The year is 55. The Brooklyn Dodgers defeat the
New York Yankees in seven games to take the World Series. Dr.
Martin Luther King, Jr. Leads the first major U. S.
Civil rights movement a bus boycott down in Montgomery, Alabama. Minimum wage is a dollar,
a gallon of gasoline is twenty three cents and a black and white television
goes for $99.99. And at the top of the music charts we've got The Ballad of Davy Crockett.
If you were to ask anyone in 1955 what a gentleman looks like, they'd probably
say Carrie Grant. The well dressed actor has been appearing in Hollywood movies for over 20
years and he just came out with his latest movie, To Catch a Thief with Grace Kelly.
It's safe to say in 1955, the idea of being a gentleman was as strong as it had ever been.
So what happened? I mean, here we are a mere 70 years later
and it seemed like the idea of the gentleman has disappeared.
So let's start things off by defining what do we mean by the word gentleman? So a gentleman
per definition is any man of good and courteous conduct. Now, originally, the word gentleman was
the lowest rank of the landed gentry of England, ranking below an esquire and above a yeoman.
The rank of gentlemen comprised the younger sons of the younger sons of peers,
and the younger sons of a baronet, a knight and an esquire in perpetual succession. So in a nutshell,
a gentleman was someone who had a heritage, who had a blood relation in some way to
a bit of nobility. That being said, the gentleman didn't really have any claims.
He perhaps didn't have any money, but he did have his name. He did have this title, The Gentleman,
which separated him from the commoners. Now, as an American in a classless society, that's a joke.
But seriously, here in the United States, it's not something that we have a history
of nobility and titles. So for us it doesn't seem like that big of a deal.
But in many other more established countries like France and the UK.
That have a much longer history, the idea that you have heritage, that you have a lineage,
was a big deal. Now, the word gentlemen was apparently first used in the year 1275,
but the word itself actually came into more common usage after the year 1413. Why? Because
Henry V passed a law which required that in all original writs of action,
personal appeals and indictments that the estate, degree or mystery of the defendant must be stated.
Basically, if anything was getting written down, you needed to declare,
it needed to be clear who the individual was. And not everyone's going to be an earl.
Not everyone's going to be a duke, especially if you're a lesser son.
Anyone watching Game of Thrones? Yeah. What happens to all the second, 3rd,
4th, 5th sons? Well, if you can't marry them off,
they go off to seek their fortune. But these guys wanted to be known.
They wanted to be really clear with everyone that they are not a common man. Now, traditionally,
this wasn't an issue because you had these second sons. You had these 3rd, 4th, 5th,
7th sons, whatever it is, they were living on the land and they were working it under their fathers.
But this became really unattractive after England got decimated with the black death and there were
wars overseas that you could go over there and make a fortune. So basically, you got these men
of noble blood out there trying to make a name for themselves out there in those continental
wars. Or maybe they're just trying to make their way up in a court of a really high noble house.
Point being is they wanted to be known as gentlemen. And by the 16th century,
the gentry, as they were called, had pretty much established themselves as a distinct order. Now,
what about the right to bear arms? This is where it gets a little bit confusing.
And there was a time period where only nobles were able to raise armies to be able to carry weapons.
But the idea is that gentlemen had the right to bear arms. And there was a really fluid situation,
16th, 17th century, and basically was if you carried arms, you were known as a gentleman.
Gentlemen could carry arms. So you kind of see it was like a circle right here. And the idea of
a gentleman being associated with nobility, that pretty much disappeared because it was
well known that if you could afford it, if you could afford arms, if you also could
afford not to work and be able to have time of leisure, you were considered a gentleman.
So then we're entering the 19th century, and this is when the word gentleman really
made a big deal. It was a sign of status. If you were a gentleman again, you didn't have to work.
You had means. You could bear arms, you could carry a weapon,
and you were just thought of as a step above the common man, especially the merchants or
the people that had to work, labor with their hands. And in fact, if anyone's familiar with
the history of cricket, you've probably heard the terms gentleman and player.
And you know what the difference is? A gentleman plays cricket, but he doesn't
need to be paid. He just does this because he enjoys it. Versus a player is actually played,
they make money with it, and that is not considered to be gentlemanly,
when you think about it, is pretty damn stuck up, but yeah, that's the way it was.
Now, jets, if you're enjoying today's video, do me a favor and smash the like button. I appreciate it
when you interact with the videos and it lets those YouTube gods know that, hey, this video
is worth watching. Now, the word gentleman, its meaning and its usage did start to change.
In fact, in 1714, Sir Richard Steele wrote, the Appalachian of gentlemen is never to be
affixed to a man's circumstances, but to his behavior in them. And this is key because what
happened is it started to evolve that it wasn't viewed as just gentlemen. Were this
because they were born gentlemen, that they had descended from nobility? No, gentlemen.
It was viewed as something that you could become based off your behavior. This was
further reinforced during the Victorian period. Whenever we had a number of rules,
we had a number of distinctions that were formed between being able to see
classes so you could dress in a manner of a class.
But did you act that way? Did you know all the hidden rules?
Did you know the mannerisms? And a gentleman was aware of these.
He was trained in these. He understood why they were there, even though they seemed
like they were invisible rules that may seem not important to someone not from that class.
He understood why they were there, and he also he guarded them. He made sure that others followed
them. So as you can see, we had strong history, strong usage up till about the First World War.
Well, first up, let's look at who was pushing the idea of the gentleman. This was English history,
not American history. And this made sense because England was
the world's superpower for a few hundred years.
But guess what? After World War I, who started to emerge? It was the United
States as a superpower. And we didn't have a history of class. We were in large part,
we like to think of ourselves as a classless society.
So the idea of a gentleman, even though many people would aspire to it in the 1920s, 1930s,
even into the 1950s, it wasn't something that was genuinely American. In fact,
if you go back to 1955, there was a movie that came out that was much more pivotal
than To Catch a Thief, which is a great movie. I love Carrie Grant, but rebel without a cause.
Now, this movie was a pioneer at its time. This was dealing with the angst of being a teenager,
of being misunderstood. In fact, the hero we see here, James Dean, very vulnerable, someone
that wasn't afraid to cry, to show his emotions, something that a gentleman oftentimes doesn't do.
This was a guy that dressed very brash, very loud. He was the rebel. He was a bit of a hoodlum.
And this was someone that was getting arrested. These were not gentlemen and traits, yet they were
being openly not just openly celebrated, but the mass, the young people absolutely latched
onto this. They connected a lot more with James Dean than they did the gentleman, Kerry Graham's.
Now, gents, before I reveal the five reasons why I think gentlemen pretty much have gone extinct, I
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Go over there and get the best deal on the web. So what happened? Why has the gentleman started
to disappear? Well, the number one reason that I think it has started to disappear,
especially after the 1950s, the 1960s, is it was no longer a useful indicator of social status.
Seriously, I mean, if you think about the word, why was it used? People wanted to set themselves
apart from the commoner, and that may have worked in the 1930s, 1940s, 1950s, when we
had a very rigid society, but we started seeing the upheavals in the 1960s, definitely the 1970s.
The whole idea of being a guy in a suit looking like you're part of the crowd,
this wasn't attractive. A lot of women were simply looking for something different.
When people were looking for creativity, they're looking for a business partner.
They're looking for someone. Yeah, you could definitely go
with a guy that was a gentleman. He's probably going to be very dependable.
But if you want somebody that's creative, if you want somebody that's thinking outside the box,
it's probably not going to be that guy in the gray flannel suit. So the idea of a gentleman
as a status marker, as something that you could dependably, say, hey, this is what I want to
be like, it shifted, it changed. It wasn't what we had this idea of a gentleman anymore.
The rules all of a sudden got thrown out. And it was the rule breakers
that were all of a sudden at the top. We saw this in the 1980s.
All of a sudden, coming out of silicon valley, we saw people that simply didn't
look like the typical gentleman. We saw men that didn't act like the gentleman. We saw,
all of a sudden movies that started shifting throughout the 1980s, 1990s into the 21st century.
We saw who was on top, basically their vision and their idea and
their mannerisms change. All of a sudden, it was the Gordon geckos. It was the guys on wall
street that looked like gentlemen, but definitely didn't act like them.
Then all of a sudden, we saw the 1990s of these guys coming
out of silicon valley. We saw the.com bubble.
These guys didn't even dress like gentlemen,
and they sure as heck didn't wait their turn in line. They were going out there
and they were grabbing it. And this is what people started to aspire towards.
And that takes me to the second reason. All of a sudden, our role models shifted,
and it's always interesting. Does Hollywood copy life or does life imitate Hollywood?
But we started seeing this circle again in the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s.
We saw what was on television, what was being marketed as, hey, this is what we should aspire
to. All of a sudden, the gentleman fell out of favor, not only the way that men were dressing,
but the way that they were behaving. And I'm not going to say it's all bad.
There definitely was some negative. I think a lot of the men that we saw at fathers, especially in
the 1980s and 1990s, were basically displayed as buffoons. But there was also a lot of good,
a lot of more complex characters that we were able to see them fully instead of just seeing
the one dimensional gentleman which had been pushed on us as being the ideal.
All of a sudden, we saw all the different colors, we saw all the different flavors,
all the different types of people of men that are out there now. The third reason I think the
gentleman is going extinct is unfortunately, a lot of the behaviors that work in smaller groups
can be taken advantage in larger networks. So when you work in a company and there's only ten people,
15, maybe even 100 people, if you are a great, hard worker, if you're somebody that actually
gets things done, you build up a reputation and it's hard, yet you're able to move up in advance.
But when you're in a larger business, whenever, you know,
now we're working through the computer all the time, a lot of times you've got people that are
busting their ass. You've probably had this happen to you, and all of a sudden your boss
takes your credit. You've got peers that are basically aren't sharing the wins with you,
and all of a sudden you're getting passed for promotion even though it should have been you.
And so a lot of these behaviors of a gentleman, not simply tooting your own horn,
not raising awareness of what you've accomplished all of a sudden that started working against a lot
of guys. We'd also see people take advantage and even mock gentlemen behavior. Some of you
guys have taken a lady out and then you pay for everything because you're old school that way.
And come to find out she was just looking for a free meal, you were taken advantage
of and she brags to all of her friends. I'm not saying this happens all the time,
but some of you guys have told me about stories like this. And the thing is,
as we expand our networks, as we start to interact with more people,
we have more opportunity, but we also have more opportunity for being taken advantage of.
And unfortunately, if you rely on somebody's word,
if you rely on it assuming that people always have good intentions, you can be taken advantage
of. And this is where being a gentleman can sometimes not pay. And that takes me to .4,
which is open hostility by a lot of people in modern society. And you can call it feminism,
you can call it whatever you want, but there are certain behaviors by gentlemen in which
groups view this as you're placing ownership maybe on women, that you are implying that
they are weaker by opening the door. Now, for me, I open doors for anyone.
It's just a sign of respect and something nice to do. And I think that a lot of you guys still
continue to do that. But certain behaviors, especially if it's linked to the patriarchy.
This is viewed as negative and being a gentleman and the idea of a gentleman is something that's
been attacked by a number of groups and a lot of men have been fearful scared that they are
going to just simply be attacked and so they decided to abandon a lot of those ideals. Now,
this next point I'm pulling from evolutionary biology and in case
you don't know, that was my undergrad major. I studied a lot of this stuff.
But we've been on this planet a long time, 7 million years. If you look at
what hominins and if you go back 200,000 years, homo sapiens and civilized society, what, maybe
5000, maybe 10,000 years depending on how you count it. Point being
is the idea of a gentleman is just a few hundred years old.
It's a very thin mask over the deep dark brute that is within us. The
one that had to survive, that had to fight, that had to kill,
that has survived multiple generations. And that very thin mask was always something that
could easily be disturbed and thrown off if we're put in a tough situation.
Personally, I try to hold true to a number of gentlemanly ideals and in fact,
I would love to hear from you guys down in the comments below. What you think the ideals,
what are some great rules that every gentleman should follow? I probably make a video on this,
but when I signed up for the United States Marine Corps, I'd watched An Officer and a Gentleman.
I always had this ideal of being something greater than just simply the physical that I am.
And I have these ideals that I tried to live up to. And for me personally,
that's why I love the idea of a gentleman. The idea that you can transcend the flesh,
the idea that you can be more than just simply these parts, that the sum of them
can create something great, create something that could live on through its mannerisms,
through the ideas, through the thoughts, and just simply the way that we interact with others.
So what video to watch next? Why did men stop wearing pocket watches? Did you ever wonder,
why did we go to the wristwatch? Why did we stop wearing the pocket watch? Guys,
I got you covered in this video and I break out the history,
I break out the details. I think you're going to enjoy it. Go check it out.