Andrew Tate’s apparent downfall has been satisfying to watch. It shouldn’t be reassuring. If Tate were the problem, his disappearance would be the solution. But he didn’t create a generation of confused young men. He found them and turned their search for manhood into a business model. His legal troubles are for the courts. His cultural record is already available for judgment.

Respectable society became very good at telling boys what a man must never be: aggressive, entitled, domineering and, above all, toxic. Some warnings were necessary. But a list of prohibitions is not a blueprint for a life. You can’t build a character out of an HR manual. Boys need to be told not only what bad men do, but what good men are for.

Tate answered them.

Get fit. Stop complaining. Work hard. Build confidence. Make money. It would be dishonest to pretend none of this was useful. An Australian study published this year found that young men who saw value in Tate were drawn mainly to fitness and financial self-improvement, rather than his views about women.

That was what made him effective. But the useful advice wasn’t separate from the poison. It was the delivery system. Boys came for the gym routines and stayed to be told that women were prizes, wealth was character’ and manhood was a contest.

Why was a stranger on the internet doing this job at all?

Family breakdown is part of the answer. Its bill doesn’t always arrive when a marriage ends. It arrives years later, in the places children go looking for what was missing. This isn’t about blaming single mothers or pretending every home containing a father is happy. Many women did heroic work after men walked away, checked-out or proved useless. To say fathers matter isn’t to criticise the mothers who carried the load. It’s to admit their load was heavier.

But what weakened was larger than the household. Fathers, grandfathers, teachers, churches, sporting clubs, first employers and older men once shared responsibility for teaching boys how to carry themselves. Not all of it was wonderful, but together they transmitted a code: control your temper, keep your word, protect the vulnerable, work hard and take responsibility when things go wrong.

As those institutions weakened, technology moved into the spare room. Television became the electronic babysitter. The internet opened the door to a larger world. Social media allowed strangers to speak directly and repeatedly into a boy’s insecurities. Then the algorithm arrived and worked out precisely which insecurity would keep him watching.

Television filled an afternoon. The algorithm fills a worldview. It notices loneliness, humiliation, anger, and sexual frustration, then supplies certainty, grievance, and someone to blame. A boy searching for gym advice can soon find himself taking life lessons from a shirtless stranger beside a sports car.

Tate’s cleverest trick was presenting this as traditional masculinity. It was nothing of the sort. Traditional masculinity, at its best, demanded self-command, duty, restraint, loyalty and sacrifice. A man was expected to control his appetites, provide for his family and become someone others could rely upon.

Tate kept the costume and threw away the code. Self-command became command over others. Ambition became exhibitionism. Women became trophies and money became the measure of the man. He didn’t rescue boys from shallow modern culture. He was shallow modern culture with its shirt off.

But the problem is larger than Tate, and it will remain long after he’s gone. And the solution is not censorship. Tate has the right to speak, just as everyone else has the right to call him a grub. Free speech does not, however, create an entitlement to algorithmic amplification into a 14-year-old’s bedroom. Platforms should answer for what their systems promote to children. The film industry has lived with age classifications for decades. Nobody argues that an MA15+ rating is an assault on a director’s freedom of speech. It simply acknowledges that children are not adults. Silicon Valley shouldn’t face a lower standard because its screen is smaller and its content never ends.

But classifying content or removing an account doesn’t fill the vacancy that made it attractive either. Governments like bans because they can announce them at press conferences. Now Canberra wants to hand e-Karen another set of coercive powers, as though a sufficiently stern notice from a bureaucrat might succeed where families and institutions have failed. Forming character takes 20 years and usually happens somewhere without a lectern. A government can remove a video. It cannot install a father.

Nor does it help when ordinary discussion of fatherhood, stable families, duty, and male responsibility is treated as politically suspect or labelled ‘far right’. When sensible people become frightened to say sensible things, the ideas don’t disappear. They are inherited by the fringe, bundled with resentment, conspiracy and contempt for women.

The opposite of Andrew Tate is not weaker men. It is better men: ambitious without being ruthless, confident without being cruel, and strong enough to carry responsibility rather than merely command attention. Tate exploited instability and sold boys a code likely to make them worse partners and fathers. Young women deserved better than the men he was helping create. Young men deserved better than Tate.

His downfall, if it lasts, should be welcomed. But if the cultural chair remains empty, another online prophet will sit in it – probably with a better camera and an even nastier algorithm. And, as usual, we’ll pretend he came from nowhere.

You can take down the man. You can’t leave the boy unanswered.

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