The Beautiful Panic.com

“…That is the secret of happiness and virtue. Liking what you’ve got to do. All conditioning aims at that. Making people like their inescapable social destiny.” -Aldous Huxley

YouTube is a cultural psychologist’s wet dream. I have destroyed my life and that of my kids’ as I subjected myself to years of slack-jawed hypnosis. I became addicted to the site. All the while finding needles in haystacks and connecting a wide variety of incidental content to substantive topics that I have been researching for years. The content of a controversial figure in the realm of relationship advice has been a gold mine when it comes to researching post-internet mating habits. The late Kevin Samuels was an American internet personality and image consultant who mounted a defense on behalf Black males in response to what he perceived as the destruction of African American families and communities at the hands of toxic feminism.

The “high value man” is a subject at the center of Kevin Samuels’s program. The slender framed Samuels is always smooth and streamlined. Projecting elegance in a white office with a business casual wardrobe, fresh haircut, and designer glasses. He begins the show with a drink from a Glencairn glass. A woman appears in the black space beside the feed. It’s a call-in show. Women who need advice or want to air their grievances concerning subpar men, or Samuels’s general philosophy, would typically call from their bedrooms. Most of these women claim to already be, or on their way becoming, independently wealthy and wish to attract a “high value man”. Samuels then proceeds to burst their bubble of what he perceives to be overconfidence and entitlement. First, he asks their height, weight, and dress size. Then, he asks them to rate their attractiveness from 1 to 10, 10 being the most attractive. He stipulates that they cannot use 7, that number being the most popular for modest women. Most women would then proclaim themselves as an 8, 9, or 10. To which he would respond with a derisive stare.

Most of these young women do have high standards. They hope to find an attractive spouse who is primed and ready to provide them with the life they’ve always dreamed of. They want a man who makes, or aspires to make, enough money to provide all the trappings of wealth and is just waiting to meet the right girl. Meanwhile, many of these young women have children out of wedlock to alleviate the crisis of meaning engulfing our collective consciousness, more on this later. Samuels’s argument is; If that man exists, he already found a woman who is more attractive and more agreeable than the caller. Usually, Samuels advises them to be realistic, and lower their standards and expectations. Stop waiting for a Bentley to pick you up and drive you to the finish line of life. Put on your running shoes, find a nice man, and try to enjoy the marathon and all its challenges. Nah!… He tells these broads to be submissive to their man. Especially when it comes to decisions traditionally made by the man of the house. He tells them that prioritizing personal and professional ambitions over their romantic relationships are masculine traits. When they ask, “What about my happiness?” He answers, “Fuck your happiness, ma’am.” Give the man children and take care of them. Take care of your man and learn to be happy in your femininity. I am not trying to speak ill of the dead. Samuels’s philosophy falls perfectly in line with his Christian background. And he occasionally made good points, in between admonishing women for rejecting working-class lives with otherwise adequate males. The women do this in hopes of beating astronomical odds and finding a wealthy man. Samuels would read out the sobering statistics to the caller. Calculating percentages to determine the fractional supply of wealthy single males available for the giant number of single females.

What Samuels demonstrates in these sessions are the new parameters programmed by consumerism. An entitlement, conditioned into the individual in the sexual hierarchy of both genders, to demand the features he/she desires from their prospective partner. This turns people into products. In the traditional anti-LGBTQ2+ system, for example, success is only a sexually attractive trait to women. As a result, things like competency in one’s intellectual and professional abilities are seen as masculine sexual traits. The need for confidence is biological, but consumerism has twisted it into another reward system for subservience. Young men’s sexual preferences are trained to prioritize a woman’s physical appearance because of its mass appeal. Turning the female into another tool for male confidence-building. Just another conquest in the realm of the masculine. These ideals are still venerated by fundamentalists in every major religion and continue to bleed into most of the young secular population. This enforces a hierarchy. Not only between the genders, but within them.

We have a long history of being programmed into this behavior by religions. In the Neolithic proto city of Catalhoyuk, a population of 10,000 had progressed to three room homes and a complex economy. The third room in every home was always dedicated to the meme of masculinity and femininity. In an area with an abundance of smaller animals that grazed in the immediate outskirts, they hunted and domesticated gigantic bulls that dwarf their modern, and murderous, one-ton cousins. They also found dolls depicting heavy-set women. Often in the position of labor or sex. This was what the girls aspired to “play house”. Another example of this is the famous Venus of Willendorf, a figurine of a voluptuous woman dating back roughly 30,000 years. Many of these have been found around Europe. The oldest figurine was unearthed in Willendorf, Austria, but is now believed to have originated somewhere in Italy. The figurine depicts a braided woman with large, hanging breasts, a well cushioned belly, and thick thighs. British anthropologist Chris Knight theorizes that Neolithic females deliberately withdrew their sexual favors to prod men into hauling home fresh meat. “The suggestion of the décor was clear.  Bulls had the power to pierce the walls of feminine refusal.  This awed male humans with their far smaller penises and infinitely tinier bulk and might.  Men, so easily cowed by womanly disdain, could only worship and hope to gain the thrust of a bull’s horns and enormous phallus penetrating vaginas with vast overloads of sperm.  It was the bull who could truly make children grow in a grudging damsel’s womb. Despite its evocations of lust, strife, torment and the wild, religion was used to synchronize the emotions and the symbol set of those who lived within the city’s walls.  This fervid enticement to cohesion and to the discipline of ritual geared the members of a town to think and work in harmony.”

All of consciousness is built around a codependency of mutually beneficial behaviors. The reason for controlling these sexual characteristics of our consciousness is the important overarching effects these teachings have on all aspects of modern society. Setting up a sexual hierarchy helps the overall structure of society survive. The early manipulation of our biological urges is also crucial for the elites to maintain power. This is because it keeps the population divided. In pre-historic society, the religious state redirected our sexual urges through early indoctrination- into a collective, class segregated belief that we live under the rule of an infallible supernatural being. The rule this God instituted: Marriage. The progenitors of said system must have been pleasantly surprised to find that society kept itself in line through its adaptive nature. Developing a subculture. Unconsciously recognizing the biological and social dangers of having unlimited sexual partners. We most likely took a page from our primate cousins, who also impose a control on sexual access based on social standings.

This is the world Samuels wished to bring back. Simple sexual dynamics that adapt to society while keeping gender roles intact. He blames the destruction of these traditions on universities and a few corporate entities that targeted women by selling female empowerment to enlarge their customer base. The problem is you cannot discount the sociological environment. His theory might apply to rural areas where small town certainties conflicted with the rapidly shifting ideologies of popular culture. But the influencers of pop culture are the mega-clusters of information exchange in the largest cities.

The innovations in marketing brought upon by the minds of mass manipulators like Eddie Bernays and the millions of dollars spent on research have diversified the ideas flowing through the corporate landscape. An exploitative image of the individual in every stratum of society produced an ideology which equates consumption with fulfillment. Cosmopolites have had their eyes opened to the dangers of tradition for tradition’s sake. Examining society through the eyes of the individual unveils the horrors of our traditions. They began to use these horrors to sell us an escape. They tell us to stop wasting our time trying to change society for the better. Through consumerism, you can always have something new and beautiful. Something better is always right around the corner. As president Herbert Hoover told our new masters of mankind in 1928.

“You have taken over the job of creating desire. And have transformed people into constantly moving happiness machines. Machines which have become the key to economic progress.”

By the 1980’s, the corporate state was in complete control. The American psyche had fully shifted to one of consumerism. Every household in America had a television and the lower-class and inner cities were under the spell of a beautiful illusion. The illusion that the individual was responsible for their own destiny. The economic progress that Hoover had praised only benefited those at the very top. At the lower levels of the sexual and economic hierarchies lies the relationship between the systemic oppression of Black males and the broken homes this oppression created in the future decades. Those who find it in their hearts to give these men the benefit of the doubt, might see them as misunderstood men battling with the forces of a racist, corrupt, and violent police culture, and an economic oppression at the hands of the corporate bottom line. Most that succeeded did so by complying reluctantly. Some fought against the system. The rest, the subjects of this essay, lost hope.

Women during this period had to pursue economic stability all by themselves. They had to work full-time jobs and deal with children who felt neglected. Those who could not make it in the job market had to ask for help from a government that treated them as a burden. The men became the focal point of their frustrations and were deemed worthless. Leaving embattled males to bounce around the bottom of the sexual hierarchy. Seeking equally broken and thus traumatized women. Most of which eventually grow tired of the man’s limitations or complete impotence in the arenas of financial upward mobility and mental health. Leaving children in every home that will inevitably have a negative perception of all men.

Men who had the misfortune of being at the bottom of several hierarchies became unwitting villains. Their masculinity and paternal instincts were destroyed, or never acquired, due to a system’s oppression and a destiny of subsistence. The very same factors being blamed by feminist for the female gender’s woes. The men who cannot accept their roles as passive victims of institutional injustice and corporate subservience are seen as being plagued by a childish, and habitually promiscuous and violent hypermasculinity. This behavior is prevalent in the males growing up in this environment, but I believe it is a natural response to the emasculation brought upon by their inability to challenge the inequities of their circumstances. They lose hope of achieving anything substantial and pay society back by creating children who are destined to repeat the cycle. A hopeless generation. Bred to serve the system inside of the enclosure of state-sponsored mediocrity.

What Samuels dismisses is that many of the victims of this system often lose faith in it. They are tortured by the trauma of injustice and a static and meaningless existence. Most who suffer at the hands of their corrupt local institutions become convinced that the entire system is broken. Their dark outlook sees success in said system as conforming to an evil network of cells who are only linked by their need to placate and please an unjust ruling-class. They see a truth only visible to those at the bottom of the hierarchy. Whether it is visible to you or not, it is a truth, nonetheless. Acknowledging this truth makes you an enemy of our social structure. It destroys your life and potentially that of your children.

“Men do not become what by nature they are meant to be, but what society makes them. The generous feelings and high propensities of the soul are, as it were, shrunk up, seared, violently wrenched and amputated; to fit us for our intercourse with the world. Something in the manner that beggars maim and mutilate their children to make them fit for their future situation in life.” -William Hazlitt