First, let's get this out of the way,

> In 1960, across social classes, the vast majority of children were raised by both of their birth parents. By 2005, there was a massive divergence. What happened?

The 60's happened.

Social norms broke down all over the world.

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Yes, the rich by and large want the poor to be tractable docile workers. Look at history, the relatively recent mass colonization of half the world by a tiny island nation. Slavery. The wealthy and powerful always try to subjugate whoever they can. It's their golf.

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Yes, society keeps young men in line with the "carrot" of (culturally sanctioned) sex and the stick of ostracism/shunning/shame. This is one of the fundamental pillars of what we call culture.

(The other being death, but that's less popular than sex. With the recent and relative rarity of hairy jerks with swords showing up out of the blue one day to burn down the village and kill, maim, or kidnap everybody in the place, we now use hallucinatory bogeymen for the most part.)

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Technology has obsolesced a great deal of the work these young folk used to do. (Mostly farming and war.) They are "surplus to requirement" from the POV of the system. All that oxycontin abuse? The rash of suicides? Symptoms of the malaise.

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So yeah, it sucks to be a drone.

(Heck, if I wasn't good with computers I'd probably be homeless right now. And even that is getting squiffy these days.)

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On the flip side, there has never been a better time to do things. We have radio-networked pocket supercomputers that can access pretty much the entirety of human knowledge from all of history and all of the world, there are robots, and it's never been easier to get laid.

I threw that last one in as a joke, but it cuts back to the core of the article: once we relax that social control of access to sex, does society fall apart?

(And also the loss of the "common enemy". It's a truism in political science that a common enemy is very very helpful for establishing and maintaining social cohesion. But again we talking mostly about sex here.)

I think the answer to that is, "It depends."

It seems to me that with easy access to birth control we should be seeing the responsible parents having more kids and the promiscuous folks having fewer, eh? So over time society would get stronger, no?

Maybe most people fall into non-reproductive hedonism and the Amish inherit the Earth?

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I think the bottom line is that if you find yourself a poor male with few prospects you have to figure out a lifestyle that you can live with and get on with it. Society mostly doesn't give a shit about you and is unlikely to start. You can blame the elites, but I've met some and they are just as clueless as everybody else, they just have more money, so it's pretty pointless to blame them. And anyway if you try to do anything to them they can and will shoot you. The entire US Army is essentially there to protect the elites, so good luck with that, if you want to be a rebel.

So where does that leave you?

Make some money. Find some good, solid folks and family up with them. Start a commune in the woods. Live happily ever after. I'm not joking: I've met people that have done this. They are very happy. And there is no (NO!) information about their "thing" on the Internet whatsoever. Think about that: these smurfy people totally exist but you cannot learn of them via the Internet. Most of the really happy settled folks out there DO NOT advertise. They keep quiet. They do not do SEO. You won't see them on television or youtube.

No one is making money from telling you about them so you won't hear about them unless you go looking.

There's a whole world of happy "alternate" lifestyles but "the system" won't tell you about them because it's against the system's interests! That's why hippies are always portrayed as dipshits on TV: if you saw for yourselves the lives of the non-dipshit hippies you would "quit your job, repent, and slack off."

Really it goes back to European vs. Native lifestyles and colonization. The Europeans were psychotic bastards who murdered and tortured and enslaved people, and who had absolute masters and abject servants, and all kinds of psychotic baggage. The native cultures were (and still are in many many places) not quite so messed up.

People who could get away from the towns and join Native American societies didn't want to go back. Whereas Natives had to be forced (typically with savage brutality) to adopt European culture.

"Going native" was perceived as a serious problem, because it was: if you didn't like society, or your actual literal "master" (a person under the psychotic delusion that he or she actually literally owned you) you could try to escape to, say, the Sioux nation.

We mostly exterminated or marginalized these societies, and filled and/or enclosed most of the open land, so it seems like options are fewer.

And today we have "the homeless" to act as a goad: if you don't work you will starve in the street. There's not supposed to be a way out.

This in a land (I'm continuing being provincial here and talking about North America) where the herds of buffalo were so large they could take more than a day to pass by, where the rivers were so thick with salmon during spawning season that it's said you could walk across them, where flocks of passenger pigeons were so thick and numerous that they could eclipse the sun and turn day into night.

We destroyed it, farmed ourselves into the "Dust Bowl", etc...

It doesn't have to be this way, there's a better life out there, but the system won't help you reach it.

So fuck the system. Go make your won system.