Content warning: This post discusses relationship dynamics, sexual behavior, and coordination failure in ways that will make everyone uncomfortable. It’s not written to make you feel good. It’s written to name a “demon” that most conversations carefully avoid naming.
This is not a moral argument about how people should behave. It is a structural argument about what happens when coordination constraints are removed without replacement.
You’re 78 years old. Your body stopped cooperating years ago; knees shot, back perpetually aching, hands shaking from early-stage Parkinson’s. You’re in a nursing home because you can’t manage stairs anymore and there’s no one to help you at home. There never was.
The facility takes most of your Social Security check. What’s left barely covers the phone you rarely use. Who would you call? Your room is 120 square feet. Thin walls. The smell of industrial cleaner mixed with something they can’t quite eliminate. You share a bathroom with a roommate who doesn’t remember your name, or his own.
Meals are served at 5 PM. Institutional food, the same rotation every two weeks. You know it’s Thursday because they’re serving the mystery meat casserole again. You eat it anyway. Sometimes you don’t. Nobody notices either way.
The TV in the common room plays game shows you’re too tired to follow. Other residents sit in wheelchairs and stare at the screen, or at nothing in particular. Some talk to people who aren’t there. You wonder how long until that’s you. Not long, probably. The decline comes fast once it starts.
There are activities. Bingo on Wednesdays. A church group visits on Sundays, but they talk to you in that loud, slow voice people use for children and the elderly. You stopped going. Nobody noticed.
The aides are overworked and underpaid. Most are immigrants. The younger American generation has largely opted out of elder care work, and there aren’t enough of them to fill the gaps. The same coordination collapse that destroyed family formation destroyed the demographics needed to care for the elderly. They’re not unkind, just exhausted. They move through their rounds efficiently: medications, vitals, help to the bathroom if you can’t make it yourself. They don’t have time for conversation. There are thirty residents and three aides on shift.
Most barely speak English. Not their fault. They’re filling gaps as native-born workers decline, doing work Americans won’t do anymore—work there aren’t enough Americans left to do. But it means even basic conversation is difficult. You’re isolated not just by circumstance, but by language. The young woman who helps you to the bathroom can’t understand when you try to tell her about your hip pain. She smiles, nods, moves to the next resident.
Your children? You don’t have children. That’s why you’re here. No partner either. The relationships never lasted, or you never found one worth keeping, or you kept looking for something better that never materialized. Doesn’t matter now. The result is the same.
Holidays are worst. Christmas, Thanksgiving. Days when the few residents who have families get visitors. You watch them arrive with flowers and awkward cheer, staying exactly the obligatory hour before leaving relieved. You have no visitors. The staff puts a paper decoration in your room. Everyone pretends you don’t notice the difference.
You had friends once. Some died. Some moved away. Most just drifted. People get busy with their families, their grandchildren, their lives. You didn’t have those anchoring relationships, so you became someone they used to know. They probably don’t remember you’re here. You’re not sure you’d want them to see you like this anyway.
At night you lie awake—you often do. The bed is wrong. Your body hurts. There’s nothing to get up for anyway. You think about the choices that led here. The relationships you left. The ones you never quite started. The years you spent thinking you had time, that something better was coming, that you deserved more than what was being offered.
You were right, maybe. Or maybe you weren’t. But you’re here now, and time is the one thing you definitively don’t have anymore.
This doesn’t happen randomly. It happens structurally.
The coordination failure is abstract when you’re young. Statistics. Dating pool composition. Attachment theory. It becomes concrete when you’re old: you die alone because you never built the relationships that would have carried you through the final years. By the time you understand what you needed, you no longer have the time, health, or energy to build it.
This is what awaits a significant percentage of the current generation. Not because they’re bad people. Not because they didn’t try. But because they were making individually rational choices in a broken system, and the system doesn’t care whether your choices were rational. It only cares whether you built a support structure that survives contact with your decline.
Most won’t.
Research shows approximately 40-50% of the current adult population displays insecure attachment patterns—anxious, avoidant, or disorganized. But this dramatically understates the crisis because the trend is rapidly worsening.
A meta-analysis of 94 samples (N = 25,243 American college students) found:
More critically, the dating pool is far worse than general population statistics suggest. Research shows securely attached adults are most likely to be married, while avoidant individuals are most likely to remain single. Additionally, avoidantly attached participants are overrepresented in dating apps beyond their 25% population prevalence.
This creates predictable selection bias. As cohorts age, securely attached individuals form stable partnerships and exit the dating pool. They drop from ~50% in early dating years to ~20% among older singles. Meanwhile, dismissive-avoidant individuals cycle through relationships rapidly, failing to sustain partnerships and re-entering the market repeatedly. They rise to ~50% of the remaining pool. The pool itself shrinks dramatically as functional people exit, leaving only ~14% of singles aged 57-85 even dating.
Meanwhile:
These aren’t separate problems. They’re symptoms of the same underlying coordination failure of the type Scott Alexander termed “Moloch”. There’s a “demon” possessing an entire generation’s ability to form lasting partnerships.
When insecure attachment is rapidly becoming the majority, and the dating pool is compositionally collapsing toward 80% insecure, you’re not looking at individual moral failure. You’re looking at structural collapse.
This is not a cultural debate. It’s a compositional shift.
The attachment statistics were grim enough, but they don’t capture the full picture. A meta-analysis of Western countries found 12.16% (CI: 8.01-17.02%) of the general population has a personality disorder, with Cluster B personality disorders (borderline, narcissistic, antisocial, histrionic) affecting 5.53% (CI: 3.20-8.43%).
Being in a relationship with someone with a personality disorder is a nightmare, though each type creates its own hell:
The dating pool problem: Like insecure attachment patterns, personality disorders are overrepresented in the singles pool. These individuals cycle through relationships rapidly—relationships fail predictably due to their patterns, they re-enter the dating market, and the cycle repeats. Meanwhile, healthy individuals partner and stay partnered.
Combined effect: At age 35-40, you’re facing:
The implication is stark: Partner early with someone reasonably compatible, and do whatever you can to make it work.
This doesn’t mean stay with someone who has a personality disorder or is abusive. That’s not fixable and you should leave. But if you find someone who is:
Commit and invest in making it work rather than endlessly seeking someone better through serial dating. The pool gets worse, not better. The person you meet at 25 who’s 80% compatible is statistically better than who you’ll meet at 35 who might be 90% compatible on paper but comes with accumulated baggage from failed relationships.
Traditional wisdom about marrying relatively young and working through problems? The modern data validates it. The dating pool compositionally degrades over time. Those who partner early and make it work are responding rationally to the selection bias reality.
When problems operate at population scale, their consequences don’t arrive dramatically. They arrive statistically.
If this were individual pathology, distribution would be random. It isn’t.
The attachment statistics show directional change over time: 15% decline in secure attachment, 56% spike in avoidant, 18% increase in disorganized. The dating pool shows systematic compositional degradation as cohorts age. The personality disorder overrepresentation follows predictable selection bias patterns.
This is structural collapse, not personal moral failure. Something broke the coordination mechanisms that made pair-bonding possible. We need to name what broke, and how.
In Mark 5, Jesus encounters a man possessed by demons. He asks: “What is your name?”
The demons answer: “Legion, for we are many” (Mark 5:9).
Jesus casts Legion into a herd of swine. The pigs rush into the sea and drown. The man is freed.
The story illustrates something crucial about coordination failures: you can’t fix them from within. Legion can’t be reasoned with or reformed. It has to be recognized, named, cast into something, and destroyed there. Only then does healing become possible.
Modern relationship dynamics are possessed by Legion. Not a single demon, but many coordinated failures producing collective catastrophe. And like the biblical story, most people will drown like swine before the demon is cast out.
This isn’t pessimism. It’s recognition. You can’t solve a Moloch problem you refuse to name.
Every discussion of modern relationship dynamics devolves into gender warfare:
The conversation fails because people over-identify with their gender and defend it tribally instead of examining the system producing the outcomes. When you’re stuck defending “your side,” you can’t see that both sides are trapped in the same broken coordination mechanism.
It’s easier to blame the other gender (or yourself) than to recognize that the coordination mechanism itself broke. People keep trying to solve the problem at the individual level—“just choose better,” “just be better”—because acknowledging the structural collapse means facing that no individual solution exists.
But you can’t fix Legion by being a better person. You can only name it, recognize you’re possessed, and understand that the swine have to drown before healing becomes possible.
Birth control decoupled sex from reproduction, removing the natural constraint that enforced coordination between male provision and female sexual access. But more fundamentally, it shifted the time horizon for attraction optimization.
Previously, pregnancy risk forced long-term thinking: you couldn’t afford to optimize for immediate attraction/excitement because the consequences were long-term. You had to consider “Will I respect this person as a partner and provider over decades? Will attraction deepen through shared life and partnership quality?”
Birth control removed that forcing function. Now women could optimize for short-term attraction (immediate spark, excitement, chemistry) without long-term consequences. This is individually rational—nobody should have to marry someone they’re not attracted to, and optimizing for both immediate attraction AND long-term partnership quality would be ideal.
The coordination failure emerges because provider traits generate long-term attraction but not short-term attraction. Competence, reliability, provision capacity—these create attraction through respect, gratitude, and partnership quality over time. But they don’t produce immediate spark. When the system shifts to rewarding short-term optimization, provider traits stop being selected because their value only emerges long-term.
The asymmetry: short-term attraction signals (physical attractiveness, status, excitement) concentrate on a small percentage of men, while long-term partnership traits distribute more broadly. Rational short-term optimization produces impossible mate selection dynamics.
Go to wtfhappenedin1971.com and look at the charts. Every metric breaks.
In 1971, the US left the gold standard. What followed was the systematic decoupling of productivity from wages, the destruction of single-income household viability, and the collapse of economic foundation for traditional family formation.
The data:
The consequence for relationships is that men cannot provide the way previous generations could, even if they want to. The economic foundation for traditional male provision has been structurally destroyed. A man working 40-50 hours a week at median income cannot afford housing, healthcare, and family formation the way his grandfather could.
This isn’t about men “failing to step up.” The economic system broke. Provision became structurally impossible for the average man.
No-fault divorce laws decoupled marriage dissolution from accountability. Either party could exit unilaterally without proving fault. The timing was catastrophic. Precisely when birth control and economic divergence were already breaking relationship coordination, divorce rates spiked during the critical window when millions of children were forming attachment patterns. Children experiencing parental divorce during ages 0-7 develop insecure attachment from inconsistent caregiving and household instability. Those children became adults who struggled to form stable relationships, then passed that attachment damage to their own children. A generational cascade that compounds with each cycle.
When you combine these three structural changes, you get LEGION.
Women respond rationally to their constraints. Provision isn’t economically available anyway—wages can’t support a family. Why select for provider traits when provision is off the table? Birth control enables optimizing for short-term attraction (immediate spark, excitement) without pregnancy risk. The pattern emerges: respond to immediate attraction without the constraint that previously forced long-term thinking about partnership quality and provision. Individually rational given what’s actually possible.
Men respond rationally to their constraints. They can’t afford to provide anyway—single income is insufficient for family formation. Short-term attraction doesn’t correlate with provider capacity, so developing provision traits doesn’t lead to selection when the system rewards short-term attraction optimization. Commitment isn’t rewarded when sexual access is available without it to some men. Why develop provider capacity when it’s neither economically viable nor selected for? Optimize for attractiveness and perceived status instead. Individually rational given the incentives.
LEGION: Both genders making individually rational choices that produce collective catastrophe. Women can’t get commitment from attractive men because those men have too many options. They can’t attract “provider men” because those men have opted out, feel exploited, or have too many short-term options themselves. Men who tried to develop provider traits feel like suckers. Men who didn’t develop them can’t attract stable partners. Trust collapses between the sexes. Coordination becomes impossible. Both genders end up isolated, unable to form lasting bonds.
This is LEGION: rational individual optimization leads to collective nightmare.
The compound effect of these three demons doesn’t stop at failed relationships. It’s breaking civilization. Before we analyze each demon’s detailed mechanics, let’s see the full scale of what we’re dealing with.
The coordination failure doesn’t stop at the dating market. It cascades into economic and civilizational collapse.
For most of history, men’s primary motivation for doing difficult, dangerous, unglamorous work wasn’t personal fulfillment—it was mate selection. Men worked construction, mining, garbage collection, infrastructure maintenance, commercial fishing, logging, electrical line work, all the dangerous jobs that keep civilization functioning, primarily because provision was how you became attractive to women.
Most men would rather not do these jobs. They’re hard, often dangerous, frequently unfulfilling. But men did them anyway because the economic calculus was clear: develop provider capacity, become attractive to women, build family, gain purpose and legacy.
The coordination failure destroyed this incentive structure. When provision stopped being selected, men lost their primary reason to do the hard work that keeps civilization running. Women began choosing based on attraction and excitement rather than provider capacity.
This wasn’t because men are lazy or irresponsible. It’s rational optimization to changed incentives. Economic divergence means you can’t afford to support a family on a median wage anyway. The inconsistency that birth control enabled means women aren’t selecting for provider traits anyway. Why work the dangerous, unglamorous jobs?
Meanwhile, feminism promised that entering the workforce would bring liberation—careers, economic independence, fulfillment through work. This was a reasonable hope. Who wouldn’t want financial security and meaningful work? The promise made sense: if work brought men status and purpose, why not women too?
But most women have discovered what men already knew but couldn’t say: work isn’t actually fulfilling for most people most of the time. Careers are often grinding, exploitative, unfulfilling. The 40-50 hour work week, office politics, meaningless tasks, demanding bosses, economic pressure—men weren’t keeping some secret enjoyment from women. They did it because they had to for mate selection and economic survival, not because they loved it. But the feminist promise couldn’t acknowledge this reality without undermining the entire project.
Now women face economic necessity, not liberation—single income can’t support a family, so most can’t opt out even when work proves unfulfilling. The desire for meaningful work and economic independence wasn’t wrong. The promise that work would deliver those things was. And there’s no going back—the economic system now requires two incomes, trapping both sexes in arrangements neither particularly wants.
Look at the gender breakdown of dangerous, difficult, essential work:
These aren’t careers women are clamoring for even with all barriers removed. They’re dangerous—these professions dominate workplace fatality statistics. They’re physically demanding, often isolated, generally unglamorous. Men did them because provision equals mate selection. When that incentive structure breaks down alongside other economic and demographic shifts, the consequences compound.
The consequences are measurable:
These labor shortages have multiple causes—demographic aging, deindustrialization, immigration policy changes, disinvestment in vocational education. But the coordination failure in relationship markets compounds them. When provision capacity stops being selected for, when “dangerous unglamorous work that supports a family” no longer leads to mate selection or social respect, one more incentive to enter these fields disappears.
Both genders ended up trapped in a worse equilibrium. Women wanted economic independence but got economic necessity—most can’t opt out of work even though many find it unfulfilling. Meanwhile they’re selecting for attraction that doesn’t correlate with men willing to do hard work, producing partners who can’t or won’t provide even if they wanted to.
Men lost multiple reinforcing incentives simultaneously: Economic provision became structurally impossible (wages can’t support families). Mate selection stopped rewarding provider capacity (women optimizing for attraction instead). Social respect and community membership that came from being husband and father eroded. Facing the same unfulfilling work with no prospect of family formation, no social standing from fatherhood, no community to belong to—increasing numbers are opting out entirely.
Both genders are worse off. Women are stuck in jobs many don’t want, struggling to find men who’ll commit and be able to provide for the family they both want. Men are checking out of both work and relationships, descending into deaths of despair.
The relationship Moloch feeds a larger civilizational Moloch. Infrastructure has funding available through recent federal investment, but can’t access it—not enough workers to do the maintenance and construction. Skilled trades face severe shortages despite rising wages. When the male-dominated professions that maintain civilization’s physical systems can’t attract workers, infrastructure decays, critical systems fail, living standards drop for everyone.
You can’t run an industrial civilization when the coordination mechanisms that motivated difficult, dangerous, essential work have broken down. This isn’t about going back to patriarchy. It’s about recognizing that removing one coordination mechanism (provision equals mate selection) without replacing it with something equally effective produces predictable collapse—not just in relationships, but in the economic and physical infrastructure that supports civilization itself.
The swine aren’t just drowning in failed relationships. They’re taking critical infrastructure, economic productivity, and civilizational maintenance capacity down with them.
Now that we understand the stakes—this isn’t just personal, it’s civilizational—let’s examine exactly how each demon operates.
Before birth control, sex carried pregnancy risk. This biological constraint meant women had to be consistent in their sexual gatekeeping—they couldn’t separate attraction from provision because the risks were coupled. The natural constraint enforced coordination: men developed provider capacity to be selected, women selected for traits that predicted stable partnerships.
Birth control removed pregnancy risk, allowing women to optimize for short-term attraction (immediate spark, excitement) and stable provision (long-term partnership quality) separately. These desires don’t naturally align—short-term attraction doesn’t correlate with provider traits or long-term partnership quality. Before technology, biology forced them into one choice. After, they could be pursued independently.
This isn’t conscious strategy or manipulation. Women aren’t doing anything wrong by wanting both immediate attraction and long-term stability—both desires are completely reasonable. The problem is that removing the coupling constraint revealed an underlying incompatibility: short-term female attraction concentrates on traits that don’t predict stable partnership.
The decoupling would have been neutral if attraction distributed symmetrically. In that world, people optimize for attraction, match at similar levels, everyone finds partners. But attraction doesn’t work that way.
The Asymmetry That Broke Everything
The data is unambiguous: women rated 80% of men as below average attractiveness, while men’s ratings of women follow a normal bell curve. On Tinder, women swipe right on only 8-14% of male profiles; men swipe right on 46% of female profiles. Women match with about 10% of their swipes; men match with 0.6%. Speed dating research shows that in larger pools, women become significantly more selective, choosing about one-third of partners, while men’s selectivity remains unchanged.
Women’s short-term attraction concentrates on 10-20% of men. Men’s attraction distributes broadly across women.
The Impossible Optimization Problem
When you decouple sexual access from reproduction in this asymmetric environment, you create an impossible situation. Women can’t get commitment from men they’re immediately attracted to (those men have abundance, no scarcity, no reason to commit). Men who could provide stable partnerships can’t attract when women optimize for short-term attraction signals. Nobody’s desires are wrong—wanting both immediate attraction and long-term stability is reasonable, wanting honesty about where you stand is reasonable. But the desires can’t all be simultaneously satisfied given how short-term attraction actually distributes.
The pattern that emerges: sexual access concentrates on 10-20% of men based on attraction, while commitment and partnership get sought from different men with provider traits. When men observe this differential treatment, trust collapses. Men stop developing provider capacity that isn’t being selected for. Women can’t reliably identify who would actually commit. Both genders start defecting on truth-telling because cooperation isn’t credible. Race to the bottom: everyone optimizing for short-term signals because long-term coordination became impossible.
We know exactly what broke. We know exactly how to fix it. And it won’t be fixed, because the people profiting from the broken system have more political power than the people drowning in it.
What would need to happen economically for men to provide for families the way their grandfathers could:
1. Stop inflating the currency
Since leaving the gold standard in 1971, wages have decoupled from productivity. From 1948 to 1971, compensation and productivity grew at almost the same amount. After 1971, that alignment broke down. Productivity kept rising; wages stagnated.
To restore single-income family viability, you need monetary policy that stops stealing purchasing power through inflation. Real wages need to track productivity again. This means the Federal Reserve would need to stop accommodating deficit spending through monetary expansion.
2. Address the national debt
The U.S. national debt is on an unsustainable trajectory. Unless policies change, debt will reach 200% of GDP by 2047. Federal interest spending reached $882 billion in FY2024 and accelerated to over $1 trillion in FY2025. The United States now spends over $3 billion per day just on interest payments. Debt service consumes an increasing share of the federal budget.
Growing debt crowds out private investment, reduces business capital, lowers productivity, and translates into lower wages. When high debt levels reduce capacity and capital stock, workers earn less because businesses have fewer resources to invest in productive assets.
To restore family-formation economics, you’d need to actually pay down the debt, which means massive spending cuts or tax increases that nobody wants to vote for.
3. Fix housing affordability
The national housing deficit is at an all-time high of 4.7 million units. Home prices to median household income have risen five-fold, and since 2019, the income needed to buy a single-family home has doubled.
The solution is fundamentally supply-driven: reform restrictive local zoning laws, streamline permitting, remove minimum lot sizes, allow accessory dwelling units, reduce regulatory barriers to construction. Increasing supply is at the core of any solution to alleviate the housing affordability crisis.
To restore single-income family viability, a man working full-time at median wage needs to be able to afford a house in a reasonable commute of his job, the way his grandfather could in 1960. That requires building millions more units and removing the regulatory barriers that make construction prohibitively expensive.
4. Reconnect wages to productivity
Policy proposals to reconnect wages to productivity include strengthening labor’s bargaining power, updating labor law to reflect modern employment relationships, addressing corporate concentration that suppresses wages, and reforming trade and tax policies that incentivize offshoring.
But the core issue is that boosting productivity growth alone will not lead to broad-based wage gains unless policies are pursued that reconnect productivity growth and the pay of the vast majority. The gains from productivity have been captured by capital owners rather than workers, and reversing that requires fundamental shifts in policy.
Public choice theory explains why governments systematically fail to implement reforms that would benefit the general public.
When a policy provides substantial benefits to a well-defined group while spreading costs thinly across millions of taxpayers or consumers, the beneficiaries have strong incentives to organize and lobby for the policy. Meanwhile, individual members of the public face such small personal costs that they have little motivation to oppose it.
Applied to our problems:
Monetary policy: The Federal Reserve accommodating deficit spending benefits:
Who bears the cost? Everyone else, through gradual purchasing power erosion. But, because each voter bears a very small part of the cost of bad decisions, voters lack the incentives to sufficiently monitor the government.
Paying down the National Debt requires either:
Meanwhile, kicking the can down the road has concentrated benefits (current spending continues) and dispersed costs (future taxpayers pay). The total dollar loss by losers may far exceed gains by winners, yet the will of the winners is implemented as public policy.
Housing/zoning reform will never happen because local homeowners benefit from restrictive zoning (maintains their property values through artificial scarcity). They show up to every zoning board meeting. Young people who can’t afford housing are dispersed, disorganized, often don’t even live in the jurisdiction yet.
Policies that would reconnect Wages to productivity would shift gains back to labor face opposition from:
These are organized, politically powerful groups. Workers are dispersed, often lack union representation, and face collective action problems.
The public response to these problems? Demand MORE government intervention. Which creates NEW concentrated interest groups who benefit from the intervention and will fight to maintain it. The cycle accelerates.
Can’t afford housing? Demand rent control which reduces housing supply and makes problem worse. Demand government housing subsidies (which bid up prices and benefit landlords). Demand affordable housing mandates which often don’t result in additional affordability and drive up costs of market-rate units.
Can’t afford childcare? Demand government subsidies which bid up prices as providers capture subsidies. Can’t afford healthcare? Demand government intervention which creates more concentrated interest groups capturing the spending.
Each intervention creates beneficiaries who will lobby to maintain and expand the program. Each makes the underlying problem worse while appearing to help. This is the classic Moloch problem.
The rational self-interested behavior of every actor in the system points toward:
The only way this ends is crisis forcing reset. The incentives for good management in government are very weak, and the political economy makes reform before collapse nearly impossible.
The attachment statistics didn’t appear from nowhere. There’s a specific structural change that helps explain how we went from 51.02% insecure (1988) to 58.38% insecure (2011) and climbing: no-fault divorce laws and the subsequent spike in divorce rates.
Following California’s adoption of no-fault divorce laws in 1970, virtually every state followed suit. The consequences were immediate and dramatic: divorce rates spiked from 9.2 per 1,000 married women (1960) to 18.2 (1973) to 19.3 (1974), peaking at 22.6 (1980)—a 145% increase in two decades. Less than 20% of couples married in 1950 ended up divorced; about 50% of couples married in 1970 divorced. Approximately half of children born in the 1970s saw their parents part, compared to only 11% born in the 1950s.
This wasn’t a gradual cultural shift. It was a legal/structural change that produced immediate, massive increase in family dissolution precisely when children were in their critical attachment development years.
The rates have since declined—currently around 14.2 per 1,000 married women (2024)—but this doesn’t undo the damage. Divorce rates remain 54% higher than the 1960 baseline, and children experiencing parental divorce have stabilized around 40%—nearly four times the pre-1970s rate. The spike generation (1970s children who experienced 50% divorce rates) developed attachment disorders, became adults who struggled to form stable relationships, and passed that neurological damage to their own children. Declining divorce rates can’t reverse generational attachment damage already encoded in millions of nervous systems.
The research is clear on how parental divorce damages children’s attachment development. Maternal sadness and instability related to divorce are associated with less availability and greater inconsistency in responses. Children don’t know to what extent they can count on their mother, so they implement hyperactivation strategies—constantly seeking attention and reassurance—characteristic of anxious attachment.
Disorganized attachment is seen in children whose parents are inconsistently available, sometimes a source of love and comfort, other times a source of neglect and unavailability. This is exactly what happens when children shuttle between two households with different parenting styles, different rules, different emotional availability. Children in joint custody must adapt to largely different parenting styles and different sets of family members, with little research done on the effects of inconsistent parenting styles in these arrangements. High ongoing conflict between parents in shared parenting arrangements shows more negative outcomes for children—specifically poor child adjustment and increased risk of developing insecure attachments.
During the critical early childhood period when attachment patterns form, frequent overnights of very young children in two homes are associated with attachment insecurity and less regulated behaviors. These children experience radical inconsistency in caregiving precisely when their attachment systems are being wired.
The timing of parental divorce proves crucial. Parental insecurity was most pronounced when parental divorce took place in early childhood, consistent with hypotheses about sensitive periods in attachment development. The children most affected by the 1970s-1980s divorce spike are now adults in their 40s-50s, many carrying their own attachment disorders into the dating market.
Adult children of divorce show lower well-being levels, higher divorce rates, poor marital quality, less positive parent–child relationships, and more insecure attachment styles than adult children from non-divorced families.
Children whose parents divorced may be less comfortable with closeness, more avoidant of others, and have less secure attachment styles than those who did not experience divorce.
Parental divorce increased the likelihood of having an insecure adult attachment status. More specifically, parental divorce was more strongly related to insecure relationships with parents in adulthood than insecure relationships with romantic partners or friends.
The mechanism is straightforward: If a child is repeatedly exposed to parental marital disharmony, concepts of relationships in general will be affected as the child takes in ongoing strife and relational confusion.
The problem compounds: attachment disorders are transmitted across generations.
Transgenerational trauma occurs when emotional wounds are passed on from generation to generation because there has been no resolution or healing. Attachment is transmitted from one generation to the next, and adult attachment has been shown to predict the security or insecurity of children’s attachment relationship with their parents.
Ainsworth’s foundational attachment research established approximately 30% insecure attachment in intact American families during the 1970s—right as no-fault divorce was being implemented. This provides our baseline.
During the no-fault divorce era, divorce rates spiked from 9.2 per 1,000 married women (1960) to 22.6 (1980). Half of children born in the 1970s experienced parental divorce. These children developed attachment disorders from inconsistent parenting, shuttling between households, and exposure to parental conflict.
By 1988, college students showed 51.02% insecure attachment—a 21 percentage point increase from baseline. These were the children born 1966-1970 who experienced the divorce spike firsthand.
By 2011, college students showed 58.38% insecure attachment—a 28 percentage point increase from baseline. These were children born 1989-1993, raised by divorce-affected parents who struggled to form stable relationships themselves.
The progression from 30% insecure in the 1970s, to 51% insecure in 1988, to 58% insecure in 2011 and climbing matches the timeline perfectly. Divorce implementation damaged the first generation; that damage transmitted intergenerationally, accelerating the collapse.
The problem compounds in modern dating because participants who experienced their parents’ divorce, perceived high levels of conflict in their family of origin, were single and presented with discomfort in close relationships were more likely to express negativity in their outlook on marriage.
So you have people who are skeptical of marriage and commitment, entering a dating pool where everyone has similar issues, using dating apps that select for avoidant attachment, with no community vetting to identify secure individuals, in an economic system where provision isn’t viable anyway.
Each structural failure compounds the others. Easy divorce didn’t just increase divorce rates—it created generations of people neurologically wired for relationship failure through damaged attachment systems formed during critical childhood development periods.
Children experience inconsistent parenting which creates attachment disorders. These children become adults who can’t maintain relationships. Their children develop attachment disorders, and the cycle intensifies. Population-level insecure attachment rises across generations.
The economic destruction compounds the problem. Divorce doesn’t just split a household—it destroys wealth. Legal fees consume tens of thousands of dollars. Two households cost substantially more to maintain than one; economies of scale evaporate. Asset division often forces selling the family home at inopportune times, losing equity. Retirement accounts get split, reducing compound growth. One or both parents may need to liquidate investments or take on debt.
The children inherit this destruction. Where previous generations received accumulated family wealth—a down payment for a house, help with education, startup capital for a business—children of divorce inherit depleted assets split between two financially strained households. This perpetuates the economic divergence problem: each generation starts from a weaker position, making family formation even less viable. The attachment disorders prevent stable relationship formation; the depleted inheritance removes the economic foundation that might compensate.
So you’re producing generations that are both psychologically damaged (insecure attachment) and economically disadvantaged (no family wealth to build on), entering a dating market where provision isn’t economically viable anyway, trying to form families in an economic system that requires two incomes but penalizes the childrearing that dual-income families can’t provide.
This isn’t about morally judging divorce. Sometimes divorce is necessary—genuinely abusive relationships, serious incompatibility. But the structural change from fault-based to no-fault divorce made divorce dramatically easier, producing a generation of children with attachment damage that persists into adulthood, gets transmitted to the next generation, and compounds with economic disadvantage that makes family formation increasingly impossible. And the outcome is often worse even for the adults who divorce: re-entering the singles market at an older age, with children and baggage, where finding someone “better” than the partner they left is statistically unlikely. The promise of “escape to something better” rarely delivers.
We created an attachment disorder factory through legal changes in the 1970s, and we’re living with the consequences 50 years later as those damaged children become adults who can’t form stable partnerships and lack the economic foundation that might help them try.
There’s another coordination mechanism that collapsed, and almost nobody talks about it: social vetting and matchmaking.
For most of history, marriages and relationships weren’t formed through individual search of an anonymous pool. They were arranged, either formally or informally, by families and communities who knew both parties.
This wasn’t (primarily) about parental control. It was about information asymmetry reduction.
Your community knew you. They watched you grow up. They saw how you treated people over years. They knew your family, your character, your reliability, your flaws. You couldn’t fake who you were long-term in a tight community.
When it came time to form partnerships, families and friends pre-vetted potential partners based on distributed knowledge. Reputation mattered because you couldn’t escape it or start fresh elsewhere. Character assessment was communal, not individual detective work. Strategic lying was much harder because your history was known, visible, and couldn’t be hidden. Search costs were dramatically reduced as the community filtered the pool to compatible candidates. Both parties came with references through implicit or explicit social vouching.
The matchmaking wasn’t random. It was your aunt saying “I know a young woman from church who would be good for you—reliable family, similar values, I’ve known her since she was young.” Or your friend saying “My cousin just moved to town, you two should meet—I think you’d be compatible.”
The community used its distributed knowledge about people’s character, built over years of observation, to reduce the impossible information problem of individual mate search.
Modern dating is the opposite system, especially through apps. You meet strangers with no shared social context. There are no reputation consequences—you can reinvent yourself on the next app. There’s no community knowledge about their character over time, no distributed vetting from people who know them, no social cost for lying or bad behavior.
Strategic lying becomes the optimal strategy. It’s easy to misrepresent yourself through photos, descriptions, and histories. There are no consequences when discovered—just move to the next match. Everyone knows everyone else is lying, so you have to lie to compete. You can hide red flags until people are emotionally invested and present an idealized version with no reality check.
The search problem becomes structurally impossible. You’re searching through thousands of profiles individually. Each person requires weeks or months to truly assess. You can’t efficiently filter for character—it’s not visible in profiles. Attachment disorders and personality disorders look normal initially. By the time you discover incompatibility, you’ve invested months. Meanwhile the pool is compositionally degrading as you search, with securely attached people continuously exiting.
The experience at 30, 35, 40: you’re trying to assess strangers from dating apps. No one in your life is helping you find good matches. Your friends aren’t saying “I know someone who’d be perfect for you.” Your family isn’t introducing you to pre-vetted candidates from their social networks.
You’re left doing individual detective work on strangers who have every incentive to lie, in a pool that’s 80% insecurely attached, with personality disorders overrepresented, while the people who would be good matches are either already partnered or hidden in the noise.
The odds aren’t just bad. They’re structurally impossible.
The social vetting mechanism collapsed for several reasons. People don’t live near extended family or long-term communities anymore. Your friends don’t know your cousin’s friend from church because nobody goes to church and your cousin lives 2,000 miles away. Tight communities where everyone knows everyone don’t exist in modern urban environments; you don’t have a community that’s watched you grow up and can vouch for your character.
Even when connections theoretically exist, people are afraid to introduce friends because if it goes badly, they’ll be blamed. The downside risk—being blamed for a bad match—outweighs the upside of being credited for a good one. Everyone’s overwhelmed with their own lives anyway; taking time to thoughtfully match-make for friends feels like unpaid emotional labor nobody has capacity for.
The cultural narrative reinforces this collapse. You should find your own partner. Arranged or assisted matching is old-fashioned, controlling. You’ll know when you meet the right person. This individualism ideology makes matchmaking seem inappropriate rather than helpful.
And there’s no incentive structure left to counter these barriers. In tight communities, successful matchmaking earned social credit and strengthened community bonds. In atomized modern society, there’s no payoff for the effort.
This lost mechanism compounds all the other failures:
You’re trying to solve an information problem that requires distributed community knowledge using individual search through an anonymous pool where lying is optimal.
It’s not that you’re bad at choosing. It’s that the system makes good choosing structurally impossible without community vetting that no longer exists.
The traditional vetting system wasn’t perfect—it could enforce conformity, limit choice, serve family interests over individual preferences. But it solved real coordination problems:
We destroyed that system in the name of individual choice and autonomy. But we didn’t replace it with anything that solves the information problem. We just told everyone to figure it out individually using dating apps in an anonymous pool where lying is optimal.
The result: Most people can’t find compatible partners, not because compatible partners don’t exist, but because the discovery mechanism was destroyed and not replaced.
This is another demon in Legion. Another coordination failure producing collective catastrophe while everyone makes individually rational choices: lying on apps, not helping friends find partners, avoiding liability of introductions.
What most people won’t hear: You can’t change LEGION. You can only change yourself.
The vast majority of people in the dating pool are focused on their wish lists: the things they want in a partner, what they deserve, what they won’t settle for. Almost no one is focused on doing the actual work to address the problems that make them difficult to be in a relationship with.
The work means addressing your own attachment issues (anxious, avoidant, disorganized patterns). Processing trauma that affects how you show up in relationships, especially if you had difficult early relationships or family dysfunction. Learning to set and respect boundaries consistently. Developing reliability: doing what you say, being count-on-able. Building emotional regulation capacity so you’re not creating chaos for partners. Recognizing and changing your own destructive patterns. Becoming the secure base you wish you had. And most critically: practicing meekness—recognizing the power you have over your partner and choosing not to use it.
That last one deserves emphasis because it’s where most relationships actually collapse.
Every relationship involves power. Sexual access, emotional vulnerability, financial resources, social status, physical strength, attractiveness, options elsewhere. You have some form of power over your partner. They have some form of power over you.
Relationships collapse when power gets weaponized. Using sexual access strategically—withholding to manipulate or giving freely to others while restricting with your partner. Threatening to leave during conflicts to weaponize commitment uncertainty. Using financial control to leverage access to resources. Exploiting emotional vulnerability by using disclosed trauma or insecurity against them. Leveraging attractiveness by reminding your partner of your options and making them feel replaceable. Using past mistakes as permanent ammunition, never letting them move beyond failures.
This isn’t abstract abuse—it’s the everyday power moves that destroy trust. When your partner can’t predict whether you’ll weaponize your power, they can’t feel secure. Without security, attachment fails. Without attachment, coordination becomes impossible.
Meekness means recognizing you have power and deliberately choosing not to use it, even when you’re angry, hurt, or feeling justified. Not because you’re weak, but because you understand that weaponizing power destroys the coordination structure you’re trying to build.
You’re more attractive than your partner? Don’t remind them. Don’t use it as leverage. Choose to make them feel secure anyway. You control sexual access? Don’t weaponize it. Be consistent. Don’t use it strategically. You have more financial resources? Don’t use it to control. Don’t create dependency as leverage. You know their vulnerabilities? Don’t exploit them in conflict. Protect what they’ve trusted you with. You have more relationship options? Don’t threaten. Don’t create anxiety about your commitment.
This is the opposite of what modern dating advice teaches. Most advice is about maximizing your leverage, maintaining power, “not being a doormat,” keeping your options open, making them chase you. That advice produces Moloch. It teaches both parties to optimize individual power position, which destroys the trust necessary for coordination.
Meekness isn’t accepting abuse. It’s not tolerating bad behavior. It’s not giving up boundaries.
It’s choosing not to use the legitimate power you have as a weapon, even when you could, even when you’re justified, even when they deserve it.
Because relationships that survive are the ones where both people recognize they could destroy each other and choose not to. Where power exists but isn’t weaponized. Where vulnerability is protected, not exploited.
That’s rare. It requires both people doing it consistently. When only one person practices meekness, the other often exploits it, and the relationship becomes abusive.
But when both people recognize their power and choose not to weaponize it? That’s the trust infrastructure that makes coordination possible. That’s what secure attachment actually requires.
This is hard. Much harder than maintaining a wish list. It requires:
Most people won’t do this. And, most of this needs to be practiced in a relationship to be effective. Reading a book on karate won’t make you a black belt.
It’s easier to blame the opposite gender, complain about the dating pool, or wait for someone who “gets you” without having to change.
But if you’re one of the 20% secure remaining in the dating pool or if you can become secure through deliberate work, then you have dramatically better odds. Research shows securely attached adults are most likely to be married, and those married for more than 20 years are more likely to have secure attachment styles. They find each other. They build stable partnerships.
The statistics are grim, but they create an opportunity: If you actually do the work while others don’t, you become increasingly rare and valuable. Not because you have better looks or status, but because you can actually maintain a relationship. In a pool where 80% can’t coordinate, being able to coordinate is the competitive advantage.
This doesn’t destroy Moloch. But it might let you escape it.
Abstract advice to “work on yourself” is useless without specific practices. Here’s what actually works:
1. Identify Your Attachment Pattern and Its Triggers
Take the Experiences in Close Relationships assessment to identify whether you’re anxious, avoidant, or disorganized. Then track your specific triggers. When do you pull away? When do you panic about abandonment? When do you create chaos? Write these down. Pattern recognition requires data.
Most people think they know their attachment style but haven’t observed themselves systematically. Track for 30 days: What situations make you anxious? What makes you withdraw? What makes you sabotage? You can’t change patterns you haven’t identified.
2. Build Reliability Through Small Commitments
If you’re avoidant: Practice making and keeping small commitments to people. Say you’ll text tomorrow—then text tomorrow. Promise to show up at 7pm—show up at 7pm. Build the muscle of following through before trying it in romantic relationships.
If you’re anxious: Practice sitting with uncertainty without immediately seeking reassurance. When you want to text “are we okay?” wait 24 hours. Build tolerance for not knowing. Secure attachment requires not panicking when connection isn’t immediately confirmed.
Start with low-stakes relationships: friends, acquaintances, family. The work is the same but the consequences of failure are lower. You’re building capacity, not testing it in high-stakes romantic situations where failure costs you the relationship.
3. Join a High-Commitment Community (Not Just Dating)
Find a community with real vetting, real mutual aid, real consequences for bad behavior. Church communities that actually function (small, accountable, mutual aid), mutual aid networks, tight-knit hobby communities, anything where people know each other over time and reputation matters.
The dating pool is broken because there’s no vetting. You can’t fix that alone. But you can position yourself in communities where vetting happens naturally through repeated interaction and where your character development becomes visible over time.
This serves two purposes: First, you develop relationship skills in lower-stakes contexts. Second, high-functioning communities are where high-functioning people are. The 20% secure aren’t primarily on dating apps—they’re in communities where they can assess character over time before romantic involvement.
4. Practice Direct, Assertive Communication
State what you want clearly. Ask directly about deal-breakers: finances, marriage timeline, children, career plans, sexual expectations, relationship structure. Passive communication—hints, hoping they guess, leaving catalogs around—destroys coordination. Passive-aggressive communication—punishing without stating why, withholding without explanation—destroys trust.
Assertive communication means stating preferences, boundaries, and needs directly without aggression. Not “you always ignore me” (aggressive) or silent treatment (passive-aggressive) or hoping they notice you’re upset (passive), but “I need direct communication about plans at least 24 hours in advance to feel secure.”
This doesn’t guarantee you’ll get what you need—but it makes coordination possible. Indirect communication guarantees failure because your partner is guessing, and guesses are usually wrong.
Resources: Nonviolent Communication by Marshall Rosenberg (framework for expressing needs without blame), When I Say No, I Feel Guilty by Manuel Smith (assertiveness training that doesn’t collapse into aggression).
The darker truth: most people won’t do the work, and therefore can’t be salvaged from this.
Legion has to run its course. The swine have to drown. The system has to collapse under its own contradictions.
Who can’t hear this:
Who might hear:
The 60% with attachment disorders aren’t going to heal while Legion possesses the system. Individual therapy helps individuals. It doesn’t fix LEGION.
To understand how deeply these patterns embed, and what happens when civilizations remove structural constraints at scale, we need historical precedent.
If you’re a man trying to figure out how to provide for a family: The economic system is broken and won’t be fixed through normal political channels.
This isn’t defeatism. It’s recognition of incentive structures. The reforms needed are clear (monetary stability, debt reduction, housing supply), but they’re politically impossible. Individual survival strategies (exceptional earning, geographic arbitrage, dual income, opting out) don’t solve the civilizational problem.
The system-level fix requires collapse first. By then, most of the current generation will have aged out of family formation years anyway. The swine drown while waiting for reforms that never come.
The pattern we’re living through isn’t unprecedented. The late Roman Empire experienced a remarkably similar civilizational collapse—and Christianity emerged as the coordination mechanism that enabled survival through the collapse.
By the 3rd-5th centuries CE, the Roman Empire faced genuine population decline and declining birth rates. Two major epidemics (165 CE and 251 CE) killed up to a third of the population each time. Sound familiar?
The Roman system had a critical structural flaw: widespread infanticide through “exposure”—especially of female children. According to historian Jack Lindsay, “more than one daughter was practically never reared” even in large families. The result: gender imbalance, family instability, demographic collapse.
The modern parallel: Since 1980, over 1.6 billion abortions worldwide. Roman infanticide through “exposure.” Modern infanticide through “choice.” Same coordination failure. Different vocabulary.
Christianity didn’t survive the collapse through better theology or moral superiority. It survived by providing functional coordination mechanisms that solved real problems the Roman system couldn’t.
Plague Response as Trust Infrastructure:
During the two major plagues, while pagans fled cities, Christians stayed and provided basic care to both Christians and pagans. Simple nursing care dramatically improved survival rates. Christians survived plagues at higher rates AND converted many survivors. Rodney Stark’s analysis in “The Rise of Christianity” shows “tighter social cohesion and mutual help” enabled fewer casualties—not theology, but coordination.
Rescuing Exposed Children:
Christians rescued exposed infants and raised them, “absolutely prohibiting” infanticide. They didn’t just condemn—they adopted the victims. Christian emperors later implemented reforms that ended the practice. This solved the gender imbalance problem, enabling family formation for future generations.
Family Structure Reforms:
Christianity elevated women’s status, preached against divorce, and prohibited sexual activity outside marriage. By making marriage more stable and sexual access contingent on commitment, Christianity restored trust infrastructure necessary for family formation. The inconsistency problem that plagues modern relationships was solved through cultural enforcement of consistent standards.
Alternative Community Networks:
When bishops stepped into civic leadership roles as senators disappeared, Christianity provided continuity. Christians built networks that functioned when imperial institutions failed: food distribution, care for widows and orphans, dispute resolution, community organization—all maintained through Church structures.
Christianity didn’t survive by moralizing about Roman failures. It survived by providing functional solutions: community care during plague, rescuing exposed children, marriage reforms creating stability, alternative coordination through Church structure, mutual aid networks pooling resources.
These weren’t primarily theological positions—they were coordination mechanisms that worked when Roman systems failed. Christians had higher survival rates through superior coordination in crisis. Their tighter social bonds meant fewer casualties during plague, and their adoption of exposed children meant more stable demographics.
We’re facing similar structural collapse: infanticide/abortion creating demographic crisis, economic collapse destroying provision, institutional trust collapse, male participation declining, below-replacement fertility. Christianity provided the coordination mechanisms that survived Rome’s collapse. What coordination mechanisms will survive ours?
Christianity didn’t just condemn Roman failures—it provided alternatives. Not just “stop exposing children,” but “we’ll adopt them.” Not just “marriage is sacred,” but stable structures that actually worked. Not just moral condemnation, but functional coordination mechanisms.
Modern responses involve moralizing without coordination alternatives. Conservatives say “return to traditional values” while ignoring destroyed economic foundations. Progressives say “embrace sexual liberation” while ignoring that removing constraints without replacements creates chaos. Neither builds functional alternatives.
Christianity itself. But not the Christianity we practice now.
Modern Christianity has the same coordination failure it’s supposed to solve. Megachurches are anonymous markets with religious aesthetics—show up on Sunday, consume entertainment, leave atomized. Culture war engagement is performative theater. Even practicing Christians have low fertility rates, participating in the same broken system: dating apps, anonymous markets, dual-income traps, no community coordination.
Early Christianity looked nothing like this. House churches where everyone knew each other’s character. Mutual aid networks pooling resources so single-income families were economically viable. Community accountability with real social consequences—not state enforcement, but reputation costs in tight communities. Community vetting using distributed knowledge about character built over years.
The contrast:
Modern: Megachurch crowds of strangers. Entertainment services. Culture war. Economically isolated nuclear families. Dating apps. No vetting, mutual aid, or accountability. Christianity as identity, not coordination mechanism.
Early: House churches of 30-100 people. Everyone knows everyone. Mutual aid pooling resources. Community vetting for marriages. Social consequences for sexual behavior. Economic support making single-income families viable. Christianity as survival mechanism through collapse.
What functional revival requires:
Most churches won’t do this—too invested in the megachurch model, too comfortable with performance. But some will. Early Christians built mutual aid and stable family structures before Rome collapsed, enabling survival. The same playbook works now.
Christians aren’t supposed to wait for God to fix civilizational collapse. They are God’s mechanism for fixing things.
The coordination mechanisms that survived Rome’s collapse are needed now: mutual aid networks, stable family formation, trust infrastructure, community function, solving the inconsistency problem. The Church already knows how. The mechanisms, theology, and historical precedent exist. What’s missing is Christians acting like they’re God’s hands in the world rather than spectators waiting for the Second Coming.
The Roman Empire’s population didn’t recover its previous levels until the 12th-13th centuries—nearly 800 years after the collapse. The generations that lived through it were sacrificed. The swine drowned. Christianity preserved something through the collapse, but most people still suffered through civilizational breakdown.
We’re likely entering a similar period. Most people won’t be saved. The coordination mechanisms are too broken, LEGION too entrenched, the rational incentives too misaligned.
But historically, something eventually emerges that provides functional coordination solutions. Whether we’re smart enough to build it deliberately rather than stumbling into it through 800 years of civilizational collapse remains to be seen.
If this analysis is right, we’re living through the drowning. The question isn’t how to save everyone—that’s not possible while the demon has control. The question is: What do we preserve for after the collapse?
This is salvaging pearls from burning buildings: distinguishing structural functions worth preserving from arbitrary forms that can burn. The method for making these distinctions systematically is in Pearls from Ashes: A Method for Discovering Moral Structure After Deconstruction.
Knowledge to preserve:
What needs to be recovered (eventually):
First wave feminism (1870s-1920s) proved something important: women gained voting rights, property rights, education access, and employment opportunities while sexual restriction norms remained intact. The civilization didn’t collapse. Female legal equality and sexual restriction coexisted successfully for decades.
The two only got bundled together in the 1960s+ with birth control and second wave feminism. This bundling was historically contingent, not structurally necessary.
The problem: when sexual restriction was enforced through honor killings, violence, legal subordination, and brutal double standards, fighting the enforcement meant dismantling the restriction entirely. You couldn’t separate the coordination function from the oppressive method.
But the coordination function itself—commitment required for sexual access, enforced monogamy preventing wealthy men from monopolizing multiple women—passes every Sieve test independently of how it’s enforced.
The modern right-wing hypocrisy:
The loudest advocates for “traditional values” are often practicing exactly what enforced monogamy was designed to prevent: wealthy men monopolizing reproductive access to multiple women.
Donald Trump has 5 children with 3 different women. Elon Musk has 14 children with 4 different women. Combined: 19 children with 7 women. This is informal polygyny—what researchers call “high-tech polygamy” or serial polygyny.
Wealthy men can achieve the same reproductive outcomes as formal polygyny through serial monogamy and informal partnering arrangements, excluding less-competitive men from the mating market. Musk reportedly offered one mother $15 million plus $100,000 per month to not identify him as the father—resource polygyny through wealth rather than formal marriage.
This is the ancient pattern Christianity was supposed to eliminate: wealthy men using resources to monopolize multiple reproductive partners while low-status men get shut out entirely. Enforced monogamy benefited both low-status men who gained access to mates at all and women who got stable commitment rather than being cycled through by wealthy men as temporary partners, aging out while he moves to younger replacements.
When right-wing elites preach traditional marriage while practicing informal polygyny, they’re advocating a system that constrains other men’s sexual access while preserving their own ability to monopolize. It’s the worst of both worlds: sexual restriction for the masses, polygyny for the elites.
Jesus couldn’t save the man by reasoning with Legion. He had to cast the demons into the swine and let them drown (Mark 5:11-13).
The man was saved. The swine were not.
We’re living through the drowning. Most relationships formed under current conditions will fail. Most people will not form secure attachments. The coordination mechanisms are too broken, LEGION too entrenched, the rational incentives too misaligned.
This generation’s relationship market might be the swine. The sacrifice necessary for Legion to be cast out and for healing to become possible afterward.
I don’t know what comes after. I don’t know if the next generation will learn from watching us drown, or if they’ll be possessed by the same demons.
But I know this: You can’t heal what you won’t name.
The demon is coordination failure produced by:
Legion. Many demons, coordinated possession, collective catastrophe.
Go into the swine.
Let the drowning happen.
Preserve what’s valuable for after.
And maybe—maybe—the next generation won’t be possessed by what destroyed us.
This post names the demon. The work ahead maps the path out.
I’m not just documenting the collapse. I’m building the framework for what survives it: the coordination mechanisms that actually work, the structural alternatives that can function when current systems fail.
The vetting mechanisms. The mutual aid networks. The stable family formation structures. The reputation systems that make character visible and strategic lying costly. The intentional communities where “provision equals mate selection” can work again because everyone enforces it together.
Early Christians didn’t defeat Rome by moralizing about its failures. They built parallel structures that solved coordination problems the Empire couldn’t. They survived because they did something while everyone else just complained or coped.
That’s what this is: the beginning of rebuilding functional coordination for people who see the demon and refuse to stay possessed.
I’m writing the analysis. I’m documenting what passes the Sieve. I’m connecting the people who are building alternatives instead of just critiquing the wreckage.
This isn’t the last piece. The ones coming show what actually works: historically, structurally, practically. The blueprints for communities that can coordinate. The economic frameworks that make family formation viable. The answer to “what do I actually do Monday morning.”
But I can’t reach people who aren’t listening.
If you want the analysis that shows what actually works, if you want to connect with others who see what’s broken and are willing to think clearly about solutions, if you want the frameworks that might help you escape LEGION while others drown—you need to subscribe.
The ones who understand what broke and why have to find each other. That’s what this is building: the network of people who can see the demon clearly enough to name it.
The swine are drowning. The question is: are you going to drown with them, or are you going to be one of the ones who sees clearly and acts accordingly?
A personal note: If you’re a single woman who appreciates how I think about problems, and wants to form a stable, honest, and secure relationship through commitment to shared goals, please do reach out or refer me. I’m single, and I want to build a life with someone, have children, and help prevent civilizational collapse. I’m practicing what I’m preaching here: direct communication about what I want, community-based vetting (you’re reading 12,000 words of how I think), and honest signaling instead of strategic games. And I’d prefer not to become the 78-year-old man in the nursing home from the intro story.
Attachment Styles:
Personality Disorders:
Dating and Aging:
Divorce, Children, and Attachment:
Roman Empire Demography and Collapse:
Christianity’s Response to Roman Crisis:
Christianity and Family Structure Reforms:
Christianity and Late Roman Institutional Transition:
Wage-Productivity Decoupling:
Housing Affordability Crisis:
National Debt and Fiscal Sustainability:
Public Choice Theory:
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