The Great Numbness: Life in the Post-Great War Wreckage
World War Wednesday: Are we seeing the fall of another lost generation?
Young men are out here looksmaxxing1 when they should be Logos-maxxing.2 We are witnessing the emergence of a new Lost Generation. Are we smashing our faces with hammers just to feel something? The latest somatic response to feel like you are winning at something by mogging.3
The Great War hit Europe, the British Dominions and America so hard it left them numb.
The 1920s roared for some, but for many, the bleakness of the Great War never truly dissipated. We see a similar pattern today. In the face of the rapid explosion of AI and drone technology, our digital addictions serve as frantic distractions from a growing internal void and looming dread over jobs and an occupation-less life. The pre-Great Depression interwar period, the Roaring 20s, was defined by a great numbness. It, too, coincided with capitalist materialism and consumerism that masked a profound disconnect in the soul of the youth.
The Veteran’s Friction
For the men returning from the mud and blood of the Somme, the home they dreamed of while in the trenches no longer existed. What followed the shock was often a disconnect between those who had witnessed the equality of death in the field and the civilians who had merely endured the rationing of butter.
Alienation set in and many veterans returned with a specific brand of hostility; viewing civilian complaints about wartime austerity as pathetic—a betrayal of the stoicism required to survive the front. This friction was sexed. Across Europe, women, who had found independence in munitions factories, were often alienated from shell-shocked husbands who returned as strangers. In Britain, this rift was so deep that some suffragists regrounded their claim to citizenship in the separate spheres for the sexes, and the benefits of social motherhood and feminine values for society. Among the men of Italy, if they could have built a manosphere4, the angry members of the “trenchocracy5” would have done so.
The Death of the Chaperone
Like the old GOP elite in the Global War on Terror, World War One killed the aristocracy’s claim to lead as an almost accidental consequence, by comparison it basically murdered Victorian modesty. The middle-class conventions of the 19th century dissolved with eros and narcissus running rampant. In the face of what should have galvanized them into action, the Western cultural elite split with some uselessly paralyzed by horror and others taking advantage of the dislocation to sprint toward a cold, mechanical utopia, and others embracing the youthful anti-tradition of fascism.
The American Escape
But then, there was something of an American escape valve. Europeans could look across the ocean and perhaps hope and cheer, somewhat. Jazz, America’s music, was that syncopated escape from the dirge of the early 1920s. Ironically, African American stars like Josephine Baker and Louis Armstrong became the faces of a new, international energy. This was a frantic distraction from the fact that the old world had ended in a muddy ditch, and no one knew what was replacing it. But it was beautiful.
What is the Jazz of today; a new sound of life, offering a rhythm of hope for the future? K-Pop? Perhaps we are lost indeed.
Or maybe this is just our struggle, as every era has had its own. While we study the past, those of us alive today were not supposed to solve the 1920s; however, the 2020s are our problem. Americans have responded to troubled and anxious eras before, with movements like Muscular Christianity and the New Deal. Now we need a Logos of the digital age — one that reorders our relationship with technology, the state, and our neighbors, and recovers what it means to be human in an imperfect and tragic world.
looksmaxxing | noun | \ˈlu̇ks-ˌmak-siŋ\: The systematic process of optimizing one’s physical attractiveness through a combination of grooming, fitness, and occasionally extreme or dangerous DIY "hardmaxxing" techniques like literally smashing the bones in your face with a hammer.
Logos | noun | \ˈlō-ˌgäs: In classical Greek thought, it (λόγος) denotes reason, word, or rational discourse. In Aristotle’s rhetoric, it refers to the use of logic and evidence to persuade, was the intelligible structure that made reality comprehensible to the reasoning mind. The ability to make sense of the world you find yourself in. This made it a natural bridge into theology. In the Gospel of John, the Logos is identified with the “Word of God” the eternal rational principle through which all things were created, and ultimately with the person of Jesus Christ. Though in the case the English “word” is considered by some to be insufficient to capture the full meaning. Early Christian thinkers drew on the concept to articulate a God who is not only powerful but fundamentally intelligible — a creator whose rationality is reflected in creation and revealed to human reason. A deity who desires to be known and has given humankind the ability to know the divine and participate in the work of stewarding creation.
mogging | noun | \ˈmä-giŋ\: The act of physically dominating others in a social setting by being more attractive, taller, or more muscular, thereby “relegating” them to a lower status. Derived from the acronym AMOG (Alpha Male Of Group), it represents a hyper-competitive social hierarchy where young men “check” their peers’ physical stats to assert dominance and alleviate their own deep-seated anxieties of irrelevance.
manosphere | noun | \ˈma-nə-ˌsfir\: A diverse and decentralized digital ecosystem of online communities, forums, blogs, and social media spaces linked by a focus on masculinity, male identity, and — often — opposition to feminism and mainstream gender norms. Functioning as a surrogate social structure for a demographic alienated by the collapse of 20th-century social contracts. Replacing organic mentorship with algorithmically-driven frameworks, it encompasses a wide ideological spectrum, ranging from men’s rights advocacy and self-improvement communities to more extreme misogynistic subcultures. Examples include:
MRAs (Men’s Rights): The legalistic wing, focused on perceived systemic discrimination in family and civil courts.
MGTOW (Men Going Their Own Way): A separatist movement advocating for a total withdrawal from romantic or domestic cooperation with women.
Incels (Involuntary Celibates): A subculture of men who attribute their inability to find romantic or sexual partners to societal or genetic factors, often expressing hostility toward women.
Red Pill: The “performance” wing; men who believe they have “awakened” to a rigged social game and seek to optimize their status within it.
PUAs (Pick-Up Artists): Communities centered on strategies and techniques for seducing women, often framing relationships in transactional or adversarial terms.
Black Pill: The terminal point of nihilism. A fatalistic offshoot that believes romantic outcomes are determined entirely by immutable biological “stats,” rendering effort futile and driving some toward the DIY extremes of “hardmaxxing.”
Trincerocrazia | /trin-tʃe-ro-kra-ˈtsi-a/ or in English, trenchocracy | noun | \ˈtrench-ˈä-krə-sē\: a term coined by Benito Mussolini in 1917 for the cohort of Great War veterans and belief that that shared combat trauma gave them legitimacy and a mandate to dismantle a soft civilian order. “The word is ugly. No matter. There are uglier ones which have long enjoyed citizenship rights in the Italian language. We don’t give a fig about ‘purists’ who snarl at ·neologisms’. It’s all part of the eternal conflict between the old sensibility and the new! The trenchocracy is the aristocracy of the trenches. It is the aristocracy of tomorrow! It is the aristocracy in action. It comes from the depths. Its ‘quarterings of nobility’ are a splendid blood red. On its coat of arms there may be depicted a ‘Frisian horse’, a dugout, a hand-grenade.” —Mussolini