Customer Reviews

The Garbage Generation

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Amneus deftly describes in this book how thefeminist/liberal/leftist attack on the notorious and now officiallydiscredited "patriarchy" is in fact an attack on civilization itself, since the former was the prerequisite for the latter. He documents how the feminist wish for the rights of the more primitive matriarchy along with the benefits of civilization, which only patriarchy can produce and provide, is wanting to "have your cake and eat it too", of wanting to have it both ways, that the two are incompatible. That, and that the effects on men are uniformly negative, which is why men should oppose these trends. And while many claim we're still under a patriarchal system, Amneus shows that we're actually a long way towards going back to the matriarchal stone age. Not only that, but many applaud this as if it were something progressive. Even the "family values" and "compassionate conservativism" crowds don't get it. Amneus shows how deluded these folk are, pointing to the ghetto, Haiti, and the indian reservation for what actually ensues when women are in control. On the one hand, the material in this book is something we already kind of know; on the other hand, reading the book reminds one of how much we've forgotten in the last generation or two as other assumptions and beliefs have become the unexamined norm and certain ideas have become verbotten. That's what makes the book so refreshing and eye-opening, since it's definitely not a re-tread of standard 50's traditionalism. It urges men to view their work as their bodies in "Our Paychecks, Ourselves", where he implores men to refuse to pay child support for the male-only "privilege" of having their families destroyed and their children taken from them. Further radical ideas include a thorough debunking of conservative favorite George Gilder's sentimental views about the civilizing effects of women, and the reasons why single men should avoid educated, independent, "career" women like the plague. Some would no doubt consider this book to be a misogynistic diatribe, such is the strength of its point of view, except that in promoting civilization over primitivism Amneus is hoping to show how patriarchal systems benefit everyone, not just the evil, brutish, straw-men erected by feminism or the incompetent bozos of the TV sitcom (which are actually more common under matriarchy). Much of the material in the book is, in fact, taken from feminist writings, only it's turned around to show what its real implications are once men and children are included in the consideration. The book says so many things that aren't even on the radar screen of others in the murky public debate over gender roles and the relationship between the sexes, divorce and custody, the rise in adolescent gangs and crime, the "breakdown of the family", etc., that anyone reading it is certain to feel as if the author is from another planet. This is perhaps the best evidence that we're no longer living under some oppressive patriarchal conspiracy, as the common propaganda would have us believe. This all doesn't imply Amneus comes across as some wacky lunatic throwback, only that he provides a unique and clear perspective sadly lacking today anywhere on the left or right. In fact, the book is concise and well-documented scholarship, not a creation of some ranting Archie Bunker or Andrew Dice Clay. It's also available in its entirety on-line..., though after reading it you'll be sure to want to order several copies - either to give to friends or to burn, depending on your persuasion. Read this book only if you're ready to have your thinking seriously re-aligned, especially if you're a male confused by the many conflicting messages coming from the mostly female dominated debate of the last decades.

Although hierarchy (patriarchy) advantages some and disadvantages others, everyone benefits to the point that hierarchy maintains social order. Hierarchy, like death and taxes, is a certainty where societies form. When revolutionaries (feminists, communists) say they want equality and want to eliminate hierarchy, what they REALLY want is another system of inequality where they're in charge. It may be that feminism may be a potential cause of so much social dosorder, because we've scrapped hierarchies that maintain order wholesale for the last 35 years. The "garbage generation" will have to clean up the fallout from this failed social experiment...let me put it this way, the results will make the current social, political, and economic turmoil in the former USSR look like paradise. This book is a must read for anyone who doesn't want this to happen.

A lot of what is written here should be apparent to any objective person. Unfortunately, so many people have been so poisoned by the politically correct mindset that women and men are functionally equal, inter-changeable, and the wife-husband family model is somehow oppressive or outdated that they don't even question whether this is correct.

Society was built by men working to provide a good life for their wives and legitimate children. We all enjoy the benefits of civilization by accepting certain restrictions on our behavior. You cannot have, as the feminists claim, all the benefits of affluent, modern America without restrictions on your behavior. Our standard of living will crumble as the future engineers, doctors, teachers, leaders have no incentive to achieve. Men invent, build, heal and rule for the good of their offspring and loyal, devoted, dependable, subservient female partners not for the good of strangers or women who are allegedly 'superior'(smarter, wealthier, more powerful) and refuse the secondary role. Without this outlet of their energy, they become aimless and dangerous. They need to be taught by their fathers how to be productive husbands and fathers.

For example, welfare and government run health care are paid for primarily by working, married men yet benefit primarily unemployed, unmarried women and their children. Yeah, I feel bad for those kids but enabling their mothers by elevated single, poor motherhood to a sacred calling creates more problems in the long run for many, many others.

As the immature, delusional, selfish and impulsive are allowed to tear Western civilization apart by chasing personal liberty without responsibility, there will shortly be no one left to even turn out the lights as we are forced back into caves.

Fantastic sociological observation, relating society's functioning to the dynamic within the smallest social unit, the family. The author's observation of matriarchal societies is unique and surprisingly accurate.

The only flaw is his lack of observations concerning the 'hyper patriarchies' of the Middle East and Eastern Europe and its destructive influences. Also, clarification of Catholic patriarchies such as South America and the Philippines and their relative lack of success would be interesting.

Otherwise fantastic and original work.

It's 2011. Over 20 years since the Garbage Generation was written, and all of the ills of single-mother families have only become more pronounced since this work was produced; the percentage of people who marry continues to decline, divorce rates haven't budged, and the population of all Western nations has become stagnant or have precipitously declined. Without a fresh supply of well-bred citizens, our economy becomes overridden with debt, inefficiency, and general decay.


How does Amneus's master-work chronicle this decline? With 2 central arguments:

1. Feminism has overwhelmingly shifted the power of sexual relationships and familial relationships into female hands through the legal system, by "de-regulating" how and when females have sex. This is our shift from patriarchy to matriarchy.

2. The result has been for fickle-females to destroy the family and toss father's out of homes, resulting in a new generation with zero interest in the future well-being of their mother country.


It is amazing that people can contest such easily demonstrated facts; the decline of all western countries since the sexual revolution is easily observed and will only continue in scope and stature as the 21st century rolls on. The Garbage Generation, besides explaining in great detail how patriarchy produces civilization, and how matriarchy destroys civilization, also lists extensive research and citations to document everything claimed.

The critics of this book are 100% politically motivated; Amneus only argues with cold-blooded fact and reason. Those who condemn this book only have their cries of hysteria to show for it.

I would recommend this book to anyone interested in the truth of the West's decline, because as we all grow older, we can witness the central thesis of this book unfold before our very lives.

Flying in the face of today's conventional (feminist-promoted) wisdom, this brilliant book painstakingly shows that patriarchy is the indispensable foundation for civilization, and that it is responsible for social stability, prosperity, technological advances, and such peace as human societies have known. "Men, not women, are the ultimate guardians of morality; and while men may delegate the responsibility to women (as in the Victorian age), when women subvert the moral order, men must reassert their responsibility to restore it."

Amneus does not contest the matriarchal theory of history, only its interpretation. It is necessary to define our terms. Often when people bandy the word "matriarchy" about, they envision an advanced civilization run by women, sometimes with armies of Amazons. This has never existed. What Amneus means by matriarchy is a society in which paternity is meaningless, children belong solely to the mother and women are not bound to husbands. This is how primitive societies operated, and as Amneus demonstrates, this is *why* they were primitive; there was no motivation for men to be stable or productive.

Amneus shows that the pathological behavior of men in these matriarchal societies is pretty much the same as that of an increasing number of men in America (and Europe): without the prospect of paternity to anchor them, they become violent and idle, refusing to work to support women who will not be faithful to them or children they are not allowed to help raise, or who might not even be their own. Amneus cites exhaustive statistics demonstrating that people who grow up without fathers are significantly more prone to criminal behavior, neurosis, substance abuse, and being unable to achieve. 75% of violent criminals grew up in female-headed households. When feminists build their matriarchal castles in the air they invariably claim that with women in charge, violence will disappear, but the historical record is conclusive that the reverse will happen.

Amneus does not discuss this, but in fact, these primitive matriarchal societies were at war virtually nonstop, because the men had nothing else to do and no motivation to avoid wars. Modern liberals try to insist that our hunter-gatherer past was peaceful and hyperborean, but the facts indicate that instead, the advent of civilization - that is, patriarchy - led to the most peaceful millenia of human history. For more on this, see Sick Societies: Challenging the Myth of Primitive Harmony and War before Civilization: The Myth of the Peaceful Savage.

Amneus also points out how the feminist message has changed over the years. In the early 60's, feminists declared that women ought to become independent of men and provide for themselves. By the 70's, when it became clear that this was not going to work, feminists were whining that taxpayers, chiefly patriarchal men supporting their nuclear families, ought to be forced to subsidize women who were having children out of wedlock. Women are still dependent on men, only they are getting the rewards of being supported without reciprocal obligations to any particular man. "Feminists believe that the patriarchy ought to subsidize its own destruction by paying women to create fatherless families."

He also discusses the value of patriarchy in promoting decent behavior. Under patriarchy, a man's wife and children are to an extent seen as his property and his responsibility; consequently, he protects them. Men today have been deprived of this role. The result: bullying is rampant in female-run schools, making those schools lethally dangerous; street crime has skyrocketed; a high percentage of children in female-headed households are abused, often by their mothers' boyfriend or new husband; and at least one man so forgot that it is a husband's role to protect his wife that he had her slowly starved to death after denying her medical care for years (after initial injuries which it would be charitable to describe as "suspicious").

This book shows why men refuse to commit, an answer you won't find in the articles in Cosmo pondering this question: Men will not commit because women do not commit. As our laws stand today, marriage gives all the rights and privileges to the woman and none to the man. Women can leave marriages at whim, knowing that the law will give them the children and most of their husband's property and force their husband to support them and their children for years, while denying those husbands the right to care for and protect those children from the parade of Mommy's boyfriends who will abuse them. What does any man stand to gain from such an arrangement?

The double standard is a necessity for civilization, and unfair as it seems, men and women held to similar standards will not behave in a similar way: "The 19th century husband was empowered to take his wife's children from her, but he didn't. Today's wife is empowered to take her husband's children from him and she does in millions of marriages, and the marriages in which her right is not exercised are de-stabilized by the knowledge that it could be exercised if the wife chooses."

Also allow me to quote what I considered one of the most vital points in the entire book. I used to call myself a feminist, not realizing that my idea of feminism had died out before I was born: the idea that women ought to strive to achieve and be responsible for our own actions. Amneus points out how misogynist is the attitude that makes today's divorce laws possible: "The Promiscuity Principle (a woman's right to control her own sexuality) makes women moral minors who cannot enter into an enforceable contract to share reproduction with a man." The entire basis of feminism is the idea that women cannot be held responsible for their own actions and cannot look after themselves. Patriarchy actually gives women far more credit.

Amneus also credits feminism with today's cultural degeneracy: "the inversion of 'cultural flow' (in dress, hair style, music, ideas, language), formerly from the higher ranks of society to the lower, now from the lower to the higher". This inversion is something that concerns me greatly, and since reading this book I've started to see it as a side effect of feminism: women realize, at some level, that few of them are going to equal male achievements, which is why it has become necessary to deface the very concept of achievement; and that recognizing legitimate authority has become "uncool" because legitimate authority goes against the anarchy upon which savage women and feminists thrive.

Amneus' proposed solution to the havoc wrought by feminism is that men must demand custody of their children and refuse to support wives who leave them or children who are taken away from their wives. I can only say that I hope this will happen.

This book can be read online at fisheaters.com/gb1.html .

This book will open your eyes to some facts that western society tries to hide from itself.

I recommend this book to anyone who wants to understand why our society is slowly decaying.

In THE GARBAGE GENERATION, Daniel Amneus has an enormous axe to grind against feminism and the breakdown of the traditional, patriarchal family. Unfortunately, his critical insights are clouded by a confused framework that seeks to understand the problem in terms of 'patriarchy' versus 'matriarchy'.

Amneus tries to argue that the natural order of human society is 'matriarchal' and that this matriarchal form of human society is incapable of sustaining human civilization. By the same token, he argues, 'patriarchal' society is responsible for the creation of human civilization and necessary to sustain it. Before modern civilization began to form (with the city states in Mesopotamia), the natural order of human social relations was matriarchal and it was a shift to a patriarchal system that allowed civilization to form, grow, and prosper. The breakdown of patriarchy, as in American ghettos where women are the heads of most families, results in crime, chaos, and ultimately makes civilization impossible to sustain.

There are two huge flaws in Amneus' reasoning that render the whole project unsupportable:

First, as at least one other reviewer has already pointed out, Amneus' assertion that primitive human societies were matriarchal in nature is highly questionable and seems not to actually be true. Amneus bases his assertion, ironically, on an apparently large body of feminist scholarship to the same effect, i.e. that the natural order of human society is matriarchal and patriarchy is a recent phenomenon. Anyone with even the most rudimentary knowledge of anthropology or human history will know that there have been cases of matriarchal human societies, but will also know that these cases have always been the exception to the rule. Amneus, and the feminists whom he cites, use (for example) American Indian societies as an illustration of the natural matriarchal order of human relations, but the case of matriarchal societies among American Indians is quite the exception. In fact, most American Indian societies that were well documented were quite brutally patriarchal even compared to the harsh European standards of their observors. Women in these societies had a low social standing and were treated quite poorly by the men. This seems to have been the norm throughout the primitive world, and is absolutely ordinary wherever primitive societies are still found. So the whole premise of matriarchal society being the human 'norm' seems to be little more than wishful fantasizing on the part of some of the dimmer feminist academics, and Amneus provides no further or remotely convincing evidence to demonstrate his premise in this regard.

Just think of any documentary of an isolated, primitive tribe that you have ever seen. Were the women in charge? Hell, no. Ninety-nine times out of one hundred they will have been doing the most menial work of supporting the village and treated with marked inferiority relative to the warrior men.

So that pretty much reduces Amneus' argumentation to nonsense, as he unfortunately gets lost in the framework of matriarchy versus patriarchy, and many of his perhaps valid contentions about the consequences of feminism or the breakdown of the traditional family are impenetrably clouded by that flawed theoretical framework.

The other huge problem with Amneus' reasoning is that he references an abundance of modern sociological studies in an attempt to demonstrate that matriarchal families tend to be unsuccessful and result in social disintegration, but does not differentiate between single mother households and single father households. Most of the studies that Amneus refers to, for example, speak of 'single parent households' and any differentiation between single mother households and single father households is not addressed by Amneus or by any of the study excerpts that he quotes. He compares the outcomes of single mother households to the outcomes of traditional, two parent households, while a logical comparison with regard to matriarchy versus patriarchy would be to compare single mother households with single father households. A two parent household could be matriarchal in nature or patriarchal in nature, and so could a single parent household. Amneus, for example, references the alarming incidence of criminality among children raised by single mothers, but he does not seem to address whether the children of single fathers fare any better. It is common knowledge and common sense that children do not tend to fare as well when raised by only one of their parents instead of two! Single father households in the US today are much more rare than single mother households, so an epidemic of criminality caused by children of single fathers would not be observed in the same way that it has been observed in the case of single mothers, but that does not mean the incidence of criminality is necessarily better. Amneus does not seem to be aware of this crucial flaw in his reasoning. His criticism of single mother households in comparison to two parent households is nothing more than a straw man argument. Has anyone ever claimed that it is better to have a one parent household than a two parent household?? Some feminists probably have, but not any reasonable person. A logical equivalent to Amneus' argument would be to say that women are inferior in productivity to men based on the fact that a single woman working at a task is not as successful as a woman and a man working together at it -- such reasoning is nonsensical.

Amneus is extremely independent in his thinking and conclusions and this results in some potentially interesting observations and insights, but his overwhelming loyalty to a flawed theoretical framework and to an extremely dubious and poorly substantiated set of premises leave this book with little to offer.

The author explains "the rich get richer and the poor get poorer" by saying that the rich are patriarchal while the poor are matriarchal. Ninety-seven percent of our top 1000 company CEOs are men. As the author points out, ruling class wives are happily subservient, taking good care of their children. The author whines about those who practice family values having to pay for the sins of those who don't. Unfortunately, he stops short of questioning why the rich are patriarchal and at the same time they force matriarchy on the rest of us. The ruling class are using sex warfare to divide and conquer us, to put the cart before the horse, to turn us upside down. It is classic creeping government tyranny, the kind we have been warned about. And all they had to do was empower ordinary women. The claim that women's rights is a necessary part of democracy is a BIG LIE. Every effective decision-making body in the world has a tiebreaker. Unless you feel that only big government police officers should be allowed to use force against others, the more physically capable spouse (the husband) should use reasonable force to keep order in his own home. Maybe they do it differently up there in richland, but they are not the last bastion of real men, the virtuous keepers of family values. Women's "rights" has nothing to do with helping women, it is an ever-expanding government weapon to subjugate ordinary people.

Anneus writes from his heart about a subject that might be the most important facing our society. His obvious bias is overcome by the shear force of the rightiousness of his cause,