How America Lost the Institutions Binding Men and Women Together

Social clubs, religious organizations, and civic groups have declined since the 1990s or earlier. For decades, these institutions served as counterweight to American individualism, creating spaces where people encountered those different from themselves and learned to cooperate across differences.

Social media and digital platforms have accelerated the shift. They reward individual self-promotion and attention-seeking rather than building shared social connections, leaving people more isolated even as they appear more connected.

People are spending less time in third places and withdrawing from civic organizations and religious bodies, a trend that Cox's new book traces as a continuation of his earlier work on declining social engagement in American society. People are spending less time in third places—cafés, community centers, civic spaces—where encounter and shared activity once happened naturally.

Membership in civic organizations and religious institutions has fallen. This withdrawal from social and public life is deeply troubling because it removes the mechanisms through which Americans once learned to coexist.

An Amazon tribe previously isolated from the outside world was given Wi-Fi and smartphones through Starlink access. The tribe had maintained distinct cultural norms and social structure for generations.

After the technology arrived, young people became distracted. They gossiped behind backs on chat sites. Pornography use became rampant among younger users. The New York Times documented the transformation in real time, showing how quickly societies absorb technology when it arrives, and how expectations shift about what people can ask of each other.

The case illustrates a broader truth: the mechanism of disruption is not the internet itself, but the way screens follow people everywhere, making constant distraction and comparison a baseline condition of social life.

Personal computers in the 1990s and 2000s were stationary, confined to one room. This limitation prevented unsupervised access and made constant use physically impossible. A young person could not take the internet to the dinner table.

Smartphones are portable, addictive, and designed to capture attention. You have a distractible instrument in close proximity at all times. Someone puts their phone on the table during dinner and it becomes impossible to ignore: the buzzing, the incoming messages. The screen follows you to every social interaction, constantly offering escape from face-to-face engagement.

For years, there was a reasonable hope that exposure to different viewpoints—to people with different experiences, different perspectives, different backgrounds—would lead people to learn and to empathize. The reasoning was straightforward: knowledge breeds understanding; exposure reduces bias.

That expectation proved wrong. People became tribal quickly. It became harder, not easier, for people to put themselves in someone else's shoes. Access to information did not make people curious about why others act differently. Instead, people used that information to reaffirm their own beliefs and biases, generalizing and stereotyping rather than understanding.

People do not take the next step of being curious about why someone acted differently or believed something different.

The result is not greater understanding but greater entrenchment. People generalize and stereotype based on selective exposure to information that confirms what they already thought. The mechanisms we use to access knowledge have become mechanisms for deepening division.

Dating culture has undergone dramatic change. Norms around who can approach whom, how to express interest, what consent means, and what respect requires have all shifted. Yet there is no clear guidance on how young people should navigate this new landscape.

The result is confusion and uncertainty. For many young men, that confusion has translated into withdrawal. They have stepped back from dating activities and from social activities more broadly. Without clear standards or examples, without mentors or institutions teaching them how to behave, many have chosen not to try.

Younger generations were raised with a promise: you can be anything, achieve anything. Politics became a vehicle for expressing that individuality and identity. It offered structure and narrative for how to think about yourself and the world.

But these same generations were not raised with parents emphasizing the importance of marriage, parenthood, or other traditional social obligations. Unlike previous generations, they did not inherit a sense that certain roles—spouse, parent, citizen, member of a congregation—provided structure and meaning to life.

Into that vacuum, politics flowed. Young people adopted political beliefs with the force that previous generations reserved for religion, letting their political identity shape not just how they think but how they live. It became a stand-in for the institutions and obligations that once gave life shape and purpose.

Schools, religion, and family once worked together to instill values and develop character. That was understood as formative work—the intentional shaping of who a young person would become.

Today's parents are less likely to engage in that work. The institutions that once shared that burden have collapsed or retreated. The result is young people who have not been shaped by anything outside their immediate family—and often not even within it.

This is framed as empowerment.

In reality, having to figure out who you are and then project that identity across all your digital platforms—social media, dating apps, professional networks—feels endless and exhausting. The work of self-invention, done without institutional templates or guidance, leaves many feeling adrift rather than liberated. The freedom to be anyone becomes the burden of choosing and performing yourself constantly.

Membership in civic and social organizations has collapsed broadly. Trust in political institutions and religious institutions has fallen sharply. The precipitous decline in institutional trust has changed the terms of engagement entirely.

Young women increasingly question whether institutions like marriage serve their interests. Rising distrust stems partly from the perception that institutions restrict autonomy and create unwanted obligations.

Because trust eroded and autonomy became sacred, institutions stopped trying to shape people and started trying to serve their desires. Schools began offering accommodations rather than demanding sacrifice. Organizations catered to individual preferences rather than teaching obligation.

The result is a generation that has not been taught an ethos of obligation—that we have duties to others, that some restrictions on pursuing our desires are necessary for collective life. Without that ethos, people view any institutional demand as inherently suspect or even damaging.

Mutual consent has become the sole ethical standard for intimate behavior. But consent is not enough. Society should be willing to collectively judge certain behaviors as inherently damaging to one or both people, regardless of whether both parties technically agreed.

Online interactions reveal degrading and dissociative behavior that would never occur in workplace, school, or civic settings. Those institutions created predictability and behavioral standards—norms that prevented harassment, prevented the public humiliation of others for social status, prevented the sending of unsolicited sexual content.

Without those institutional norms in place, dating and online dating have become significantly harder. The burden of enforcing standards falls entirely on individuals negotiating their own boundaries in the moment, often with power imbalances and social pressure working against them.

Asking women and girls for nude or suggestive images—to partners, boyfriends, or strangers—is incredibly common. In one example from Carter Sherman's book The Second Coming, a teen girl voluntarily texted nudes to one boy, then discovered they had been shared across her entire school.

Current American society is paralyzed. It refuses to judge such behavior as wrong, leaving it to individuals to negotiate. But that approach dumps the burden on the people least able to enforce boundaries: teen girls navigating social pressures, power discrepancies with older partners, and their own developmental immaturity.

A clearer standard would be: boys simply should not ask girls for such images unless in a committed relationship. Schools and families should establish this as explicit baseline. The burden should shift from girls policing behavior to society establishing accountability when people violate these standards.

A young man, well-connected, head of the University of Chicago Republicans, about to graduate, had an opportunity to join the Trump administration. He rejected it. His choice: become a podcaster instead. The appeal was independence, autonomy, and the possibility of building a personal brand.

This choice reflects a broader pattern. Young people are not interested in building something as members of an organization or institution. They prioritize freedom and individual autonomy over the kind of advancement that comes from loyalty to an organization and shared purpose with others.

Optimization culture and individualism have taught them that their value comes from standing out, not from fitting in or advancing an institution's mission. The incentives of social media reward personal brands, not team players. So institutions lose their appeal.

Households have fewer children. This means less social friction in formative years—less sharing of bathrooms, less sharing of bedrooms, fewer demands to sacrifice for siblings or accommodate different needs within the home. Middle and upper-middle class families have increasingly funneled all resources into fewer kids.

The message children absorb is clear: the family exists for my advancement and the furtherance of my interests. Schools have reinforced this by offering accommodations—extra test time, modified assignments, individualized attention. The balance between accommodation and institutional obligation has been lost.

The result is a generation that moves through the world expecting people to accommodate their various needs and wants. They have never had to develop the capacity to compromise, to sacrifice, to adjust their expectations to fit with others' needs. The sense that institutions and other people exist to serve their individual interests has been deeply instilled.

Teaching children their family's history gives them a sense of connection to something larger than themselves. When kids learn that they are not just a single shining star, but part of a bigger constellation, they develop a better sense of their obligations to their family and to the people around them.

Understanding that obligation requires understanding that different people have different needs and interests. Direct participation in running the household is critical. Kids who help with cooking, cleaning, care for younger siblings, and the daily work of maintaining a home learn that they are useful, that their contribution matters, and that the family depends on them.

This participation instills an ethos of contribution that counters the default message of the accommodation economy: that institutions and other people exist to serve their individual interests. It teaches instead that they have a role in something shared.