In The Thing, G. K. Chesterton declares,
“…the truth is that nobody has any business to destroy a social institution until he has really seen it as an historical institution. If he knows how it arose, and what purposes it was supposed to serve, he may really be able to say that they were bad purposes, or that they have since become bad purposes, or that they are purposes which are no longer served. But if he simply stares at the thing as a senseless monstrosity that has somehow sprung up in his path, it is he and not the traditionalist who is suffering from an illusion. We might even say that he is seeing things in a nightmare. This principle applies to a thousand things, to trifles as well as true institutions, to convention as well as to conviction.”
When Chesterton does decide to make a particularly relevant application of his idea, he considers the then ongoing attack against the institution of family, saying,
“Among the traditions that are being thus attacked, not intelligently but most unintelligently, is the fundamental human creation called the Household or the Home. That is a typical thing which men attack, not because they can see through it, but because they cannot see it at all. They beat at it blindly, in a fashion entirely haphazard and opportunist; and many of them would pull it down with out even pausing to ask why it was ever put up.” (sic)
“they have fallen into a habit of mere drift and gradual detachment from family life; something that is often merely accidental and devoid of any definite theory at all. But though it is accidental it is none the less anarchical. And it is all the more anarchical for not being anarchist. It seems to be largely founded on individual irritation; an irritation which varies with the individual.”
“We are told that in this or that family Grandmamma talked a great deal of nonsense, which God knows is true; or that it is very difficult to have intimate intellectual relations with Uncle Gregory without telling him he is a fool, which is indeed the case. But nobody seriously considers the remedy, or even the malady; or whether the existing individualistic dissolution is a remedy at all.”
Pay careful attention to those quotes. They are layered and rich and deep and wide. He has struck at the heart of Crititical Theory’s work. Here is the Left’s fatal flaw in a sentence… “But nobody seriously considers the remedy, or even the malady; or whether the existing individualistic dissolution is a remedy at all.”
The great audacity of a humanist worldview is the idea that progress (increase of socialist power) and the stripping away of moral constraints are virtues to be cultivated at almost any cost. You must blanketly accept their diagnosis and their cures in every instance leading up to their ultimate solution—the overwhelming of and wanton destruction of every historical institution among men and rewriting the codes of nature. It does not matter how plainly false their cause-effect claims are, how “counter-productive” their means, or how ridiculous their plans for a “better” world; it is your moral duty to bow to their superiority of heart and mind and give them carte blanche to rule over and thin out the whole of humanity as seems best to them moment by moment.
On her last day in the House, 1990, Margaret Thatcher delivered a rousing condemnation of the socialist designs of many of those present. She was being criticized for a spreading gap between the top 10% and the poorest 10%… a gap that only ultimately matters if your goal is equal outcomes or if the WORKING poor are unable to subsist. She hit the nail on the head when she responded, “All levels of income are better off than they were in 1979. But what the honorable member is saying is that he would rather the poor were poorer provided the rich were less rich.”
This is just a more tame version of Mao’s willingness to see most of his own people wiped out to bring about this glorious vision for the human race. Fewer but better Chinese sounded good to him. Indeed, his willingness, and even excitement over the idea that nuclear war would reduce the human population by billions and allow him to build his Utopia faster with the few that would remain, bears the marks of a profound darkness of soul… and so do the complaints being addressed by Margret Thatcher.
Each generation tends to regard “the world that is” as a trap from which to escape… into more progress and less moral confinement. This is not a new phenomenon for our “super-enlightened” Millennials and GenZ folk. Many think they can fix the world, and each generation seems to arm itself against the past with the firm conviction that they are the hope for this brighter future, so long as they can throw off the constraints of those fools who have gone before. Then, of course, they will resent the next generation for thinking the same thing about them.
If you are fixated on disrupting society in order to throw open the gates to the glorious new Utopia of equality of outcome regardless of input and regard every inequality in the present as stemming from the oppression of past and present institutions there are few things better to paint with a bull’s-eye than the traditional family. Since equal destitution is preferable to unequal prosperity, in Social Marxism there is no element in the traditional family that DOESN’T drive the humanist to distraction. It has been the historic powerbase for “the patriarchy.” The financial advantage of strong families over broken families is monumental. Parents dominate the lives of Children, gatekeepers for the forming and impressionable hearts and minds that the Left so desperately want to shape in their own image. Families tend to have their own unique culture… replete, egad, with moral convictions. The radically divergent levels of nurturing, skills, and stability in various homes leads to radically different outcomes in the lives of Children in almost every area of life.
The family has been the glue for every successful society in the history of man… but these are eager to shred it… but first their plan is to erode it, bit by bit, disruption by disruption, cutting its moorings one by one until it simply floats away… bleeding to death from a thousand cuts.
Here is the plan.
- Beat down the very idea of male headship in the home. The fact that you more than likely winced at the very complaint goes to show you how much ground Critical Theorists have gained convincing people that the sexes are without meaningful distinction, and that gender roles are oppressive constructs made by men to keep women under their power.
That take is an interpretive lens that dictates cause-effect rather than observing it. Anecdotal evidence gleaned from strong feeling secures angry souls in this conviction. The refusal to recognize and value the differences between the genders leads to a marrow deep disgust at traditional gender roles and emboldens the young to rip down those fences with confidence.
Every institution needs a leader, however, and a double-minded institution in leadership conflict is in danger of collapse. In the family, that leader has historically been the husband. Headship does not mean tyrant, though many leaders become tyrants. Biblical headship in the home is more in line with the vision of a family shepherd, who protects, builds, and provides, working hand in hand with his shepherdess who nests and nurtures.
The husband was typically the first legally recognized tier of government. Societies had the family at its core (not individuals) and the father was the legal representative of it. (That’s one of those fences that you want to fully understand before even thinking about tearing it down.) Whatever interpersonal struggles took place behind closed doors, the husband and father stood accountable before the community for his family.
Therefore, the Left put forth social visions which deny gender roles (and now, even gender) and provoke both endless power struggles in the home, and, ultimately, a lack of stable headship altogether.
This, however, is not a random construct but the natural inclination of gender, as husband and wife each bring their special gifts to bear upon the joint creation of a family. In single parent households and same gender households one entire spectrum of gifting is lacking and the consequences of that absence is statistically discernable… i.e. survive & thrive is severely diminished.
The proper functioning of a home—peak achievement of survive & thrive—demands certain basic things. These things have not changed in all the millennia of man; only the means of achieving them and their particular value ranking change from place to place and time to time. Throughout the ages, men and women have each brought their God given gifts and inclinations into play to meet those needs well. Individuals are not all equal in these gifts and inclinations but the patterns are clear.
The radical changes that the industrial and technological revolutions have brought to the means for meeting these basic household needs have been a source of confusion… a steep learning curve. Armed with industrial invention and technological abilities, things that were once naturally outside the range of typical female abilities, things requiring brute strength and powerful stamina, have come within the grasp of women generally. As near back as the 1980s most production in the world was dependent on strength and stamina. The economy has shifted with the digital explosion, however, to allow mental labor to find an equilibrium with manual labor.
So the question arises, “How do we do family best in light of these changes?”
Whatever we work out for an answer, whatever the details prove to be, our methods must work with and not against gender gifting and gender inclination.
The Marxists struck hard while the iron was hot to malign the very idea of gender inclination, sowing confusion and hostility between the sexes, reducing survive & thrive in the modern home. Indeed, the American family is by and large unhealthy at present. Those basic needs for healthy family are not being met well. Children are not being reared and nurtured well. Depression, confusion, and suicide are, thus, on the rise, and societal collapse seems to loom in the shadows just beyond our vision.
It is interesting that Marxists, social or economic, have historically despised and radically undervalued organizational leadership, while simultaneously planning the overthrow of existing societies to bring them to heel under the overwhelming vision of the ubermench… a visionary and organizational leader. Whatever promise Marxists make about a society of equals, this equality is only envisioned as rising spontaneously from the ashes of the old world, destroyed by their organizational leadership, and brought to fruition under the tutelage of authoritarian leaders… who never actually plan to relinquish power to the people at all. - Measure a woman’s worth by her ability to compete with men economically and in career-mindedness. If you make a flat comparison between all working women with all working men, it is true that men out earn women… that women make according to the 2023 Forbes calculations 82% of what men make in their lifetime. This drives many to distraction. “This is proof of the villainy of the patriarchy!!!” “The system is rigged against women!!!” “Capitalism must go!” Any economist worth his or her salt, knows, however, that this gap expresses nothing more than the differences in Gender inclination in life, and that those inclinations are not a problem… they are a blessing.
Marxists are obsessive about equality of outcome. They believe that in a perfect world everyone would come out equal. This is, of course, ridiculous and leads to a lot of unnecessary rage, envy, and emotional misery. Like those who groan and spin out over the spreading earnings gap between the top X% and bottom X%, this spread in outcomes torments the ranks of the unthinking. I suggest, however, that the closer that gap becomes, the more unhealthy the American family is becoming. Equality here marks not more “fairness” in the system, but both government interference in market place forces and a breakdown in the nurturing power in the home.
In his poem, “The hand that rocks the cradle is the Hand that Rules the World,” William Ross Wallace sees the power of motherhood as Marxists cannot. We are more than our economic presence. It is the home and family that matters most for rich or poor, in sickness and in health. Compared to the nurturing power of motherhood, says, Wallace, “All true trophies of the ages, are… impearled.” “Women,” he cries, “how divine your mission!” He declares, “Infancy’s the tender fountain, Power may with beauty flow, Mother’s first to guide the streamlets, From them souls unresting grow.”
In her writing for a local paper, Laura Ingalls Wilder asks an important question in regard to the work struggles of women in 1919 when the men came home from war—Who’ll Do the Women’s Work?
“Flaring headlines in the papers have announced that “women will fight to hold jobs,” meaning the men’s jobs which they took when the men went to war. … One would think that there must have been a great number of women who were idle before the war. If not, one wonders what has become of the jobs they had… We heard nothing of numbers of women who could not find work before the war. They were all busy, apparently, and fairly well satisfied. Who is doing that work they left, to fill the places of men who went into the army, or is that work undone?”
Women didn’t want to go “backward.” They were energized by new possibilities before them. Wilder said of them, “We don’t know where we’re going, but we’re on our way.” She summarized general sentiments well saying:
“It makes our hearts thrill and our heads rise proudly to think that women were found capable and eager to do such important work in the crisis of war-time days. I think that never again will anyone have the courage to say that women could not run world affairs if necessary… But this too is certain. We must advance logically, in order, and all together if the ground gained is to be held. If what has hitherto been women’s work, in the world, is simply left undone by them, there is no one else to take it up. If in their haste to do other, perhaps more showy things, their old and special work is neglected and only half done, there will be something seriously wrong with the world, for the commonplace, home work of women is the very foundation upon which everything else rests.”
Critical theory advocates despise the sacrificial homemaking, what I’ve been calling nesting, and nurturing of mothers. A woman’s only worth is her economic worth as the equal of men. Their vision of sameness stamps out the divine gift of complementation in the creation of stable, nurturing families. - Cut human sexuality free from moral obligations to marriage. Like it or not, sex is the glue of a marriage… Scripture calls it a one flesh union, and that union is special and powerful.
Societies that never develop the values of chastity before marriage and fidelity in marriage never get off the ground. No matter how far a society develops, it is doomed to collapse when those values have been abandoned.
The Left wants unfettered sexual exploration, which leads to complete self-absorption and erodes the bonds between husband and wife. They want sex to be about you, your pleasure, your desires… a private world of one who uses others to scratch where it itches, rather than a powerful tool in the crafting of one flesh unions where each seeks the pleasure of the other. This type of selflessness is hard to achieve, and those in the thrall of Critical Theory want to make it impossible to achieve. Selfishness is easy, the path of least resistance, but selflessness is a hard road leading to happiness. It builds strong families. - Promote a vision of human sexuality without consequence or restriction by age or gender or relationship. One of the great gifts that the Judeo-Christian worldview gave to most of the world was a vision of family as a desexualized “womb” (i.e. nurturing environment) in which children could maximize their personal potential free from the perverse designs of predatory adults. This discipline and delay is an essential component of the path of life, and of the building of strong families.
It is a microcosm of what J. D. Unwin discovered for whole societies in his work, Sex and Culture. Those societies that disciplined themselves sexually prospered in all areas of social life, from the arts to the sciences. They continued to advance as long as these sexual values and disciplines were generally maintained. These societies collapsed within a century of completely abandoning these values.
Most people would set sexual arousal and its cultivation to orgasm as one of the great experiences of life. The French even reference it and its after effects on the body as “la petite mort” The little death. We don’t have sex addicts for nothing.
For the Left, however, this is promoted as THE experience of life and is encouraged as a primary pursuit in any way at any age with anyone. To limit sex to male-female, or to consensual adults, or to one-on-one encounters, and, for many, even to human-human intercourse, is the very essence of oppression. They must be free… free from restraint, free to explore themselves, free to invent themselves, and free from any negative consequences for this behavior. Other than pregnancy, which they can cure with murder, any negative outcomes are the fault of those who built systems that restrain, demean, or punish them. In a proper world, their wantonness would lead to life.
Family, as noted above, is given powerful moral protection in Scripture. It is the a-sexual “womb” which allows children to maximize their character through an age of innocence. - Undermine the institution of marriage by promoting divorce, and even trying to convince people that divorce is good for the children. (Robin Williams Mrs. Doubtfire comes to mind.) They spread lies about divorce statistics to convince people that the institution is a failure (Divorce has never been anywhere near 50%) and to encourage people to cut ties when things get hard… or if it’s just cramping your style. As Chesterton noted, seldom do the marriage and family haters bother to ask fundamental questions about their criticisms of the difficulty of family association, like Compared to what? What system do you put forward that is better than family, however, hard family connection can be? Do you imagine that imperfection in the family paradigm excuses doing anything else in its stead? That any change must be an improvement? What is the cost of your proposed change of paradigm? Have you given any thought at all to the unintended consequences of tearing down the family fence? What hard evidence to you have? More often than not, as Chesterton noted, critics are armored with little more than irritation and annoyance. They are frustrated at the self-sacrifice required to make family work. They are tormented by the idea of having to forgo the pleasures and self-aggrandizement that sustaining Family bonds demands. Solid dialogical moral reasoning demands evidence… lots of it. Relying on Marxist dialectics to provide all the “evidence” needed is like saying, “I’m the best at this or that. Don’t believe me? Just ask me. I’ll tell you.”
- Undermine the institution of marriage as an essential part of starting a family. You decide what makes you a family, not the law! “We don’t need any lousy piece of paper to tell us what we are.”
In fact, says the Left whose ultimate goal is the eradication of marriage, “Nobody should even consider getting married until they’ve tried living together for a time.” Indeed, “They haven’t even lived together yet!” is a common complaint in movies and television when a “hasty” marriage is announced. It is as if studies were done and showed plainly that sleeping together quickly and living together was a proven path for successful marriage.
It is, in fact the opposite. The highest divorce rates are found among those who 1. Have a handicapped child, 2. Lose a child, 3. Live with someone (anyone) before getting married. The lowest divorce rates are found among those who wait for marriage to have sex and who are an intimate part of and regular attender of meetings in some religious community.
For the Left any external bond (treaties, contracts, promises, family, etc) is a force of oppression. One must be free to change their mind whenever and as often as it becomes necessary to be true to self. Self is always evolving and so human bonds should also be changeable. Therefore, “family” is whatever one says it is, and defending the traditional family is wicked oppression and high handed bigotry. - Redefine the institution of marriage to include any combination of genders… and now that we are about it, any combination of numbers. When the LGBT community was pushing hard for the legalization of same-sex marriage (Which the supreme court circumvented with an unconstitutional move), people kept saying, “all they want is marriage, let’s just give them marriage.”
Well, for one, we should never empower the government to redefine essential terms in our legal structures… EVER. This leads to chaos.
We kept pointing out back in 2012 that this redefinition of marriage was a slippery slope… waiting closely behind it was a massive push for multiple partners in a legally recognized group union, and a push to normalize adult child sexual encounters. I was barraged with people mocking me, “You #$%&*^ conservatives are always going on and on about slippery slopes. All they want is marriage and we owe it to them.”
Yet, this is exactly where things have gone. Quickly, we began to see the push for vocabulary shifts geared to normalize pedophilia. “No, no, no… let’s call them ‘Minor Attracted people.’” When speaking of the crimes of Epstein, some reporter spoke of his victims not as children, but as “under-aged women.” Do not say that I am making too big a deal out of such things. When you know their long-game the oddities in their short-game come into focus.
One LGBT activist’s post that I read shortly before the Supreme Court’s verdict on gay marriage was particularly honest about the looming event. He wrote (I paraphrase from 11 year old memory and notes in my FB feed) “Homosexuals don’t want marriage because they want marriage. They never needed it much and honestly wouldn’t know what to do with it if they get it. They want marriage to destroy marriage. They want marriage to make Christianity illegal.” And how is this done? By redefining words.
Redefinition of key terms and phrases in legal documents like the constitution is done often when progressives who hate the constitution gain power on the court. The constitution is intended as a limitation and definition of the power of the Federal government. Government must honor those limitations. So, for instance, taken together the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments prevent Government from discriminating based on race, color, or previous condition of servitude. In the Civil Rights act of 1964, the redefinition of “public” broadened the power of the constitution beyond its government-limiting status making it a weapon in the hands of government for getting control over the populace in their business dealings. By prohibiting discrimination as laid out in these amendments in privately owned businesses that opened their doors to the public or took money from the Federal Government other basic rights of private citizens secured by other amendments were inherently violated. In time, the court expands the definition of “race” to reflect the intersectional values of Critical Theory—LGBT, Gender, Disability, etc. Now, the doing of business demands setting aside all moral, ethical, and religious convictions by business owners in order to satisfy anti-discrimination laws emerging from the redefined “constitution.” - Redefine family around the core relationship between mother and child, disenfranchising men as extraneous. Not only are father’s given zero rights over a child in utero, but we commonly excuse women who never tell the fathers of their children that the child even exists. This is a recurring movie theme expressly because it is a commonly shared cultural experience. We defend it, generally, as the right of the mother over that which is hers. She shouldn’t have to share if she doesn’t want to.
We recognize the damage done by disenfranchising the slaves in our early national history, denying them the freedom to function as personally responsible adults in society. The same damage is done when one essential element of the family (a statistically verifiable essential element of the family) is purposely undermined and ham strung in their attempts to live out their most basic, biologically driven, role in family. The statistics surrounding single mother households regarding the damage of fatherlessness on children, testifies also to the damage that this has done to women as well, forcing them to operate outside their own biologically driven roles as well. Men, when cut off from fulfilling their primary operational commands (protect, build, provide) grow increasingly dysfunctional in all areas of life. They become abusers, destroyers, and users, and depression, confusion, and suicide climb. Critical theory puts men in a lose-lose situation, specifically because it has labeled them oppressors. A public health campaign against “toxic masculinity” is a war against men… a design to replace men in the lives of a newly defined family with Government. - Promote the murder of children as a woman’s right… and if you balked thinking, “You mean abortion? Those are fetuses not children,” then my point is well made.
Fetus comes from the Latin meaning generic “offspring.” This is just a word game to conceal (sometimes from our own hearts) what we are killing. There is to be no consideration of the life of the child.. NONE. The child is only granted the status that the MOTHER decides the child should get. We are made to be protectors and providers, we are made to be nesters and nurturers, yet we have set ourselves up as arbitrators of death over the very people we are to protect and nurture.
This, like so many other acts that we commit unthinking, is a slippery slope. First we happily kill our children for our own convenience, then we kill our aged parents to lighten our load, then the annoying weak of society who diminish our ability to enjoy ourselves in life. We demand to the right to kill ourselves, and soon such death becomes expected of us for the good others, lest we burden family or society, then death becomes our legal duty, and euthanasia becomes the law of the land.
Those who dole out death easily in one context will not hesitate to reach for that cure in other contexts. Am I surprised at how may on the Left wish for my death and offer to facilitate it as well? I am not. We have slaughtered over 60 million children in America since 1973 and the pro-abortionists who regard the right of child murder a basic element of women’s rights and women’s healthcare are amped up for more and more. “Legal, Safe, and Rare” has been exposed for the ruse it always was… they want it often, they want it early, they want it late, they want it for any reason… and indeed, they want infanticide too. - Break down natural parental rights over their children. Those promoting the Child Rights Act aim primarily in making children the property and responsibility of the state, by promising rights beyond what parents could be expected to provide in every environment. So, paying for them is deemed the moral imperative for society (i.e. Socialism).
They’ll pay for them and they’ll control them. Governments are always willing to exchange support for control. Everything has strings. Hence the common saying, “He who controls the purse strings makes the rules.”
The government wants to force parents to give medical care they don’t believe in.
The government wants to eliminate parental influence over their kid’s education, whether it is Bill Nye demanding that parents stop teaching their children biblical creation stories, or a Democratic candidate for Governor declaring, “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.” The creepiness of the statement is found in the context. He was pushing back against parents complaining about school libraries promoting books with graphic sexual content and encouraging pedophilia… yes, encouraging.
Today, we are facing threats by the Left that if we fail to support “gender affirming care” for our confused children, they will take them away from us and, perchance, charge us with crimes. They want to make conversion therapy illegal everywhere, so that parents cannot even attempt to help their children who struggle with same sex attraction… knowing that the suicide attempt rate in that community is upwards of 40%, and that they have radically higher percentages in every form of domestic and substance abuse.
But they do want to conduct their own conversion therapy by demanding that we allow them to expose our children to homosexual and transgender indoctrination. They will of course, claim that is just to “make them like us,” leaving room for a scary double-entendre, but the agenda has always been grooming and recruitment… what many in the LGBT community call “mentoring.” I highly recommend that you find access to Libs of TikTok and spend any amount of time watching posts by the Left. This would be one of those times that you tell me that you heard bad things about the woman reposting these things so that negates the actual content… which she has not created or altered. Social media platforms are constantly punishing her for doing nothing put revealing what is being said. I just took a quick peek. Teachers are on giving guidelines for keeping parents in the dark about teachers helping to transition their kids.(3/15/2023) - Cast children as belonging to society at large, forcing society’s agenda for them in discipline, education, religion, and health. From the earliest years of our nation, public education advocates have struggled with their desire to keep parents from indoctrinating their children, because they believe that indoctrination is the job of the state. This is not shocking, because when you are a hammer everything looks like a nail.
Hillary Clinton’s “It takes a village to raise a child” was not a recognition that many influences go into a child’s formative years, but code for her belief that children belong to the state. The Left believes that parents ought to be mere nannies on the state’s behalf. This is one of the things that they hesitate to say out loud, but believe quite firmly. In a promo for MSNBC, Melissa Harris-Perry stepped in it badly by actually saying what leftist’s actually believe. She said, “…we have to break through our kind of private idea that ‘kids belong to their parents’ or ‘kids belong to their families,’ and recognize that kids belong to whole communities.” Those who say, “Well, all she meant was…” simply do not understand what they actually believe. You have to study their ideology beyond being just so sure they don’t mean this or that… because that would be crazy… except if you read their materials, they do mean this and that… and yes it is crazy.
Now a good part of separating parents from their children is by convincing them that they have some fundamental right to privacy in space and action. “My life is none of your business!!” Story
You are responsible for raising them, for teaching them the way of life, how to survive and thrive in any environement with a special focus on the one they are preparing to launch into… - Foment distrust between generations. “Indeed,” says the Left, “children should teach their parents a new way of being.”
Keep in mind, however, that kids don’t teach adults. Kids are idiots and fools. If you’re learning from kids, you need to discover who is teaching those kids… they are your real teacher.
So, the Left praises what the “youth of today” are teaching us… so environmentally concerned, so socially concerned, so tolerant, so noble, how do they put up with is and our backward ways. But they only say this because they believe that it is they themselves who are teaching the kids. As with the Nazi youth, or even Antiochus Epiphanes, authoritarian governments believe they can steal a nation in a single generation if only they can capture the minds of the youth and turn them against their parents.
Obama’s Attorney General from 2009-2015, felt confident enough in one context to discuss using brainwashing techniques to get the youth of America to change their thinking about guns.
Just so, there is a growing trend to keep grandparents out of the lives of children as much as possible. They make books and publish articles teaching young parents how to establish clear rules to keep them from polluting your pure parenting with their dark traditional methods. Ignore their advice. What do they know? And read the most up to date techniques available from parenting experts… i.e. social Marxist devotees who will prepare you for the brave new genderless world that is coming. I read many of the child rearing experts when you all were born… they were blithering fools. Those who published truly solid and effective parenting advice were routinely singled out in publications for mockery and scorn.
Interestingly enough, part of the vegetarian push of the 70s, which grew into veganism in the last couple decades is aimed at the disruption of the dinner table. There are important times that parents have with their kids; bedtime reading, and the dinner table are two of them. These are extremely important and productive patterns in raising stable and empowered kids. Experts have attacked the reading hour, making it a time of passing on “white supremacy” no matter what color you are. But that is a hard sell when kids are generally eager for it. The dinner table however is easier to disrupt. Kids are coached to be hostile and disgusted by what their parents offer them for food. - Make the government (and not the family) the primary safety net in society. Throughout the whole of human history people have sought safety from a dangerous world in community. Cooperation is a powerful tool for protection and prosperity. Whatever other forms of community have been built, nothing has equaled family for a social safety net.
That is one reason the family must be weakened… must be reformed. The ultimate goal for the Left is a one world socialist government controlling the lives of every individual member of society. They want everyone standing isolated… alone… helpless… before this irresistible force of Government.
One gets the utopic picture of this in Barack Obama’s 2012 campaign ad, “The Life of Julia,” no relations to your Grandma. Even a CNN correspondent was creeped out. He writes,
“For Republicans, Julia’s story might seem like a joke too good to be true, but they should take it very seriously. Because buried within “The Life of Julia” is the ideological vision of modern liberalism – to create a state that takes care of its people from cradle to grave. The story of Julia is a microcosm of Obama’s vision for America and emblematic of his view of the government’s role in an individual’s life. “The Life of Julia” has done what many conservatives have failed to do so far – outline in exacting detail what modern Democratic policy wants for individuals. Here we have Obama’s 21st century synthesis of the Great Society, New Deal and New Frontier. Julia’s entire life is defined by her interactions with the state. Government is everywhere and each step of her life is tied to a government program. Notably absent in her story is any relationship with a husband, family, church or community, except a “community” garden where she works post-retirement. Instead, the state has taken their place and is her primary relationship.” - Cripple the strong to sustain the weak. The great of goal equity is impossible… because it is impossible, only Government power players in a highly prosperous nation could even hope to try it. They aim to strip away the produce of producers in order to prop up the unproductive. As an excuse to power, it’s genius. It appeals to man’s inclination to take shortcuts and the path of least resistance.
Sowell gave keen warning of this vision of a dependent citizenry, saying, “No society ever thrived because it had a large and growing class of parasites living off those who produce.” But the level of dependence that the nanny state fosters is exactly what the power-hungry crave. Whereas the goal of all righteous charity is the raising of the weak into responsible adulthood, the goal of Government entitlement is to weaken the strong by stealing from them and limiting their production power, and the enslavement of the weak who become dependent on handouts—a double whammy. In the end, the only way that equality can be made, is by reducing everyone to the lowest common denominator, with an ever descending denominator as the entire de-incentivized system crumbles. - Cultivate selfishness as a virtue. Every couple years there is some new flash of excitement over some new strategy for true happiness that usually ends up being just regurgitated patterns for ultimately destructive selfishness. We might consider the push in the seventies for people to open up their marriages and become swingers, or the present push to throw of all moral restraint to discover the true you, but this push towards selfishness takes place on many levels. We want people to tell us to do exactly what we want to do… it’s seductive advice because it echoes one side of the struggle in our own souls. With two angels on our shoulders, one representing Freud’s “Id” and the other his “Super-ego,” how much relief do we find when a person we look to for advice echoes the call of our own animal passions.
Now, I’m all for healthy self-care… I learned it from the airlines, “Put your own oxygen mask on before helping others with theirs.” Not bad advice; you can’t help anyone else if you are passed out in your seat. The goal here, however, is supposed to be making yourself useful to others.
So, here is a popular one: “Don’t regret what you did, only regret what you didn’t do.” This, of course is complete folly. One should always regret violating other people’s natural rights. You should always regret causing innocent people harm. One should always regret neglecting those around us in their hour of need.
Here is another one from “You are not free, until you are free from having to please other people.” Again, foolish and misleading. A people pleaser can drive themselves nuts trying to satisfy everyone, but being free from a concern with pleasing others makes you a narcissist. Do you want true freedom? Here is a counter, “You are not free, until you are free from having to please yourself at other people’s expense.
Then there is the old standby: “Don’t worry about what other people think about you.” Really? Seems to me that caring what other people think and feel about anything is a key component of healthy community and family. You mustn’t be prisoner to other people’s selfish whims, but caring what others think about you is step one in social harmony. I want to be liked, but will do what’s right whether you like me for it or not. I want to be thought kind, but not weak and manipulateable. I want to be thought helpful, but not usable. These are always good cares.
“Don’t change for other people, just be yourself.” Actually, we should always be changing ourselves to be better at community and family.
“Follow your heart.” Hmmm… just one problem, the heart is desperately wicked and selfish. If we tear away all the external restraints into which we have been enculturated and just get down to the original us, we will find little but the seven deadly sins waiting for us. We are not beautiful butterflies who will soar if only we can escape from all of society’s expectations, religious expectation, family expectation; we are selfish creatures with powerfully destructive instincts.
Every time a new trend starts up as a shortcut to happiness, I am always agog, thinking, Wow, selfishness! Why have we never thought of this before?! - Marginalize those advocating for traditional family. They are boring and exclusive… nay, they are disgusting and oppressive, villains of the first order. Years ago I saw a rather humorous SNL skit in which family and friends sat around a table sharing scary and shocking events that happened to them. They begin going into horrifying details about “eating,” “sleeping,” “Yawning,” etc. Perfectly normal events cast in terrifying terms and described in the most explosive way. This is a popular technique by the left. Faux outrage (except for the useful idiots in which the outrage is real) over common elements of life. They work up offense. Cast basic elements of being a human in community into shocking forms. Egad! They can scarcely bring themselves to look upon the nightmare scene… Man and wife, raising boys and girls looking for their boys to find wives and their daughters to find husbands who will also raise boys and girls who find wives and husbands, etc.
- Centralize the marginal members of society. They put the fun in dysfunctional after all. Here the Left is fixated on the idea that the more dysfunctional you are, the more authentic your life is. They take the opening line of Anna Karenina—“All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way”—as a sign of creative diversity to be praised. Take for instance Miranda Lambert’s song, “All Kinds of Kinds,” where her conviction “Ever since the beginning to keep the world spinning, It takes all kinds of kinds” is fleshed out with tattooed ladies, dog-faced boys, acrobats, and a Pharmacist who abuses her access to drugs to keep herself thin and drugs her kids so she can have secret hookups with a cross-dressing congressman. Yeah, that’s what the world needs. Yeah, that’s what keeps the world going round. Far from diminishing human happiness and productivity… far from destabilizing families and society at large, dysfunctional people, the Left imagines, prove to be just another kind of functional… a functional that leads to a weird diversity that is its own reward, no matter how much human misery attends it. Thus, Hollywood loves to make movies that celebrate highly dysfunctional people as having some secret understanding of what real life is all about, some lived experience that is better than the lived experience of stable productive people who make wholesome families and raise successful children.
- Redefine “family” as the product of chosen association rather than natural association. Because the Left despises being limited, being hemmed in by nature and man, they also resent the expectation to regard biological family as anything but random association that should have no claim on the individual. Blood obligations are oppression. So, to make my point here are some things that popped up when I typed in “What is family?” into a Google search. Family is not about blood. It’s about who is willing to hold your hand when you need it the most.” Family: Life’s greatest blessing, a group that dreams, laughs, plays, and loves together, those whom you can always count on, always present not only in the good times. Family isn’t always about blood. It’s the people in your life who want you in theirs; the ones who accept you for who you are. The ones who would do anything to see you smile and who love you no matter what. If you want to know who your family is, look at the sidelines, the audience, the people clapping, the one’s telling you how much faith they have in you, that’s what family is all about.
Now, choices like adoption and marriage can create family, and people often speak of people they care deeply about as “like family,” but human history tells us that few things can replace the bond of natural family. The Left considers this powerful sense of union and duty that natural family has over us as irrational because it is dictated by “chance” rather than chosen by a self-creating, self-defining individual. They resent the habit of obligation that family historically implies. To them it is an artificial construct, not the fruitful designed of nature.
One quote goes, “Learning how to say no to family is one major ingredient for success because no matter how focused you are, family will demand of you even when it’s totally inconvenient.” - Declare the worst sin in society as making someone feel bad about how they live. The Left hates morality and ethics… the despise the idea of wisdom. Therefore the great sin in a Leftist controlled society is to hurt someone’s feelings. Bad grades hurt feelings. Failure to win a trophy hurts feelings. Being told that you are wrong about something hurts feelings. Struggle is painful. Rejection is painful. Being unliked is painful. Being called derogatory names is painful.
There is an actual ranking used to depict the strength of facial expressions used to convey emotion. TV and Hollywood have long exploited what is regarded as level 5 facial expression in order to manipulate their audience into feeling about the characters what they want them to feel. They want to generate pity for those whose moral framework leaves them rejected by their peers. Purple hair girl strikes a pose of debilitating sadness when a popular girl walks by yelling “Freak!” The poor homosexual strikes a pose of sorrow when his expression of “love” for another male character leaves that character repulsed. No one should ever be made to feel that way… never… unless you are in an oppressor class, then your torment and even death is just desserts. They are so effective at this, that it is not uncommon to have an audience rooting for the serial killer to get away and for that mean hounding police officer to get his comeuppance… death. - Demand that all speech and action be “inclusive”…except the intolerant; it’s okay to exclude them. I saw a comic today. A man traverses the desert and arrives at the edge of a town. There, a sign reads, “This is an inclusive society and if we feel your are talking, thinking or behaving in a non-inclusive way you will be excluded.”
In inclusive world, everything that does not make room for the favored mascot victim groups of the left must be canceled. Father Daughter dances are terrible because some girls don’t have fathers, and some sons who think they are daughters cannot get Dear Ol’ Dad to go with him. Expecting workers to show up on time is bad because some cultures have a different time orientation so your company rules need to make room for every possible alternate view of reality. Having grades is not inclusive because it tells some students that didn’t do as well as others.
When I was growing up, we had a handicapped girl in a wheel chair. She simply could not do many of the things that the group wanted to do. Her mother asked if we could go out of our way to include her in some of our events when possible. “Inclusive” as Leftist ideology suggests that our group should never do anything that didn’t make room for her.
I just typed in Inclusive into Google and got a dozen articles telling me that using any word that suggests badness about any dysfunctional condition, that has any possible association with an unpleasant, or negatively regarded past, is NOT inclusive. Any word that could conceivably provoke any negative feeling or association is off limits… just sooo insensitive and inconsiderate.
Now, imagine the very concept of a society actively attempting to reinvent the family, or should I say, a society falling victim to those who are actively attempting to reinvent the family, to change its fundamental shape in the hopes of creating a better society. It is, in my mind, like trying to reinvent the wheel.
Most in our society have, in the ecstasy of the possibilities found in our nation’s powerful infrastructure, lost sight of a few fundamental truths. The Left hate inconvenient truth, unwelcome truth. After all, “we don’t get our food from hardworking farmers, we get it from the grocery stores.” (Actual quote)
- Life is hard.
- Survival is a battle.
- Community is essential.
- Family, as historically defined, is the core of community.
In every society that has ever been in every place that society has ever been, the interaction of human nature with specific and ongoing threats to survival have shaped patterns of life… social patterns designed to win the battle for survival. One of the most basic elements in these patterns of life is family. Family traditions emerge in each community quite naturally, having an almost evolutionary strength to them… i.e. adopting patterns that don’t work leads to the weakening, or even destruction of, the society… survival of the fittest, so to speak.
This is not to suggest that all patterns that have allowed survival are equal; quality of life, fragility of survival, and the happiness of individuals within particular systems are not inconsequential, but it does highlight a problem with modern social engineering designs.
- This desire to reinvent the family is driven by a craving for progress and independence that is fueled by secularism and a vision for a humanist Utopia.
- Secularism is relatively new, though you wouldn’t know it by its body count.
- The patterns being promoted by secularism are untested by the unfolding of centuries.
- These patterns have not emerged naturally, but are being advanced through media campaigns that conceal the consequences of particular actions.
- These patterns are not sustained naturally, but are being sustained by government pressure and threat and at great economic cost to all.
