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The “restraining and guiding effects” historically depended on men, of course. So, when there are many families who lack fathers, not enough men and women will learn to compromise with and defer to others. Far from containing “a network or tissue” of authorities that the individual is inclined to work with and, as needed, answer to, the culture sees endless struggles of self-assertion. Incompatible groups, with their precious feelings, eagerly prostitute themselves out to the bureaucratic gods, the government and corporations. “Do you care about blacks, and women, and gays, and transgender people, and…? Yes? Ah, good! Now I will vote for you, or shop at your store.” In other words, we are “not a free but a chaotic people.”

In fact, with the loss of male authority, masculinity itself has come to be perceived as a pathology from the very beginning. As Ryan D’Agostino stated in a 2014 article in Esquire,

By the time they reach high school, nearly 20 percent of all American boys will be diagnosed with ADHD. Millions of those boys will be prescribed a powerful stimulant to “normalize” them. A great many of those boys will suffer serious side effects from those drugs. The shocking truth is that many of those diagnoses are wrong, and that most of those boys are being drugged for no good reason—simply for being boys.

“What’s happened,” according to psychiatrist Ned Hallowell, “particularly in schools where most of the teachers are women,” is that

there’s been a general girlification of elementary school, where any kind of disruptive behavior is sinful. What I call the ‘moral diagnosis’ gets made: You’re bad. Now go get a doctor and get on medication so you’ll be good. And that’s a real perversion of what ought to happen. Most boys are naturally more restless than most girls, and I would say that’s good. But schools want these little goody-goodies [“impotent individuals”] who sit still and do what they’re told—these robots—and that’s just not who boys are.

As everybody knows, men and women don’t understand each other, so in a context dominated by the latter, whether it’s an elementary school or Harvard, normal male behavior may be deemed “bad” or “toxic.” For this and other reasons, which, however, I don’t have the space to consider here, boys should not spend their days among women authorities. Although it is unlikely to happen, gender segregation seems to be the best single thing we can do to improve our schools. If, on the other hand, we want to continue to tame man, rendering him a docile and compliant worker bee for people who mean nothing to him and vice versa, then the present situation is certainly desirable.

Restoring male authority, although necessary, seems nearly impossible to do by rational means. Notwithstanding evidence that women’s happiness has declined both absolutely and relative to men, it is implausible to think the culture as a whole will want men to become men again, that is, in the old sense of the man of the house. For that to come about, crisis and catastrophe will be necessary—or rather, more of them. Imagine the apocalyptic inner cities once the unsustainable entitlements run out.