About rootlessness and broken relationships

2026-08-21

Reading the leftist Jacobin magazine article with the title Toward Simp Liberation? led me to the remarkable investigative journalism piece from The Cut by Ezra Marcus titled Revenge of the Simps. Its subtitle is how a community of porn addicts tried to rescue the teenage camgirls they worshipped from the clutches of a violent webcam pimp.

This crime story is a microcosm of the modern Western world. It has everything from getting rich quick, putting money over people, selling an exaggerated version of oneself through social media personas, producing explicit sexual content of oneself, being a ruthless entrepreneur, understanding male worth as a function of personal wealth and status, thinking of female worth as a matter of looks, seeing women as objects of entertainment, propping up masculinity as a facade for sociopathy, all against the backdrop of broken relationships with their rootless individuals.

In this world, there is a level of analysis in which there are perpetrators and victims. Though at another level all participants share a common set of values. The men qua traffickers who measure their worth by their business acumen are on a continuum with the women who are perfectly fine, at least initially, with selling their body for some easy money, where “modelling” is just an acceptable form of porn. And they are all in principal agreement with the simps who otherwise consume the pornographic material.

From victims to perpetrators

In both of the aforementioned links there are many references to Andrew Tate, even though he is not involved in the criminal case at hand. Andrew is the embodiment of a wider phenomenon as bully and bullied himself: the victim of dysfunctional parenthood and hostile urban living conditions who becomes the means through which abuse is normalised, propagated, and valorised.

Andrew recycles age-old ideas of manhood while continuing the capitalist practice of commodifying every facet of life. His message internalises the social structures he was raised in and suffered from, blending them with the materialist mindset of incessant grinding for enrichment and upward social mobility at the expense of all intangible values.

As such, Andrew necessarily communicates something that is truthful about his society. Though he does it only as a way of private gain, hence his masculinity merchant gimmick. Fundamentally, he is not interested in institutional reform. Rather than abolish slavery, he is content with being the master of slaves and a god in their eyes. To this end, Andrew fulfils the destiny of the bullied to become a bully as soon as the conditions are favourable.

It is, nonetheless, an analytical error to blame Andrew Tate for what is happening in this case and others. Even if he himself is contributing to phenomena, he is but an instance of wider trends. Communities are broken not because of Andrew’s meme-grade rhetoric but due to the very structure of modern economic organisation.

Cities breed distrust

The vast majority of people in industrialised countries live in big cities as individuals or atomic families, where they are expected to be away from home most of the day while they do some kind of work. At their workplace they are all treated as expendable “labour force” or “human capital” and are thrown under the bus whenever it is expedient for their employer to do so. There is no mutual sense of togetherness. Their everyday experience is thus one of distrust. This is the baseline normality of the modern world.

The perennially jaded individual does not have the time or energy to commit to family affairs, no matter how kind or conscientious they are. Even in two parent households, children do not spend enough quality time with family. More so in single parent families. The lack of quality time with loved ones forces young people to seek connection in imaginary friends, with whom they develop parasocial relationships. Their role models are not actual, flawed individuals, whom they experience day-to-day, but exaggerated figures of seemingly impeccable quality on magazine pages, TV shows, and Internet sites.

The city is an inherently dangerous environment for the vulnerable. In the common scenaria, this includes children, women, and the elderly. Though gangs bearing weapons appear with increased regularity in many countries, meaning that even the strongest man is ultimately just as easy of a prey. No place is safe for kids to play care-free and for parents to get a moment of rest, all while the elderly are effectively rendered irrelevant to social reproduction by being left to wither away in some facility among strangers. Neighbours come and go, as they are typically renting the place they live in. So there is no sense of trusting those around one’s own place either. By extension, one does not know who they are dealing with: everyone blends in with the anonymous crowd and is a potential vector of attack.

Consequently, there always lurks some danger right around the corner, which makes everybody more tense. Parents do not let their children go out while they themselves suffer from chronic stress due to the rigours of work, the disproportionate burden of parenthood placed on the atomic family, and the pervasive sense of threat in their milieu.

Kids staying in closed spaces all day is an understandable protection mechanism, though it still is detrimental for their longer-term adjustment in society. They are not socialised properly, not with friends their age and not with elders in their community. They are trapped in a tiny physical space, which becomes a restrictive mindscape that is an extension of their own fears and overthinking. They are eventually get sucked into the fabricated world of parasociability and concomitant distorted images, whether those originate in legacy publications or online media, and seek happiness in what effectively is some form of pernicious escapism. Furthermore, they have unrealistic expectations about their own self and their relationship with others, which has far-reaching implications for every aspect of social life, including romantic experiences which are pertinent to the criminal case presented in Ezra Marcus’ journalism.

It is not only the vulnerable though. Cities are meat-grinders that make no exceptions. Such is the pace of life they dictate, such is the environment they necessarily create, that everyone eventually falters.

Anonymity and the lack of honour

At its core, the big city is akin to the jungle, for it engenders a default combative behaviour of the individual or tiny group against the rest of the world. The city cannot instil a communitarian, collectivist ethos because there are no such social bonds to be experienced on a quotidian basis. Those bonds occur naturally in the extended family, which incorporates the neighbourhood and the entire village into a singular unit of shared trust and intergenerational solidarity.

Cities do, of course, offer plenty of opportunity. This is the byproduct of the anonymity they enable: you can essentially be whoever you want and connect with those you like, which sounds liberating until you realise that the same is true for everybody else who will now seek to exploit you with impunity. Those who play fair get abused by those who have no such restraint. Which brings us back to the baseline of distrust.

Anonymity makes it so that it is impossible to have an honour-based moral code. Only the law can dissuade people, though the law cannot be enforced to the same effect as a local community singling out one of its members. The law is less efficient because its locus of authority is away from the fray of the action. To put it simply, the police officer is not your relative or immediate neighbour most of the time. The law, in this regard, can only be close to events when the political order is totalitarian (which then creates conditions for centralised abuse on a monumental scale).

The lack of honour is the environment in which the vicious moneyman thrives and where the sociopath emerges as the master grifter. There is no incorporation of accountability in one-to-one interactions, which means that the most unscrupulous rise to the top. They are even celebrated for their success in doing so, since this is the ordinary operation of the system—the rules of the game, if you will.

Systemic problems and the importance of hierarchy

For as long as we are seeing the degradation of relationships as a “manosphere problem”, an “Andrew Tate problem”, or in other contexts a “modern women problem”, we are not being thorough in our investigation. There are system-wide forces at play that need to be understood as such and be addressed in a root-and-branch fashion.

In the Jacobin piece I mentioned in the introduction, Evelina Johansson Wilén and Meagan Day discuss events through the lens of feminism. While both of them are insightful, I think feminism cannot appreciate that itself is a product of this structurally individualistic world. In the feminist worldview at-large, hierarchy as such is what oppresses people in general and women in particular, which inevitably leads to individualism even when the discussion is along the lines of building social movements. Why? Because if your extended family, which is dismissed a priori as “patriarchy”, has no power over you, then nobody should: you are a rootless person who only understands the irresponsible logic of “my body; my rules” in all of its manifestations.

Hierarchy, which in a local community that spans generations always becomes patriarchy and matriarchy as one, is how an individual’s innate freedom is harnessed for the greater good. The harnessing is key. In the absence of hierarchy, each person has to rely on their own devices. Political correctness demands that we echo the notion that all people are equally competent at controlling themselves, but experience tells us that some individuals are fundamentally their own worst enemy: give them too much freedom and they will ruin their life together with that of others. The honest person who understands their propensity for self-harm admits that they are empowered when framed by others. Structure is always—always—what people need: it either comes from within, with unflinching discipline, or in community with other people. The latter is the only reliable arrangement from the perspective of social organisation.

Hierarchy is what holds individuals accountable. If this is not enforced by the extended family and immediate community, then it must be conferred as supreme authority to some nanny state or not done at all, which is where we are nowadays. The social fabric is torn asunder because at the micro level there is nobody to keep individuals in check, even when those individuals are religious or, anyhow, have a clear idea of what their society’s concept of righteousness is. America is a country of deeply religious people, for example, yet here we are commenting on its rampant porn-defined substrate. The issue is more basic, then, and has to do with the defective setup of face-to-face accountability.

In a vacuum of hierarchy, there is no collective power apparatus in place to guard against predators from a position of caring. The drug lord has easy access to your son. The pimp is one social media post away from your daughter. And so on. With the tutelary figures—hierarchy!—gone, what remains is a war of all against all, whose repulsive face we keep witnessing on a daily basis.

A crisis of values

Moving to the text of Ezra Marcus’ reportage, I find that the following quote reveals something more than the details of a human trafficking crime:

Another young woman, Sarah, moved into the lake house a week after her 18th birthday. She’d found the job through a Snapchat ad, which had promised $8,000 a month for bikini photos. She was pressured by Muhammad to quickly sign a contract. After a month streaming naked on Chaturbate, working 11-hour shifts, she had earned only $1,000; Connor told her the shortfall was her fault. One day, a fan sent $32,000 directly to her PayPal. She didn’t tell her bosses, only her boyfriend, Kaiden Kingsley, a recruiter who lived in the house. But word got back to Tyukalo, who ordered Muhammad to take her phone. When she got it back the next morning, her bank account was drained and the contacts for her family and friends had been blocked.

What we read here is descriptive of modern society at-large. Consider these general observations:

• Get rich quick? Check.
• Find a shortcut to the good life? Check.
• The good life is measured in material possessions and luxury? Check.
• An exploitative contract from your boss? Check.
• Blaming the employee for the lack of business profits? Check.
• No tutelary figure to hold teenagers accountable? Check.
• The girl boss who sells her body because those are her rules? Check.

What we read here is specific to organised crime, yes, and I do not mean to trivialise it, though we have to learn from the particular in order to appreciate the general. As soon as we abstract away the details of this specific case we realise that what is happening, in terms of values, is business as usual.

The polite society, the one which can no longer understand its political correctness as the shadow play it actually is, will, of course, condemn the crime. Though in reality its moral standing is suspect for as long as it normalises all of the above in its routine workings.

In this specific story, the simps end up helping the victims. Though their capacity as simps is itself part of the structural problem. If you are demanding pornography as a consumer, you are necessarily contributing to the formation of the supply chain for pornography through the incentives you reinforce. And with that comes rampant cruelty.

In this twisted world, where porn is mainstream entertainment and girls are encouraged to “liberate” themselves, your demand for pornographic content means that you have no principled objection to your child, sibling, relative, being on camera. And if you think that you are okay when strangers do it but not your loved ones, then you are echoing the individualist mindset with its attendant disregard for solidarity. This is the crisis of values that brings us here.

Contra feminism as hinted at in the Jacobin publication, I view modernity’s social woes as products of too little hierarchy. Andrew Tate and friends make a mockery out of patriarchy and manhood in general because they are not interested in the pro-social, responsible project of building communities; a project that always happens with women as equal contributors. They only care about maximising their earnings at the expense of everyone else. As such, they leverage parasociability, turbocharge the mindset of victimhood, amplify the latent distrust in society, and encourage people to fight each other as rootless individuals. Put differently they do business as usual minus the politeness.