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breakingarrows · 5 years

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Far Cry 5 Review

[This was originally published on VerticalSliceMedia.com in 2018 and is republished from the latest draft I have]

Far Cry 5 Review

I do not like Far Cry 5. My issues with the game are many, and partly already chronicled in my writing about the games endings. My frustrations extend across all aspects from the way you play the game (mindlessly) to the way it presents its fictional cult (vapidly) to the way the game makes the player’s presence known in the world (it doesn't). There is nothing redeeming to be found within the 25 hours I spent in Hope County. The small victories within one-off side quests can’t redeem a game that refuses to engage with anything meaningful or even succeed in hiding its rote systems that have been played out for two games now.

Gameplay Loop

One of the main responses to complaints about the narrative of Far Cry 5 has been to cry, as the Bad End Podcast put it, “the gameplay!” However, even in this regard Far Cry 5 fails.

Each Far Cry game has been about repeating the same series of tasks over an elongated period of time with a drip feed of storylines along the way. Complete main missions and occasionally a named character will appear to spout off some pseudo-intellectual dialogue. Complete side missions and you’ll interact with the zany characters that are meant to entertain you with their characteristics that sure are “out there” amiright? Except that in Far Cry 5 the people you meet and talk at you don’t have interesting things to say. Some even have a pre-filled system for delivering quest locations on your map.

Go up to an NPC with an icon above their head and they will recant you an “A, B, C.” Statement. It usually goes like this, “A was doing this, then B happened. You should check out C.” Sometimes with a few additional flourishes but the basic information stays the same. Clear this outpost, find this prepper stash, rescue these hostages, destroy this building. The delivery system has been tweaked but what you are being tasked with remains the same. All of it is repeated again and again across each of the three areas and with little to distinguish one from the other. Clear an outpost in John’s region or Jacob’s or Faith’s, and the execution, location, and following result are the same. Most all major games are a cycle of gameplay repeated over a period of time, but most have the decency to hide that cycle with variety; Far Cry 5 does not.

Nearly every missions requires you to kill, whether it be cultist or animal, and to travel to a location to do so. Follow the highlighted icon on your display, kill everyone, maybe hold square over a specific item, and mission accomplished. Very little is memorable throughout the game. An early mission in Fall’s End has some entertaining dialogue around the Testy Festy, a gathering of locals to enjoy cooked bulls’ balls. The mission requires you to kill a bull mid-intercourse and freeing the cows beforehand induces a sexy music track to begin playing. This, and Hurk Jr’s comments about making his daddy and mommy compete for his love were the only times I enjoyed my time with Far Cry 5.

Window Dressing

Other characters attempt to be a source of humor. There is an alien conspiracy theorist who gets teleported and leaves behind a gun that can vaporize enemies at close range. A government agent comes in discussing high-level security threats and has the defining trait of saying “pardon my french” whenever he uses a word vaguely obscene such as poop. Aaron, aka Tweak, has daddy issues and hates two pigs for some reason, sending you to whack them to death with a baseball bat. A scientist fails to warn you that the serum to attract Angels actually will attract skunks and a mob of black and white mammals ensues. There are more, but none that leave anything memorable for you to keep, and all have one or two missions before they disappear forever. Had I spent more time with these characters, especially the ones who die and the game expects you to care about, I may have developed an actual bond. Far Cry 5 is obsessed with making sure you’re never bored or in one spot for too long, something Heather Alexandria pointed out, which is probably why you never spend meaningful time with anyone.

Playing into this, the radio stations are a source of worldbuilding details that become literally drowned out by the world around it. The radio is only accessible when inside a vehicle, and even then the volume is pretty low, guaranteeing it won’t be heard very well when driving. Even staying in an unmoving vehicle won’t guarantee you the ability to listen in on the religious radio station, or news reports that evaded me my entire playthrough.

And ultimately I don’t think the game is very interested in engaging with substance. There isn’t anything here for the player to find, so they hid what they could lest the player become curious. It’s something that Astrid wrote about, with the title “Far Cry 5 Offers Nothing to Believe In.” as well as Errant Signal in his video analysis of the game.

Throughout the game you will be kidnapped so that the game may force some time with the antagonist of whatever region you were liberating at the time. These kidnappings occur very frequently and in exceedingly ludicrous ways. Twice I was in a wingsuit flying through the air only to have the screen fade to black and a loading screen greet me. Loading is long and frequent, breaking up the pacing of cutscenes significantly. The controller vibrates to notify you when it's nearly finished loading, as if the game anticipated the player to grow bored during the length of these loads.

Mindless waypoint complaints can be soothed by playing with the UI options, which allow you to turn on or off every detail that appears onscreen by default. I did notice that even with it all off, the sound effect for binoculars tagging enemies will still trigger, as if the developers threw this option in without considering the other systems it interacts with. However it doesn’t keep the default experience from being so brain dead. Even the simplest of people can follow the yellow marker point to point for the entire game and make it through without ever having to think beyond, “Go here. Kill that.” It’s completely mindless and offers no challenge.

Narrative Dissonance

Early on, Joseph Seed will tell the player that “not every problem can be solved with a bullet.” You then proceed through the entire game killing everyone with bullets, sometimes with bow and arrows, your bare hands, or animal companions. That phrase is repeated later on, as if the game looks down on the player’s actions, despite them being the only option available to interact with the world. Instead you are given a weapon of death, pointed in their direction, and told kill. Over and over and over until it becomes almost reflexive which could have been used to make a comment on that impulsive violence except Far Cry 5 doesn’t.

A narrative conceit created for gameplay is the drug Bliss, which is used to justify the existence of brain dead enemies for the player to mow down. The Bliss is positioned as something you can’t escape. This is evidenced by the treatment of Angels, those who have been overtaken by the Bliss, as well as the very telegraphed betrayal by the rescued ally named Marshal. Taken from your group at the beginning of the game, Marshal is taken by antagonist Faith and rescued midway through redeeming her area. He is taken back to the headquarters of the resistance in that region, a prison, and proceeds to shoot an ally NPC, open up the prison to invasion, and commits suicide. All of this is blamed on Faith’s ability to control through the Bliss, except that both you and the sheriff were exposed to the drug without the same after-effects. Angels are assigned for death, despite their status as unwilling subjects of the cult, and the drug’s influence is called irreversible, despite characters surviving multiple exposures. As Holly Green writes, this usage of drugs in games “[is] not just inaccurate, it’s lazy.”

Graphics

Common praise is thrown at the graphics, and the developers’ ability to render a realistic Montana landscape. And yes, Far Cry 5 looks pretty, but every AAA game looks great and their status is fleeting until the next big game releases. This is why Journey remains beautiful whereas Uncharted 3 begins to show its age when compared to the latest iterations in that genre. The ability for developers to render realistic graphics is not only a temporary accomplishment but one that reinforces and crunch nature of game development.

Even separate from that, details in its ability to render a world falters compared to an earlier game in the series: Far Cry 2, as evidenced by this video from Crowbcat. Some of the most telling differences lie in small things such as bush branches being pushed by the presence of the player, whereas Far Cry 5 only has flat 2D textures angled in different directions for bushes. Fire in Far Cry 2 burns foliage by slowly eating away at the branch’s leaves. In Far Cry 5 it simply makes the affected greenery swap out colored textures for black ones. While the landscapes may be in higher resolutions with greater fidelity, it loses the many small things that lend the player a presence in the world. Instead you are simply a mounted camera with arms for killing.

John Seed

Upon completion of the tutorial island you will be unleashed to travel wherever you so desire on the game map, though it lightly pushes you to begin with John Seed’s area to the southwest. In this area you rid the town of Fall’s End of peggie (the derivative term used for Project Eden’s Gate members) occupation and kick off the resistance to John Seed’s control. Everytime a major point is passed on your Resistance meter John will have you captured and brought before him for lectures on sin and atonement.

John is obsessed with the confession of sin and the resulting atonement that confession yields. However this isn’t the same as confessing to a priest in the Catholic Church. Instead, John enjoys carving the sin’s name onto your flesh before cutting it out and placing it on whatever surface lies nearby for all to see. The imagery is crude though effective. Having your sin made a part of your flesh and having that flesh taken from you and posted in public is freeing, both in that it is no longer a part of you and that it is no longer hidden. The flesh throughout the New Testament is a source of sin, of failure, of our inherent flaws. To have that flesh serve as the easel upon which our specific failing is made known to all who can see it, and to cast it out of us, is a violent, but functional, metaphor. Failing to explore why John does this, and specifically why he seemingly loves to do it, is where Far Cry 5 falls flat.

Cult leader Joseph recognizes that John still has growing to do before he can become a true leader of the cult. John never mentions frustration with his place in the power structure, which might have fed his anger. Instead, John simply takes pleasure in inflicting pain on others. Giving John a clear source for his anger, for his need to force others to atone for their sin, would have made him a more believable person. Likewise, Joseph could have been made a better antagonist if the source were a tragic one he exploited, like with Faith.

The context that came to my mind that would have improved my empathy for the character was that John was gay amidst a cult that killed those who couldn’t or wouldn’t conform. Having John previously cast out of religious institutions due to this, and to have him be given shelter and power by Joseph would have justified his place within the cult. To have Joseph turn around and betray John by carving this “sin” onto him but leaving it to John to cut out would have given him a source of internal conflict. This could have been the reason he so enjoyed cutting the sins out of others, because he was unable to cut it out of himself. John’s sin could have been other things as well, whether it be a lack of faith, jealousy of his older brother, pride in his control, these too would have worked as sins he didn’t want to acknowledge.

However, to have John be gay would be to acknowledge that Evangelicals, one of the largest demographics of the United States, especially rural counties like the fictional Hope County of Far Cry 5, cause unjustified harm to people simply for existing. And because Far Cry 5 has a cowardly approach to most of the subjects within, this would have been too “political” for them to include. Due to the lack of depth in John’s character, Far Cry 5 shows its not only unwilling to do anything slightly provocative but also to make its characters more than empty vessels of dialogue. John remains a vapid character because of this, and even his “Say Yes” infomercial can’t drown out the overwhelming dullness surrounding him.

Faith Seed

Once you have eliminated John and conquered his area, you move on to Faith Seed’s to the east. Faith, named after the virtue, is in charge of the production of the Bliss drug for the cult. She communicates through the Bliss constantly, but lacks any semblance of humanity save for two instances.

The first is when you destroy the large statue of Joseph in the center of her area, when she will mention that your actions will cause Joseph to bring down consequences on Faith, what exactly this means is never mentioned unless you explore certain caves. In them you will find notes discussing that there are many Faith Seeds, and this one is simply the latest to have that designation. The others, the ones who failed, met terrible deaths at the hand of Joseph and his cult.

The second appears just as she is about to die during your drugged out fight with her. Its presence near the end of her campaign was insulting as I had already spent enough time listening to her boring lectures on trusting in Joseph that I couldn’t care less. With this one she brings up how she was ostracized and bullied and that Joseph was the only one who took her in. The twist, if you can call it that, is that he drugged her and exploited her for his own purposes, betraying the faith she had put in him. Why she was ostracized and bullied is unanswered, and given her appearance as a standard blonde girl, doesn’t really come across as believable no matter how cruel humans can be.

Riley MacLeod has written about the double standard Faith represents a double standard among Evangelicals, but even that is being too sympathetic to the game. The references to her exploitation come way too late or rely on the player finding them among the game world. Failing to mention the betrayal by Joseph earlier means there is no time spent on how cult leaders frequently sexually exploit the women, and children, of the cult with their power. Far Cry 5 is more than willing to show off gun violence and brutal executions but barely even acknowledges the sexual violence that occurs within the cults it wants to badly emulate.

Jacob Seed

Jacob Seed is perhaps the best of the four siblings, though that isn’t very high praise given his company. Jacob is a war veteran who spent a period of time in the first Gulf War. It was during this time that he and a teammate were shot down and stranded far from any allies without the required provisions. Starvation drove Jacob to achieve a mindset that he referred to as clarity, one that drove him to kill and consume his friend in order to survive. This mindset, one that he purports separates the weak from the strong, is how he rules over the northern section of Far Cry 5’s map.

Opposing him is the Whitetail Militia, who are frequently taken prisoner for mind control sessions that allow Jacob to trigger them, and you, into violent frenzies with the song “Only You (And You Alone).” How this condition has been implanted into you isn’t discussed. Much like the Bliss drug, it is merely a narrative shortcut to allow for dream-like sequences in which you run through a shooting gallery whenever you are captured.

Jacob’s ideology about separating the weak from the strong calls to mind John the Baptist's teaching about how Jesus was coming to separate the wheat from the chaff. Conveniently this interpretation leaves out the fact that those who were spared in the New Testament were not the ones who were strong but instead the ones who believed in Jesus and his teachings. Jacob has the most coherent arguments for why the world is going to end, though he never discusses anything else beyond that. While he mentions upon his impending death that he doesn’t actually care much whether or not his brother talks to God, it is about the most we get out of him besides his obsession with meat and killing the weak.

Joseph Seed

Joseph Seed lacks charisma; he lacks a defined faith beyond the world is ending. Most likely this is because those behind Far Cry 5 didn’t want to upset any Evangelical Christians with direct references to Jesus or the New Testament outside of Revelations. Joseph, and especially John, appear less like rural Montana citizens and more like Silicon Valley douche-bros with their partially shaved heads and millennial fashion wear. You could mistake them for Richard Spencer and his “dapper” style that was used as a way to legitimize his disgusting views on race. Far Cry 5 may want to use that same style, but don’t worry the cultists aren’t white supremacists; in fact, they’re very inclusive as indicated by the amount of non-white folks among them that you murder throughout the game.

Joseph’s problem is the game’s problem: the appearance of depth and meaning. Each character has one trait or characteristic that is repeatedly used but never given depth. Joseph believes the end of the world is coming and that he is God’s chosen vessel to save everyone, willing or not. He uses this to justify the violence his cult commits to those who resist. The game justifies his violence by telling the player they are the reason people suffered, that Joseph was right and you should have never come to stop him. This would have been slightly more acceptable had Joseph been a detestable asshole who I wanted to shove a knife into, but he isn't. Instead Joseph is a boring prophet proclaiming over and over how I’m wrong, he is right, and the world is going to collapse so we all better follow him into the bunkers belowground. He even sings “Amazing Grace” at the outset, as if to unknowingly hammer the fact that this game is only ever surface level with its source material.

Midway through each area, when you are captured for the second time, Joseph will make an appearance to speak to the player. Each time he tells a story or attempts to make a point that was so banal the only one I remember was insultingly generic. When he visits you and Jacob he retells a story about how when he was younger he had a wife and soon-to-be-born child. His wife got in an accident and died while the child barely hung on to life. Joseph, feeling called by God, killed his child in the hospital by cutting off her oxygen. The reason behind this ploy is obvious; it is to build up the players hatred of Joseph. However, it came in the midst of all the other awful shit going on in Far Cry 5 that just rendered it another dull addition to the tone of the game. I already heard a companion describing how a cook tortured his victims. I already saw John carve out the flesh of another companion. Faith showed me how she forced people to jump to their death on the rocks below. Throughout Hope County I came across bodies strung up on road signs, people dead in their homes, and piles of corpses in makeshift mass graves. All of these things should be repugnant, but because Far Cry 5 constantly throws these images at you and fails to do anything with them beyond asking you to be horrified, it makes them vapid.

Joseph Seed has his own book, one which may be available to read excerpts from elsewhere but in-game it only exists to let the player know the cult is not drawing only from the Old Testament and Revelations. Verses are quoted and thrown at the player as if they mean something. Our main antagonists all have Biblical names with no thought behind what they represent. It shows that the game has no interest in doing anything other then delivering a re-skinned Far Cry game with a North American evergreen forest setting.

Closing

There was real potential to do something interesting with the setting. Whether it be to show how religion, actual religion not this Eden’s Gate pseudo-religion, is often used to justify awful things. They could have included an attempt to contact the outside world only to find the federal government was uninterested in spending resources on a backwater county, leaving the citizens to die and the cult to rule until their own collapse. Violence could have been made slightly meaningful if the people you were killing weren’t so generically villainous in their actions.

Connections could have been made to show how preppers and militias are often fearful not only of government intervention in their lives but the influx of immigrants and The Other. It fails to acknowledge the violence already present in that region separate from the introduction of a doomsday cult. In regards to gun ownership the game seems to have something to say, though unintentionally: it's a good thing the good preppers and militiamen had guns to fight off the bad preppers and militiamen that make up the cult. This is essentially the “good guy with a gun” argument implemented in a place where law and order has been done away with. See, the 2nd Amendment is justified because without it how else would these people have defended themselves from the cult? Tracking and blocking mass sales of guns, especially those designed for the sole purpose of killing humans, definitely wouldn’t have kept this cult from obtaining their armaments.

Instead we have as Julie Muncy describes, “a hall of mirrors.” A game that lacks the ability to do anything more than deliver the same uninspired experience the series has been able to mask well enough until it brought it to a land I know. And it forces you to reconsider what you thought about the previous entries, and that their exotic locations were perhaps an uglier choice than we initially thought. That iis one thought provoking thing Far Cry 5 managed to instill in me, I can’t say the same for anything else.

#Far Cry 5 #Far Cry #Ubisoft #Video Games #Video Game Criticism #Criticism #writing

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katieelwanger · 5 years

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Online Vulnerability

When I woke up this morning, I was excited to see that The Real Life podcast had a new episode out that seemed like it was going to be about something I've been processing through lately. I haven't talked about it with anyone and I've never heard anyone else talk about it and I imagined it probably wasn't a popular opinion or one that would feel good to hear so I was excited to hear someone else speak about it and process through it which is exactly what Jeff & Alyssa Bethke did on this episode.

VULNERABILITY.

I've been thinking about online vulnerability a lot lately and the way that term has overtaken the internet. Everyone is trying their best to be real, authentic, and vulnerable. Instagram, especially, has turned into a place of sharing #realife and about how much of a #hotmess you and your house are, but in a funny, acceptable way that isn't totally real (especially for the business accounts that are beautifully curated) and I see this mostly in the mom community (this is just about the IG mom community as a whole).

It's not bad in and of itself to be real, to be authentic, to be vulnerable. Those are great, necessary things for human life and especially the Christian walk. But in the last couple years the internet has swung so far in the opposite direction from "putting our best selves out there" to now praising and celebrating and "commiserating" together the moments of utter chaos and messiness of life because it makes us feel better to know there are other people out there who also don't have it all together. It's nearly to the point where people are shamed for sharing the good moments or for posting a nice photo because it isn't real enough, even if that may actually be that person's reality in that moment (we shouldn't make people feel bad OR feel bad about ourselves just because someone caught a lovely moment that was very real! And really as moms we should be celebrating together because it isn't always easy to capture those moments that often include wiggly targets 😊).

I've actually heard of what I'm often seeing online referred to as "fellowshipping in the flesh" and boy is that convicting and a hard pill to swallow. When we run to the internet to find comfort in others struggling the same way we are without there being a solution or true hope or path for growth offered up like we can more typically find face to face, we're simply fellowshipping in the flesh and finding comfort in remaining stagnant in the ways in which we need to grow and mature vs encouragement in how to do so.

I'm not saying we do need to have it all together or that anyone actually does. Of course we don't. That's why we need Jesus. And I'm not saying we can't ever share our hard day or that our house is a mess at the moment. But I think we do ourselves and others a disservice when we nearly boast about our #hotmess lives because it 1) almost gives people an excuse to stay where they're at in life, to not grow, to not make progress, or to not put in more effort to be disciplined and habitual about their responsibilities in life (whatever the case may be) and 2) it doesn't actually hold us accountable for the things in our life we are struggling with. There is little to no real accountability online. We need to be finding that in our families and communities, being real and vulnerable with them and more importantly with the Lord so we aren't just stuck in this place of not having it all together but so that we can walk through it, grow from it, and come out on the other side having a deeper dependence on the Lord and a greater understanding of His love for us. And come out on the other side stronger, more capable because of the Lord, and able to accomplish more through His strength.

As Jeff Bethke talks about in this episode, I've been thinking a lot about how everyone is calling the internet "a highlight reel" like that's suddenly a bad thing that means people aren't being their authentic selves when in reality that is exactly what the internet is - a highlight reel. You'll have to listen to get his explanation and a really good analogy about that, but this is why I don't post a lot of "real life mom moments" on the internet. It's not because I'm not having them or don't want people to know I'm having them. Of course I'm having hard moments as a mom, of course I get behind on laundry, of course there are toys scattered about sometimes; we live here after all. But I think there is enough of that on the internet and I also think as consumers of the internet we need to be more wise about how much we are consuming and also more wise and logical in knowing that just because "what's her name" posted a cute photo of her kids this morning doesn't mean there weren't some tears or hard moments or messes right before or after that photo. That's just a given. She doesn't need to follow that cute photo up with a picture of her messy kitchen for the sake of keeping things real.

So for all of these reasons, I think it's okay for people to mostly share the good moments, the beautiful moments, hopefully some moments that actually inspire others to strive for greater things, to be more disciplined, to draw nearer to God, maybe to be a better steward of the tasks God has given to them, even if they are mundane and monotonous. I think we can use the internet to edify, to uplift, to spur one another on rather than simply share about how real and messy our lives and homes are since that's already a given. In my opinion, that just doesn't hold as much value as the former.

Also, I personally don't want to portray myself as a hot mess. I just don't. I don't think Jesus wants me to remain the hot mess I was without Him. I know it's typically meant as just a silly term and I'm not saying I've never said it or will never say it and I'm not trying to make more out of it than is necessary or make people feel uncomfortable for using that term. AT ALL. But I do think Jesus died on the cross for us "hot messes" so that we don't have to remain there. So we don't have to identify as this chaotic, struggling, worn out, drowning mother who can barely keep their head above water and isn't able to manage their life, their home, their children, their job, whatever it may be. Of course knowing Jesus and walking with Him doesn't make us perfect but I think we need to take more seriously the whole idea that our old selves are literally dead and gone and we are new creations in Christ.

So, no. I don't want to put myself online as a hot mess mom because 1) that's not who I want to be so I'm not going to keep speaking that over myself and 2) that's not even who I am. I have hard moments, days, sometimes weeks that are not always, but certainly sometimes, a result of me choosing my flesh over the Holy Spirit. But because of Jesus I'm not drowning, I'm not in over my head, I'm not a hot mess. I'm a woman, a wife, a mother who is being sustained, upheld, and strengthened by the Lord and a woman who chooses to honor Him, obey Him, and walk with Him and the result of that is some pretty beautiful moments in my home with my kids, with my husband, and to some degree having a good handle on the mundane tasks of life because I know the Lord desires discipline and servanthood from me as a homemaker.

Another point that was made in this podcast episode was the difference between being vulnerable vs being authentic. Being vulnerable would be sharing about something while you're going through it (real life community is the best place for this) while being authentic would be sharing about it after you've already walked through it with the Lord (which could be done online) and would give people hope and encouragement!

(Again I'm not saying we should never post about hard things online when we're in the moment. This is all just a very broad and general idea so hopefully my point/thoughts are coming across properly.)

I don't want this to come off as boastful or like "look at me I have it all together" because that's not where my heart is at all or my intention. I can only boast in the goodness of the Lord and His kindness towards me and I quite literally do not have it all together. This is just kind of a hard topic to share about in general without it coming across as "judgemental" or offensive simply due to the nature of the topic and its ever growing popularity right now. And it's a hard conversation to have in a culture that would say I'm not being authentic by saying these things. But often times what we want to hear and what we need to hear are two very different things. What we want to hear feeds our flesh and what we need to hear (and may even make us uncomfortable at times) feeds our spirit and that is most important of all.

My thoughts are sort of jumbled as I'm constantly battling brain fog and currently suffering from a headache so if this is all over the place and comes across not fully processed that would be why. I also am still processing these ideas but I thought it was an interesting enough thought to share and I'm curious to know what others' thoughts are on it. And if you completely disagree with me and think I'm a crazy lady that's okay too and you're not wrong. 😂 This is just what I feel like the Lord has brought to my mind and heart lately and maybe it will encourage someone who struggles with the internet and what can of place to give it in their lives. And if you haven't listened to this particular episode of The Real Life Podcast yet, you really should. It's got some great wisdom in it and all of their episodes do!

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yuppiefail · 7 years

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The demographic and economic reasons we should expect more violent white supremacy

“It is possible that Dylann Roof is not an outlier at all, then, but rather emblematic of an approaching storm,” wrote Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah in an amazing piece called A Most American Terrorist: The Making of Dylann Roof which I highly recommend you read in full.

I want to expand a little upon something I wrote recently about white supremacy using Christopher Cantwell, who represented the grassroots movement for violent white nationalism in the VICE documentary on Charlottesville, as an example. In my post I asserted that America’s white nationalists are going to murder more non-whites. The reason I believe this is demographic. Young white men are not doing very well relative to other demographics. They’ve stalled out education-wise, meanwhile every year a college degree becomes more of a requirement for employment prospects, marriage prospects, and social standing. They’ve stalled out regarding social skills, which today’s economy also disproportionately rewards. America has created a large and growing cohort of young white men who do not, and should not, expect to achieve any of the hallmarks of American success that their fathers’ fathers did. They will not get good jobs. They will not get married. They will not buy houses. They will not retire. And they blame women and ethnic minorities for this fact. As their sheer numbers and alienation grow, I believe it would be foolish for us to expect them to retreat quietly into obsolescence.

Between 1979 and 1983 the US lost 2.4 million manufacturing jobs and 270,000 auto manufacturing workers lost their jobs. At the start of the 1980s America employed 450,000 U.S. steelworkers. By 1990 that number was 170,000, and the remaining steelworkers’ wages had dropped by 17%. declined from 760,000 employees in 1978 to 490,000 three years later. Economist Erik Hurst told Econ Talk Podcast host Russ Roberts that between 2000-2005, the American economy shed four million manufacturing jobs. Coal mining is dead.

In other words, America’s pretty much lost all the jobs that men are better suited to than women by nature of their higher average physical strength and stamina.

One World Economic Forum study shows that between 2008 and 2013 annual median incomes in 26 advanced economies fell 2.6%. Many economists blame automation (plus global trade) for slow job growth and stagnant wages across the developed world.

That income earnings increase nearly linearly with educational attainment is one of labor economics’ most well-established empirical findings. Not only do earnings increase linearly, but today, a college degree is twice as valuable as it was in 1980. In 1980 a BA or higher meant less than 40% more earnings than a high school diploma. Today a BA or higher means 80% more earnings than a high school diploma.

Over the last forty years the gender gap in educational attainment in the U.S. has flipped, according to a recent NBER working paper. According to Hurst, 70% of men ages 31-55 don’t have a BA. Today women graduate from high school more often than men. Women make up 58% of college graduates. Women hold more Master’s degrees than men. There are 135 women for every 100 men in graduate school.

In other words, at the same time education was becoming a requirement for high wages, education rates slowed for men and grew for women.

And at the same time, between 1948 and 1980, America’s workforce changed dramatically. Where our economy was once based on blue-collar work, including factory work, transportation, and farming, in that period white-collar work, particularly professional, technical, and clerical jobs, began to dominate. Combine that with a 1970s recession, which motivated women to work who otherwise wouldn’t, and we’ve seen a decline in men’s wages combined with a rise in women’s professional progress.

Where does that leave men? In Men Without Work, America’s Invisible Crisis author Nicholas Eberstadt found that in 1948, men made up a little more than a tenth of working age (20-64) Americans without jobs. By 2015, however, they made up nearly two-fifths of this population.

“Low-education men compare their lives to the past and don’t like what they see,” Brookings’ Richard V. Reeves wrote. “Where their fathers got a decent-paying job without a degree, they now can’t. Where there fathers were considered the automatic ‘head of the household,’ today women compete with them in the labor market. And the gender gap in median wages has narrowed. Many white men, especially those of modest education, feel as if they are being overtaken and left behind. So rather than ‘It’s the economy, stupid,; in truth, ‘It’s relative status, stupid!’”

In 2000, 8% of 21-30 year old men with less than a BA did not work at all in the previous year. Today that number is 18%. It hit 18% in 2010 and has stayed there. Just under 1/5 of 21-30 year old men with less than a BA are idle, 90-something percent are unmarried, and 70% of them are living with their parents.

Hurst expects we’ll see a continued decline in the employment-to-population ratio.

In my post about Cantwell, I wrote:

Cantwell is trying to start a race war by telling weak-link whites that they aren’t losers because they suck, but because they’ve been under attack. And it’s working. America’s weak-link whites have long suspected that they’re under attack. They chant about white genocide because they think it’s real. They don’t feel the erosion of white supremacy in America as the natural and right loss of unearned, corrupt power. They feel backed into a corner. And people who feel backed into a corner will lash out violently, and feel justified doing so. Today’s crying and afraid is tomorrow’s church shooting.

Of course the church shooting I referenced was that by Dylann Roof, who recently became the first person the United States of America has sentenced to die for a federal hate crime.

In GQ, Ghansah wrote of Roof:

He found solace in the belief that he too was part of the dispossessed. The embittered white men who feel like they have no real future in the 21st century. Roof knew this fear so well that he even wrote in the manifesto that he finished in jail: “How can people blame white young people for having no ambition, when they have been given nothing, and have nothing to look forward to? Even your most brain dead white person can see that there is nothing, to look forward to? Even your most brain dead white person can see that there is nothing good on the horizon?”

“To understand Dylann, you need to read The Hidden Injuries of Class,” Wachter said. What that book revealed was “how white working-class people in Boston, in South Boston, the more you interviewed them, what came out, especially after a few beers, is how inferior they felt to all the Harvard, Cambridge, bright, educated people.” In Wachter’s mind, Dylann wasn’t stupid, but he felt displaced. It was a case of class resentment. “And here’s the funny thing: If I had a dinner party right here with just white Ph.D.’s, it would not be socially acceptable for me to make any slur to an African-American person or a Hispanic person or a Muslim, but if I refer to poor whites as rednecks—”

“Or crackers or white trash,” I interjected, saying the words he didn’t want to say.’

He grimaced but acknowledged them.

“That would almost be socially acceptable to say those things. It just shows you how alienated they are. And these poor white working-class guys, they must realize this. See? So maybe Dylann’s family is a good example of downward social mobility. And Trump showed us this, that we underestimated how vulnerable and precarious self-esteem is for white, working-class people in this society. They not only see the white elites, but then they see…”

“They see us, black people, coming from behind, eclipsing them.”

Ghansah also wrote about what she’d found researching the white supremacists of today online. “There are thousands of them,”Ghansah writes. “Like Roof, they are brought into the fold because they have found something that explains their laggard social progress to them.”

They are young. They are undereducated. They are “extremely socially awkward,” which disqualifies them from low-education white-collar and service-sector jobs. White supremacy offers them friends. “These young white supremacists call this reversal ‘weaponized autism.’ What once alienated them now helps them relate to others, people like Dylann Roof, over a common desire to start a race war.”

They are “armed to the teeth. They often brag about their arsenals of guns, because these are the guns that will save them in the coming race war,” which they look forward to.

I believe there will be more Dylann Roofs because math means there will be more men who fit his profile. More and more men are dropping out, not getting jobs, not getting married, not buying houses, but instead staying in their parents’ homes reading each other tells themselves what they desperately want to believe, that they are victims. That the women and the blacks and the Hispanics took from them what is rightfully theirs, what their fathers had, or at least their grandfathers: the hope of a job, and wife, and a house without having to learn social skills or go to college.

These men view the erosion of their privilege as an attack. Some of them feel like their very lives are threatened. They are men without a future, so they are men who have nothing to lose. Dylann Roof stood in front of the jurors 573 days after committing his crime and said without hesitation, “I felt like I had to do it, and I still feel like I had to do it.”

Ghansah:

We already know the way out of bondage and into freedom. This is how I will remember those left behind, not just in their grief, their mourning so deep and so profound, but also through their refusal to be vanquished. That even when denied justice for generations, in the face of persistent violence, we insist with a quiet knowing that we will prevail. I thought I needed stories of vengeance and street justice, but I was wrong. I didn’t need them for what they told me about Roof. I needed them for what they said about us. That in our rejection of that kind of hatred, we reveal how we are not battling our own obsolescence. How we resist. How we rise.

We are not battling our own obsolescence. Nothing but war will stop the transition from a farming, mining, and manufacturing economy to one that rewards high education and social skills. But we are going to have to figure out what to do with our millions of Dylann Roofs. Because otherwise nothing but war will stop them from violently revolting against theirs.

The demographic and economic reasons we should expect more violent white supremacy was originally published on

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