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April 2, 2025 - Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin
20:50
The Purpose of a System is What it Does

Adolescence is a feminist retelling of Joker.

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So, I just finished watching Netflix's Adolescence that is, of course, currently doing around and being promoted by everyone in our government and, of course, the media.
And it is being embraced by the feminist cohort of our media class as being something akin to a new biblical study or something, as if everyone now has to watch this to understand.
And I just finished watching it, as I said, and I mean, it just makes them all look really bad, right?
If you actually watch this, you realize that actually they are all the villains of what is happening in adolescence.
Everyone around Jamie has contributed, Jamie being the name of the young boy who killed the young girl, has contributed to him becoming a killer in some way.
And it's a damning indictment of modern Britain.
And I don't know if it even means to be.
It's such a bizarre thing that when you read through these summaries of each episode, they're kind of accurate, but there are other things about it that aren't really included in the synopsis.
And it's just such a peculiar thing to see something that's written so well, actually, and with a surprising amount of finesse, especially as if you go, you can see the Stephen Graham, the writer's perspective on it.
We want to look into the eye of modern male rage and examine the influence of Andrew Tate on boys and other public figures.
And you look at it and you realize, but this isn't really about them.
What this is about is some kind of system that everyone seems to hate.
Because everyone who's involved in this system seems to really dislike what it is they do.
I mean, in the first episode, you have the detective expector, Luke Bascom, and his assistant, a childless woman called Misha Frank, investigating the murder that Jamie has committed.
And they bring him in for questioning, and it goes through a long, long single shot scene, as they all are, until it gets to the end where they show the CCTV footage of Jamie murdering the girl.
And throughout the entire process, you essentially see a kind of ritual humiliation of the family and Jamie before the system.
Like at one point, Jamie is strip searched because the suspicion, and heavy suspicion is placed on this, that Jamie's father has somehow abused him.
Whereas Jamie's father is shown to be nothing but an upstanding man who shows his son, we get to see him showing him plenty of love and affection and trusts him.
When Jamie says, I didn't do it, he says, right, well, that's okay then, son.
Then, you know, you've got nothing to fear, which is how I would have responded, were this my son.
I would have taken him at his word.
And when it turns out, when you see the stabbing, it's Eddie, his father, who it's a harrowing scene, it's a difficult thing to watch.
But what happens up until then?
Well, you have the cold, emotionless, and frankly difficult to deal with system where everyone seems to be acting like a prisoner of it, going along until eventually, after all of the humiliation and all of the abstractness of the system is applied, you finally get Jamie and Eddie left alone together.
And there's a difficult moment to watch between the father and son.
And so, in episode two, as it says, Bascombe and Frank visit the secondary school to try and find out more.
And what's strange about this is that the students are deeply uncooperative with the police.
Especially this, there's Jade, who's an African immigrant, it seems, who's best friends with the with Katie, the girl who was murdered.
And she seems to genuinely hate the police and seems to blame them or something like that.
And that's a very difficult thing for them to understand.
And she then goes and beats up, literally beats up Ryan, Jamie's friend.
Now, I mean, it's one thing being like, okay, well, it's a teenage girl beating up a teenage boy like she's some MMA fighter.
Probably not something that's ever really happened.
But the point is, why is she doing this?
And it turns out that the girl that was stabbed, Katie, had been orchestrating a cyberbullying campaign against Jamie, the boy who stabbed her, on the basis that she is calling into question his dignity as a man by calling him an incel.
And this campaign of cyberbullying is something I think, I guess the implication is they've all been taking part in it, apart from his friend Ryan.
And this is why they didn't want to speak to the police.
Because, and we don't really know how long the campaign of cyberbullying has been going on for, but it's obviously a little while.
But it's being done in code, right?
The kids are using emojis to transmit messages that, of course, the parents don't understand.
So when they look at Instagram, these actually don't look like offensive messages.
But the offense is in the kinds of emojis.
And what's interesting is that Jamie isn't a part of Manosphere.
He doesn't watch Andrew Tate, or at least not that we've shown in the series.
The concept of like, you know, being an incel and the red pill and the 80-20, you know, 80% of women going off 20% of the men, that's all weaponized against Jamie.
That's how Katie bullies Jaime, saying that he'll never get a girlfriend.
She's not interested in him.
No woman will ever like him.
He'll be an incel forever.
And then this, again, in front of hundreds of people, possibly thousands of people.
It's the internet.
It could be any number of people.
It's on Instagram.
And this seems to be the reason that Jamie went and confronts her, and he grabs her in this confrontation on CCTV.
She shoves him to the floor.
And so he gets up and stabs her.
So it's like, right.
This is not really about ideology in as much as it is about persistent bullying campaigns and a victim taking revenge on his bully.
Now, I'm not saying that's justified or anything like that, obviously.
You know, and I'm sure only, not even the most bad faith person would say that that's what I'm saying.
But the issue isn't ideology.
The issue is the human suffering that Jamie had gone through up until this point, in which he inflicts it back on his bully.
It's not about hatred of women or misogyny.
And we see that actually in episode three, which is the one where all of the really quite dramatic clips with the psychologist person interrogating him in the room come from.
So Jamie is for some reason placed in some sort of mental institution.
He's not meant to be there.
Apparently, that's the only place they've got.
And so the Bryony, the forensic psychologist, spends a lot of time talking to him and processing him.
And she tries to treat Jamie as if he's an adult.
But the thing is, Jamie isn't an adult.
She asks him about his sex life.
He doesn't have a sex life.
He doesn't have any of this.
He makes up a lie that he's touched a girl's boobs.
He hasn't.
It's revealed to be a lie.
He's just a 13-year-old.
And yet she's treating him as if he's an agent, as if he is an adult, as if he is fully in command of all his faculties and he knows what he's doing.
And this whole process is very frustrating to Jamie because this isn't how punishments are supposed to be for boys.
Just blurting out his feelings isn't the solution for a young man, actually.
Young men have a different way of dealing with these things.
But the reason that this bullying campaign had started is because Jamie had asked Katie out and she'd rejected him.
He had asked her out thinking, okay, well, everyone, she took a topless photo of herself, sent it to one boy.
The boy spread it around the school, which is a lesson in and of its bloody self.
And this had encouraged Jamie to ask Katie out, thinking, well, maybe she'll be interested now since she's not liked by anyone else.
And she rejects him and presumably to restore her own social status, begins bullying him, which leads to the campaign of intimidation and harassment against him.
And so this is not great, but Jamie's outbursts are taken by Bryony to make her the victim of what she's been doing to him in this interrogation, which is bizarre because she's not.
She's the adult in the room.
And she's the one essentially kind of emotionally manipulating him, it begins with.
She's very friendly with him, trying to get him to open up.
She takes him through this very manipulative emotional ride.
And then Jamie at the end is looking for her approval, asking, do you like me?
Because apparently they've had a, she's his psychologist or something.
They've had interactions before.
And she just leaves without saying yes or no, which, I mean, it just felt cruel, frankly.
I was just, okay.
And at one point, she has a conversation with one of the guards there.
And he just says, yeah, I hate my job.
He doesn't like the system.
It was the same with the school.
The police officer whose son is there and explains to him how the Instagram emoji communication works.
He hates the school.
The school is chaos.
Like, there's no hard boundaries.
Everyone's treated with soft kid gloves.
It's a very feminized environment and it's getting people out of control.
The children are so unbelievably disrespectful to the teachers.
They're incredibly loud.
A lot of the teaching is done via them watching videos.
And again, this is all stuff that the police officer complains about.
He says, I hate this place.
This can't be how anyone actually learns.
It's like, yeah, I agree.
But who created this system?
Who wanted the system to be like this?
It used to be that schools were bloody orderly because you could get a rap on the knuckles.
You could get corporal punishment.
Who took the corporal punishment out of the schools?
Who made this system?
And the answer is the people who are worried that the Jamie's of the world will go off on and attack women randomly.
But this wasn't random.
This was the series of the consequence of a series of events that have very obvious human connections and very direct routes.
In episode three, Bryony is trying to get Jamie to admit that he's like a Manosphere misogynist.
She comes out and says things like, how do you feel about men?
What's it like to be a man?
How's masculinity?
How do you feel about women?
And Jamie, again, to my surprise, the writers didn't make Jaime into a bizarre caricature of like an Andrew Tate fan or a Manosphere goon or something like that.
Jaime was not really following her questions because Jaime, though he is aware of like the red pill discourse, rejects it.
And he says explicitly, for example, in the 80-20 thing, he says, look, I don't really believe that 80% of women are only attracted to 20% of men.
Like, he just doesn't think that's real.
He's not in those filter bubbles.
And they're just aware of the dialogue.
And he's aware of it, of course, the discourse, because he's being bullied by it, by people using it against him.
So it's just like, okay, that's kind of wild, isn't it?
That they've actually made sure to tell us in the text itself that actually it wasn't Andrew Tate who made him do this.
It was the mean environment on social media that had triggered this.
It's like, okay, well, why are we talking about Andrew Tate then?
And the ideological layer is something that is tried to, they do try to insert it. in this series.
I mean, there's one point where they're like, oh, it's that Andrew Tate incel shit.
But that's not what's driving this, at least from the structure of the text.
And so the fact that this is even coming up is kind of bizarre, because if it wasn't for Katie bullying Jamie with the red pill man's incel manisphere stuff, there's no reason to think that Jamie would have brought it up because he doesn't seem to have been interested in it from what we are shown in the show.
And we see the psychologist trying to introduce it artificially, even though that's not what Jamie's concern is.
That's not what he's bothered about.
And anyway, in episode four, we see the consequences to the family where they're being essentially ostracized and bullied by the society in which they live.
And this causes a period of self-reflection for Eddie, his father, who towards the end of it is having a conversation with his wife and says, well, my father used to beat me with a belt really hard.
And I swore that I wouldn't do that to my kids.
And I didn't.
And yet, by the end of the episode, Eddie takes it upon himself to say that he's been the failure as the father.
Whereas, in fact, well, there's no reason to think this.
Eddie's very, very attentive to his family.
He's clearly got a very loving relationship with his wife, with his children, and he shows them huge amounts of affection.
Eddie is the very model of a good father.
And I'm sure that that's deliberate to make good fathers around the country think, well, could I do all of those things?
Maybe that could be me.
And they sit there and go, well, he was on the computer a lot.
Therefore, he must have been radicalized by Andrew Tate.
But we already know that the reason that he committed this, as they showed us in episode three and two, is that he was being bullied at school on social media.
The real villain of the piece is social media and the unfettered access that it gives young people to one another.
There's no escape.
When I was a kid and we didn't have smartphones, let alone social media, if you didn't want to be bullied, you'd go home.
And they couldn't come with you.
But they're always on your phone.
You're always getting the notifications.
And it wasn't just like half a dozen people.
It could be hundreds.
I can't even imagine what that does to young people now.
But the point is that there's nothing Eddie can do as a man to solve the problems.
Because the problems are a product of the system in which he lives and has very limited agency over.
Everything is outsourced to an official, a functionary, a bureaucrat, an expert.
And they come in and with their position in life and many of the positions are held by women who don't understand what the young man is going through.
Well, they can't empathize.
They can't solve the problem.
They go, well, it must be misogyny then.
It must be Andrew Tate.
But that's not the issue.
The issue is that there's nothing, for example, Jamie can do against a woman calling him an incel or a girl calling him an incel.
He just has to sit there and suffer the public ritual humiliation of this.
There's nothing he can say.
There's nothing he can do.
There's no court of appeal in any of this.
Not only because the parents, the adults, have no idea this is going on.
The children, the son of the police officer, has to explain it to the dad.
No, these images mean this.
This is a bullying campaign that Jamie is being subjected to, which is, of course, and the kids, I think, feel culpable in what has happened because of what they did, Jamie.
And so there's no court of appeal for Jamie on this.
And so it really seems that the story was either going to end in one of two ways.
Either he murders Katie or he commits suicide, neither of which are good endings.
They're both terrible endings.
So what can be done?
What are the issues?
What are the solutions here?
Because it's not a hatred of women that fuels Jamie.
Jamie doesn't hate women.
He seems to actually quite like women.
He seems to be a fairly normal teenage boy when it comes to women.
He posts pictures of scantily clad women in their underwear on his Instagram post with misogynistic comments alongside.
But you're not shown the comments, but it's implied that he just finds them attractive.
This is what he's kind of into with girls, which is pretty brave at 13, I suppose, but there we go.
The point being, it's the system.
Everything about the system is the problem.
I mean, the kids have their phones in classes.
They're constantly, you see at least two or three times when they're walking around the episode of the school, when they walk around, people being told off for having their phones in the classrooms.
Okay, well, they probably shouldn't have those, should they?
That probably should be completely forbidden under all circumstances.
The kids are totally disrespectful for the teachers.
The teachers are completely slack.
The police don't seem to be very emotionally involved in anything.
They're very bureaucratic, actually, and distant, and are happy to put Jamie through sort of a kind of ritual humiliation just in order to make sure this dad's not abusing him, even though there's literally no reason to think that he would have been.
And come the end of it.
Eddie is kind of losing his mind.
The dad is kind of losing his mind because he's being bullied by his own neighbors and their children.
And he nearly beats one of them up because he's at his wit's end because there's nothing he can do.
And that's kind of terrible, isn't it?
So anyway, I don't think that adolescence tells the message, transmits the message that we're being told that it does.
I actually think that what it reveals is that there are many young men, as Bill Burr once put it, living lives of quiet desperation.
And this used to be something that only older men had to go through.
But now we've made our society so unisex and we've stripped away so much that was designed to protect the dignity of young men that they've got nowhere else to go.
And so what are they left with?
Terrible results that nobody wants.
Nobody wants anything like this to happen, but it does happen.
And I've seen a lot of people saying, well, hang on a second.
This is a race swap thing.
It's like, yes and no.
It's not that the facts that you're citing aren't correct, but there are examples of sort of, there was one in Wales, like a 16-year-old white kid killed a, or 15-year-old white kid killed a 14-year-old girl, both like.
And there are other examples around.
And it's not strictly speaking that this is the case, that it's just, oh, a non-white kid did something to a girl, and therefore they've swapped it over.
No, what this speaks to is a much more difficult issue to grasp, because it is something I think is really happening to a lot of young people.
And for them, life becomes very difficult.
And I'm very sympathetic to that.
I don't want to see young men being turned into Jamie, but that means that young girls probably should make sure that they're not becoming Katie.
And it also means that the people who are running the system that's creating this state of affairs where this happens.
I mean, I'm telling you, this never happened when I was a kid.
I'd never heard of anything like this.
And yet, a quick Google search will find that the examples that the authors use, they're substantive.
They really do exist.
And so this is something that's changing in society.
And we've got to get to grips with it.
If we don't, then we're just abandoning our young people to the wolves.
Putting them in the state of nature and saying, good luck with the internet.
You're on your own.
Who knows what can be done to you?
And who knows how that will affect you psychologically and what your response will be?
And then we'll be like, right, okay, well, this is Andrew Tate's fault.
No, no, no.
And that's one thing that's well represented in this series is that the blame on the manosphere misogyny and Andrew Tate is a punt, right?
It's a way of giving, it's a way of alleviating themselves responsibility.
Say, no, if we can just blame this on Andrew Tate, then actually there's nothing wrong with the system.
And actually, we can just get rid of the Andrew Tates of the world and the system's perfect.
That's not the issue here.
That is absolutely not the issue.
And adolescence makes that pretty clear.
The issue is not online radicalization.
The issue is what the system itself does.
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