I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach—and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived . . . for the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. —Henry David Thoreau
Writing, for me, is hard work. I ask myself, Do young men need another book? I was told that they seldom read anyway. Haven’t they already grown up in a mind-numbing bubble of noise, texts, images, and endless messaging? Aren’t they constantly inundated by social media influencers, professional marketers, educators, and government experts—all telling them how to live, what to buy, what to inject, how to think, and what to fear?
This leaves young people in an uncomfortable and confusing vacuum—what Pope Benedict XVI called the dictatorship of moral relativism—an empty illusion where there is no objective truth, only my truth or your truth. It is a painful place for a human being to live.
And the statistics confirm it. This is the most anxious and depressed generation of young people the world has ever seen. In just the past few years, the numbers have skyrocketed.
According to the Centers for Disease Control:
- 57% of teen girls say they feel persistently sad or hopeless.
- 40% of teens—boys and girls—report they’ve felt so down within the past year that they couldn’t do their normal activities like schoolwork or sports for at least two weeks.
- 52% of teens who identify as LGBTQIA+ say they struggle with mental health.
- 30% of teen girls have seriously considered suicide—a number that’s risen nearly 60% over the last decade.
- 22% of LGBTQIA+ teens say they attempted suicide in the past year.
And that’s not even accounting for the fact that nearly 100% of the young men I meet have been exposed to hard-core pornography. It has robbed them of innocence and obliterated their moral compass. Many have given up altogether or become part of the staggering number of young people who die every year from suicide or drug overdose.
Thoreau was right: “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.”
Yet, in the midst of these attacks on our young people, I have personally witnessed many young men defeat them.
Through my work in Claymore: Milites Christi, I found that, despite all the endless chatter and advice they were receiving from so-called “experts,” young men were awakening to the realization that something has gone terribly wrong. When they searched for answers, they’d encounter people who either lie to them or who, despite good intentions, have become numb to the evils of this age of moral relativism and had nothing helpful to share. By the time these men found our groups, they’d lean into our witness stories, ask questions, and share their own heartfelt stories. They all became our brothers in so many ways.
One day, in the public library, I came across the writings of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the great Russian writer who had spent eight years in the Soviet Gulags for pushing back on Stalin. Solzhenitsyn wrote, “Marxism claims that some groups and classes of human beings are good and others bad, so to perfect itself, humanity must isolate and eliminate the bad people.” But Solzhenitsyn came to a deeper truth: the dividing line between good and evil does not run between groups—it runs through every single human heart.
“The Marxist position,” he argued, “was that humanity would be perfected through the inevitable progress of world history. But if the dividing line is within each human heart, then only limited improvement is possible in this life—and degeneracy is always equally possible. The Marxist position is to be rejected, it seems, because it overlooks the reality of Original Sin.”
Original Sin. In a sense, we all enter into this story at birth, and sooner or later we find ourselves standing before the tree of the knowledge of Good and Evil. Created with free will and given the divine gift of reason and intellect, we must choose. In our quest for meaning and purpose, we are sent on mission—to seek the truth and then decide which city we will help build: the City of Man, or the City of God.
Only at the end of our lives, when our partial knowledge gives way to full vision—when we see God “face to face” (1 Cor. 13:12)—will we fully understand the ways in which He guided us within His larger story. In the meantime we must trust someone, find a mentor, start somewhere, for there is an enemy that would like nothing more than to keep us from the truth.
There is a poignant moment in the first Chapter of John’s Gospel where Jesus turns to the disciples of John the Baptist and asks, “What do you seek?” They reply, “Rabbi” (which means Teacher), “where are you staying?” He says to them, “Come and see” (Jn. 1:38–39).
No propaganda. No ideology. Nothing to sell them. Just: “Come and see.”
As the Lord attests, the way out of a life of quiet desperation is through accompaniment. Each of us has the capacity for great evil . . . and great good. And when we walk with one another, guided by truth and love, we are stronger and more impervious to this dictatorship of sin.
Author’s Note: Download the Claymore, Milites Christi Blueprint here. It provides a framework for accompaniment, discipline, and finding answers to man’s timeless questions: “Who am I?” “What is the meaning and purpose for my life?” “How shall I live?” “Why are we created male and female?” “How do I find happiness, here, today?” “How do I find love that lasts and doesn’t fade away?”
Photo by Bogdan Todoran on Unsplash
