Discourse 20: The Exsanguination of Our Organic Cultural Spine

Thoughts on Parenting I

                As a general observation, I believe it is not only steadily becoming more difficult to raise a child in our modern era, but also becoming increasingly difficult to be a child in the modern era. The two are functionally intertwined, each serving as both a cause and effect, and on occasion a catalyst for a cyclical deteriorating downward pattern of cultural decay.

As mentioned in my previous Discourse “Let’s Flip Some Tables”, children are on the front line of relentless social and cultural engineering, promulgated by the public-private partnership school system apparatus.

This engineering extends to the rest of their entire psychosphere, from entertainment to music, books to news media, narrative managers touch everything we encounter on a daily basis, for children and adults. It is nothing short of total mental warfare.

Not only are children often exposed to negative peer pressure, but they are also immersed in a miasma of chaos that is always testing, tugging, nudging and directing their values, sentiments, identity, individuality and worldview.

Of course, this is not new. Everyone alive grew up in some earlier stage of the scientifically managed mass society building system and its associated propaganda and conditioning apparatus. By design, it attempts to churn creative, imaginative, individual children, into compliant, domesticated drones for the state. Workforce trained and addicted to consumerism, a global citizen of a rat utopia. But while this is not new, it is in fact accelerating both due to the quickening pace of technology as well as due to a crossing of a particular threshold of critical mass I will bring up shortly.

As said in “Lets Flip Some Tables”, children must be taken off of this front line where they are vulnerable (as desired) and ill prepared to face the Machiavellian psychology of the system. They are the battle for the future, a battle they must be well equipped to face before engaging the enemy. This is the primary responsibility of their parents and should not be delegated.

Do not interpret this as advocating for being a helicopter parent and placing your child in a bubble. While I do not particularly like Alan Watts, this quote of his is fitting:

“’Kindly let me help you or you will drown.” Said the monkey putting the fish safely up a tree.”

We cannot cope for our children, we cannot take their bruises, cuts and heartaches. They need them the way a fledgling must jump from the tree to learn to fly. To do so is to handicap them for life, for they will be without a critical component of the learning process.

Beyond the obvious initial step of not sending your child into enemy territory called occupational daycares (public-private school system) , navigating the line of protecting your children from, yet teaching them about, the world, can be very, very difficult.

I will not counsel those of you I consider legitimate parents on the complexities of raising a child, I do not believe OR claim there are concrete correct ways to parent, but there are concrete incorrect ways.

We should support and love them tremendously; we should also give them our time and attention. These things should not only be done out of duty, but out of the Joy of Duty. (For context I compared this in previous discourse to the satisfaction of a carpenter observing the product of their hard labor) Likewise, we must prepare them to be aware, to endure, to cope, to battle. At the minimum, a parent must love their child by showing them the world is indeed full of beauty and has a wonderful architect… but we must also teach them to fight; fight for their mind, perhaps for their very soul. This fight, just like that of our own, cannot be delegated to anyone else. One day they must enter the breach and it is up to us to prepare them for it.

So, while the world is difficult for parents who do these things on their own way, there is a growing number of parents who not only raise children incorrectly, but they are growing ever more incapable of it. Fewer and fewer children are getting any real support from home.

This effect is fostered by the cultural rot prevalent in our modern world, the slow and progressive (double entendre) bleed out of cultural pillars, specifically the symptom of the decline of stable successful marriages over the past 50 years. I discussed this in “The Edification of Marriage Through Fear and Trembling.”

While this development does make it generally more difficult for children as a whole, the decline of marriage itself is a symptom of the decay in trained sentiments and values of individuals. This is a cyclical process that is growing worse with each passing generation as untrained children with an undeveloped moral sense grow into parents themselves.

As a percentage, the number of children keeps growing who are raised by parents with minimal to absent standards, who lack not only a sense of duty, but who are growing more narcissistic and detached from the things that used to be considered worthy, good and beautiful.

Throughout human history dating deep into antiquity, there have been feedback mechanisms in organic human culture that guided social values and mores. A form of constructive positive peer pressure that encapsulates a cultural spine.

The crux of this mechanism is the family, which makes the family the cornerstone of civilization, and no civilization has been able to exist or maintain itself without a cultural spine. Historically there have been other components of this mechanism outside of the family, externally reinforcing these values, those natural behaviors, even beyond the reinforcement of other parents in the immediate community. (Not always through instruction but by example)

Sacred clowns would socially shame those who step outside of these natural behaviors in various forms of ritual humiliation, serving a purpose similar to village shaman and priests.

Natural behaviors tend to be good, hence why the sacred clown would shame the fool, the unnatural, the evil.

These behaviors are filtered through a particular acceptable moral sense, which has been more or less consistent over the ages until the past few centuries. These behaviors have an ancient connection to the truthful depths of Christian theology, which is why western civilization has up until recently been successful as it was structured at its core with Christian morality.

With that being said, while people can certainly have differing opinions on the topic of Christianity or the nature and meaning of Jesus Christ, I think it is important for them to recognize the cultural significance and necessity of a unifying cultural ethos, pathos and logos, similar to the forms presented by the gospel and traditionally facilitated by parents who have built themselves for the role.

Unfortunately, as the 20^th century progressed and Christianity was slowly dismissed, its cultural pillars of natural behaviors were tossed as well. Like Chesterton's Fence , this cultural spine, this scaffolding of civilization, served a very important purpose. Instead, the fences have been torn down and all of the cattle have got out.

My point in saying all of this, society no longer has positive external feedback mechanisms and a growing number of new parents do not have the ability to self-initiate these mechanisms. Furthermore, many modern parents role play for status without duty because we have a society of men and women without chests. Likewise, other parents in their artificial communities are not any better, which reinforces the perceived normalcy of their degenerative condition.

Meaning, we have reached a critical mass of shitty parents.

While I certainly believe, and to a very great extent know, that this was intentional and part of an ongoing agenda, this fact makes little difference because it is here now, and we have to deal with it. The system is not going to fix a problem that it wanted to create.

We no longer hold each other to any uniform standards. So many fences have been torn down, we truly have no idea what could have found its way out. Perhaps the fences were on Isla Nubar and we are now in the raptor pen?

This means people look the other way, away from bad parents or an injured man laying in the street. We move through life detached, fearful, judgmental, tribal, and isolated. People gravitate towards and live in networks, because nations, states, cities… all feel foreign and fractured. This is why our geographic communities, roads and even churches are so hostile. The ligaments and tendons that used to hold our natural communities together have been dissolved, without these standards we are merely floating into one another with aimless hostility from our islands. This was inevitable the moment the technology of culture was seized, and organic objective morality was rejected.

Without standards, we can all be perfect because we never fail to live up to them.

People are most often now measured more by rhetoric than action, their ideology over praxis.

This inversion of the natural order has made it difficult to succeed, both as a child and as a parent. This has made it easy to sell the narrative to men and women that children are not desirable, even burdensome. It has also made it easy to push towards collective proxy parenting by the state (longer and year-round school days) coupled with a decrease of parental rights. Technology has also assisted with this transformation as the average elementary school student now spends more time per day on an electronic device than time spent interacting with their parents.

As people become progressively worse at instructing & disciplining their children, teaching their fledglings the ways of the world, the state becomes more inclined to offer us the solutions to the problems it ignited.

The significance, to be frank, the institution of parenthood is the key to civilization and is the only thing between the newborn human mind and the instruments of a fallen world.

Without strong, trained parents, the human mind does not stand much of a chance against the whims of the system from the very start.

In a world of shit and piss, this is one of the greatest things, because we can control this. As long as the rights of parents are preserved there is hope.

We cannot reverse the rot in society as a whole, but we can excise it from our orbits. We can improve ourselves and help those around us. We can choose to be good parents. We can choose to hold the line and wait for reinforcements in both the short and long game. We can stop the generational decline by turning it back, a reversion.

We can do this by fighting for our children by helping them discern and defeat the world properly.

This is heavy work. I do see many of you out there lifting, know you are in my prayers.

Being a parent is and has been my life’s greatest joy.

However, as I gain a measure of wisdom the older I become, I now firmly understand it is also the most important thing as well.

What a wonderful combination! The most important task outside of my marriage brings my life the greatest of joy. Seems to me like if there was ever a hill… this would be the one.

As for me and my house, we will serve the lord.

-Joshua 24:15