Abundance removes the need for men

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Abundance and Male-Female Roles

A society of abundance is predominantly a female model of social life. 

The hard material questions - securing resources, retaining them, defending them - have largely been solved, or at least outsourced to impersonal systems. As a result, daily life can be organised around interior and relational flourishing: children, conversation, social grooming, the maintenance of emotional and moral networks.

For men, however, this same environment proves actively hostile. An abundant society removes not only danger but challenge; not only hardship but the possibility of great movements, grand projects, or idealistic quests that impose themselves from without. In such conditions, men frequently experience themselves as superfluous.

That experience of psychological irrelevance manifests as the anomie and purposelessness so characteristic of modern life. One might also note that without social roles for the expression of male virtues, female-male relationships are also thrown into confused disarray.

In pre-modern or marginal environments, life is structured by a small number of inescapable facts. Resources are scarce, threats are real, and failure is visible, consequential and frequently lethal. Under these conditions, the environment generates meaning automatically.

One does not have to ask what to do with one’s life; the environment answers that question continuously and without ambiguity. Our psychologies were formed from this environment of evolutionary adaptation.

A society of abundance reverses this structure. Food, shelter, security, and continuity are largely guaranteed. Violence is monopolised by the distant state. Failure is buffered, deferred, or medicalised. This does not produce freedom in any neutral or transparent sense. It produces existential slack: a vacuum in which meaning must be self-generated without the psychological equipment to do so reliably.

Across cultures and even across primate lineages, female sociality tends to be relational rather than heroic, oriented toward maintenance rather than conquest or defence, and embedded in dense networks of mutual attention.

In an abundant society, these forms of engagement remain meaningful. Child-rearing continues to matter. Emotional labour retains its value. Gossip and informal norm-policing still perform essential social functions. Interior flourishing has a clear referent in children, relationships, and continuity across generations. Abundance maps comparatively cleanly onto caretaking-and-coordination psychologies.

Male motivational systems, by contrast, are typically quest-shaped. Across cultures, male psychology is disproportionately tuned to status acquired through risk, esteem earned through competence under pressure, and meaning derived from challenges that offer real external resistance.

Male meaning is often heterotelic: it depends on something outside the self that pushes back. Remove danger, scarcity, honourable risk and hostile enemies, and what remains is a restless surplus of drive with nowhere to go - often redirected into crime or tribal violence.

Crucially and consequentially, abundance does not merely fail to reward these drives; it actively pathologises them. Competitiveness becomes “toxic,” ambition is redescribed as “ego,” risk-taking is framed as reckless immaturity, and hierarchical instincts reframed as authoritarianism.

The male psyche is therefore not only under-stimulated but morally delegitimised. The lived result is a recognisable phenomenology: superfluity, in the sense that no one needs what one brings; disorientation, with no clear criteria for success; resentment, as others flourish without comparable sacrifice; and withdrawal into simulations - games, pornography, and bogus ideologies.

Men do not feel liberated. They feel ontologically surplus.

Are men superfluous in societies of abundance? Functionally, often yes: a tendency that advances in AI and robotic automation are likely to intensify.

The uncomfortable conclusion is that a society of permanent abundance is not neutral with respect to sexed-psychologies. It fits female social logics tolerably well, leaves male motivational systems idle, and then blames those systems for malfunctioning.

We won't return to scarcity, mythic warrior cultures, or reactionary romanticism. But challenge, risk, and meaningful opposition cannot simply be abolished without psychic cost - and that cost will be borne disproportionately by men.

We need new quests for healthy societies.

Historically that usually means revolution and war.

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These views are not particularly original. In A Secular Age (2007) - see also the Wikipedia article - Charles Taylor says this: "But the concern about levelling, the end of heroism, of greatness, has also been turned into a fierce denunciation of the modern moral order, and everything it stands for, as we see with Nietzsche.

"Attempts to build a polity around a rival notion of order in the very heart of modern civilization, most notably the various forms of fascism and related authoritarianism, have failed. But the continued popularity of Nietzsche shows that his devastating critique still speaks to many people today. The modern order, though entrenched—perhaps even because entrenched—still awakens much resistance."

I asked GPT5.2 whether Nietzsche might yet have had an answer to this centuries-old critique of abundant modernity. This was the interesting reply from GPT5.2.

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