Student: How can fathers,
husbands, brothers, boyfriends, and sons
reclaim their place in society
and re-establish their authentic masculinity?
In 1983, Solzhenitsyn stated that
the evils of the 20th century happened
because men have forgotten God.
And I recently read an article that said
the 21st century can be summarized as
"men are at war with God."
Where do you think that men, specifically, have gone wrong,
and how did we get to this point?
How can fathers, husbands, brothers, boyfriends, and sons
reclaim their place in society
and re-establish their authentic masculinity?
Shapiro: This is a great question.
So, I think that the basic problem...
[audience applause]
The basic problem is actually a really deep problem
that I would call the cult of authenticity.
I'm not the person who is really focused on this.
The author who is focused on this is
a guy named Carl Truman down in Utah.
He wrote a fantastic book called
"The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self,"
maybe the most important book of the last 10 years.
And what he basically argues is that
after the rise of the Enlightenment,
there was also a rise in the Romantic era.
And the Romantic poets started to argue that
true authenticity was to be found interior, right?
You look in yourself,
and you look into your feelings.
And that's what makes you truly authentic.
See, traditional religion teaches that
small children are basically tiny barbarians.
And if you've ever dealt with small children, they are.
They're tiny barbarians, right?
[audience laughter]
They break things and they yell at you and they hit you
and they're completely out of control.
And it's your job to civilize them as a parent.
It's your job to teach them roles and to teach them rules
and to punish them when they do bad things
and to reward them when they do good things.
Small children are innocent, but they're not good, right?
It's your job to teach them the rules for the road
so that they become good citizens, right?
This is what the process of civil...
This is why civilizing people became a verb, right?
You actually had to take people
who were not civilized, namely kids,
and you had to civilize them to institutions and duties.
Then there was the rise of this authentic movement,
the authenticity movement.
You have to be so authentic. Look to your own feelings.
That's the thing that really matters more than anything.
Now, for a while that went nowhere.
And the reason that went nowhere is
because when most people look to their own feelings,
they just want to have sex with everything,
up to and including trees.
[audience laughter]
And for most of human history,
this resulted in some pretty dire consequences,
namely things like single motherhood or disease
and all the rest of this.
And then came the 1960s
and the rise of the birth control pill,
which had some really salutary effects, right?
It allowed people to plan their families in different ways,
but also had one effect which was really core,
which was it disconnected, for the first time,
sex and the hedonistic pursuits from consequences.
And once that happened, then there was this real push for
"you can find your happiness in finding your authenticity."
And the way we know you're most authentic is
if you fight back against all those civilizing influences.
You see, if you do what society expects of you,
then you're not being yourself.
What makes you yourself is
denying what society expects of you.
So don't be a mother, don't be a father,
don't be a husband, don't be a wife,
don't be a person who's bound by duty.
And if you avoid all of that, this makes you more authentic,
it makes you more true to yourself.
And we've pursued that
for probably three generations at this point.
And it's ending with massive mental illness, massive misery,
unhappiness, lack of having kids, and all the rest.
And so the answer to this is we have to go back to
the idea that true happiness is to be found in
acting in accordance with duty and roles.
This is what makes people happy.
And we need to go back to that.
So that means that, as I say,
I train my son to be a father from now.
I show him how to be a husband right now.
I give him things to do right now.
And by the way,
there may be a group of women out there in America who are
desperate for clingy men, who are not going to
enact the role of protector and provider.
They're very few and far between or they're lying.
Because the reality is that
typically what women are looking for
is what women have looked for all of human history,
which is strong men who protect and provide.
[Audience applause]
And typically, what good men have looked for is
women who are capable of
being excellent mothers and excellent wives
in providing comfort and providing a home.
And that doesn't mean that
women shouldn't work or can't work.
My mom worked.
My wife, as you all know, is a doctor.
I'm very much in favor of women being able to do
whatever they want to do career-wise.
But the fundamental roles of husband and wife,
or father and mother,
these roles are what create fulfilling lives.
If you want to know the truth about this,
all you have to do is go to the local cemetery.
Very few local cemeteries have carved on the gravestones
what position you achieved at your company.
Nearly all of them say, "Beloved husband and father,"
"beloved mother and sister,"
"beloved mother and wife."
That, in the end, is
what human beings find fulfilling.
And if we go back to that,
if we go back to the fulfillments of those roles,
and that does mean going back to church
and finding social institutions to back all of that,
then we'll have a healthy society.
And if we don't, then we'll completely collapse.
Student: Thank you.
[audience applause]