When Strong Men Create Weak Times

Are we witnessing the beginning of a societal collapse disguised as progress?

I’m not talking about the typical political doom-and-gloom. I’m talking about something far more fundamental, the erosion of the very traits that built civilizations. Work ethic. Personal responsibility. The ability to delay gratification. The understanding that your rights end where someone else’s begin.

We’re now facing a choice that defines whether we remain a nation or descend into tribalism.

I am 45, but I was raised by people born between 1918 and 1938. My grandparents didn’t just raise me, they trained me. On that farm, there were no participation trophies, no safe spaces, no excuses. You worked. You suffered. You learned. By the time I was emancipated at 15, the judge looked at me and said I had the maturity of a 40-year-old man. That wasn’t genetic, it was intentional.

That generation understood something we’ve forgotten, suffering builds character. Struggle creates strength. Adversity teaches you what you’re made of.

They survived the Great Depression, when unemployment hit 25% and people genuinely questioned whether they’d eat that week. They won wars that determined whether this country would even exist. They worked until their hands bled and never once thought they deserved a paycheck for showing up and doing nothing. When my brother had a botched eye surgery that left him permanently damaged, my grandfather refused to sue. “That would be taking money we didn’t earn,” he said. Right or wrong, that was their compass.

Compare that to today. We’ve created a generation, and I’m watching the next one come up even worse, that believes showing up is the same as succeeding. That feelings matter more than facts. That disagreement equals oppression. That personal responsibility is someone else’s job.

We’ve abandoned the moral and ethical frameworks that held society together.

Church attendance has plummeted. In 1950, nearly 70% of Americans attended religious services regularly. Today, it’s below 50% and dropping fast, with the sharpest declines among younger generations. Say what you want about organized religion, but it provided something critical: a shared moral framework. A line in the sand. A set of principles that said “this is right, this is wrong, and it’s not negotiable based on your feelings.”

Gender dysphoria used to be recognized as a mental disorder requiring treatment and compassion. Now we’re told to celebrate it, and if you don’t, you’re a bigot. We’ve gone from rare, tragic abortions to abortion-on-demand up until birth, with over 600,000 performed annually in the U.S. alone, justified with increasingly absurd arguments about what constitutes “life” or “viability.”

The compass is gone. And when people don’t have an internal moral framework, they start making decisions based purely on what feels good in the moment, what satisfies their flesh, their ego, their immediate desires.

Look at the contradictions: Democrats claim to champion equality and generosity, yet San Francisco, one of the wealthiest and most progressive cities on Earth, has over 8,000 homeless people living on its streets. The city’s budget exceeds $14 billion, yet the problem only gets worse. Where’s the tolerance? Where’s the compassion? Or is it only compassion when it doesn’t require personal sacrifice or tough love?

Nobody owns their failures anymore.

Labor force participation has been declining for decades. In 1960, it was over 83% for men. Today, it’s barely 68%. It’s not all retirement, millions of working-age men have simply dropped out. Meanwhile, those who do show up increasingly expect maximum pay for minimum effort.

You didn’t get the job? It’s discrimination, not the fact that you spent high school partying instead of preparing. You’re broke? It’s the system, not the reality that you show up to work and scroll TikTok for six hours while expecting full pay. Your life is a mess? It must be society’s fault, your parents’ fault, your employer’s fault, anyone’s fault but yours.

My generation was taught that if you take on a job, you do it right or you don’t take the money. Now? People demand top dollar for mediocre effort and act offended when you expect results. The “quiet quitting” phenomenon, doing the bare minimum at work, is celebrated as some kind of revolutionary act rather than recognized as the theft of wages it actually is.

This entitlement mentality is everywhere. We have legal immigration processes, but people ignore them for decades and then demand citizenship rights. We have Medicaid, Medicare, food stamps, WIC, church food banks, the Salvation Army, and countless benevolence organizations. Federal welfare spending alone exceeds $1 trillion annually, yet we’re told the country doesn’t care about the poor. We literally have more social safety nets than any society in human history, and still, it’s never enough.

I think gaming culture, and I’m not just talking about video games, has played a role in this. We’ve created a reality where your avatar gets unlimited lives, where you can reset when things go wrong, where effort is optional and rewards are guaranteed. The average young adult spends over 7 hours daily on screens. Then we wonder why young people enter the real world completely unprepared for consequences, for failure, for the reality that nobody owes you anything.

Situational awareness is gone because people have stopped thinking about others. Traffic accidents are up. Pedestrian deaths are at a 40-year high. People walk into traffic staring at phones, oblivious to the two-ton vehicles around them. It’s all about “me”, my pronouns, my feelings, my needs, my rights. The idea of considering the whole of humanity, of respecting boundaries, of understanding that your freedom to swing your fist ends at my nose, it’s vanished.

Here’s another piece. We’ve eliminated suffering without eliminating the need for it.

Drug overdose deaths have exploded from around 17,000 in 1999 to over 100,000 annually today. Fentanyl is everywhere. And our response? Harm reduction. Safe injection sites. Free Narcan distributed like candy. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t want people dying in the streets. But we’ve created a system where you can remain a perpetual addict with minimal consequences.

Previous generations understood that sometimes people need to hit rock bottom before they change. Sometimes suffering is the teacher. Now we’ve medicalized and subsidized every vice, removed every natural consequence, and wonder why people never recover.

Cannabis legalization has led to a situation where the average THC content in marijuana has increased from 4% in 1995 to over 15% today, some concentrates exceed 90%. We’re not talking about hippies smoking joints anymore. We’re talking about serious drug use with serious mental health consequences, particularly in developing brains. But it’s marketed as harmless recreation because “it’s what I want.”

We’ve become so divided in our ideologies that we’re reverting to tribalism. And history tells us what happens next.

Mass shootings have increased dramatically. In the 1970s, there were fewer than 10 active shooter incidents per year. By 2021, that number exceeded 60. This isn’t about gun availability, guns have always been available. My grandfather had guns everywhere on the farm, and it never occurred to us to shoot up a school.

It’s about the erosion of that internal moral compass that says “this is a line I will not cross.” When you remove the framework that defines right and wrong, that creates boundaries around acceptable behavior, you get chaos. When you raise generations without faith, without family structure (41% of children are now born to unmarried mothers), without community ties, without work ethic, without the ability to handle adversity, you get people who see violence as a viable solution to their problems.

When you have 53 million foreign residents, a million green cards annually, and two million illegal entries per year, you’re not creating a melting pot anymore, you’re creating separate communities with separate values, separate languages, separate loyalties. That’s not diversity. That’s the recipe for tribalism.

Previous immigrant waves integrated because there was pressure to integrate. You learned English because you had to. You adopted American values because that was the expectation. Now we celebrate maintaining separate identities, separate languages, separate cultures, and then act surprised when people don’t feel like they’re part of the same nation.

We’re not electing leaders based on character, morals, ethics, or track record anymore. We’re electing based on who we hate the least. That’s not governance, that’s survival mode.

The political divide has become so extreme that we’ve lost the ability to even agree on basic facts. We can’t have rational discussions about policy when one side thinks men can get pregnant and the other side is labeled “fascist” for disagreeing. We can’t address real problems when every issue becomes a tribal marker rather than a solvable challenge.

Congressional approval ratings hover around 20%, yet incumbents win reelection over 90% of the time. We hate the system but can’t figure out how to change it because we’re too busy fighting culture wars to address the structural rot.

Here’s something else we’ve lost, the pursuit of excellence.

Grade inflation is rampant. In 1960, the average GPA was 2.5. Today it’s over 3.1, despite all evidence that students know less. We’ve eliminated academic tracking because it “hurt feelings.” We’ve removed gifted programs in the name of equity. We celebrate mediocrity and punish excellence as somehow unfair to those who didn’t earn it.

The military is struggling to find recruits who can pass basic physical and mental standards. 71% of young Americans don’t qualify for military service due to obesity, lack of education, or criminal records. This is a national security crisis rooted in the reality that we’ve raised a generation that can’t do the bare minimum.

In the trades, we’re facing a massive shortage of skilled workers. The average age of a welder is 55. Plumbers, electricians, HVAC technicians, all aging out with no one to replace them. Why? Because we told an entire generation that manual labor was beneath them, that everyone needs a college degree, that working with your hands isn’t respectable. Now those college graduates are drowning in student debt, working as baristas, while plumbers are making six figures and can’t find apprentices.

Perhaps the most dangerous thing we’ve lost is shame.

Shame used to be a regulating force in society. If you didn’t work, you were ashamed. If you had a child you couldn’t support, you were ashamed. If you took welfare when you could work, you were ashamed. If you did shoddy work, you were ashamed.

Now? We celebrate single motherhood as “brave.” We normalize being on government assistance while refusing work. We post videos of ourselves stealing from stores and call it “reparations.” We’ve removed every social consequence for destructive behavior and then act shocked when that behavior proliferates.

My grandfather would have rather starved than take charity he didn’t need. That wasn’t pride, that was character. He knew that taking what you didn’t earn degraded you as a person. We’ve lost that understanding entirely.

That old saying about hard times creating strong men, and strong men creating good times, and good times creating weak men, and weak men creating hard times? We’re in the “weak men creating hard times” phase. And the hard times are coming whether we like it or not.

The question is: can we reverse course before the collapse is complete?

I don’t have all the answers. But I know this: we need to get back to training people, not just raising them. We need to restore personal responsibility, work ethic, and pride in what we do. We need to stop making excuses and start making sacrifices. We need moral and ethical frameworks that aren’t based on whatever feels good in the moment.

We need to bring back shame for destructive behavior. We need to bring back consequences. We need to bring back the understanding that your actions have results, and you’re responsible for those results.

We need to integrate, not just immigrants, but our entire fractured society. We need common language, common values, common understanding of what it means to be American. Not uniformity of thought, but unity of purpose.

We need to embrace suffering as the teacher it is, rather than medicating and subsidizing every discomfort away. We need to let people fail so they can learn to succeed. We need to demand excellence rather than celebrating participation.

Most of all, we need to be honest about where we are. Not the sanitized, politically correct version, the raw, uncomfortable truth. We’ve failed an entire generation by telling them they’re special without requiring them to become capable. We’ve celebrated tolerance while abandoning standards. We’ve prioritized feelings over function. We’ve created a society where showing up counts as success and where personal responsibility is considered oppressive.

If we don’t correct course soon, Hanson’s warning about tribalism won’t be a hypothetical. It will be our reality. Because once a nation loses the common bonds that hold it together, once it fragments into competing tribes with no shared values or mutual respect, you don’t get diversity, you get civil war.

We’re not there yet, but we’re closer than most people want to admit.