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@ noahrevoy
2025-06-08 11:53:20For most of human history, the sexual marketplace was well-regulated.
We are speaking here in general terms. Not every culture got it right, and some were deeply dysfunctional. But wherever marriage, parental investment, and the moral care of children were prioritized, those societies dramatically outcompeted their neighbors.
Incentive structures that supported strong families produced surplus: economic, cultural, and human. Weak ones collapsed.
Why? Because the production of highly competent, capable, mentally and emotionally secure adults is the highest-return activity humanity has ever engaged in. Nothing else provides such a powerful, generational return on investment as raising children into competent adults at scale.
While environment shapes culture and even genetics over time, it is people themselves, their values, behaviors, and internal structure, that determine the quality of every institution and innovation that follows. Get the people right, and the rest follows.
Take Athens, for example. Its golden age wasn’t built on sexual freedom, but on carefully arranged marriages, legally enforced paternity, and multi-generational households. This wasn’t repression, it was coordination, domestication. And it worked.
By the time these norms matured, the sexual marketplace was governed by a complex web of family expectations, religious rules, cultural norms, and community enforcement. Sex was not isolated from responsibility. It was embedded in systems designed to ensure reciprocity, stability, and legacy.
Above all, it was aimed at protecting the vulnerable:
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Women were shielded from bad marriages and abandonment.
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Children were guarded from fatherlessness, abuse and neglect.
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Men were protected from being forced to raise another man's child.
This governance wasn’t repressive. It was protective. It aligned biology, morality, and law to preserve what mattered most.
Marriage was not just a personal bond. It was an intergenerational contract. It linked families, preserved bloodlines, and protected children.
In fact, how well your sexual marketplace was regulated was a clear class signifier. Among the lowest strata of society, mating was often chaotic, driven by instinct, convenience, or desperation. But as you moved up the social hierarchy, norms became stricter, expectations higher, and matchmaking more deliberate. The most successful classes were the ones that invested the most in supporting marriage, disciplining sexual behavior, and preparing the next generation.
This worked for thousands of years to build the west one family at a time.
Then we tore it all down.
The very structure that made sex, love, and family sustainable was dismantled. We became irresponsibly individualistic.
Now, everyone says they want institutional solutions.
But very few understand what that would require, what it demands of us, what it disrupts, and what it will take to build something stable.
This isn’t about dating tips. This is about rebuilding the moral and legal architecture of the sexual domain, so that it works for families, for children, and for civilization again.
You can feel it needs to be done, even if you can’t describe it exactly. Something sacred has been shattered, and pretending it’s working only deepens the misery.
We live in the ruins of what used to be a functioning system. The decline isn’t just visible in the data, it saturates the emotional landscape of daily life. Modern dating feels transactional. Sex is hollow. Women are uncertain. Men are lost. Families are rare and fragile. "Adults" are immature.
And the worst part? Most people think this is normal.
It’s not. It’s a moral, social and institutional collapse. And if we dont fix it, it will be followed by an extinction of western people and culture.
What Happened?
The sexual revolution did to sexual norms what firing the police would do to public safety.
It removed the enforcers of reciprocity, parents, churches, norms, and law, and replaced them with "freedom."
But what replaced regulation wasn’t liberation. It was chaos and predation.
The sexual revolution did not liberate anyone. It dismantled the governance systems that once made mating intelligible and reciprocal:
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Parents, churches, and community elders no longer guide young people toward marriage.
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Legal structures no longer incentivize fidelity or protect paternity.
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Cultural norms no longer bind sex to responsibility, or love to legacy.
What replaced these governance systems wasn’t freedom. It was the stripping away of oversight and consequence. And just like in economics, when you deregulate a high-stakes market, you don’t get utopia, you get predation.
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Divorce soared
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Marriage collapsed
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Anxiety, depression, inceldom, and sterility rose
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Families disintegrated
The result was not a paradise of pleasure. It was a battlefield of broken hearts. The infamous war of the sexes.
It gave us blurred lines between desire and coercion. Propaganda saturated the culture, making vulnerable people pliable, not free. Women were told casual sex meant power. Men learned how to seduce without commitment. Children were conceived under illusion and discarded under regret.
Many had sex believing it would lead to a relationship. It didn’t. Others had children out of wedlock, thinking it would bring stability. It didn’t. Some aborted those children when reality collided with fantasy. Others raised them alone, unsupported, ashamed.
It taught men they had no right to expect paternity. It taught women to mistake attention for commitment. It taught both sexes to expect betrayal.
The social trust required for family life was gutted. And the pain is no longer anecdotal. It is systemic. It's become the new normal.
And no amount of personal effort or success can fully protect you from that institutional decay.
You might build a good life, a strong marriage, a stable home. But you do not live in a vacuum. Your children must still navigate this broken marriage economy. They must form relationships in a world shaped by lies, instability, and betrayal.
You are surrounded by people who were never taught what love is, never shown how to lead a family, never given the structure needed to make good decisions. And their collapse affects you. Their sons may pursue your daughters. Their daughters may carry into your family the wounds of fatherlessness.
You are not exempt from institutional failure, because you live within its consequences every day.
This Isn’t Just About Personal Choices. It’s About Incentives.
You’ve heard enough advice about what you can do: vet better, save yourself for marriage, build character, avoid degeneracy. That’s not what this article is about.
This is about how we fix the structure.
If we want to rebuild civilizational stability, we must re-regulate the sexual marketplace. That means:
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Reintroducing strict moral and legal constraints on sexual behavior
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Promoting courtship norms and family formation at the institutional level
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Creating strong disincentives for single parenthood and non-reciprocal mating
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Restoring incentives for intergenerational involvement in match-making and marital stability
We do this not by going backward, but by going deeper.
By building new institutions, new incentives, and new legitimacy that reward responsibility, protect the vulnerable, and make family formation achievable again for ordinary people, not just the elite.
The Pain Will Force the Change
This may sound impossible to those immersed in the present. But the future is not shaped by what is tolerated, it is shaped by what becomes unbearable.
And this relational economy is becoming unbearable.
The incentives will shift. What was considered impossible yesterday, and still feels improbable today, will become inevitable tomorrow. The only question is whether the solutions we implement will solve the real problem or merely replace one set of dysfunctions with another.
This is where Natural Law matters.
Natural Law gives us something no ideology can: decidability. It offers clarity in confusion, boundaries grounded in reality, and the ability to calculate what leads to order, and what leads to collapse.
Using Natural Law, we can:
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Diagnose the root causes of imbalance between the sexes
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Define what reciprocity looks like in the sexual domain
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Design institutions that reinforce mutual obligation, not exploitation
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Create feedback loops that correct deviation rather than institutionalize it
This isn’t wishful thinking, it’s a social systems design method based on reality. And the longer we delay in applying it, the more damage will compound.
The loneliness, sterility, mistrust, and despair are not sustainable. Not biologically. Not socially. Not civilizationally. Eventually, society will snap back.
And those who understand what went wrong, and are building what comes next, will become the architects of the new order.
Not because they imposed their will. But because they offered rule when everyone else offered ruin.
We don’t need more advice. We need new incentives. And those can only be built by men who are no longer waiting for permission.
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