So You've Been Locked Out of Life

The Uncomfortable Truth About "The Lost Generation"

The Complicated Nature of Slavery

“Quite an experience to live in fear, isn’t it? That’s what it is to be a slave.”

That line from Blade Runner is one of the most haunting in a film filled with haunting lines. It seems true, and it cuts to the heart of so much human dysfunction that it could be a psych course all on its own. When your heart is dominated by terror, the terror is your master. And, according to what we’ve all learned about slavery (and especially American slavery), terror is the chief tool of the master for controlling and motivating his slaves.

Two years ago I began work on the follow-up to my book Reclaiming Your Mind (serialized here in 2025, and due to see print in 2026). It’s called The Art of Agency, and it will be serialized here for supporters in advance of publication in the coming year.

This new book is an examination of human freedom—how it works, where it fails, what stands in its way, and how to make your life your own in a world that seems designed to frustrate any such endeavor. The work is based on extensive historical and philosophical reading, and decades of personal experience and mentorship work.

But as I started writing it I realized that there was a sizable gap in my education:

Beyond the normal stuff (like the autobiographies of Frederick Douglas), I hadn’t actually read many of the other, more unfiltered first-hand accounts of those who were enslaved.¹ So I did.

Fortunately, a lot of these accounts survived—they were collected between 1936 and 1938 by FDR’s Works Progress Administration’s Federal Writers’ Project.² You can read them here, and you can find a startling collection of excerpts in the second chapter of A Renegade History of the United States by Thaddeus Russell.

Amongst the tales of abuses by slavers, abuses by other slaves, the punishment box and the taskmaster’s whip, tragic family separations, and the other things we’re all familiar with, another, more disturbing picture emerges through the testimony:

For many freed slaves, slavery was preferable to freedom, and the working conditions in the cotton and tobacco fields were certainly preferable to the working conditions available in the factories and slaughterhouses of the era.

Why would this be?

Could it be because rape of slaves was less common than rapes of free women during the time?³ Or that slaves had greater economic security than free workers of the time? Could it be because the slaves had better bargaining power and more in-group solidarity than free workers of the time?⁴

Those things are all true, and they were factors, but they don’t touch the most important factor that emerges from the narratives of former slaves.

That most important and consistent factor cited by the slaves who wished for the good-old-days?

The sense of family among the slaves, and of the paternalistic relationship between slaves and masters. The slaves felt like they would be taken care of, and their culture created varieties of freedom (sexual self-determination, freedom from social climbing, freedom from financial anxiety, more days off than working people had at the time, etc.) that the free people of the time simply did not have. They knew their place, and they knew very little existential insecurity compared to their post-slavery life (or to their free-born peers).

For my money, the most horrific aspect of slavery isn’t that slaves were abused, treated like cattle, or forced to live in fear.

The most horrific aspect is that some non-trivial percentage of the human population, when given the choice, prefer slavery to freedom.

Which brings me to the article from Compact Magazine that has been making the rounds.

Days of Rage

The article in question is called The Lost Generation, and it documents the startling levels of discrimination leveled against white males in corporate America since the DEI craze took hold in 2014. It features personal anecdotes of foreshocks from the early 2010s. Its data is good. Its conclusions are accurate, insofar as they go.

Yes, an entire generation of white males were more-or-less completely frozen out of prestigious and upwardly-mobile professions at the same time that they became the sustained target of loud, unremitting hatred and propaganda that lasted for almost ten years—long enough to engender resentment in millions of men (i.e. anyone who was between ten and twenty-five when the propaganda started, and a lot of others who were older).

That’s men, in general. Men were the villains—white men were just extra-evil villains.

According to an old African proverb, young men who do not find a home in the village will burn it down to feel its warmth. The French Revolution, the American Revolution, the Sandanistas, the Ba’athist revolution, the Russian Revolution, the Cuban Revolution, and just about every other revolution in history occurred for a single reason:

Young men were disproportionately shut out of society by existing elites and the aspirants who had allied themselves with the ruling class.

Disaffected young men destroy civilizations.

Is it any wonder that Groypers, white and male identity politics, and all manner of radicalization both to the left and the right are “suddenly” part of our world?

The only surprise, really, is that catastrophic revolution hasn’t happened to us…well, surprising until you look at the demography: none of the developed countries on Earth have enough young men to actually burn the village down. The best the young men can do is start fires online, and our security services have gotten good enough at psychological warfare that they have effectively channeled, controlled, and isolated the threat.

At least for now.

So, yes, the rage you hear seeping through Jacob Savage’s article, and that you see burning itself across the internet, is real.

It is justified.

It is righteous.

And it is incredibly dangerous.

But it leaves a few things out.

Being White-Male’d Out of Life

To begin with, Savage’s article suffers from some severe limitations where historical perspective is concerned.

First, take a look at this excerpt:

Sounds good. Sounds reasonable. And that leads directly to this conclusion:

And, unfortunately (for everyone), that is not true. Gen X and Boomers did not view the practice as benign. Nor have they been exempt from its demands.

The view taken by the article is that DEI is a recent phenomenon that put the screws to white men in a serious way only in the last decade, and only really tightened them since the 2020 Summer of Floyd, is historically blind and tragically wrong.

DEI is not a recent phenomenon—it’s merely a recent brand name.

Just like automobiles existed before Tesla, the DEI program existed long before it was named “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.”

White males have been in the cross-hairs for a long, long time. Hiring preferences and discriminatory mandates were already sufficiently advanced to make headlines when I was a preschooler (back in the early 1980s). These “equal opportunity” and “affirmative action” programs (as they were called back then) are the reason that we have the political commentator Scott Adams today.

In the mid-1980s, Scott Adams was an up-and-comer at Pacific Bell (the regional telephone company for northern and central California), but when he was in line for promotion into the career track he wanted, he was told point-blank not to even bother applying: he was too white, and too male, and Pac Bell had decreed that no more white men be advanced in the company for the foreseeable future.

Adams, having had his fill with this sort of thing (he’d seen it happen to friends at other companies), started working on his escape hatch. He created a comic strip called Dilbert, which lampooned the notoriously pathological management culture at Pac Bell in a way that paved the way for future pop culture phenoms like the Mike Judge comedy Office Space.⁵

I was in and around academia during the same period (due to having close family in the profession), and the denizens of that particular circle of hell had a term for the phenomenon of discovering that your earned (and, often, promised) promotion from adjunct to full faculty was being denied in favor of filling the slot with an unqualified female and/or minority candidate:

Being “white-male’d.”

In my teens, that same “inclusive” wave swept through fire departments in California, throwing a number of people of my casual acquaintance out of a job (not all of them white, but all of them male and with seniority that made them much more expensive than the diversity hires). It was such a prominent phenomenon during that era that it was used as a keystone plot device in the antiracist film American History X.

By the time I was 29, I’d known six people personally who got white-male’d out of their academic careers. Two of them went on to become successful cottage-industry public intellectuals. The other four went into corporate work or IT, where they wound up hitting the same wall around a decade later. None of these six got to retire after amassing wealth—they were dumped out of careers entirely, and have survived on donations from their audiences (in the former two cases) and on freelance work won through the friends-of-friends network (in the latter four cases) ever since.

By the late 1990s, the trend was so prominent that it also served as the silent animating principle behind cult hits like Fight Club and The Big Lebowski.

The same discrimination protocols hit the independent film industry when I was involved, in the 2000s. All the projects I worked on—including the ones I ran—always had a woman, a minority, or both in prominent positions (whether they actually did any work or not), because films which did not have such individuals getting front-line production team credit could not get financing, and had difficulty winning distribution deals outside of the studio-nepotism network. To this day, I’m convinced that several of the gay white men I knew in the scene were not gay at all, but were shamming in order to get access to the industry.

The same thing was happening in the tech industry VC culture when I was involved there, in the late 2000s and early 2010s. Which is to say nothing of what was going on in the lower tiers of the tech industry, where nearly every single friend of mine who worked in IT and lost their job after age 35 and sent out a resume found themselves “white-male’d” out of job after job. Only a few of those managed to pivot and survive into their late 40s when they were washed out for good.

Things did get a lot worse for the Millenials, and for Gen Z, and the trap did snap the rest of the way shut after 2020, but make no mistake:

This is a race and gender war that’s been waged relentlessly and progressively since the early 1970s.

But if that’s true, then what about this snippet from the Compact article?

I haven’t worked at, nor do I have sources in, the NYT, but based on what I know of how similar organizations work, I can guarantee that (at least) one of two things are true:

• These men, and those like them, had connections that insulated them from the step-wise purge, or

• As implied in the excerpt, they were not allowed a free hand in hiring and promotion decisions—these things are above their pay grade.

Or, more likely, both.

Here’s the even-uglier part:

Despite what the denizens of DEI will tell you, this entire program has precious little to do with racial justice, righting past wrongs, or anything remotely noble like that. It is, instead, a sort of social control strategy aimed at disenfranchising and scattering the demographic that poses the most danger to the ruling class:

Young, literate, rebellious, and energetic men.

Counter-gangs, Prohibition, and The War Against Vitality

The war on young men—and on competent men in general—didn’t start there.

In the mid-20th century, when the Boomers came of age, they also found a world that was unwilling to make room for them. By that time, the corporate think tanks (such as the Rockefeller Institute) realized that they could increase the supply of consumers and permanently depress wages if they put money behind the most radical voices of the nascent mid-century feminist movement.⁶ By pushing the women of the largest generation in history into the workforce with relentless propaganda, they could quadruple the supply of new workers in the space of a decade. They could also universalize the tax base (which would increase monies available to the NGO sector through USAID—these foundations were major beneficiaries of that program), and extend the indoctrination umbrella to peremptorily defang future generations of rebellious youth.⁷

Here is the producer of Trading Places relaying his conversation on this topic with one of the members of the Rockefeller family:

This is hard to imagine from our current vantage point of universal Boomer institutional capture, but the youth revolts of the 1960s were not “spoiled selfish Boomers trying to steal everything.” They were undertaken with good cause. The post-WW2 world was damn near a Brave New World-style police state for vast swaths of the American population, there were draft-heavy unnecessary (and losing) wars waged under false pretenses roughly once a decade, and those that wished to change things, step out of line, or forge their own path were put down—often brutally—by the State.

The young revolutionaries were violent on a scale that we have not seen outside the Summer of Floyd, and they were not engaging stochastic or chaotic violence: the violence was targeted, the generational drop-out was real, and the widespread resistance to the Post-War planned society was a constant drag on the plans of those who ran the American Empire and the American economy. It took a lot of work for the Machine⁸ to put the Boomer genie back in the bottle, but it eventually did, using a very sharp, canny strategy:

Counter-gangs.⁹

The strategy goes like this:

First, find organic groups of discontents with legitimate grievances against the system.

Then, among those groups, find the most dishonest, opportunistic, deluded, and/or radical actors—the ones who have almost no possibility of maintaining public support over the long haul.

Fund those actors, directly or indirectly, ensuring that they dominate the conversation. This forces more reasonable and/or intelligent players to spend their time fighting for legitimacy against the nut bars.

Along the way, you use their disreputability to encourage reactionary conservatism among people who might agree with “There’s a legitimate grievance here” but who absolutely don’t agree with the way the favored group expresses it or the remedies they demand.¹⁰

Once those groups who have been selected to lead the movement achieve a critical mass, eliminate the threat they pose by doing one or more of the following:

• Grant shallow victories on their most widely appealing demands, leaving them unappealing to those who only signed on due to momentum. These normies, disenchanted by the radicalism that remains, will then wander away, and the organization will cease to be a threat to the establishment.

• Buy off the leaders.

• Assassinate or imprison leaders who cannot be bought, blackmailed, co-opted, discredited, or otherwise controlled.

Of course, this assumes that the counter-gangs are ones that have any hope of achieving respectability—there can also be advantages to just having people available to cause chaos. For best results there, in addition to funding them, it helps to infiltrate them so that you can pull their strings directly. This is the kind of activity we in the U.S. became freshly familiar with during the Summer of Floyd and in the years since, but it is an old strategy that used to be widely known—so widely known that there was a popular film and radio drama in the 1950s called I Was a Communist for the FBI (based on a true story).

But back to the main story:

Promoting perverse strains of feminism were not the only early move in this war.

Feminism’s fallout negatively affected the economic prospects of middle-class white men more than other demographics, but this was not the demographic that, at the time, were proving most troublesome to the powerful. That honor fell to disaffected white and black men, mostly from the working and freelancing classes, many of whom had already served abroad in the Korean and Vietnam wars.

Many suffered from PTSD as a result of the war, and could not get treatment (the government whose coercion had saddled them with the disorder did not consider them worth treating).

All those who had served in the wars found themselves, upon their return, possessed of manners and morals that did not jive with the new politically-correct orthodoxy of the time—or with the new status hierarchies that centered around engineers and eggheads instead of around technicians, craftsmen, and blue-collar grunts.

As a result, among both the veterans and the home-grown activists, most found themselves locked out of career-paths that had been available to their fathers. They were understandably and justifiably pissed off.

The Civil Rights movement, Black Power movement, and Anti-War movement all represented persistent and potentially fatal troublesome elements for the establishment of the day. Despite Richard Nixon’s overwhelming electoral victory (prompted by the surge in anti-establishment violence in the summer of 1969 and following, and the subsequent civil war within the Democratic Party), these elements were powerful enough that Nixon determined to undermine them permanently.

He did this by declaring a War on Drugs, which necessitated sweeping new government powers that allowed, eventually, for the near-complete abolition of 4th Amendment protections and financial privacy, and freedom of association, as well as serious as-practiced revisions to the Rules of Evidence that reversed the burden of proof in asset seizure situations.

Faced with the overwhelming power of the newly-created Federal and State Bureaucracies (which were weaponized preferentially against Nixon’s political enemies, and later against the political enemies of every sitting President), and encouraged by selective enforcement that incentivized a steady ramp-up in drug potency and ramp-down in drug prices, the anti-war and Black Power movements gradually disintegrated. Some activists¹¹ moved on to academia (or prison, and then academia) and business—others got lost in heroin and other previously-rare substances that rapidly destroyed their communities and made them permanent clients of the welfare state. One way or another, the revolutionaries were now dependent upon the system, and no longer represented a threat.

These moves are examples of what young men who are perceived as threats to the system have been taught to expect for four full generations (Boomers, Xers, Millenials, Zoomers).

The Boomers as we know them now—greedy, self-involved, crassly materialistic, spiritually empty, robotically ideological, blinkered, propagandized, and clinging blindly to power at the expense of their nation and progeny—are textbook examples of what happens to a people that gives in to those who wish to eliminate the threat posed by the tremendous creative energy of young men.

And the decaying empire of the United States, with its hollowed-out industrial base, its below-replacement birth rate, its arrested arts and culture scene, its lack of technological innovation, its decades-long unbroken record of war losses, its virtual lack of a national culture or identity, and its Fight Club-style angry ennui, is a cautionary tale for what happens to countries who choose to villainize, disenfranchise, and castrate their young men.

The Master’s Consolations

Despite the humiliations, abuses, and horrors of their lives, the slaves in the American South enjoyed the kind of freedom that comes from fear and neglect shown by one’s masters. Because their labor was needed, they never had to fear going hungry. Because they could not be forced to work (nobody can be forced to work if they would rather die than do it), they were free to enjoy and produce entertainments that the free could face prosecution for attending. Because a slave revolt could mean economic ruin for an entire plantation (or region, if it spread), they had no busybodies managing their personal affairs, and the slave women had comparatively little fear of being abused—the other members of the community could be depended upon to take revenge on their behalf. The slaves lightened their bondage through quiet-quitting, and not working when the boss’s men weren’t looking directly at them.

In this environment, many slaves descended into perpetual indolence. More of them made the best of their lowly position and milked its advantages as best they could, but stayed dependent.

But others became master musicians and theatrical performers. Some became master agriculturalists. Some became master craftsmen who sold their wares and services off the plantation, and kept the money they made. It is to this subset of the enslaved (and their descendants) that America owes vast swaths of its material culture, its love of peanut butter and sweet potatoes, its blues and ragtime and jazz and gospel and rock’n’roll and rap music—and, because of that music, its victory in the Cold War struggle to dominate the culture of the entire world. It is also to this subset (and their descendants), who became powerhouses once freed, that we owe the American dramatic tradition (theater and film),¹² our ideas about sexual privacy (recent woke-coded repression is a WASP counter-reaction, as is the new Christian-coded chastity movement), and countless other aspects of what is best about day-to-day life in the West.

These high-agency slaves, and the free whites whose respect they won, changed the face of the world. The bonds of slavery slowed them down, but it did not keep them down. Even though slavery was followed by a hundred years of segregation and second-class citizenship, they conquered America’s spirit and helped teach its white majority to love personal freedom as much as they loved political freedom.

But, alas, many of those freed died still wishing for the return of slavery, and the freedom from worry and the guarantee of stability it provided.

The slaves in the American South enjoyed their strange kind of freedom because of the threat they posed to their masters.

When freed, they still posed a threat. They were forced into re-education during Reconstruction to eliminate their love of personal freedom, and turn them into obedient employees. But after a hundred years, their spirits had yet to be crushed and integrated into the Machine. They were finally subdued with welfare, drugs, willfully degraded public education, and public housing—a return to the kind of dependency their ancestors once knew, but without the solid community bonds or mutual solidarity that made such a life bearable.

They kept one consolation, though: resentment. The hatred of the white man who kept them down. A kind of hatred that defeats motivation, that saps vitality, and that revels in despair.

White men were the backbone of the Machine, already part of the equation, but they too were dangerous. Energetic, disruptive, prone to inventing, adapting, and enhancing whole swaths of new technologies (such as airplanes,¹³ rocket ships,¹⁴ and user-friendly personal computers¹⁵) in their back yards and garages. Prone to collaborating with the disruptive black influence and bringing it into their music (rock’n’roll), their movies, and their military friendships. Prone to turning over the tables when the game is rigged against them. Believing that they have a right to have a shot at becoming the next world-famous whatever.

But what if you peel away those career opportunities, a piece at a time, over the course of a few generations. If you dangle Universal Basic Income in front of them. If you keep them distracted from developing their agency and power in their young-and-vital years with video games and cell phones and internet time. If you make it expensive for them to acquire transportation, and punish their parents for letting them socialize. If you convince them that women hate them, so they shouldn’t even try to to learn the arts of conversation and seduction. If you convince them that rejection is proof that they’re worthless. If you throw their inventors in prison and their activists in jail. What if you do all this while letting their violent criminals go free (but less often than you let minority violent criminals go free—you must keep that racial animus well-stoked, after all)…

Well, as long as you’ve kept these young men illiterate and ignorant, the worst they can do is shoot up the occasional school, or burn down the occasional city block. And, let’s be honest…who really cares about that? At least they’re not doing anything that might change the system or disrupt your position.

Playing To Win

So you’ve been male’d, or white-male’d, out of the career you want.

Join the club. There are a lot of us out there. There will be a lot more before the current situation changes.

You want justice? You want revenge? You want a revolution?

I get it.

But the hell of it all is, time does not stand still for grievances. You have only a few precious decades of vitality on this Earth, and they’re ticking by while you read news stories, and get angry, and contemplate getting revenge, and go play video games, and maybe go to a protest or a riot if you’ve got one available.

The kinds of barriers that have been put in your way are unjust and unfair and criminal (literally), as well as an offense to decency.

But they are something else as well:

A selection pressure.

If you let them stop you, if you don’t find a way around or over or through the barriers, or a path away from them to a new and underpopulated part of the economy and the social world, then the people who have waged war on you and your gender for generations, and on your ethnicity for a little-less-long than that, are going to win.

They will have taken you out of the game. Another troublesome, energetic young man, gone the way of the dodo.

You will leave no legacy. You will not have a life you enjoy. You will have the freedoms of neither the Yankee worker, nor the Southern slave. You will lose your life, a minute at a time, to the games, and the feeds, and the overdose of inadequate substitute pleasures (cheap beer, cheap porn, cheap food, and bad art).

You have been victimized. You had no choice in that.

But are you a victim?

That is entirely your choice.

And choosing not to be a victim is as simple, and as difficult, as finding ways to make every minute of your life count.

Take the risk to make friends in real life. Talk on the phone with distant friends, instead of over text.

Pick a craft, or an art (or a few), and get good at it. Do it for yourself—eventually, you’ll have something worth showing off. Maybe even something people will pay you for.

Pick a profession where being a man doesn’t count against you—or pick one where it does, and take up the fight joyfully.

Educate yourself. Read old books—especially fiction and history.

Study how people think, and feel, and desire, so you can know what to expect from them, and how to connect with them.

Learn how the world works (money, mechanics, politics, power, personal savvy) so that you can find opportunities that others have missed.

I can’t promise you’ll be a celebrity, or a top-man, or even a roaring success.

But I can promise you this:

Your life will be your own.

And, in a world where everyone is a slave, that kind of freedom is priceless…even though it’s hard.

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If you enjoyed this post, you may also want to check out my Unfolding the World series, a history of the current geopolitical storm rocking our world, its roots, and its possible outcomes.

When not haunting your Substack client, I write novels, literary studies, and how-to books. You can find everything currently in print here, and if you’re feeling adventurous click here to find a ridiculous number of fiction and nonfiction podcasts for which I will eventually have to accept responsibility.

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1. Douglas was both an extraordinary individual, and an activist. Because of the polemical intent of his works, there has been a lot of dispute among historians over the last century about how trustworthy his accounts are. I have not the qualifications to render a verdict on this issue—to me it seems that there’s nothing obviously unbelievable in his accounts, but it is also clear that his accounts are not universally representative of the slave’s experience—read on for an explanation.

2. The WPA was make-work program to create employment during the Great Depression. Most of what it did was pretty useless and deliberately inefficient, created little of lasting value, and did not help to end the Depression. This program, however, managed to create something of genuine lasting value—an historical archive of unheard voices in American history that contains a great deal of material that is a shock to modern sensibilities where slavery is concerned.

3. This doesn’t count the instance of marital rape, a category which didn’t legally exist at the time and wasn’t a universally established legal category in the United States until the 1990s.

4. Russell cites statistical sources and legal precedent for these claims in his A Renegade History of the United States.

5. I had the misfortune of working at Pac Bell in the early 00s. By that time, Dilbert was no longer satire—it was documentary characterized by understatement.
By the way, by the mid-1990s, Dilbert was the most popular comic on the planet.

6. Contrary to what you might have heard from certain self-styled “reactionary feminists,” mid-century feminist movement was not, itself, astroturfed. It was a genuine grass-roots movement based on some serious, valid grievances. I discuss some of those, and the context in which they arose, in this article:

The Seeds of Destruction, Part 1

7. They did this at a time when the economy could barely hope to grow fast enough to accommodate the projected doubling of new workers that would have happened had the Baby Boomer employment workforce entry had followed the same pattern as the Silent Generation. The labor supply boom in the workforce coincided with a sharp drop in wages, and the transition to near-universal two-parent working households (and also upped the divorce rate due to the financial and familial stresses that resulted).

8. If you’re not familiar with The Machine, I explain what it is, how it works, and how it came to be in this article:

Green Grass Oppression

9. For more on the mechanics of the Counter-gang strategy, see Caleb T. Maupin’s book on the subject. The TL:DR is that it’s a much more sophisticated version of the divide-and-conquer strategy employed by the British in India and other colonial holdings in the 18th-19th century, and by the Spanish in Central and South America before them, and by the Romans before them. An early use of this modern version was employed during the Russian Revolution, where British, Russian, German, and American interests all financed various counter-gangs, the end result of which was the elevation of a minority radical party (the Bolsheviks) to power over the other factions, all of whom were more numerous and most of whom were far more competent and politically realistic, because those larger factions devoted the bulk of their energy to fighting one another to exhaustion. The founding of the USSR was the result.

10. A classic example of this from the era is abortion-on-demand. Then, as now, most of the public agreed that abortion should be legal early in the pregnancy, and increasingly restricted later on as the fetus develops. Then, as now, most of the public agreed that sex, medicine, and reproduction should be private matters, not the business of the State. By going with universally-legal-and-protected-abortion-until-birth instead of a scheme closer to the public consensus (which would have matched the legal regime in most Western European countries in the late 20th/early 21st centuries), the powers that be guaranteed a perpetual cultural battleground that could be endlessly exploited for electoral energy and donations while completely defanging the threat to entrenched interests for the following generation or two.

It worked.

11. Yes, a lot of these activists were also terrorists.

12. Also important to the development of this tradition were Applachian Borderers and American Jews.

13. The Wright Brothers

14. Jack Parsons

15. Synthesized by Steve Wozniak based on design ideas stolen from Xerox, using off-the-shelf electronics hardware.