Must We Destroy the Planet in Order to Develop Good Men?

On idle men, consequence, and the absence of structure

Young Men Have a Capacity to Drift

Parents see it early.
Released from discipline before he has developed any of his own.

He leaves school with energy, appetite, and freedom—but no real regard for the body that has to carry him. The structure is gone. Nothing has replaced it. So he drifts.

Smoking, drinking, staying up late, showing off — chronologically an adult, and no longer taking advice.

It isn’t rebellion so much as undirected physiology. The body is used before it is respected. Old people recognise it immediately. They know those habits don’t age well. They know the bill comes later.

Men have a capacity to drift.

Not because they are deficient, but because, without demand, nothing organises them. No pressure, no structure. No structure, no direction.

This hasn’t gone unnoticed historically

In Henry IV Part 1, King Henry IV looks at his son and wishes for something harder—something that would shape him. And in Henry IV Part 2, Falstaff reduces it bluntly:

War is where idle men are put to use.

By the 19th century, the idea had lost any subtlety. Theodore Roosevelt argued for the necessity of strenuous struggle to prevent softness. Friedrich Nietzsche elevated hardness and resistance as shaping forces. And William James finally named the problem clearly in The Moral Equivalent of War: war works—but only because nothing else has been built to replace what it does.

When men drift, someone eventually suggests a war.

War imposes what is otherwise missing:
pressure
consequence
hierarchy
visibility

It forces a body into contact with reality.

But war is not development. It is uncontrolled overload.

It produces coherence in some—and destruction in many. It is not a system. It is what remains when systems fail.

War was never the male equivalent of childbirth.

It was the failure to build one

It was the absence of a better system for forcing men into contact with consequence.

Women have not needed an external ordeal imposed in the same way. The body already provides it. Cyclic physiology, the preparation for pregnancy, the possibility of childbirth, and the physical continuity of care all demand organisation, restraint, and recovery over time.

With childbirth, breastfeeding and childrearing, the campaign begins in ernest.

Not spectacles, real work with vital consequence.

They impose limits.

Women have never needed a war to be shaped by consequence Anneke Jamison. The Promotion (winner 2022 Napier Waller Art Prize)

They do not allow long-term neglect of the body without consequence.

Women are brought into contact with consequence through continuity.
Men have often required interruption.

Many societies understood this.

They did not leave male capacity to drift, and they did not need war to organise it. What is often called “men’s business” was not casual or symbolic. It was structured. Initiation, responsibility, law, and consequence were built in. Strength—and the capacity for violence—was recognised early and placed under limits.

Retribution existed, but it was bounded.
Force was permitted, but governed.

These were not wars. They were contained systems of consequence.

Male capacity was not denied. It was recognised—and put under law.

We have largely removed both—the structure and the demand.

What remains is a population of young men with capacity but no framework for using it, and no real consequence when they don’t. The result is not peace. It is drift.

So the question remains:

Must we destroy the planet in order to develop good men?

Or have we simply failed to build anything that demands enough of them?

William Bradley Ingram, aged 20 - 1915