I recall reading that at the trend's peak era in the Middle Ages, one out of every three males in Europe was a monk or a low-level cleric. I've heard similar figures for Buddhist monks in different parts of Asia.
Strip away the entire dimension of religiosity from the monastic experience and consider this state of affairs as a social construct for a moment. We are told life was very painful and survival difficult in the medieval period, and I have no reason to doubt this. But rather than a perpetual struggle of "all hands on deck," you have up to 30 percent of males locked away in stone holes where they did little to no work directly related to survival (outside a little farming which was really more like gardening).
Instead of contributing their labor to the community doing economically "useful" work like blacksmithing, metalwork, hard-labor 15-hour-a-day farming, shoe-cobbling, fishing and hunting, etc….they sat there and read, or copied illuminated books. At certain times of the day they performed elaborate rituals inside the monetary that most of the public would not see. They spent a good deal of time just sitting in prayer or contemplation.
Whether or not you think this work has theological value is a moot point. The point is it had little to no real ECONOMIC value. Judging from contemporary writing, too, Monks enjoyed a largely pathetic reputation, a few holy-man exceptions aside. In medieval literature they are portrayed as "losers" and drunkards, social misfits, weirdos – in other words, beta males.
The more I look at history, Asian and European, the more a common pattern emerges: there is always a massive surplus of males. Generally sexless males. For several thousand years, the standard way of dealing with them was either burying them in monasteries with harmless aspie busywork like gold-leafing scrolls. When we entered the "age of discovery," many were just sent to "the colonies" to languish in the heat. Again, initial conquistadors and crusaders aside, most of these "colonial officers" are given a distinctly beta-ish cast in the literature of the day (Read Orwell's "Burmese Days" for example – dozens of men with no real life plans just laying around in the torpid heat fanning themselves, playing checkers…the 1800s equivalent of the vidya-and-Cheetohs couch potato).
Finally by the 20th century, a new way was found to deal with these excess beta "useless eaters:" Slaughter them by the the tens of millions in history's bloodiest battles. In the past, these beta types couldn't really be useful as soldiers, who had to be physically strong to carry armor, heavy weaponry, walk for days at a time, and so on. But by WWI the killing was so mechanized that even more physically slight men could handle long guns, fly planes, or man ships.
So, if you are willing to roll with me on this theory a bit, we might wonder why society seems to habitually produce so many of these sexless, beta-type males. And I propose the time is ripe for "secular monasteries", where the focus is not religious but rather technological.
Picture vast, windowless skyscrapers filled with millions of NEETs in little cubicles. They can play vidya, watch porn, even smoke weed or ingest yet-uninvented pills for pleasure or sedation. All the Doritos and Mountain Dew you could wish for, perfectly free. VR goggles. Like a medieval monetary, it wold serve the goal of simply removing these sexless misfits and since its all virtual, it would probably be very cheap. Something very close to this is already a reality in much of Asia. What does Holla Forums think?
