Yesterday, an article titled "The Lost Generation" by Jacob Savage lit up social and news media well beyond Compact’s usual readership. Savage, a film writer, began with a narrow observation: that DEI-driven selection in Hollywood systematically filters out a large portion of capable scripts and creators before quality is even assessed. From there, he widened the lens. What looks like an industry problem, he argued, is really a generational one: an entire cohort of white millennial men has found itself locked out of the apprentice-to-master pathways that once allowed talent to mature into excellence.
This was not Savage’s first time addressing the issue; earlier this year, he made a similar case focused on writing and publishing. But this piece struck a nerve, likely because it gave voice to a diffuse, long-simmering frustration: the sense that no matter how hard they work or how much skill they acquire, the doors for these young men simply never open.
What makes Savage’s argument worth taking seriously is that it is not, at bottom, about grievance. It is about cultural continuity. When a society systematically blocks a large segment of its potential talent from formative opportunities, it does not merely harm those individuals. It robs itself of future excellence. The result is a break in the transmission of skill, taste, and judgment, the quiet inheritance that makes great art possible at all.
Anyone paying attention can see the effects today. Movies feel thinner and safer. Hollywood survives on reboot after sequel after reboot. Literary awards go to authors whom few readers recognize, while readers quietly drift away. The emperor has no clothes, but critics keep insisting he does.
The question is not whether these choices are well-intentioned, but whether they are compatible with excellence in fields where excellence is rare.
Excellence lives in the tails
In any large group of people, most cluster around the middle in ability, while a small number sit far out at the extremes. Statisticians call these extremes the “tails” of a distribution. The average person lives near the center; exceptional performers live in the thin outer edges. This matters because in creative fields like writing and filmmaking, progress and excellence are driven almost entirely by those extremes. The difference between a competent manuscript and a great one is not incremental but exponential, and the handful of works that actually move a culture come from the far right tail, not from the broad middle.
When institutions select only a few winners from a large pool, they are therefore not choosing from the average; they are choosing from that extreme tail. Even if different demographic groups had identical average ability, excluding a large portion of the pool before evaluation would still lower the expected quality of the final selections. But in reality, some groups — white men, in this case — are overrepresented in the extreme right tail of creative output, not because of favoritism but because of higher variance. When that tail is amputated for ideological reasons, the institution does not get “a second set of the best.” It gets a statistically inferior set.
The Bell Curve became infamous for political reasons, but its core insight — that elite outcomes are driven by a small number of outliers in the right tail — has been quietly vindicated across field after field.
The slush pile problem
Imagine a publisher that selects ten debut novels from a slush pile of one thousand unsolicited manuscripts. That publisher is not choosing among average writers; it is hunting deep in the extreme right tail, the handful of submissions that are dramatically better than the rest. If the pool is evaluated honestly, the top ten represent the best available future of the craft.
Now impose an ideological pre-filter: DEI and parallel ideologies. Suppose more than half of the submissions are discarded unread because their authors are white men. Even if manuscripts from white men were merely average overall — a generous assumption — this immediately degrades the expected quality of the final ten selections by shrinking the pool. But the more important fact is that white men have historically been overrepresented in the extreme right tail of creative output, not due to favoritism, but because their higher variance produces more outliers. Remove that tail, and you are no longer selecting the best ten manuscripts. You are selecting the best ten that remain after excellence has already been amputated.
This is not a one-time loss. It initiates a downward spiral.
Degraded selection trains degraded judges
Institutions do not merely select work; they train the people doing the selecting. When editors, producers, or executives are consistently exposed to a diminished talent pool, their internal standards recalibrate. This is not malice or incompetence. It is adaptation. Judgment is a muscle, and like any muscle, it weakens when it is no longer exercised against real resistance.
In publishing, this shows up quickly. Editors who rarely encounter truly exceptional manuscripts begin to confuse technical competence with greatness. Safe work starts to feel ambitious. Polished mediocrity is praised as bold. At the same time, writers who might once have been shaped into excellence are left unchallenged because the mentors themselves no longer recognize what that final step requires. Apprenticeship collapses not because no one cares but because too few people remember what mastery looks like.
The same dynamic appears wherever selection precedes training. In film, executives who greenlight scripts primarily on ideological grounds lose the ability to spot narrative power. In corporations, managers chosen for compliance over competence learn to reward the same traits in others. Over time, institutions stop producing excellence not because talent disappears, but because the systems responsible for recognizing and refining it have forgotten how.
This is how cultural decline actually works. It is quiet, procedural, and self-justifying. Standards fall, not with a bang, but with a series of reasonable explanations. And by the time the public notices — when movies feel hollow, books forgettable, and awards unmoored from popular judgment — the damage is already baked in.
The generational cost
One of Savage’s most pointed observations is that this system does not even operate evenly within the group it ostensibly disadvantages. Established white male writers, the ones who came up before these filters hardened, are largely insulated. They are known quantities. They are friends of editors, fixtures of institutions, familiar names who can safely occupy the handful of slots still deemed acceptable for white men. Their presence is then used as evidence that no exclusion exists at all.
What does not happen is the handoff. The informal mentoring, sponsorship, and apprenticeship that once allowed younger writers to rise is conspicuously absent. The pipeline ends with the generation that already made it through. Below them is a vacuum.
For younger white men, this vacuum is not abstract. It means no entry points, no cultivation, no path from raw ability to mastery. Even the established white male writers, eager to prove their DEI fidelity, ignore the young white males in favor of mentoring minority writers. Over time, that produces predictable human consequences: withdrawal, bitterness, disengagement, and in the worst cases, despair. A society that systematically tells a large cohort of its young men that there is no place for them should not be surprised when some of them simply give up. Deaths of despair do not emerge from nowhere; they follow the removal of meaning, dignity, and future orientation.
But the damage does not stop with those men. It radiates outward. When a culture cuts itself off from a large share of its most capable potential contributors, it impoverishes everyone. Voices that might have challenged, refined, or elevated the culture never develop. Traditions are not renewed. Excellence becomes rarer, then unfamiliar, then suspect. In the absence of greatness, mediocrity fills the space, not because it is chosen, but because it is what remains.
This is how cultures hollow out. Not through open censorship or dramatic collapse, but through selection systems that quietly trade excellence for safety and inheritance for optics. The future is shaped not by the best we could have had, but by the best we allowed to survive the filter. And over time, even that distinction is forgotten.
A culture that does this does not merely fail a group of men. It cheats itself of its own future and teaches itself, generation by generation, to live with less.
What you can do
No single reform will fix this. Systems built by incentives rarely reverse themselves voluntarily. But cultures are not sustained only by institutions. They are sustained by people, by small acts of transmission that accumulate over time.
The first step is to stop outsourcing judgment. Read books that are not prize-approved. Watch films that are not critic-anointed. Recommend work because it is good, not because it is sanctioned. Cultural demand still matters, and excellence starved of attention withers as surely as excellence starved of opportunity.
Second, create and support parallel pathways. Mentorship does not require permission. Editors, writers, filmmakers, and professionals who still know what excellence looks like can take on apprentices informally: read drafts, give hard feedback, make introductions where possible. Even one serious mentor can change the trajectory of a life. Waiting for institutions to bless this again is a losing strategy.
Third, support alternative institutions. Subscribe, donate, attend, and promote projects that select on merit rather than ideology. Parallel structures — small presses, independent studios, new festivals, off-platform awards — are how cultures preserve knowledge when the center forgets it. History is full of examples. This moment is not special, and it is not catastrophic. It is, rather, the harbinger of change.
Fourth, tell the truth without cruelty. Pretending mediocrity is excellence helps no one, least of all those being patronized. Honest critique is not exclusion; it is respect. A culture that cannot say “this is better than that” is a culture that cannot improve.
Finally, extend the hand that institutions have withdrawn. If you are established, reach down. If you are mid-career, reach sideways. If you are young, seek out others who still care about craft and standards and form your own workshops, reading groups, and circles of excellence. If you are a reader, find books off the beaten path that have been self-published by frustrated young men. Apprenticeship can survive underground. In fact, it often does. And patronage is a real and impactful thing.
None of the actions described here will make headlines, and none will save a culture overnight. But taken together, they do something quieter and more durable: they keep excellence in circulation. Cultures endure not because their institutions are wise, but because enough ordinary people refuse to let standards die.
Editor’s Note: We are all fighting uphill in a culture war that is trying to crush us. Help arm PJ Media with the truth in our fight for the future.
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