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About this Episode
Dan is back with another solo episode, taking excerpts from his substack, https://danhollaway.substack.com/
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Transcript
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Let's go.
Welcome to Citizens.
We're going to talk about something very important today.
Very important to me, to you, to our civilization.
We're going to talk about fathers and sons,
because this is the relationship that
sustains a civilization.
It is the epicenter for all human interaction,
the transference of knowledge and responsibility
for one generation to the next happens in that relationship.
And through a combination of nefarious foreign
factors and our own incompetence,
we've allowed this relationship to dwindle, to diminish
and for its impact on society to lose what it once had.
And I'm going to share a story for my personal life
as well that was very meaningful for me.
And it really, despite all the work I do,
and all the research and discussions,
and interviews, and all this stuff,
there was something about it that made it real in a way
that I didn't expect, I guess.
So today, we're going to talk about something
that's both deeply personal and profoundly
civilizational.
This relationship between fathers and sons
and not masculinity and the cartoon version people
argue about online and not the culture
or caricatures that dominate social media.
I mean real masculinity, the kind that
quietly sustains a society, the kind that repairs roofs,
leads patrols, raises children, buries friends,
and keeps moving anyway.
It's the kind that does not announce itself,
but shows up every day, consistently in responsibility,
carried without complaint.
Unless you're in the infantry, then you complain
the whole time.
That's part of it.
We'll do whatever you want us to do,
but we're going to complain and smoke
and throw shit at each other the whole time, just so you know,
that's the deal.
For most of human history, civilization
is dependent on men, willing to shoulder burdens,
whether they be physical, moral, or generational.
They built roads and homes, they defended borders,
they kept promises.
They taught their sons how to do the same.
They planted trees under which the shade they would never
sit.
Strength was not about domination.
It was about service.
It was about being the man others could depend on when
something heavy needed carrying.
Right now, across much of the Western world,
that process is breaking down.
The formation of men, how to grow boys
into responsible adults, is faltering
or being ignored entirely.
And when that formation weakens, the effects ripple.
They ripple outward onto families and communities
and institutions and permeate through our entire civilization
and our civilization begins to crumble.
And to understand why this matters,
we have to start somewhere.
We have to look into why that relationship
has to some degree evaporated.
Why we're not prioritizing it.
Things like that, I think we'll start with my story,
which is a moment over the phone, actually.
So not long ago, I got a phone call from Candace
that it'll be hard to forget it, to be honest.
It's etched into my memory at this point.
I'll remember it for the rest of my life.
It wasn't dramatic or anything.
Nothing catastrophic had happened.
It was just an ordinary moment and an ordinary day.
The kind most people would overlook.
Sometimes those moments reveal the most.
She and the boys had just gotten back from the grocery store.
And I could picture the scene because they're a handful.
They're really just a couple of characters.
Because I've lived it a hundred times.
The car door was closed, shuffled of bags
being gathered from the trunk, iPads, candy, whatever.
One of the little one likes to run around the back
of the house for some reason
and to let himself into the back door.
The quiet calculation of how many you can carry in one trip
is always something that I as a man think about.
It is shameful to make two trips from the car
after grocery shopping, but I wasn't there.
And she's a woman, tiny little lady.
So she had both hands full
and she started walking up the driveway toward the house.
And before she made it halfway up the driveway,
the oldest boy walked up beside her
and without ceremony, without being asked.
He reached up and took the heavier bags out of her hands.
And of course she asked him what he was doing
because he's a little character.
And he answered with the calm certainty
that children sometimes have when they say something
that feels less like an opinion and more like a law of nature,
like they're just observing something.
And he said, men carry heavy things, mama.
I wasn't there to see it, but I could picture it perfectly.
I could see him standing a little taller when he said it.
I could hear the quiet seriousness in his voice.
And when she told me what had happened,
something clicked in my mind that I had felt before
but I don't know if I ever really articulated it
in my personal life.
He wasn't repeating something that I had told him.
I'd never specifically sat him down
to give him a speech about what men do.
I had delivered a lecture about responsibility
or strength or manhood.
He was just repeating something that he had watched
over and over again.
Over time he had noticed a pattern.
When something heavy needed carrying, I picked it up.
When a door needed opening, I opened it.
When something broke around the house, I tried to fix it.
When his mother spoke, I actually listened.
When she needed help, I stepped forward,
anything she needed, right?
None of this performative or theatrical,
it wasn't announced.
It's just how I behaved, right?
Because that's who I am.
And he had been paying attention.
Children always are.
I knew this institutionally.
I've said it for a long time.
You guys have heard me say it before.
But to see the immediate impact like that
was rewarding for sure, but it was also very educational
for me.
Because long before they asked you questions about manhood,
boys memorize the men around them.
They observe everything, the way you walk into a room,
the tone of your voice, when things go wrong,
the way you handle frustration,
the way you speak to their mother,
the way you keep or break your promises.
They watch you long before they ever trust you.
They study you long before they imitate you.
And eventually, almost without warning,
imitation becomes identity.
One day a boy reaches for the heavier bags
and says something that sounds like a principal older
than he is, not because he read it in a book,
not because someone wrote it on a chalkboard
because he saw it lived in front of him.
Now that quiet transfer from observation to imitation
to identity is how civilizations actually continue.
We like to believe societies are sustained by speeches
and laws and constitutions and institutions
and formal education.
And certainly these things matter, of course they do.
But beneath all of them lies something simpler
and more fundamental.
Father's showing sons how to live.
Not with lectures, but with example.
A boy watches how a man carries his responsibility.
He watches how he handles failure.
Watches whether strength is loud or steady,
whether authority is arrogant or protective,
whether love is something spoken
or something demonstrated through action.
And those lessons,
they will take root slowly over time.
Years later they emerge in moments that no one planned,
like a little boy reaching for grocery bags,
but there's a million other examples.
A quiet statement that sounds like a universal truth.
Men carry heavy things.
But now imagine what happens when that process disappears.
Because today millions of boys are growing up
without that man in the room, without the example,
without the daily demonstration of what responsibility
looks like in practice.
They are left to figure it out on their own,
often by watching other boys who are just as uncertain
and ignorant as they are,
or by absorbing distorted versions of masculinity
from screens and algorithms.
And when that happens something deeper
than individual households begin to change.
Because the formation of men by the process by which boys
learn how to shoulder responsibility,
how to serve others, and how to carry weight.
It's not just a private family matter.
Excuse me, it's civilizational infrastructure.
This is the foundation on which our society is built.
And without strong men, we can't sustain it.
Without them, we can't build it more,
or again, if we need to.
And there's only one way to make them.
And that is through the transference of knowledge
and identity.
And that is all of our job, whether you're a father or not,
whether you're responsible for children or not,
in your day-to-day life, the way you behave,
what you accept from other men,
all of these things really matter.
And when that weakens, the consequences don't stake and find
to one house or one neighborhood.
I mean, there are some obvious examples
like enter cities with low-father involvement
leading to crime.
But we see it throughout our culture as well.
It's not just about the,
it's not just about enter city kids
who are growing up in fatherless homes.
It's about the lack of nail strength
permeating our society now.
And all the stupid shit that's happened
as a result of that.
Right now, those principles are appearing,
or those ripples rather are appearing everywhere.
We've talked about this many times before,
the crisis that's facing boys in the West,
especially in America right now.
Let's talk about the numbers for a moment,
because the challenges facing boys and men today
are often discussed as if they are just ideological arguments
or positions taken in a cultural debate.
But when you step back and look carefully,
the picture that emerges is not ideological,
it's measurable.
You can start with education.
Across the United States,
boys are falling behind its school.
And the trend has been developing for decades.
According to the National Center for Education Statistics,
women now earn roughly 60% of all college degrees in the US.
That gap's not only significant,
but it's on the rise, still widening.
But the story doesn't begin in college,
but the time young men arrive on a university campus,
the trajectory has already been set for them.
The pattern begins much earlier often in elementary school,
boys fall behind reading.
They are disciplined more frequently than girls are
for their behavior.
They have more energy typically,
because I don't know if you know this,
but a toddler, young boy, their testosterone levels
are like 1,300.
They have a lot of energy.
They're more likely to be suspended,
more likely to struggle with attention
and traditional classroom environments over time.
Many began to disengage from the system altogether.
By high school, the gap is visible in graduation rates.
By college, it's unmistakable.
Now, obviously, none of this means
that boys are less intelligent than girls.
The explanation is both lazy and unsupported by any evidence.
What research increasingly suggests
is something simpler and more complicated at the same time.
Boys and girls often develop quite differently.
Boys tend to benefit from environments that allow
for movement, competition, experimentation,
a lot of hands-on engagement.
Many of them learn best
when they can interact physically with the material
in front of them, building something
or solving a concrete problem,
testing themselves against a challenge,
like linking Douglas debates or model you in, stuff like that.
If you're going to teach civics, teach it in an environment
where they have to apply civics to something.
Otherwise, the young man is never going to learn it.
Same thing with math, same thing with chemistry.
Yet over the past several decades,
many educational environments have gradually
moved in the opposite direction.
Classrooms have become more sedentary,
more standardized, and less tolerant of physical energy.
And as a result of this, we just give them
adderol gas.
Competition is discouraged.
Risk is minimize ordering quite compliance, our reward.
We've talked about this before about what
does it mean to be a good student?
It means that you're quiet and you do your work.
And you don't have too much energy,
and you don't disrupt.
But all of these things are things you need to do.
To be successful in life, especially as a man.
And the result is predictable.
Many boys disengage, not because they
are incapable of learning, but because structure around them
no longer aligns with the way they tend to develop.
Education has always been very feminized.
But definitely in the last 100 years,
I mean, it's been pretty rough for young men.
And education, of course, is only one part of the picture.
The economic story tells another part
of this, according to data from the Federal Reserve Bank
of St. Louis.
Inflation-adjusted wages for men have stagnated
or declined relative to what men earned in 1979.
That statistic is startling when you stop
to consider its implications.
For much of modern history, each generation of men
could reasonably expect their academic prospects
to improve over time.
The latter was imperfect, but it was visible.
For many young men today, the latter feels far less stable.
This matters because, for most of human history,
male identity has been tied closely
to responsibility, not for domination or privilege,
but responsibility to provide for someone else, for a family,
providing for a family, protecting a household,
building and maintaining the physical and social structures
that make community possible.
Those roles gave men direction.
They provided framework for adulthood.
A young man knew what he was working toward.
When the pathway to those responsibilities
becomes clear, when economic participation
becomes uncertain or delayed, the sense of identity
attached to those roles can also weaken.
And we're seeing this in real time.
Without responsibility, purpose becomes much harder to define.
And when purpose becomes difficult to see,
something darker can begin to emerge.
Something much darker can begin to emerge.
And a big part of it is identity and the things
that have been taken away from young men.
Thank you.
We are in a constant search for our own identity as men.
It is a biological imperative that ensures
that we do the best for our community.
And if you don't give young men Captain America
and Ted Williams and these great stories
of heroic men, soldiers.
If you don't give them these alpha-type dudes
around which to base their identity,
then you will get people who follow Nick Fuentes
in Andrew Tate and Tucker fucking Carlson,
shrieking women with no testosterone in their body.
That's what you'll get.
And because that is so disjointed biologically,
you get the darkest of all consequences, which is suicide.
According to the NIMH, the National Institute of Mental Health,
the suicide rate among men and the United States
is approximately four times higher than the rate among women,
four times higher.
It is a number so stark that it almost becomes abstract,
but behind every number is a life that ended too soon.
A son, a father, a brother, or a friend.
And I'm sure many of you have one of those
that you've lost.
It's in my friend group, my military friend group.
It's over two dozen now.
In recent years, economists and sociologists have again,
using a phrase to describe the pattern,
they see emerging across many developed society
and it's called deaths of despair.
The phrase refers to rising rates of suicide
and substance abuse and other forms of self-destructive behavior
that appear most often among individuals
who feel disconnected from stable work,
from family formation and from community life.
But despair does not appear spontaneously.
It grows in the absence of meaning.
It grows when individuals feel unneeded
when they cannot see a clear place for themselves
in the world around them.
It is not a solution to relieve these people
of the stress of their life.
No, you put weight on them.
That is how you solve that problem.
And historically, one of the primary ways boys learn
where they fit in the world,
where they learn what it meant to care responsibility
and contribute to something larger than themselves,
was through the example of the men who raised them.
They see that man's sacrifice for them,
for their mother, specifically.
And they learn the importance of it.
And they take it on as their identity.
Purpose was not something they discovered alone
in a vacuum, it was something they watched being lived.
Which brings us to one of the most important modern thinkers
in my opinion on this issue.
And that's Dr. Warren Forell.
He's been on, he was on this show
and it was still called a American Party back of the day.
Warren Forell wrote the book, The Boy Crisis.
He's actually working on a book now called The Man Crisis.
Hopefully it'll be out sometime soon
because I can't wait to read it.
But Warren wrote, he spent decades studying male development,
fatherhood, the challenges facing boys
in modern society.
In his book The Boy Crisis presents a clear
and compelling argument.
The struggles many boys face today are not the result
of some sudden weakness in their character.
Rather, they stem from the gradual erosion
of the institutions and structures that once helped guide boys
into adulthood.
For most of human history boys grew up
with relatively clear pathways in the manhood.
Those pathways were not always easy, certainly not,
but they were understandable.
You could plan for them, you could train for them
and you could accomplish them.
A boy became a man by taking on responsibility,
by working, contributing to his community,
by forming a family of his own, work, marriage,
fatherhood and service were all milestones
that marked a transition from adolescence in the manhood.
And today, many of those pathways
have become delayed or uncertain or difficult
to reach, sometimes impossible, economic instability,
cultural confusion about masculinity
and the weakening of traditional family structures
have made the transition into adulthood
far less clear for many young men.
Without visible markers of progress or responsibilities,
boys often find themselves drifting longer
in kind of an extended adolescence.
The immature masculine, it's cold.
And the immature masculine is me, me, me, me.
My power is for me, stuff's happening to me,
all of this narcissistic nonsense,
but that's not what masculinity is.
Warren, Dr. Farrell, highlights another factor
that's just as important, the unique role fathers
tend to play in child development.
Fathers often parent differently than mothers,
not better, just differently.
And in a way that's complementary.
Where mothers frequently emphasize protection
and emotional security, fathers are more likely
to introduce elements of risk and competition
and boundaries and challenge.
Just by being meant, this isn't something you program for.
It's just be a dude in front of your male children
and they'll do dude stuff.
They rough house with their children,
they push them to try again after failure.
They see things like get back up
and the child falls down.
These interactions may seem small or even playful,
but they serve a very crucial developmental function.
Through challenge, boys learn resilience.
They learn how to regulate aggression,
rather than suppress it, which is a mistake.
Suppressing it is a mistake.
And that's what we teach young men
that masculinity is something to be solved,
just nonsense.
They learn how to compete without destroying relationships.
And the two little ones, brothers,
they're separated by two years, two and a half,
something like that.
They play and they fight all the time.
And I'll referee when necessary,
but mostly I just let them do it.
And it's good for them.
You can see it's good for them
because they learn how to have a conflict,
settle the conflict in a reasonable way
and then carry on with whatever they were doing,
usually playing.
Most importantly, they learn how to fail
and then recover from failure.
Frel describes this style of parenting as love with rules.
It combines affection with expectations,
care with accountability.
And in a large way, it's the way that we train soldiers.
If you're just barking at your soldier all the time,
you're gonna get some effort out of them,
but not the same kind of effort you're gonna get.
If you explain to them why you're being tough on them
and give them a specific goal to reach
and then also reward them when they hit that goal.
When all that structure disappears,
many boys struggle to develop the confidence, discipline,
and emotional regulation that adulthood requires.
At this point, I think it's worth addressing something
directly because much of the modern conversation
about masculinity is deeply confused.
In many public discussions,
masculinity is treating, as I mentioned,
as a problem to be solved.
As if it were simply a collection of destructive impulses
that must be restrained or apologized for,
but that framing misunderstands
what masculinity actually is.
Masculine is not aggression or cruelty or domination.
Those things are distortions of strength,
not expressions of it.
Masculine properly understood
is discipline strength placed in the service of others.
So I've mentioned many times,
every meaningful thing you do in your life
will be in the service of other people.
It is the firefighter running toward a burning building
while everyone else is running away.
It's the soldier standing watch through the night
so people back home can sleep peacefully.
It's the father working long hours sometimes
multiple jobs because there are mouths of feet
and responsibilities that cannot be ignored.
These are not acts of domination.
They're acts of service.
They represent strength that has been shaped
by duty, restraint, and responsibility.
Not suppressed, shaped.
It's not the same thing.
Throughout history, societies have depended
on this kind of masculine energy.
Every civilization carries burdens
that must be born if it is to endure.
There are physical burdens, the building and maintenance
of infrastructure, the protection of communities,
the labor required to create and sustain prosperity.
There are economic burdens.
The steady work of producing and providing
and ensuring stability for future generations
and there are moral burdens as well.
The willingness to step forward and say
something difficult
or to step forward when something dangerous must be done.
Someone has to carry those burdens.
Historically, men have volunteered for that role,
not because they were forced into it, by the way,
but because cultures taught them
that strength exists for a purpose.
Strength is not simply a personal advantage,
it's a responsibility.
When masculinity is healthy,
it channels energy toward protection,
provision and service.
It asks men to shoulder weight so that others can flourish.
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Every stable civilization in history has relied
on that willingness to carry heavy things.
Now, I talk a lot about Aristotle
to understand why the formation of boys matter so deeply.
We got to step back into history a little bit,
far back into ancient Greece.
More than 2000 years ago,
Aristotle wrote a work that still shapes
how we think about ethics and character today.
The Nakameki and Ethics, it's a good book.
And I butcher the pronunciation all the time.
I pull a ross on that one,
but you're just gonna have to figure it out.
In the book, Aristotle makes a simple
but profound observation about human nature.
Virtue is not something we are born with.
It's something that we acquire.
In other words, character is learned.
Aristotle argued that the qualities we admire
most, courage and discipline and temperance
and responsibility don't just appear automatically
as a person grows older.
They're cultivated through practice.
A person becomes brave by acting bravely.
He becomes disciplined by practicing restraint.
He becomes responsibility by taking on responsibilities
and learning to carry them well.
I've said this many times as well.
The more you do the right thing, the easier it gets.
And the more you do the wrong thing, the easier it gets.
Virtue and Aristotle's view develops through habit.
It is a muscle or a reflex.
Or a muscle, not a reflex, excuse me.
But habits do not form an isolation.
Children learn how to behave
by observing the people around them.
Long before they can articulate,
moral principles or philosophical ideas,
they are watching the adults in their lives
and absorbing patterns of behavior.
I'm sure you've witnessed this.
Whether you have kids or not, you've seen this.
They see how problems are handled.
They see how anger is expressed or controlled.
They see how promises are kept or broken.
And I'm telling you,
lashing out angrily or rage around kids does them harm.
But it does them harm as well to suppress your anger
and not express it in a way that they can see
because they can feel it energetically.
They can feel your anger.
And if they see you just tamping it down
and not addressing it ever,
that's exactly what they're going to do, too.
Now, slowly through repetition and imitation,
those patterns become part of their own character.
And for most of human history,
father served as some of the most important models
in this process.
A boy watched how his father approached work.
He observed how he responded to the conflict
and his life,
he saw how responsibilities were handled
and how obligations to family community were honored.
I would imagine that if you look in your own life,
you will see things good about yourself
that you've gleaned from your father
or the men in your life or bad habits either way,
maybe both.
Those daily examples formed an unwritten curriculum
in manhood.
And when you remove that model
and character formation just becomes far more difficult
without visible examples of disciplined responsibility,
boys are left to construct their understanding
of adulthood on their own.
And they're going to find examples of it
and distorted media realities.
It's just not real.
Aristotle recognized this dynamic more than two millennia ago.
And today, modern psychology is rediscovering the same truth.
Character grows through example and imitation and practice.
Now, the Romans took the idea from theory
about reason and logic and they applied it to the law,
which is usually the, no matter where you're tracing,
or what subject you're tracing from Greeks to Romans
and then into Hebrew and Christian later,
you're going to find the same pattern,
logic and reason, and then application and law.
In this case, it was Roman masculinity and civic duty.
The Romans took these ideas about character responsibility further.
Roman culture was built around a central ideal known as vertus.
The word is often translated and simply as virtue,
but in the Roman world it carried a much richer meaning.
Vertus combined courage, strength, honor, discipline,
and loyalty to the republic.
SPQR is the official sign of the Roman legion.
It described the qualities expected of a man
who understood that his life was tied to the well-being
of the community around him,
not by force, but by honor.
Roman fathers are responsible for teaching their sons
how to embody these Roman virtues.
This instruction did not occur primarily through lectures
or abstract philosophy.
It happened through discipline and apprenticeship
and daily example.
A Roman boy grew up watching how his father lived.
He observed him participating in public life
fulfilling obligations to his family
and contributing to the stability of the broader society.
He might watch his father prepare for military service
where courage and endurance were demanded not as ideals
but as necessities.
He would see him participate in civic leadership,
attending assemblies,
debating public matters or fulfilling duties tied
to the governance of the republic.
And within the home he would witness the steady work
of maintaining and providing for the family.
Now in Roman culture,
masculinity was inseparable from service.
They were one in the same thing.
A man's strength was not measured only by his physical attributes
but by his willingness to place those abilities
and service of something larger than himself.
Think about this in a time where
might makes right in most parts of the world
was the standard.
In Rome, you could be
a smaller guy, let's say,
and still be powerful and well respected
because of your virtue.
The Roman term pattern familiar is often translated
as father of the household reflected this understanding.
The father was not merely the head of a private family unit.
He was the public representative of that family
within the wider community.
His conduct carried social weight.
His decisions reflected on those who shared his name.
As a result,
Roman sons grew up constantly observing men
who were visibly responsible
for the well-being of others.
Through that observation,
they learned what it meant to carry,
weight themselves.
And I've mentioned this before a few times but
when we were a society
that was generational,
you would borrow honor from the past.
My last name is this.
That means my family did this.
And then you live your life in a way
that your ancestors can,
or that your descendants rather can borrow honor from you.
It was a transference
of identity and honor through the generations.
Now,
jump forward to the 19th century,
young republic in the United States,
when Alex Detokville traveled to the United States
in the 1830s, he came
with a simple but urgent question.
Why was this young democratic republic
working when so many others had failed?
Keep in mind,
and by the 1830s,
we were 40, 50 years in
to a constitutional republic
that used democracy to elect leaders.
And
the average democracy,
sorry, the average constitutional republic
at that time,
and even today,
lasted no more than 20 years.
So we were thriving
in a system that so many others had failed at.
European observers often assume
the answer must lie in America's political institutions.
The constitution,
the elections,
the formal structure of its government,
all this stuff.
But Tokville,
he noticed something deeper.
The strength of American,
the American republic did not begin
in Washington and began in the home.
And it is,
I guess you could say that
it's because of the way
we set up our government
for power to rise
from the bottom upward.
But that only works
if there is power at the bottom.
And it's exercised appropriately.
And it begins in the home.
And democracy in America,
Tokville argued
that the habits required for a free society
are learned long before a person ever votes
or participates in politics.
They're formed through the daily patterns
of family life.
Children watch how their parents care responsibility.
They see how disagreements are handled.
They observe restraint
and moments of frustration
and sacrifice
in moments when duty calls.
These observations slowly shape
that young person's character.
A child who grows up
seeing responsibility honored
and promises kept
learns to take obligation seriously.
A child who sees discipline practice
in ordinary life learns
that freedom requires self-government
and self-control.
Over time,
these habits produce citizens,
capable of governing themselves
instead of subjects.
For Tokville,
this was the true foundation
of the American republic.
Laws and constitutions
mattered for sure,
but they could not
sustain liberty on their own.
And we're seeing that now.
A free society
depends on people who have learned
through experience
how to exercise freedom responsibly,
which is why Tokville believed strong families
were essential to the survival
of a democratic government
in our constitutional republic.
Without those formative institutions,
without homes where responsibility
and restraint and duty are modeled,
democracy begins to erode,
and the republic fades.
When the habits of self-government
disappear, societies tend to drift
toward one of two outcomes,
either chaos or authoritarian control.
Now we arrive at
Teddy Roosevelt,
Theodore Roosevelt,
a man who spoke about masculinity
and responsibility
with a clarity
that still resonates today's often quoted.
Roosevelt worried
about a danger that in hindsight
seems almost prophetic.
As the U.S. grew wealthier
and more comfortable at the turn of the 20th century,
he feared that modern society might begin
producing men who had never been tested,
men raised in ease,
men who had never faced hardship
or carried real responsibility.
In his famous speech,
The Strenuous Life,
Roosevelt warned that
civilizations do not decline simply
because they face external threats.
More often, they weaken from within
when their citizens begin to prefer
comfort over duty.
And I would say also prefer
empathy over
standard.
He argued that young men needed
challenge.
They needed difficulty.
They needed responsibility and trial,
not because suffering was something to celebrate,
and character reports through effort,
through strength,
whether physical, moral
or intellectual,
does not develop in a vacuum.
It grows when people are asked to meet demands
that are greater than themselves.
Roosevelt believed in the society
that shields its young men
from challenge
eventually undermines its own stability.
And we're seeing that happen
in real time right now.
It appears so does the opportunity to
develop courage and resilience.
When responsibilities avoided,
discipline goes away.
Over time, the habits that once produced capable
citizens begin to fade
and we produce subjects once again,
which is completely un-American.
His concern was not merely
personal, it was civic.
A republic, he believed,
depended on men who were willing to shoulder burdens,
to step forward when something
and to accept responsibility
for outcomes that affected others.
In Roosevelt's view,
comfort could be enjoyed,
but it could not be the organizing principle
of a civilization.
If ease became the highest goal,
strength would slowly seed.
And then, of course,
we get invaded by people
who still value strength.
More than a century later,
Roosevelt's warnings feel remarkably relevant.
Looking around today,
it's a wonder, whether the challenges he feared,
an adversion to responsibility,
a preference for comfort,
and a reluctance to carry weight,
have become increasingly
the standard in America,
not just in America,
but all over the West.
So let's talk about the modern world.
Many of the institutions
that once helped guide boys
into manhood have weakened
or disappeared altogether.
I mean, I see the, uh,
the scouts of America
that which used to be the boy scouts
of America, by the way, are teaching
how to be observant for Islam,
and they have an Islamophobia badge
or some shit now,
get the fuck out of here.
And for most of human history,
a path from boyhood
to adulthood was shaped by relationships,
responsibilities, and expectations.
Fathers and extended family members, mentors,
tradesmen, community leaders,
football coaches, whatever.
Play the role in showing young men
what adulthood looked like.
In practice, boys did not have to invent
their understanding of manhood from scratch
and they didn't have to go on the fucking internet to find it.
They could just see it lived around them.
Today, that looks very different.
Fatherlessness has become increasingly common.
Millions of boys grow up
with our consistent paternal presence
or mentorship.
The daily example that once helped boys
understand responsibility, restraint,
and service is often absent.
So you can think of it as your
personal patriotic duty
to if you know of a young man,
young boy around you who is absent that
to give it to him,
however you can.
At the same time, the modern world has introduced new forms
of isolation. Many young men
now spend large portions of the lives
of physical communities.
Social media, gaming platforms,
and algorithm driven feeds
shape how they understand the world
and then, of course, themselves.
In many cases, boys learn about manhood,
not from experience adults,
but from internet idiots,
viral clips and influencers who clearly
do not understand the responsibilities
they're talking about.
When guidance comes from peers,
it often comes from other young men
who are navigating the same confusion
and that result is predictable.
Many young men feel uncertain
about who they were supposed to become.
Some withdraw from social life
entirely, retreating into isolation
and distraction.
Others search for identity and movements
or ideologies that promise clarity
but offer a little genuine
responsibility for growth.
It's mostly just rage
and grievance politics.
Modernism and post-liberalism.
None of this should surprise us.
Human development has not fundamentally changed
even if our technology has.
Boys still learn who they are
by observing the men around them.
They build confidence by watching
competence in action.
They still develop discipline
by seeing responsibility carried well.
In the end, the principle
remains simple.
Boys need men
worth imitating.
This is where public policy
begins to enter the conversation.
We'll have another discussion
about this with Phil LaBonte
next week as he's involved in this.
But the cultural challenges
facing boys and men
cannot be solved by government alone.
Or at all this degree.
But policy can play a role
in recognizing the problem
and coordinating a meeting for response.
One proposal.
Currently under discussion
that has been presented now
as a bill is the establishment
of a White House council and fathers and sons.
It's an interagency effort
designed to focus attention on a well-being
and development of boys and men
in the United States.
The goal is not
ideological advocacy.
It's coordination.
So many federal programs already exist
that touch on education
and stability and workforce
participation and mental health.
But these efforts are often fragmented
across agencies that don't work
with each other.
They don't talk.
Dedicated council could bring those perspectives
into a conversation
that allow policy makers
and other people on the board.
People like Warren Forell,
myself,
you know,
new father Phil LaBonte
to better understand
how policies affect boys' fathers
and families as a whole.
If government is going to do
anything, we need it to
defend us
and promote families.
Whatever that means.
When some of the obvious downstream things
are lowering taxes and making housing
affordable again.
But just in general,
I think the upstream conversation
is about benefiting families.
So we'll bring together representatives
from across government society.
Cabinet-level agencies could collaborate
with scholars from academia.
Should they have good information on it?
Warren certainly does.
He's one of the foremost experts in this.
Leaders from nonprofit organizations
who are already doing this work on a smaller level
but want to scale it up.
And voices from the private sector,
like you all,
who work directly with families and communities,
are part of them.
It's mission could include
strengthening father,
involvement in families,
improving educational and economic outcomes
for boys, addressing the growing crisis
and male mental health,
and supporting mentorship programs
that connect young men
with responsible adult male role models.
That's they don't have.
So this is especially important for
our kids to grow up in fatherless homes.
And it is our responsibility to solve that issue.
It is worth noting
that previous administrations have established
while White House councils focused on the advancement
of women and girls, obviously.
Those efforts reflected a recognition
that certain social challenges benefit
from coordinated attention
at the national level.
What has never existed, however, is an equivalent body
focused specifically on the well-being
and development of men and boys.
Creating one would not diminish
the importance of any other initiative.
It's simply acknowledges.
Something that should be obvious.
Another of any society depends on the
healthy development of men
period.
Public policy can certainly play a role
in addressing these challenges
that are facing men and boys,
but it cannot carry the entire burden.
Laws and programs can create support structures,
but they cannot substitute
for the cultural foundation of the shape
how people actually live.
Real change ultimately depends on cultural renewal.
At the center of that renewal,
must be a restored respect for fatherhood.
And if you want it to be respected,
you treat it with respect.
For several decades,
conversations about masculinity have often
been framed in extremes, either celebrating
exaggerated, performative versions of manhood
or rejecting masculinity altogether
as something inherently problematic.
Neither approach helps boys
grow into responsible adults.
What boys need is a clear model
of responsible masculinity,
not authoritarian masculinity rooted
in control or dominance,
but the quieter, steadier form of strength
that expresses itself through discipline
and confidence and service to other people.
A responsible man does not measure himself
by how loudly he asserts his authority.
He measures himself by how reliably
he carries responsibility.
Discipline allows a man to govern himself
before attempting to influence others.
Competence gives him the ability
to solve problems rather than create them.
And service reminds him
that strength exists not merely for personal
advantage but for the protection
and well-being of others,
particularly his family and community.
Boys learn these lessons,
less through instruction than through observation.
They watch how they met around them behave,
how they work,
how they respond to adversity,
how they treat the people they love
in the end, what boys need most
are examples worth imitating.
And that's up to you and me.
So let's return to that driveway for a moment.
It's a little boy reaching for grocery bags
at first glance. It's an ordinary scene
that unfolds every day
in quiet neighborhoods across the country.
There's no audience or applause.
There's no sense that anything
particularly historic is happening.
Yet within that small moment
appears.
That moment is how civilization moves forward.
Human societies endure
not only through laws and institutions
but through a generational relay
that takes place inside families and communities.
One generation prepares the next.
Father's teach sons
not always through speeches or instructions
but through the steady example
of how a man lives.
Sons grow up watching those patterns
absorbing them, testing them, and eventually
carrying them forward in their own lives.
The knowledge passes quietly
from one set of shoulders to the next.
And when that relay breaks,
societies begin to drift.
The habits that once form
responsible citizens fade.
The expectations
that once guided young people toward adulthood
become unclear.
Without visible examples
of competence and responsibility,
boys are left to construct
their understanding of manhood alone.
And what you will get
is a bastardization of it,
something less than what it needs to be.
But when the relay works,
something remarkable happens.
A boy watches a man
often without either then realizing
the significance of the moment.
He studies how problems are handled.
How responsibilities are carried.
How strength is expressed without arrogance
and authority without cruelty.
His little body absorbs
the energy of that.
And learns the lesson in years later
he looks back and recognizes
the calm competence he once admired
has become part of his own character.
And then
without ceremony
or any performative bullshit
the process simply begins.
One day he notices
that his own son is watching.
Civilizations rarely endure
through grand declarations
or dramatic turning points.
More often, they persist
through quite acts of example,
repeated across generations.
Whether it's a door
held open, a promise kept
a burden carried
without complaint.
If we want America to remain strong,
let us ensure that boys
once again grow up surrounded
by men whose lives
demonstrate responsibility
and discipline and service.
Not perfection,
but example.
Men worth watching.
Men worth imitating.
Because the truth is simple.
Men carry heavy things.
And civilization is one of them.
Thank you for listening.
See you next time.
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