reduction in ambition, initiative, and civic participation. A world where men are physically present but psychologically checked out.

VI. A Comparative Mirror: The Islamic World

To understand why the situation in the West leads to sedation rather than action, it’s useful to look at a contrasting case: parts of the Islamic world.

Many societies in the Middle East and North Africa allow or tolerate polygyny. This practice concentrates women among a smaller number of higher-status men. The result is an even larger pool of young, unmarried men than we see in the West.

Young, unmarried, economically insecure, without mobility. We should see upticks in civil unrest.

Where the West uses distraction, many Islamic societies use mobilization. Instead of porn and video games, these men are offered: martyrdom narratives, brotherhood in militant groups, religious clarity and meaning, and status through conflict or sacrifice.

These are two very different outcomes, but they originate from the same underlying condition. In the West, excess young men tend to withdraw into virtual life and passive coping. In parts of the Islamic world, the same demographic pressure produces militant movements and outward-directed aggression.

For decades, perhaps since the Soviets in Afghanistan, the Islamic world has been channeling men in a civilizational battle. It’s easy to forget how many organizations have come and gone, or persist still: Al-Qaeda, ISIS, Hezbollah, the Houthis, the Haqqani Network, the GIA in Algeria, Boko Haram in Nigeria, Al-Shabaab in Somalia, and of course, Hamas in Palestine.

VII. Possible Futures: What Happens Next?

One possibility is that technology continues to pacify young men.
More immersive gaming, AI companionship, VR intimacy, and algorithmic entertainment may deepen the current pattern rather than reverse it. If the emotional and psychological needs of unattached men can be met cheaply and convincingly through digital substitutes, then the withdrawal trend could become semi-permanent. In this scenario, the political consequences are muted: societies get fewer families, fewer children, weaker civic life—but no major backlash. This is the “managed decline” trajectory: quiet, stable, and stagnant.

Another possibility is the rise of vitalist male movements that attempt to reclaim agency at the personal level—Nietzschean focus paired with Aurelian stoicism. We already see early forms of this: discipline-oriented fitness cultures, “NoFap” oaths, martial arts communities, off-grid homesteading, and a growing disdain for consumer passivity. These movements reject sedation through ethos and embodiment. However, whether they scale into a meaningful cultural force or remain niche self-improvement subcultures is still unclear. They may produce a minority of resilient, focused men, but not necessarily rebuild a structure for all.

A third possibility is a political-material backlash once the number of disengaged men reaches a critical mass. Peter Turchin writes in Ages of Discord (2016), that historically, large cohorts of unattached young men are not indefinitely passive. If economic shocks, housing scarcity, or institutional distrust intensify, compounded by everything I’ve laid out above, these men could become politically mobilized—whether ideological, or worse yet, simply anti-system. And if that happens, Western societies may begin to resemble parts of the Islamic world, where elites respond to surplus men by externalizing conflict—redirecting their aggression outward, into war or geopolitical adventure. This is the scenario where foreign conflict becomes a pressure-release valve—think Orwell’s 1984 and never-ending war.

There is also a simpler, less dramatic path: rebuilding functional on-ramps to adulthood.
This would mean restoring the cultural status of trade work and skilled labor, supporting male apprenticeship and hands-on competence, and reintroducing communal spaces where young men are mentored by older men. Those, of course, would only be a start.

This approach does not rely on ideology, resentment, or nostalgia. It treats the issue as one of institutional design and cultural signaling. If societies once again provide clear, achievable pathways for ordinary men to gain dignity, mastery, and belonging, the problem becomes manageable. Most men do not need glory; they need purpose they can realistically attain.

Thanks for reading. Watch for more every Sunday.