So you’ve decided to homeschool. Maybe the local private school is unaffordable, maybe your kid has special needs, or maybe you just hated regular school and want your kid to avoid hours of boredom. Whatever the reason, welcome aboard, you’re in for a grand adventure.

While some of you are stay-at-home dads, I’m assuming most of you are working. Some of you might have homemaker wives, while others may be dual income. In any case, there are going to be responsibilities to lay out and goals to achieve. Whether you are a parent of an ultra-striver who wants to do everything, or have a more free-range kid, expectations have to be set. You need a strategy. One thing that needs to be clear is:

“My wife is taking care of homeschooling” is not a strategy.

This goes for whatever your setup is. I’m sure your wife is supermom. I’m sure she is supremely competent, intelligent, and hard-working. Even with all these qualities, regardless of whether she spends hours poring over curriculum making sure she finds the “right” one or has researched the hottest trends inside and out, she’s going to have blind spots. She is going to need direction. This is more than checking their homework at night and helping with math. You need to be the “big picture” guy, and even if the wife is tackling a lot of the day-to-day aspects, you need to have a good idea of your kid’s strengths, weaknesses, and gaps in education. That’s on you. This doesn’t mean you micromanage the hell out of your wife if she is doing the majority of the day-to-day teaching, but the responsibility is on you to ensure your children are getting a good education, and your responsibility to pivot if it’s not getting done.

This is especially true since you are the main source of discipline, and if you don’t know what’s going on, good luck getting your kids on board. Your kid’s education, whether they go to a school or at home, needs your attention. The previous generations just assumed the best of schools and let them do their thing, and this slow deterioration is likely a reason you are homeschooling now. Your wife is going to be more reliable than a random school, but you still need to have a handle on things.

This is mostly focused on kids from the K-8 grade level, as these are the ages of my children. I don’t see why most would not be applicable to high schoolers with some modification though.

“Meat and Potatoes” Subjects

Probably the most insidious part of homeschooling is work that feels productive while giving nothing of value. This is especially true of the younger ages, where it is a lot of play that feels educational while giving little value relative to time spent. Yes, it’s fun having craft time and getting your fingers sticky with Elmer’s glue as your dear little one pastes her name on a posterboard. It also does next to nothing to teach her how to read. It might be fun to create a diorama display on a topic, but now you’ve spent most of the day on inconsequential stuff and little else was done. All sorts of rationalizations are used to justify this. Maybe it is a mommy blogger your wife wants to keep up with. Maybe there is less struggle than getting to the hard work that makes tangible progress. Maybe there is a new fad and every “expert” is telling you that little Timmy will be traumatized for life if you him do an hour of book work. Your job is to rip through this nonsense and set the standard.

Lucky for you, core skills are simple and are relatively easy to assess. They really are as simple as Reading, Writing, and Arithmetic. The strategies for success in these areas have been known since forever.

Reading:

For reading, phonics is still king. Even the educational experts have admitted defeat in any other method, and there are a multitude of different resources. What doesn’t work is the suite of sing-song games and other products that promise to make learning to read “fun”. It isn’t fun. It’s work, and the faster you accept it and put your nose, and your child’s, to the grindstone for twenty minutes each day the less time you’ll waste. I personally swear by “Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons” by Zig Engelmann, though the 100 lessons are anything but easy. I also recommend “The Ordinary Parent’s Guide to Reading” by Jessie Wise, but there are plenty of other options.

While sounding out letters is just a matter of repetition and confidence, blending is the part that will make you tear your hair out in frustration. It’s something that eventually just needs to click. Luckily, once they get through blending, it’s off to the races. The lessons get harder, but there is tangible progress with every lesson instead of feeling like you hit a brick wall.

Reading is also a joy since once she learns how to read, she will maintain it. Once she is at the level of being able to read something like “The Boxcar Children”, though not necessarily understanding all of it, you’re good. Just ensure you keep a library of quality books in the house and ensure she is reading every day, and her skills will continue to improve. This doesn’t mean your work is done. You will still need to discuss what is being read to ensure she understands the story, its themes, and messaging in an age appropriate way and slowly increase the difficulty if she is too comfortable at a certain level, but it largely becomes autopilot.

Writing:

I’ve seen the wildest discrepancies in core skills with my kids in writing. One can write entire paragraphs with ease, others have trouble putting three words together. Just like reading, getting good at writing is work. At the youngest ages, simple copywriting is sufficient. The child copies words, then sentences, then paragraphs, then full stories. It’s boring, but it gets the child acquainted with pencil to paper for an extended period of time.

Once this phase is over, your child should be able to write sentences independently, but may have trouble with a cohesive narrative. The next stage is also boring, but necessary. Your child will then receive a sentence and try to rewrite it in her own words. The process is the same as before and you move to rewriting paragraphs, then stories. After this is accomplished, more advanced skills like writing essays can be taught.

The tools I swear by for naturally weak writers are IEW (Institute of Excellence in Writing) products, though they are pricey. These are also very rigid and I would recommend using other resources once the child’s core skills are locked down, but they get the job done. For more advanced writers, I recommend Memoria Press’ writing products. You goal is for the young child to be comfortable writing a solid five-paragraph essay. Once they reach high school more extended research projects and stories can be explored.

Arithmetic:

The most infuriating part of teaching math is how fast they forget everything. While reading and writing is cemented in, your kid will forget eighty percent of what she learned after a month. The other aspect to understand “mental load”, not in the silly gender war meaning, but how many items your child can juggle in his head before everything breaks down. I haven’t found any modern strategy in math pedagogy to work, as it tries to teach strategies that come naturally after working with the material. Old is better. Memorize those tables. They will pay dividends later.

There are two main philosophies in how math is taught. The “Spiral Method” where concepts are taught in a mildly random matter and a built-in 80% review in every lesson. The “Mastery Method” goes in depth on a single subject until the student has everything down. Which is better? It depends.

Kids with a naturally strong knack for mathematics and don’t forget fundamental concepts as easily can steamroll through mastery based books. Your child can quickly get several grades ahead, especially if you go through the summer, which I recommend. If you look through math books, easily 60 percent is review from last year, even in mastery books. If the lessons are sticking, just keep plowing through. The best mastery based book I’ve used is Math Mammoth.

Ones who are not so gifted are going to give you far fewer headaches using the spiral method. They are boring as hell, but they will ensure you are not re-teaching the same thing four or five times, aggravating both of you. They are also useful in that the lessons are bite-sized enough that independent work can be done quickly. All you have to do is teach the concept, if that, and it’s off to the problem set. My kids actually get mad at me when I try to help with math now, because they prefer to work on their own. I’ll get questions about specific problems from time to time, but that’s it. For spiral math, Saxon is still king. It gets a bad rep with education majors, but it gets the job done. Contrary to what detractors say, it is not plug and chug. It does a very good job at teaching fundamental concepts.

Domain Subjects

Having a solid foundation in the above three will put your kids on a solid footing for any of their endeavors. Whatever your child has to do, a solid base in the three R’s will be a net benefit, and is easily the best use of your time. Still, the meat and potatoes is not enough, and your child has to be acquainted with domain knowledge. Lack of doing so will make reading and writing much more difficult in the advanced stages. That being said, it is important to make clear that:

‘There is no such thing as transferable skills!

Contrary to popular mythology, learning a foreign language will do little to help you in the sciences. Learning piano will not make you better at math. Domain knowledge is domain knowledge, and while there is some overlap, being good at one thing does not magically make you proficient in another.

Luckily, these subjects don’t need to be as stringent of a bookwork grind as the fundamentals. They is also little pressure, as most kids remember shockingly little about these subjects once they leave school. You likely can’t do any worse. Your job is to not only give a strong foundation, but a healthy balance that will ensure not just information is transmitted, but a mode of thinking.

A lot of this depends on state requirements. Some are very stringent with mandatory testing and allotting a core set of topics to discuss. Others are a free-for-all. When making your plans, keep this in mind. How you tackle domain knowledge is also contingent on your personal skills. If you are a STEM guy who never studied the Babylonians, you’re probably better off getting a learning package. If you are a veterinarian, you’re going to give a far better animal science lesson plan than the boilerplate stuff. Know your strengths. It’s here where one should look into co-ops and tutoring. One can have the core skills down pat, but there are always gaps that need to be filled.

When it comes to the humanities, I prefer the method used in classical schools of going over an era and integrating history, social studies, art, geography, literature, and poetry into an cohesive whole. You might be studying classical civilization and discuss Roman law, read an age-appropriate version of the Aeneid, and study roman sculpture. Everything feeds off each other and creates immersion that helps get a feel for the era. Classical resources are also more matter-of-fact and far less moralizing than standard textbooks.

For the sciences, you really can’t avoid textbooks without the child missing some core knowledge. Luckily, the book learning can be supplanted with interesting projects. Going to the zoo with a specific educational purpose breaks the monotony of just poring over a book. There are also an unbelievable amount of hobbyist options at one’s disposal. You can make engines, do chemistry experiments, make circuits, you name it. Mind you, a lot of the stuff for kids advertising STEM features are garbage, but any reasonably intelligent middle-schooler will likely be able to use a reasonably safe kit designed for adults. Domain knowledge is important, but so is domain comfort, the ability to work on a tangible task in a certain sphere. Kids with just book smarts will forget everything by the time they enter adulthood.

This is where you can eschew much of the busywork schools like to give. Crossword puzzles are useless, worksheets have limited use, and you are much better off simply discussing the topics or having the child write essays to determine understanding. While some testing and memorization is necessary, it’s far more important for the child to have a coherent narrative on the subject and be able to counter any objections or integrate a counter-narrative.

Cultural Transmission

One of the strangest quirks of many homeschoolers is the obsession with their children keeping up economically with their peers. Much of the time when you read homeschool parents with graduated children, they are bragging about the college they went to, how independent they are, or how financially successful they’ve become. While that’s nice, that is only a small reason to homeschool.

While your child might have graduated top of his class in an Ivy and now works for a megacorp, what is left unsaid is whether the child is carrying on the family legacy. If you raised her in a certain faith, does she still go to Church? If you raised her to honor family, does she to have a family of her own? Does she know who her grandparents and great-grandparents were? Do they know where their ancestors immigrated from? Are the old family customs living on in your children?

Probably the most insidious idea, something that has infested every political persuasion, is the idea of the child as an autonomous individual as opposed to a person born to a certain family in a certain place, all of which is an immutable part of who she is. The most fundamental part of her education is not writing well, playing violin, or getting a good test score, but having a distinct identity.

Traditional schools are designed to replace one’s core identity with a makeshift identity to serve the modern State through standardized pedagogy and textbooks, and most of the time private schools aren’t much better. This is contrary to education historically, which was focused not as much on economic output and having a workforce ready population, but transmitting a heritage that survives another generation.

The most destructive impediment to this cultural transmission in marital instability. In divorce, it is next to impossible to transmit your values effectively, as the parents are no longer a unified force. Whatever disagreements you have, work it out. The worst thing you can do is contradict each other in front of the kids or do petty sniping. It leaves the presence of a coherent authority in shambles, and with it the associated respect.

If you are homeschooling, your family likely has values in conflict with mass culture. This is fine, but it means you need to eventually ensure your child is aware of the majority having a different value system. Coddling them will lead her to ruin later in life if she has not developed the right antibodies. The advantage is you can engage this culture on your own terms. Just like a vaccine is inert but still capable of creating an immune reaction, you can engage the culture in a way that reinforces your own moral framing. At some point, you need to engage with thinkers and propagandists antithetical you your values in a serious but uncompromising way.

Planning the Day

No day is going to be perfect, but it can at least be consistent, and education is ninety percent consistency. A sixty percent effective day is far better than a perfect day followed by a week of not following through at all. Contrary to people who think kids want to be constantly entertained, they thrive in consistency. If they have a clear idea of expectations, there is far less frustration all around.

Getting such consistency is straightforward. You set up your list of tasks the day before. If it’s a stay at home day, there is a full load. It there is an afternoon excursion, you make things lighter. The routine goes beyond schoolwork too. Make your list have basic items like “brush teeth” and “eat breakfast” to give easy things to check off and get into the rhythm of the day. Checking off lists is satisfying.

Also, before setting up book work, get those little runts tired. Have a list of calisthenics to do, hard enough to get them huffing and puffing but gentle enough not to wreck them for the entire morning. Get them tired enough to be able to sit still but not so wasted they want to take a nap. While this is most important for boys, girls thrive on this also.

Procrastination never works, and you’re going to deal with stressed-out kids who have work on the back of their minds if you don’t insist they get it done first thing. An hour of work followed by a ten minute break repeated until completion will ensure the work gets done with plenty of time for free play. Also, procrastination kills routine, and without internal discipline to follow the schedule both parent and child will get stressed and easily agitated. Just get it done.

I advocate school year-round with few breaks, as it is much easier to have an easier load for the summer, consisting of a couple hours of math, writing, and the arts to keep their skills sharp than waste months getting back on track after a lazy summer. There are vacations and such and you can be flexible here.

Planning the Home

A large percentage, arguably a majority, of your child’s education will be outside of designated school time, and your home environment should reflect that. This means regular prayer time and catechesis if you are a pious household. Your child should be into the routine of having basic life skills long before they leave the home.

Children past the toddler stages can clean their room. Children as young as seven can do dishes. They should be doing their own laundry and prepare basic meals by the time they are preteens. Everyone should be able to follow a recipe and do basic modifications by the time they are teenagers whether they are male and female. They should also be acquainted with basic home maintenance skills regardless of sex. I’m not asking every girl to be able to lay floorboards, but she should be able to use a drill. I don’t expect every boy to be able to make his clothing from scratch, but he should at least be able to patch a pair of jeans. Your little girl doesn’t need to hunt with the boys, but should know proper gun safety. Your son doesn’t need to scrub to a perfectionist wife’s standards, but he should be able to make a bathroom reasonably clean.

With regard to free play, while I am not a total screen luddite, any sort of easy entertainment should be limited. This means TV shows, video games, cell phone use, etc. Don’t worry, you will have plenty of time to make you kid “tech-savvy”, whatever that means. A good rule of thumb is to encourage activities that require engagement with the world instead of passive reception. What form this takes will vary. If you have lots of land, this will involve exploring outside, others might pain figurines, and many will play board games with absurdly complex rule sets.

Note that this is a spectrum, and I would argue that reading involves a lot of passive reception. While most parents would kill having the problem of their kid reading non-stop, there is a healthy limit, and even a kid who reads all day can be unhealthy since it avoids engaging with the world for fantasy.

By far the most important part is setting an example. If you think your kid doesn’t notice you ban phones for him but are spending all night scrolling your own phone, she does. She notices your workspace is trashed while he has to make his bed every day. She notices you just cook slop and expect higher standards for everyone else. The hypocrisy is infuriating, and any value you try to create is thwarted if you don’t live up to your expectations for others. Get your own habits in order first and set a good example.

Conclusion

Rest assured, I fail at a lot of the above. Even your best laid plans will be thwarted, whether it is through a colicky baby, long work hours, or contentiousness in the home. As stated before, no day is going to be a complete success, but different levels of failures and victories. What’s most important is to keep your high aspirations, even after the prospect of taking the sixth kid through the same process makes you groan. From what I’ve seen, its not the most educated who have success, nor the most successful. It’s the parents who grind, day after day with an uncompromising consistency while also having the foresight and flexibility to not demand too much nor too little.

This is a general outline, and I’m more lessons learned are on the horizon. This isn’t a task you can offload, and you can feel stranded when all the institutions teaching pedagogy say all your efforts are wrong, but every year you will see a little improvement, a little better understanding, and a little more maturity. The best part is, you will be a part of all of it. Good luck, you got this.

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Moyn: I’ve gotten in some hot water for proposing we consider overweighting the votes of younger people or assigning the youngest eligible voters proxy votes for the unrepresented children of our country

Douthat: Why not assign them to those children’s parents?

Moyn: Because there’s a divergence of interests between parents and children, I think it’s likelier that young people – not people who are raising families – will have the best insight into the interests of children.

While this is easy to scoff at, and it’s clear both sides have a bias based on historical trends of how these demographics tend to vote, it raises a fundamental question of how society is organized. Is the purpose of a civilization to fulfill the wants and needs of individuals, or to form a healthy basis for family formation and cultural transmission?

For the last several decades, the focus has been the former. One can point at the increasing funding of education, tax credits for children, and long parental leave as being pro-family. However, the acceptance of easy divorce, the pathologizing of free play, and the overall crudity of the physical world with advertisements for weed, adult stores, and coarse language make it hard to maintain a child’s innocence, not to mention the constant push for sexual content directed at younger ages. One only needs to look at trick-or-treating, once a childhood staple, lose popularity with fewer porchlights on welcoming children but a dramatic increase in gory Halloween displays and adult-themed parties.

Still, even with childless people who has aged-out of having kids, there was a cultural understanding to at least pay lip-service to families. While there are outliers like the Human Extinction Project and dark corners of Reddit that make no effort in masking their hatred, they are still pariahs in general culture. Most people have kids, most parents don’t hate their kids, and even those who missed the boat understand their value. That is now changing.

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While fertility ideals have rarely been met, there is a distinct downward trend in how many kids people want, and an even steeper decline on the number of children they successfully have. You see a few narratives why this is so, with many pointing to the age of marriage rapidly increasing. You also see trends in Gen Z that point to a large cohort not wanting children at all

If you go through the stats, there is plenty of confusion and debate about causes, but the trends are undeniable. While there is some optimism things will level out, trends of Gen Z aren’t showing that, showing acceleration of Millennial trends.

Historically, the childless demographic has usually been small, with only about 15% of women being permanently childless, often for reasons such as disability or infertility issues. This has ebbed and flowed with the decades, with childless women in the late 1800’s being significantly higher.

Spinsters were generally known as women who never married, but the term was reserved for women over a certain age. For example, an unmarried woman aged 20 would generally not be considered a spinster, since she still had time left to find a husband. Explanations as to why women did not marry can be found in the history of the time frame. For women in the latter half of the nineteenth century in America, the Civil War greatly decreased the number of eligible men. Periods of economic decline also increased the number of spinsters, as a marriage could be seen as too costly. Women were also seen as caregivers in the Victorian era and may have stayed home in order to care for elderly parents or sick relatives. There were women who chose to live a more independent life or to focus on a career instead, but these reasons were less likely than the ones given above.

An interesting data point is the number of women who wanted to have zero children in this era. Given this was a very unique trend, one wonders whether this was sincere or a post-hoc rationalization due to the terrible conditions for family formation in that time period.

While civilization survived the Victorian era of a large cohort of women not having children, they were circumvented by less democratic power. Childless women supported large families childless where women often supported their older parents or their sister’s children, absorbing a lot of the energy that would have gone into family formation. Still, even with these opportunities, it’s likely not a coincidence that mass upheavals such as the temperance movement, women’s suffrage, and education reform was instigated in this time. It’s likely not a coincidence political cartoons of this era often featured an old, childless spinster yelling at an apathetic crowd. Not all of these social crusades were negative, obviously, but the social atmosphere with an excess of single women definitely pointed towards moral panics. I’m not going to be able to argue a total causal relationship between such upheavals and childless women, but it’s an interesting data point.

Of course, there were plenty of eras with an excess of men. The traditional way of dealing with such an excess was, of course, exploration and war. In the American frontier, these excess men could be absorbed through gold rushes, hunting, and serving in military roles. Some made their fortune and went home, many others spent their earnings on gambling and prostitution. After they blew what they earned, they would go out again. Unfortunately, without the opportunity of family formation, most men move towards listlessness and vice.

What happens when women’s energy has a broader political outlet and no family to care for? What happens to a significant number of listless, childless men with no frontier outlet? We’re about to find out.

We haven’t come close to the bottom of fertility, and the fate of Gen Z is already largely baked into the cake. It’s likely we are entering an era where around thirty percent of older adults will have no children. While women’s fertility has a clear end date, men’s fertility does not, but it’s also clear that a man who hasn’t had a kid by his fifties is very unlikely to marry a woman young enough to bear him one. We might not hit South Korea levels, but a TFR of less than 1 is a distinct possibility.

As fertility plummets, it becomes its own self-reinforcing spiral. The remaining children will be inundated with aunts and uncles but no cousins. There will be few jobs for rites of passage like being babysitters and helping mom or a relative when she has a child. Boys see fewer family men as role models. Schools will close to deal with the demographic cliff, youth groups like the Scouts will hemorrhage troops, parks will be bereft of children actually playing. With this comes consolidation, meaning longer trips to play with friends, to get an education, and a quiet neighborhood due to lack of children. Even for parents who have kids during this time, the chances are against their children being submerged into a culture that values them and eventually wanting children of their own.

As the demographics collapse, so do the priorities of those with no kids. Suddenly working two jobs to get in “a nice school district” is not applicable. Building a community that is kid friendly, with ample play areas, safe streets, and domestic tranquility becomes less of a concern. The usual civic engagement of coaching little league sports, taking part in school activities, and being an unofficial monitor of unspoken rules loses a large percentage of its adherents. In short, healthy civic engagement will plummet.

That won’t mean civic engagement disappears, but will take other, more dystopian ends. The males who missed the boat on fatherhood will not become vitalist Nietzscheans like some online spergs assume, but will devolve into all sorts of vices. Whether it is gambling, pornography, video games, or other spicy stuff, they will fight to the hilt to maintain their empty but enjoyable pursuits. If you think these are bad now, wait until there is a cohort of men who just stop caring. There will be advertisements for sex bots on billboards, more grotesque Halloween displays on unkempt lawns, and increasingly lousy behavior in public spaces. Any attempt to clamp down will be met with a cohort of angry, childless men who feel society is trying to restrain the little fun they can have. Work ethic will plummet, and the hard-working dependable guy keeping the lights on will stop showing up. The drive to children will turn to apathy towards them, and ultimately checking out of building the infrastructure for the next generation. Things will slowly start breaking, never to be repaired, and the public square will become uglier.

Many childless women, in turn, will turn into the most insufferable, moralizing Karens the world has ever seen, and they will direct their ire towards other parent’s children. Whether this is extending abortion to outright post-birth infanticide (and many are already on this train) or dominating every aspect of a child’s life, they will be a terrifying force. It will be Woke 3.0, with ever increasing powers of the school system and Child Protective Services to impose their will on parents. Homeschooling will be attacked, private schools will be stigmatized, and a massive cohort of women will both develop a post-hoc justification for not having children by saying they hate the little runts while also pretending to speak in the best interests of every child.

Everything points to a legal and moral minefield for parents, thereby removing the impetus for having children even more. This self-repeating cycle will create one of the only implicitly anti-natal civilizations in history, and no one can vote their way out of it. In 1972, 54% of households had a child under 18 living in the household. It is now 39%. It will only get worse. What hope do parents have to vote their interests when they are outnumbered by the childless? Politicians have already slinked away from the pro-family angle. I remember in the 1990’s how both political parties’ platforms focused on raising a family, now the Democratic party avoids it and republicans only pay lip service to stable families. They are already understanding it is becoming a political loser by sheer demographics.

One could retort that good families and children benefit everyone. After all, they are the ones who will pay into social services in old age, and this is when the nastiness will go the other way. Who is going to advocate for the old lady with no kids in a nursing home? Unfortunately, old ladies WITH children often have no one to advocate for her. Who is going to care when she gets bad care, or when some worker ultimately “forgets” to give her meds and she drifts off into oblivion? Is the thirty year-old nurse who pays high taxes going to tell the secluded elderly they have something to live for and MAID is a terrible option when twenty percent of her paycheck is taxed to sustain her life?

One can retort about basic humanity, that someone, whether or not he is related, is still part of a national family. One could argue the better nature of humanity will take over as technology eases the burden of running society and helps keep the social safety net in place. While such optimism is pleasant, it is hard to live life under such abstractions. The glue that has always held society together is the children, and the more unaffiliated families that can form bonds and procreate, the more solid the civilizational foundation is. One of the core reasons for Europe’s success was its ability to remove the clannishness inherent in more tribal societies, and this was done largely through prohibitions on cousin marriage. America was only able to stabilize after generations of intermarriage between the various European ethnic groups, much of which was done through ruthless destruction of ethnic conclaves.

These social technologies require maintenance, and when a large swath of citizens understand not only their immediate line, but their extended line as well is doomed, that civic bond is broken. When those wide family bonds disappear, so does the civilization. The unspoken contract for the old to build for the young, and the young to care for the old, is broken. The multigenerational legacy of the family unit is shattered. What are usually generative impulses become destructive when not bounded. Men become reckless not for glory but only to feel something. Women become authoritarian to scratch the itch of forming a moral order that was once directed at her family.

Robots aren’t going to be able to clean the parks once done by civic minded parents when all their energy is spent protective their children from the degeneration happening all around them. Childhood innocence will be hard to maintain when they are surrounded by either total apathy or psychotically controlling strangers. Parents will band together in a sort of fortress mindset as enemies seem to swarm all around them. The government originally formed for the people and their posterity will be the biggest roadblock in forming the next generation when the majority becomes hostile to them.

Will it end in total extinction? Unlikely, unless some mad geniuses manage to find a way to sterilize humanity. Eventually, biology will take care of this extreme genetic bottleneck, and the humanity that comes out will be vastly different than the behavior of the dying generations. Until then, democracy will not save us. A majority that has lost its impetus to sacrifice and think beyond their own life will be extinguished, and the only thing keeping the nation from being conquered is the fact it will be a global phenomenon, with global consequences.

While some areas will suffer more than others, this malaise will require pain across the board to get through, and that pain will cause additional pain in a self-reinforcing cycle. This might be partially short-circuited by a spiritual revival, or maybe strongman capable of decisive action, but demographics will be rough for the near future, and with it the immolation of bonds build over centuries. Buckle up gents, it’s going to be a wild ride.

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Back in the early 2000’s, I landed upon a dream job straight out of college. I was lucky enough to have started my career during the last gasp of the old order, where I took advantage of the company’s presentation at my campus to gave my resume to one of the speakers, who passed it along and got me an interview. It was the boomer “smile and solid handshake” strategy, and worked magnificently. I went through about eight years there, with the expected bumps and bruises acquired in early professional life. After a few years, the program I spent most of my time in completed, and there was a new project opening up that was a joint venture with another corporation.

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With that project came new management, and the relatively dynamic and versatile problem solving environment turned into a mass of red tape and bureaucracy. The new managers were striver jackasses who played hardball at the slightest pushback, and all my efforts to create the infrastructure to do my job was shut down by risk-averse committees. Optimism turned to frustration, frustration turned to anger, and anger turned into despondency as the months passed by.

One morning, after working with the team at change management to create a source control space to actually check in my work properly. It was denied by upper management because they were working to get another system in place. The estimated time of completion for this system was one year. I remember not even being angry, not despondent, not much of anything. It was just a blank nothing, like a light switch went off. From that moment I totally emotionally detached from the organization. I sent out resumes and left two months later.

Every system needs buy-in to function properly. Every system needs to have the means to redress grievances and ensure said system has the capability of fulfilling needs. While there is always tension between your wants and what is feasible, there has to be a mechanism to dissuade tensions. Whether you are talking about a government, a business, a local chapter of a charity organization, or a marriage, there needs to be a discourse to manage tradeoffs between parties. While the ideal is every member engages in a positive manner with an inner confidence they are being heard and concerns are being addressed, the truth is negative engagement works too. Even if a person is cynical to leadership and the future of an organization, the fact he is complaining and making sharp retorts shows he is still engaged. Even thoughts of getting revenge on a certain hated figure or dreams of taking the entire institution over shows an unsevered connection that is binding him down, whether such aspirations are healthy or not.

For many men, a negative relationship to the world is their chosen lot in life. They go to a job they hate but somehow can’t leave, live in a town they despise but can’t get themselves to move away from, or trapped with a wife whose conversations have deteriorated to subtle barbs at each other. They may hate everything about their situation, but their own frustration becomes the albatross that kills any prospect of changing their circumstances. Things are bad, but never get bad enough.

Then there are the men who live through such circumstances, recognize it as hell on earth, and, in a moment of clarity, find all of their emotional energy drained away in an instant. Suddenly the anger directed at the boss or co-worker dissipates, and nothing remains. The fury at the busybody with his constant red tape melts away. They become, cease being thorns on his side. The tormentors become irrelevant, like their existence doesn’t matter at all.

There was a viral video some time ago of a woman recounting her divorce. The couple suffered hard times from the beginning and were enmeshed in marital counseling. The husband was all in, doing everything in his power to save the marriage. The woman admitted to the therapist she wanted a divorce anyway and explained how she saw all emotion drain from her husband’s face. He hardened, finally shrugging and said “fine”. She explained her shock as he completely withdrew, got an apartment, and removed her from his life like she stopped existing. In other words, his light switch went off.

Every man has a threshold when he realizes that discussion is pointless, he is surrounded by bad actors who demand everything while giving nothing in return, and he realizes no one is going to save him. Often, no matter how bad things get, he will hold on to his tenuous grasp of reality because the alternative is too terrifying. Others will live in quiet desperation as the alternative is considered worse. Sometimes this morphs into meaningful action that go outside the bounds of public morality.

Then there are the ones who withdraw, maybe going through the motions but with no emotional connection, enmeshed in total apathy in their work or domestic life. They may still be around, but the passion is gone. If you want to see the precursor at the light switch going off, last week has gave two prime examples. A murder trial and the cancellation of a prominent online academic.

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I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,

dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,

angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,

Such were the opening lines of Allen Ginsburg’s Howl. Written in 1955 it was the war cry for the Beat Generation. In it, he lamented his compatriots’ lost to mental anguish and served as a visceral condemnation of modern society. It was a passionate, spastic work, meant to be voiced loudly and without breaks, hence the name. You will find phrasing that makes little sense, such as “hydrogen jukebox” and “kind king light of mind”, meant to give an emotional resonance with its tonal qualities more that its coherence. Controversy buttressed the poem, including the poem being censored in Britain, adding to its mystique. The controversies made a spectacle almost as stirring as the poem, a piece of performance art in itself.

Was it a great poem? People in the era gave it mixed reviews, with some pointing out its intriguing but garbled messaging while others praised its anarchic nature. What’s without question is that a class of poets, revolutionaries, and outright crazies latched on to it, and what was once the anthem of social outcasts is now taught in high schools across the nation.

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Poetry has fallen on hard times. Probably the first victim in the decline of real literacy. The masses today are unlikely to read any of the famous poets after their stint in school has ended. It doesn’t help that poetry was also one of the first domains that became gatekept by a cadre of hacks, giving the art form a reputation of empty pretension with the modern man. Attempts have been made to create the next great poet, the most pertinent example being Amanda Gorman.

During Super Bowl LV, she recited a poem during opening festivities. This was its climax.

Let us walk with these warriors,
Charge on with these champions,
And carry forth the call of our captains!
We celebrate them by acting
With courage and compassion,
By doing what is right and just.
For while we honor them today,
It is them who every day honor us.

Tennyson she is not.

Contrast this to poets they used to have on broadcast television, such as the incredibly witty Robert Frost being featured on NBC News.

One can tell the malaise of modern times in that there is no real crying call of this era, no mantra of a generation. There is no great poem, music, or movie that serves as the anthem of the Zoomers, or even a subset of them. Regardless of one’s side on the political spectrum, regardless of one’s background, there is no cultural artifact that speaks directly to your identity, to your predicament, that is embraced as a cultural marker. Instead, millennials have nostalgia for the comfort of commercial slop, and many zoomers have nostalgia for an era they never lived through.

Everywhere there is a lack of words for their place in the world, a piece of art that gives them emotional, rational, and spiritual meaning to their existence.

I recently read through the second edition of ’s poetry compendium, Horizons of Iron, now sold through . For those unfamiliar with Arthur, he was the editor of an online poetry journal, Atop the Cliffs, from 2017-2024. His attempt to create an art culture in the wild west of the late aughts internet was commendable, if quixotic. The sphere was full of edgelords who were interested in getting a rise out of their enemies and hyper-intellectual types who delved into theory. They could make great memes that distilled a complicated issue down to an essence that packed an emotional punch, but such rhetorical themes can only live in the fleeting attention ecosystem of social media.

The poems comprise several themes, from dejection on immigration transforming a familiar homeland to a foreign country to universal themes of love lost. His style is a terse, tough, melancholic tone, more like what a steppe warlord would recite in his times of contemplation than a sensitive academic.

MOUNTAINOUS DECAY

Life blood drains away
Mixing with the dry dust
Bleeding into the pints,
The steel gilded with rust

From death in the valleys
To spires in the sky
Opioid fever dreams
And medications gone awry
For
Death in these valleys
Comes both quick
    and slow
The mine creaks to a halt
Fentanyl killing without fault
Soot caked no more
Languish unkempt
Mirroring a dying people's faces

Reading through the compendium, one fact that struck me was the more a poem “smelled like the internet”, the less punch it packed. It isn’t just that memes become stale quickly, but there is a barrier between the two worlds the terminology is trapped in. The Non-player Character meme(NPC), for example, referring to a large cohort of people who seem to follow a rigid script, sounds natural in the internet space but jarring when used in poetry. The weakest portion consisted of poems that used these terms, as they came across as depending too much on fleeting memes that quickly grow stale for a work of art. For example:

TAKING THE BLUE PILL
It's bitter pill brother
Seeing you adrift in normalcy
Once you were another

I stood by your side
Spoke a good speech
As you made her your bride

Today we barely talk
Politics cut us deep
Both turned to walk

Far away we drift
Occasional messages
Cut across our rift

Trump Derangement Syndrome
Branch Covidian

Compare this to a more subtle poem that leaves itself more ambiguity and gives more sensory punch:

UNMARKED

Those graves I do not know
Headstones without names
Lettering that does not show

For there they lie at rest
In quiet green corners
Visitors pass by in Sunday best

Were they washed clean away?
The glorious dead quietly resist
Perhaps soon we'll hear what they have to say....

While the collection could have used some more pruning, it’s overall a good collection with some excellent essays. What works and what doesn’t is also a powerful lesson in what sorts of art work and where they thrive.

While the crisis in art is often politically polarized, there is a dearth of artistic works across the board. Even the lower-tier forms or art, such as comics, have seen a rapid disintegration. The regular institutions that would form the next generations of prophets, whether they be art schools or MFA programs, have proven themselves incapable of creating great works. Progressives have largely tried, and failed, to create traction by being tastemakers with the support of large institutions to make traction for their preferred people, such as Amanda Gorman, but losing prestige as made them ignored. While at one time a subpar poet like Maya Angelou could be forced down people’s throats, those days have long passed.

However, the collapse of tastemakers has created excitement as the barriers to entry have evaporated, but the cost of having no social proof. Even an online presence isn’t enough to move pieces of art, as even prominent writers find their followers tough customers if their works do not fit into expected genres. And heaven help you if you write poetry. In the rampant attention economy of the web, one can easily consume a product, but this is actually a weakness.

What is interesting about Allen Ginsburg’s “Howl and Other Poems” is it was published by an extremely niche publisher. Not only was it a small publisher, but they had a brick-and-mortar bookstore situated in San Francisco that served as a base of operations. Through its reputation of publishing Ginsburg and other radical writers, it became a cultural landmark a sort of mecca for radical artists that remains to this day.

While ignored, there were also right-wing version of bookstores back in the day. The used to have chain of bookstores called “American Opinion Bookstore” that was full of anti-communist and other political writings. Of course, the right has always existed as a conglomeration of largely oppositional ideologies forced to become bedfellows through dual-party politics, so brick-and-mortar outlets are often of an evangelical Christianity with a conservative bent, traditional Catholic bookstores, and others.

A lot is said, justifiably, about the necessity of culture being done in physical space rather than through online chats. There are the basic arguments of how people act differently when there is more nuance in body language and demeanor, as well as the real chance to get punched. A more important aspect boils down to human nature. People respect what is difficult more than what is easy. People respect something that takes effort more than an easy commodity. On the other side, the suffering artist is a trope for a reason, and while one’s suffering does not make a work a masterpiece, there needs to be that difficultly, whether it be a personal struggle or a technical challenge, that is dutifully overcome to have something meaningful to write. The friction is the point.

Unfortunately, you can’t escape the medium, and the Internet is custom-built for transitory interactions. Little is required of you, and even less if given back. While meeting at a particular time and a particular place requires planning, an internet chat is a no-space, available anytime and therefore incapable of creating forms of commitment past momentary consumption.

It’s not a coincidence that the quality of movies died as special effects simplified the filming process. It’s also not a coincidence the audience quality has nosedived as theatres were replaced by phones. Truly great albums are a rarity in a time when the playlist in streaming services have become ubiquitous. As AI slop permeates through the ecosystem, the quality of both artist and audience will continue their decline.

Of course, if every artist took the lowest-tech route of reciting their poems on street corners, they would have as much success as, well, the average author selling his book on Amazon. Not that no one has not created meetups like this. A while ago Rolling Stone magazine clutched its pearls over the indie book scene in Los Angeles. BasedCon, an independent book conference, has been running for 5 years. In New York last year, a renegade art show caused a ruckus.

While laudable, What’s missing in these attempts is creating a specific scene. Whether one is talking about the Inklings or the Harlem Renaissance, disparate individuals over large areas rarely form artistic movements. Andy Warhol’s The Factory hosted an assortment of different painters and musicians. You could have countless other examples, from wholesome and largely pedestrian to completely depraved. They are a cadre of aligned people meeting in a shared space in a specific geography. They form, for lack of a better word, a scene.

Unfortunately, there is little of that energy in a specific place anymore. While there are still literary recitings and poetry sessions, most independent booksellers and other locations are more interested in the appearance of counter-cultural energy by mimicking past subversive efforts than being willing to host true modern creatives. Most niche artists delegate their work to the internet, hoping to figure out the social media algorithms that will make their existence known to a wider audience.

As much as people prefer to think of a work of art as an independent artifact, there has always been a social aspect to classic works. You are studying not only the work in itself but the wider reaction such a work brings. The controversy around “Howl and Other Poems” was just as important to the work as the words in the page. The life and times of a poet is inextricably linked to the words he writes. While the artist may isolate himself for a time, part of one’s are is to be personally in the world, to interact with other minds in the creative sphere. Whether one’s sphere is in the streets of San Francisco wrestling with the drug-addled minds of your generation or a group of professors talking in a study over whisky, these interactions are what makes art ascend, when readers not only have a work, but can contemplate a specific time and place where their thoughts were argued and defined.

Even more, it creates a pilgrimage area for those enticed to become enmeshed in the culture. Just as a simple bookstore in San Francisco became a holy site, once a movement plants its stake on a plot of land, it creates a point of origin, a part of the world it calls its own. The digital sphere can only create a facsimile of this. Creating these spaces is easier said than done. The cities fester with anarcho-tyranny, lawfare is a constant threat, and the digital sphere has made many would-be artists perfectly content in their electric cocoon.

The tastemakers are dead, and the vivid scenes of old times are a graveyard. Maybe the next great artists will be musicians, maybe poets, or maybe users of some medium that hasn’t been invented yet. Whatever form they take, they will take root outside the glow of the web.

Why 
Were you passing here?
On a journey home?
Or maybe an adventure?

But now there is a fragment
Flowers faded
Of you

Small memorial
Many miles from anywhere
They come to tend
Wonder and mourn

As the cars speed past

Thank you for reading Social Matter. If you enjoyed this article, consider sharing and subscribing. To support artists in this sphere, consider purchasing Horizons of Iron.

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I want to caveat the mindset below is a general archetype. There are plenty of people past their 60’s that aren’t the type, though the plague of this worldview has infested that age group heavily. If you are a subscriber in this age demographic, it’s very likely this doesn’t apply to you. My subscribers, especially my paid subscribers, are far more intelligent, handsome, and charismatic than the general population. It is also true, however, that everyone has dealt with this sort of person, and often they are not even that old.

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Talk to many boomers, and the self-confidence they have it all figured out is nauseating. While the incessant whining of much of the younger generation is also irritating, the conversation is not bolstered by older generations who aren’t willing to acknowledge the collapse in social trust and economic prospects that will likely make Gen-Z the first generation in a century to have a lower quality of life. The irony is the more successful the boomer in his career, the more unwillingness there is to understand these changes. It can’t be forgotten, though, that many boomers did rise to great things, and many showed enormous skill and work ethic in achieving success.

During a recent graduation ceremony the school’s founder, an older gentleman who built it as a passion project, gave the usual spiel about the graduating students being the future. It was pablum, but nice enough. As a graduation present he gave each student a copy of William McRaven’s book, “Make Your Bed”. Curious, I grabbed an extra copy and read it. It was a short, breezy, one hour read. I chuckled most of the way through, as it might as well have been titled, “The Final Boomer Boss”.

McRaven was no slouch. He was an accomplished SEAL who made combat jumps and ran the operation that killed Bin Laden, ascending all the way up to being a Four-Star Admiral. He later served as Chancellor of the University of Texas System. The book was an expanded version of a speech he gave to college graduates. I have nothing but respect for his credentials, and he seemed to be overall a good person, but man was his advice dogshit.

What was clear reading this book was, like most successful boomers, McRaven was a company man through and through. Amusingly, his one career setback was being pushed out of Seal Team Six for being too much of a square. In McRaven’s defense, he was likely in the right given some of the notorious characters there. The title of the book “Make Your Bed” was based on his military training where an impeccably made bed was harshly enforced by his superiors. Because the military said it was important, he assumed it important also, and the work involved in making sure the coin bounced off the sheets well was a sign you accomplished a simple task, and were therefore ready to start the day. The lessons were as follows.

• 1. Start Your Day With a Task Completed

  2. You Can’t Go It Alone

  3. Only the Size of your Heart Matters

  4. Life’s Not Fair - Drive On!

  5. Failure Can Make You Stronger

  6. You Must Dare Greatly

  7. Stand Up to the Bullies

  8. Rise to the Occasion

  9. Give People Hope

  10. Never, Ever Quit!

Now I understand that this is supposed to be a small, pithy, easily digestible book and not a grand treatise, but is this the best a four star admiral can give? It could be forgiven if he went into more depth to say something unique, but most of his success was this straightforward and the ensuing description added little to no nuance. He entered the military, did what he was told, suffered setbacks like a parachuting accident that left him immobilized for a year, but slogged through the hard times and was rewarded by the institution. Reading the book, there was only one instance where he implied the system screwed him over, but even then everything fixed itself up in the end.

Still, the book’s subtext was teaching other lessons. Instead of taking the lessons above, below are the actual lessons he was teaching, and anyone fifty years or younger will realize why they don’t work anymore.

• Work Hard and You Will Be Rewarded

  Trust the Institutions

  Make Your Values Applicable to Everyone

  Smooth Out the Rough Edges of Life

  Believe in Pleasant Half-Truths

  The Boomers Figured It All Out

The Silents and previous generations tended to fall into two camps. There were the ones who would talk of their life in vivid detail, especially war stories. The other would say nothing about their life, especially their war experience. The ones who talked did so in a more rough, personal way. They say they did X because of their code, or talked about the circumstances that led to their decision. The boomer generation likes to talk more in universal terms, that the basis of their decisions rested on rock-solid principles applicable to everyone in every circumstance. While the boomers often pride themselves on fighting the man, they were actually the most aggressive advocates of trusting the system.

A lot of the book pertained to his SEAL training, where there is a clear success and failure state. Swim over to the island in time and you succeeded. Set the detonation charge in the right place and you succeeded. There were clear orders with clear victory objectives. When one works in a high-trust society, this is how things work. Whether in the military of the most mundane of jobs, there are objectives for you to complete and the agency to get them done. When a society disintegrates, one has to deal with more unspecified expectations, more politicking, and more double-speak regarding what you are supposed to do.

While I’m sure McRaven was avoiding throwing people under the bus, one gets the impression throughout the book that the leadership he received was impeccable. There never seemed to be a bad actor who wanted to use him for personal gain, nor was there an aspect of the system that seemed to be dead-set against him. There was never a word about bean-counters who made him jump through nonsense, nor dealing with a sadistic or corrupt superior. If they said you were going to get a marshmallow if you persevered, you would get a marshmallow.

Even his advice about taking risks rested solely within the system’s metrics. His example dealt with an obstacle course and the risk of going head-first to get a faster time. And this was after he was told to do so. In his example of life not being fair, his example was a drill sergeant that made him do additional workouts just to instill that message. Never is there the message that the system itself might screw you over, that it would be an impediment to success. There is just total trust.

The most amusing portion of the book was recounting his encounters with Saddam Hussein under the chapter “Stand Up to the Bullies”. You could feel the seething he never broke Saddam, and the dictator had an aura that terrified everyone around him even when in handcuffs. Even worse was the hypocrisy, since it was clear he verbally and likely physically mistreated Saddam long after he was no longer a threat and was awaiting a show trial. He was a war on terror advocate through and through, and even after seeing his adversary was different than the caricature in his mind didn’t update his priors.

While Saddam clearly was a ruthless ruler, you got none of the ambiguities and conflicts of an imperial power forcing its will half-a-world away. When reality did not comply with your good vs. evil paradigm, you forced reality to conform with your mind. While McRaven tried to belittle the reader’s view of Saddam through his unkempt cell and bed, Saddam came across as far more formidable than McRaven, and I think the old Admiral knew it. “Stand Up to Bullies” indeed.

While there is little direct political pandering, McRaven had the classic idealism of equality and freedom that lionized the civil rights revolution. He was gung-ho about the war on terror bringing "emancipation” from the clutches of such people as Saddam Hussein. He is a true believer through and through. He believes in setting the same rules for everyone, and no one should be judged on a different scale. He praised Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King, and other secular saints with the same piety an Orthodox Priest bestows the name of St. John Chrysostom. The values did not just correlate to his culture and place in time, but was universal to all places in all times. His worldview showcased the all-encompassing secular religion of the American Empire. He wasn’t fighting for a distinct people, but a value system.

Anyone who lives in our current age knows that working hard doesn’t necessarily mean success, and especially not if you follow currently laid out rules. Strivers are finding their prospects dwindling by going the standard elite college route the current system recommends. The institutions are increasingly unable to do their job, and constant roadblocks inhibit anything from getting done. We have become deracinated and out once universal values are being used against us. It’s very clear the boomers did not have everything figured out. I don’t have to go into detail. We’ve all seen it.

Everywhere At the End of Time

As I have entered my forties, I’ve experienced all the obvious pathologies of aging. I’m having trouble keeping up with the young bloods on the Racquetball court, my weightlifting has to be more reserved to avoid injury and, most frustrating of all, my ability to learn new things has receded. I’m finally checking off a bucket list item of playing a musical instrument proficiently, and can’t help but notice my kids progress much faster than me with equivalent practice times. Their minds are simply sponges. As the political climate has rapidly changed, it has required conscious effort to analyze and understand the new situation without relying on older mental models of ten years ago.

It’s not a coincidence that most people’s political viewpoints ossify in their thirties and forties, becoming encased in a moment of time. In a world not engulfed in rapidly transforming cultural and political realities, this was still fine. There was also an understanding that you’re too old for this shit, there needed to be a passing of the guard, and make the transition from leader to the more humble role of passing down practical knowledge to the ascending patriarch, playing with the grandkids, and hoping you don’t turn into a burden.

This isn’t universal, and while Trump does a lot of boomerisms, even in his eighties he can pivot. You can see the mental toll it takes though. Everything is just harder. You must resist receding into the same thought patterns. You want to fall back to the security blanket of the tried and true, and mental fatigue is a constant burden.

When you believe you figured it all out, not just in your lifetime, but every lifetime, the humility that is supposed to come with old age gets thwarted. No matter how accomplished you were, and no matter your mark in history, you have to accept fading into the twilight in order for your people to continue on. In our current youth obsessed society, there is no transition to becoming a respectable elder. Instead we have a gerontocracy having trouble coming to terms with their own mortality.

In a world of systems and universal abstractions, the boomers were the first American generation that didn’t see themselves as a distinct people in a distinct time, but a sort of immortal pantheon of gods who figured out the mysteries of existence. The Civil Rights revolution was a permanent artifice of the cosmos, the system that treated them well would never fail, and the high-trust society they lived in was forever regardless of its inhabitants. Sure, there would be bumps here or there, but the foundation was immovable. Just follow the pleasant sounding platitudes and you will be fine. McRaven’s book distilled this into its essence.

Unfortunately, this sort of unmooring from time and place isn’t the output of an enlightened mind, but dementia. As human beings, we can use certain universal concepts as a sort of guiding light, but our actions always have to be placed in the context of what we see with our own eyes. Nostalgic “lessons” don’t work when the conditions in which they worked don’t exist anymore. That doesn’t mean they’re completely wrong, but they are missing some critical subtext.

Stage 2 dementia is explained as “the self realization and awareness that something is wrong with a refusal to accept that. More effort is made to remember so memories can be more long form with a little more deterioration in quality. The overall personal mood is generally lower than the first stage and at a point before confusion starts setting in.”

Note how this pertains to current discourse, and not just to boomers. There are a plethora of Millennials and Gen-Xers that act like this online. They refuse to engage with political realities. They run to talking points from over a decade ago. They have a hazy, idealized version of the past that they can’t link with current realities. They know something is deeply broken but wring their hands about someone doing anything about it that’s not according to internalized “rules”. Unfortunately, it only gets worse from here.

At stage 3, “We are presented with some of the last coherent memories before confusion fully rolls in and the grey mists form and fade away. Finest moments have been remembered, the musical flow in places is more confused and tangled. As we progress some singular memories become more disturbed, isolated, broken and distant. These are the last embers of awareness before we enter the post awareness stages.”

This is where we reach political incoherence. I would argue many online pundits have already entered this stage and have written the same cycle of articles talking about the terrifying resurrection of The Austrian Painter or how the Free Market will save society for years. The talking points are separate from whatever is being discussed, used as talismans against people who are impervious to its magic. They only have vague recollections of what once was but no idea of how such the society actually worked.

Then we see stage 4 through 6, a point of no return, and all is lost.

When you see such a person, whether it be your grizzly political pundit or your dad, the right reaction to such degradation is not anger, but pity. They are not going to change. Just as the agony of dementia can only be contained, not cured, you’re not going to cure someone unable to see reality anymore. Eventually we won’t be able to catch up either. While I personally hope to be a better beacon in my old age, I can’t guarantee it. It’s a constant battle we are destined to eventually lose. The ravages of time comes for us all.

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In the film “Up in the Air”, George Clooney plays a transient employee of a firm hired by mega-corporations for the unpleasant task of laying off employees. In the opening scenes, he is enjoying his job, but realizes as the film progresses how isolating and demeaning his work is, both to himself and to the people he is tasked with firing. The film emphasized the need for the messiness of human interactions over the shallowness of transactional relationships. It was designed to be a warning against the indifference and callousness of people who were “just doing business” and the emptiness of a world with no actual connections. It showed how inhuman corporate structures could become without realizing it. Unfortunately, the Church hierarchy took the film as an instruction manual.

Like many Dioceses in the United States, we are looking at mass church closings on the horizon, likely to hit a third of our parishes. Due to the steady drop in mass attendees since the 1970s, the cratering of weddings and baptisms, and the massive drop in vocations, many churches need to close for the Diocese to remain financially sustainable. They are treating it like in most Dioceses in the United States, as a financial and logistics issue that needs to be addressed. The drop in vocations and parish life just happened, like the weather, and the bureaucracy has to ensure its assets are fiscally sound.

When the possible closure of our church was announced, we were told of upcoming “listening sessions” where parishioners can ask questions and make appeals to the Diocese. Like many others, I signed up for one in the evening last week. I already understood the meeting was likely kayfabe. My experience working in corporate America made me cognizant of the playbook. I knew they couldn’t look callous and had to give the impression of listening to the sheep, but I assumed the decision had already been made.

When a manager talks to his employees and assures them no firings are on the horizon, it means you better get your resume up to date. When there is an “open dialogue” session with upper management, it will be used against you. I worked in a corporation with such an “open” dialogue approach, with a question and answer for our new president. An employee asked the reasonable question of how the company expects top talent to stay when they are underpaid based on industry standards. She gave a canned answer and then, behind closed doors, badmouthed the employee and wanted him gone. Even with this typical back-biting and political politicking, there were people in the organization talking to their employees. We weren’t given even that courtesy.

When I arrived, the activities hall was packed, largely with the elderly. Bad optics. The average age of our parish was actually younger than the diocesan average but large families don’t have the bandwidth to attend meetings like this. A woman stood up front I had never seen before, and with good reason. She was a representative of the “Catholic Leadership Institute”, a consulting firm that specializes in assisting Church organizations. She never lived in the Diocese and had nothing to do with the restructuring plans she was presenting. Her sole job was to be flown across the country to facilitate these “listening sessions”. She was literally the George Clooney character.

We were told that the session would comprise of a video from the bishop, then the head of the restructuring, and then a summary of why the changes were necessary. Then we would get the proposals and go into small groups to discuss them. Finally, there would be an opening for questions with a 30-minute hard-stop.

The videos were the typical sanitized pablum that is offensive in its inoffensiveness, the sort of media that goes through five committees and comes out so bereft of human touch it makes technical documents sound outright warm and human by comparison. We spent 45 minutes listening to our Church leaders tell how they heard and understood our concerns while reading from a script they didn’t bother to write. While the videos were real, one got the sort of “uncanny valley” sense you feel with AI where something seems off, when the words don’t match the facial expressions, when you understand something strange and inhuman about the production but can’t pinpoint exactly where. This strange inhumanity is a consequence of our managerial system, and its tentacles have reached every avenue of the Church.

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The all-out blitz against what has been termed “trad marriages” has been the most idiotic moral panic of the last year. While there were plenty of ripples in the last decade regarding this phenomenon, it came to a head when got a piece in the New York Times telling how her trad marriage fell apart, expanding her lousy personal experience to the entire subculture. While many progressives cheered, most people without an axe to grind and a memory better than a goldfish scratched their heads in confusion. Even before the NYT piece, there was plenty of dirty laundry on this gal, and it’s only gotten worse since then. Since when was she ever trad? Why is the NYT directing the full force of their ire on this subgroup under such weak pretenses?

The hysteria shows no sign of fading. We have a bestselling novel to stick it to those dumb trad-wives that was immediately picked up for a TV series. the New York Post recently made its own moral panic piece. Countless feminists on Substack are warning of the pitfalls of this trad lifestyle. The media is directing nearly all the propaganda at women, forming a circle to defend against this nefarious trend that could overturn more than a century of political victories.

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In their minds, trads seem to be analogous of the worst 1950’s stereotypes with the domineering husband keeping his wife chained to the kitchen, or the lifestyle of Instagram influencers with millionaire husbands pretending to be living frontier life. None of them know anything about actual trads outside of what equally ignorant people online or media outlets say.

The entire argument is silly. The 1950’s weren’t trad. The modern frontier aesthetic is a fantasy. The most traditional lifestyle is not the father going off to work and the mother staying with the kids, nor having a bunch of boutique cows and chickens running around that gave no income, but the entire family being involved in the family business. For most of human history, husband and wife worked together and had specific roles not because of ideological commitments, but to survive. A woman couldn’t handle hard farm labor, and men don’t have lactating breasts to feed children with. It was an entirely practical affair. The family would be part of a provincial parish close to home and would have relationships with their immediate neighbors. Outside of a small percentage of people who own their labor in a small, homogenous, rural town, these people don’t exist anymore. So what is meant by trad in our age?

Most modern trads make a significant effort to find like-minded people, often driving a significant distance to find a Church or school filled with fellow travelers. While some manage to be in proximity of their cohort with significant effort and sacrifice, most make do how they can. In modern times, it’s a life that requires an active effort to enter as opposed to being born into it.

Is “trad” the family I know with eight kids, five acres, and seemingly every farm animal in existence that they slaughter and sell in the local co-op? Is it the lawyer with six kids who works sixty to eighty hour weeks to maintain the family lifestyle? How about the guy who owns a multi-million dollar bricklaying company that goes to an SSPX parish? Is it the super-crunchy mom of two with fertility issues who has a twenty-hour-a-week side-hustle on Etsy? Is it the hyper-pious family with a large garden and a crunchy lifestyle who were unable to have any children and adopted? How many kids do you need to be trad? Can urban Orthodox families be trad? Can parents send their kids to public school and still be trad?

If you go by rigid criteria, all you are getting are bizarre, arbitrary rules that are ignoring a large swath of people who fit into the general “trad” category. People don’t think this way when making life choices. There are gray areas. It isn’t so much an ideology of boxes to check than it is a value system of what’s deemed important as well as a social network. In this way, it’s no different from other groups. So why the hysteria and nonstop propaganda? Why have the media tastemakers signaled to the internet’s useful idiots to amplify their warnings?

Probably the most effective way to start is to get a grasp of a “trad”
world-model by comparing them to another well-discussed subculture, The Professional Managerial Class (PMC). While my friends mostly fall into the “trad” category, most of my professional contacts fall into the PMC world. Both have made an effort to separate themselves from mass culture, though for very different reasons. Your mileage may vary, but this is my best shot at comparing the two-worlds, done as impartially as possible.

Once the general parameters are set, the hysteria and counter-signaling by the elite classes will make far more sense. Underneath their moralizing veneer, it’s a response to a potential outflow of centralized power to local institutions and an internal demographic collapse.

Marriage:

In marriage, two main factors are in play in vetting potential mates, romantic love and rearing of children. There is also the conflict between personal autonomy and being a cohesive unit. No couple is entirely on one side of the spectrum, but prioritizations are going to be clear.

The PMC emphasizes romantic love and autonomy. They want to see their partner as a “soul-mate” with deep bonds that reach the level of ecstasy. They want to achieve the paradox of having this level of connection while also keeping their independence and individual identity. PMC couples are more likely to accept different opinions in their potential spouse while dating, taking a “love conquers all” type mindset. What matters is you keep the love. Divorce, therefore, is far more accepted. Since love is the reason for marriage, when the love dies, so can the marriage.

Trads tend to ask the question “will he/she make a good father/mother” before romantic affections. They also consider marriage as becoming single unit to bring the next generation into being. While romantic love is there, marriage is a far more practical affair, like a business partnership. Since raising children is foremost, divorce is far more frowned upon, and those who divorce are likely to be stigmatized. This, on top of religious sensibilities, creates a “ride-or-die” mindset that forces the couple to learn how to get along, even if it never matches their ideal life. They understand that while a failed marriage does not mean destitution and death anymore, it may mean well death to the family’s cultural and biological line in one’s grandchildren.

Patriarchy:

In the PMC, every marriage is assumed to be egalitarian, where both parties discuss the topic until they can come to a resolution. This is a polite fiction, since it becomes clear either the wife or the husband is the one actually in charge. Still, when a decision is made, you have to pretend it was both of them who made it, which makes life difficult when the decision affects you and you feel you’ve been wronged. Because of the emphasis on independence, saying “no” is verboten and evidence of abuse. This can create never-ending cycles of arguing which slowly becomes constant sniping and frustration as the constant need for consensus becomes wearisome. To the outside world, they are treated more as two individuals as opposed to a single unit.

Both are, theoretically, equal breadwinners, and both share chores.

In more trad lifestyles the husband makes family decisions. He both has the right to say “no” and takes responsibility for any decision. Even if the wife hectored you into doing something idiotic and destructive, he’s on the hook to say it was your decision. It goes without saying the nightmare scenario here is the husband who cares not one whit for the wife’s needs or the wife who demands the husband go along with everything she wants. To the outside world though, the family is a cohesive unit.

The man is expected to be the main breadwinner, but women working part-time is common. Women often find the side hustle an effective way to ease financial worries and give a reprieve from screaming kids.

Childrearing:

The PMC has fewer kids, but gives them massive financial investment both in education and leisure. Since they both work full time, they will find the best daycares available after hours of research and apply to pre-schools when the kid turns one.

Disney World vacations adding up to ten grand is not unheard of. Expensive travel sports, elite schools, special after-school programs, and the like spend an incredible amount of time and resources. The goal is not the transmission of values so much as becoming a productive member of the elite in existing institutions. They prefer standardized education models that let them rack up college credits in “practical” areas and follow a thoroughly modern curriculum. They optimize their education for test scores and activities that look good on a CV. This, unfortunately, leaves little time for independent exploration of interests.

They prefer structured play over unsupervised play, and the children are watched like hawks to ensure no bullying, horseplay, or other anti-social behavior is done.

Trads have many more kids and emphasize cultural transmission more than elite status. Moms are expected to spend the child’s early years under her care and in instances where they are forced to work full-time, extended family or trusted sitters are used. Daycare is strongly frowned upon. Children are more involved with kids from Church through their own how-grown local sports and arts than seeking the most prestigious travel teams or dance troupe. More time is given for exploring and independence, sometimes at the expense of necessary education. They prefer classical training, with the more gifted learning Latin and ancient literature over more contemporary offerings. For this reason, homeschooling and very religious schools are their ideals.

Instead of aiming for the elite in a ruthless battle in existing institutions, they want to create men who can become financially established quickly and women who know how to raise children. The boys learn to fix and build and the girls learn home management. In general educational categories such as reading, writing, science, etc, boys and girls are taught equivalently. Some gifted ones may be encouraged for the priesthood or the sisterhood as well as the arts to build the bulwark to run alternative institutions.

While trads are wary of who their kids hang our with, children have far more latitude with unobserved play. As long as the kids don’t have electronics they can run wild.

Openness:

The PMC are superficially more open to outsiders. While they may invite you to gatherings and exchange pleasantries, there is always the nervousness because of rapidly evolving elite consensus. Because of unpredictable changes in social mores, what is acceptable to believe one week might be verboten the next based on the next media blitz. Because of the constant fear of reputational destruction based on a verbal slip, they never truly open up to either their in-group or the out-group. Overall, they tend to be chameleons and rely on stock answers that can pass the acceptability filter.

Trads are far more distrustful of outsiders, oftentimes gauging them based on religious services attended, general lifestyle, and other qualifiers to ascertain whether they are trustworthy. Because of the, often justified, assumption they are surrounded by a hostile culture that can hurt them professionally or through bureaucracies like CPS, they keep tight lipped. Once one is seen as part of the in-group, they are far more frank with their opinions.

Social Institutions:

The PMC trusts the experts. Since they are inundated with core institutions, they follow what they are told. They will get their kids vaccines right on schedule, they will understand the newest parenting fads. They will accept the latest political mandates, or at least keep their mouths shut. Every viewpoint and action will be curated through a clear consensus mechanism to ensure it doesn’t fall outside acceptable bounds.

Trads have their own list of experts, though there are no prestigious institutions or single sources of truth behind them. Instead of an official bureaucracy like the CDC or FDA, it is a mix of the eccentric doctor a mom found on YouTube, your nurse friend, some random people they talked to during food co-op pickup, sperging out researching the topic online, or simply following what their parents taught. It’s a mix of research, social proof, and gut instinct that guides their choices.

Charity:

The PMC, as part of the managerial elite, see problems as systemic. They tend to think in terms of updating the software general culture runs on to eliminate social ills. Because of this bureaucratic mindset, issues are thought of in abstractions such as racism, homelessness, racism, etc. Therefore, they are advocates of the spanning NGO framework and legislative bodies to solve these problems. They tend to prefer technique and processes to remove social ills than getting bogged down in individual cases.

Trads prefer to put their charity towards something tangible. They prefer to donate to their local church or a parishioner who just had a baby and are on a limited income. Because of this, the charities they give to tend to be smaller and of more limited scope. Their spare time is more likely spent helping a guy shingle his roof or giving meals to the local homeless than protesting outside of a courthouse or spending time on a social activist board.

The can respond with astounding viciousness when they feel personally threatened, as any legislator who tried to add homeschooling regulations will tell you. Overall though, they tend to focus on supporting their in-group, where rich members will donate to a Church expansion but are less likely to donate to fix social pathologies outside his purview.

Both, however, have a strong interest in their immediate neighborhood, and will steadfastly attack visible blight. While the most progressive of the PMC might have the most permissive attitude towards druggies and criminals in the city, the buck stops when it encroaches on their neighborhood.

Reverse Rumspringa

The Amish have a tradition called Rumspringa where the young leave the solitude of their community to live in the wider world. They can then choose to come back or leave the community for good. For most of American history, a similar coming of age occurred, even if not endorsed by their community. Many youth from small towns, farms, and ethnic neighborhoods went to college, meshed into the professional classes, and abandoned their parochial lives. The reverse rarely happened. Over several generations, local economies have sustained an extensive brain drain of their best and brightest while the monoculture absorbed new talent with ease.

While it’s very early, there is the possibility this dynamic is turning on its head. Increasingly, people who would be involved in running our global technocratic infrastructure are choosing to reject status and striverism in favor of living a more organic life. Contrary to the stereotype of trads being ignorant and backward, they are increasingly from highly-educated and high-income cohorts, as the conversion figures to Orthodoxy and Catholicism clearly show. This doesn’t mean lawyers in these communities are becoming subsistence farmers. They’re working for law firms. It doesn’t mean engineers are cloistering and building shacks in the middle of the woods. They are working at Ford. Still, they increasingly spend their income and time on alternative institutions, which will in time turn into alternate power centers. You have eccentric professors building new schools, skilled craftsmen with a locked-in clientele of fellow trads who will pay top dollar for their services, and a network of like-minded individuals that can resist social engineering.

This doesn’t mean the trads are taking over the PMC, nor does it mean that the collapse of elite culture is imminent. As of right now, the flow outward is more a stream than a tidal wave, and more people from parochial communities are getting sucked into the monoculture than vice versa. What it means, though, is that the PMC no longer has a monopoly on “the best and brightest”, nor to they have an all-encompassing monoculture one must be a part of to attain power. Instead of power blocs of government bureaucracies, academies, NGOs and prestige media that all have the same message and moral framework, alternatives are sprouting.

What happens when Opus Dei converts an aspiring Harvard lawyer? What happens when a doctor builds a natural family planning practice? What happens when a talented accountant starts a business catering to his small trad cohort? Power seeps out of the managerial state and into these alternative communities. The global power base weakens as a local power base grows. The monoculture is finding itself unable to absorb talent like it used to, and their skilled bulwark are increasingly disillusioned with what they offer. Good jobs are harder to come by, status is more difficult to attain, and the social games are suffocating. Elites are unable to create a meaningful existence, and are fighting a war against hundreds of pockets of resistance that promise a stronger sense of belonging.

Stronger family cohesion allows for more effective flexing of economic, political, and cultural will. A unified domestic front is easier to builds alliances with adjacent families as opposed to dealing with two relatively autonomous individuals. They also have significantly more children who more difficult to boil off. The more income and status agnostic trad culture is not as burdened to live in wealthier neighborhoods, are not as economically and socially encumbered by as many broken families, and increasingly have the antibodies against modernity to keep everyone in the fold.

Prestige media knows cracks are showing in the managerial machinery, from mass media to elementary education, that are increasingly unable to fulfill their fundamental tasks, and trad communities have proven able to succeed here with a fraction of the budget and manpower. When things worked well, the monoculture could easily swallow the top talent from parochial areas. This is no longer the case.

They are noticing a large cohort of talented male defectors and know the only way to stop generational cultural shift is to stymie their ability to raise a family. The ground troops taking their orders from legacy media declare this is out of compassion for women who will fall to these sexist, domineering men, but the meta-game is an entrenched elite trying to hold on to imperial power as alternative power centers are forming all around them.

The current media blitz is both manipulation and a subtle threat to women to stay part of the monoculture. As the quality of the trad male grows, women will naturally turn their heads and wonder what this trad thing is all about. The respected man running a fraternal organization in a small tribe starts to look like a better prospect than an interchangeable middle-manager working at GloboCorp.

There is, of course, the core spiritual aspect to all of this. Most people who enter a more “trad” community do so out of a conviction there is more to this world. The spiritual dead-end of technological managerialism is the outcome of an ossified system that works in symbols and abstractions while forgetting the human elements and deeper meanings a society should foster. While technique and processes have been wildly effective in the last century, they may be reaching their breaking point as the drive to homogenize humanity reaches hard limits as all spirituality, organic life, and higher meaning are washed away.

Back when there was a more organic aristocracy, there was still an opening for spiritual fulfillment in addition to accumulating status and power. There is little organic about the current managerial system, and many men are finding their place in a more localized, religious setting where they can be a big fish in a smaller pond.

Time will tell whether these early stages will morph into something groundbreaking, or whether it will be relegated a small blip in American history. The jury is out so far, but what is clear is there is no reason to follow the hysterics. The trad phenomenon is a natural reaction to social blights that are becoming impossible to hide, and angry screeds are not going to stop defectors, nor is hectoring going to stop women from entering spaces where there are higher quality men. If you want to understand trads, talk to trads, and ignore those browbeating you under the false pretense of looking out for your well-being.

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In a similar fashion, the world of Gattaca is a clean and stable techno-utopia. Genetic diseases have disappeared, the social order is largely bereft of violence, people go into space with the nonchalance of a business meeting, and everyone is high-trust and high-IQ. The future society formed by total devotion to improving the human genome, with everyone using in-vitro fertilization and gene editing to ensure the best genetics move forward. Natural children, therefore, are subject to heavy discrimination.

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Enter Vincent Freeman (this film is anything but subtle), a “God-child” conceived by a tryst in the back of a car, and therefore doomed to be a member of the underclass with a genetic heart condition. From his early years, he has had a fascination with space. When told the only way he will see the inside of a spaceship is to clean it, decides to make a deal with the underworld, buying the identity of a genetically perfect but crippled man who gave up on life. Through this new identity, he gets employed at a top tier aerospace firm called Gattaca. When there’s a murder in the facility, he is at risk of being found out by private investigators and having his dreams of entering space dashed. Through pure force of will and a doctor who looked the other way at his fraud, he attains his dream of entering space.

“Gattaca” was a childhood favorite of mine. Like many older millennials though, I started to form a more critical eye about the moral framework of many of these childhood favorites. Many movies I originally enjoyed can’t stand anymore. I once loved “American Beauty”, and now would give full-throated support to burning every copy of that atrocity. It’s both frustrating and liberating to look at media and immediately see the subtle and not-so-subtle ways you are being manipulated. Upon rewatching Gattaca, its morality is far more gray than my original memory.

While the movie is uplifting, in the end, Vincent will be nothing but trouble. His heart condition was real, and he had no business going into space on a long mission. The other passengers will likely have to deal with a corpse, be short-staffed for the mission to Titan, and even with his very real contributions at Gattaca, will end up being a net negative. His “screw-you, I’m going into space” mindset was anti-social, a monomaniacal want to exploit the techno-society that kept him down to experience something most citizens, even in this time, never did.

Of course, the movie is from the perspective of Vincent, and is bereft of questioning the moral choices of the protagonist. It’s an ambitious man rebelling against an inhuman system that is cold and bereft of humanity. They operate under an assumption of genetic determinism while ignoring unpleasant confounding factors that complicate their vast but sterile world. He doesn’t have the power to overthrow it, but he can thwart it enough to fulfill his dreams. In short, it’s a beautifully constructed work of propaganda.

A lot of its emotional weight depends on the audience’s already latent distaste for eugenics. It doesn’t make an effective case for why in-vitro fertilization and genetic modification is a moral failing. While I have a philosophical, moral, and technological aversion to IVF, the movie assumes the audience in already on board that this is a negative while never grappling with the questions it raises. In our more secular age, this sort of gene selection is viewed more and more positively.

This has led some dissidents to consider the movie a sort of Rorschach test. Can you see through the tear-jerking music, gorgeous scenery, and uplifting story to see the narcissism of a man who is willing to live a totally fraudulent life, put innocent people at risk, and likely will cause massive financial harm to fulfill a personal dream? Can you see how detrimental a world of Vincent Freemans would be? Can you get past the “eugenics bad” brainwashing to realize that these people live in a Utopia?

It stands to reason why they think this way. Everything is managed well, everything looks elegant, and everyone is trusting. Contrast this with our current world, an age of anarcho-tyranny where addicts shoot up in the streets and DEI policies make everyone’s boss a nitwit with an axe to grind. Regardless of background, everyone is assumed to have the capacity to be a rocket scientist, and countless hours are wasted to keep this myth alive. It’s obvious why a purely predictable techno-polis with clear rules, expectations, and understanding of genetic limitations feels like a godsend. Watching this movie in the 2020’s hits far different than the 1990’s.

Of course, this society is also one that is steadily losing its humanity. Every decision is through metrics and Vincent, though he shows extreme competence, is shrugged off because of a sub-optimal genetic profile. It’s orderly, but also bereft of exceptions for factors not quantified. Most of all, it ignores the core purpose of a society, to give its inhabitants a sense of place and belonging. Vincent’s immutable qualities, his genes, doom him from attaining this from the start.

The movie implies there is a large black-market consisting of people who fell through the cracks of the more visible aspects of society. Whether through a disappointing genetic profile or simply a case of having no place for their aspirations, underneath the veneer is an angry underclass formed through a rigid ideology that will eventually tear it apart.

Contrary to the world we live in today, where every rule seems to have an exception that allows a guy with thirty arrests to walk free and certain interests can act in ways that would jail the rest of the population, the world of Gattaca has no such exceptions. Both structures create a resentful underclass, one that can’t stand the chaos and arbitrariness, and one that has skills and ambitions but doesn’t fit into an easily quantifiable mold. While you can point to Vincent’s fraud and deceit, one has to ask if he owes anything to a social structure that refuses to recognize his potential. Many are just as unhappy and unfulfilled as he is, and one can’t fault a guy who says “fuck it” and gets his. No matter how aesthetically pleasing a place it, is has to have meaning for those living in it.

Regardless of the technological or material advancement of a society, people will be destroyers if it doesn’t fulfill human wants. There will always be out-groups, but if a cultural elite has no mechanism for good actors to rise up, their resentment will go towards destructive ends or get exploited by others. Even the most utopian world will be resented if it fails to instill meaning. In Gattaca, going to space became a mundane matter, but to Vincent it was a life quest, and you need people like this. There’s always the tug-of-war between individual ambition and group cohesion. There a Faustian, reckless ambition that pushes forward and creates chaos but also new opportunity. There’s he cool, controlled planning that creates the predictability necessary for hundreds of millions to live in peace. Both need to be balanced.

In the future, maybe the world of Gattaca will realize the limitations of genetic determinism, just like our current society is beginning to realize the intrinsic constraints of one’s genetic code. A future Gattaca world might understand that exceptions will not bring chaos when done prudently, just like our society is realizing countless exceptions make said exception the rule. While most genetic profiles will make a future rocket scientist unlikely, it doesn’t stand to reason they can’t bring value in other surprising ways that should be nurtured. Our world, and the world of Gattaca, have no sense of this dynamicism by veering in opposite directions. The balance has been lost.

If they can’t achieve that balance again, then maybe they deserve to fall.

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In the current era, it’s easy to get stuck in a bubble and feel too secure in your views. The increasingly curated algorithms of social media makes this problem even more difficult to avoid, and steps have to be taken to ensure you are engaging with the wider political climate. You need to challenge yourself with serious works from serious people that disagree with you. When I came across a new book from the , “Why Postliberalism Failed” by and , I thought I landed on such a challenge.

Like many young men, I had largely a libertarian view of government, so the Catholic libertarianism that many thank tanks of this era espoused in the 2000’s was a good fit. As my views changed to coincide more with the ascendent Trumpian right, their argumentation became less compelling as the conservative, mild libertarianism of the right got trampled time and time again by their opponents.

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This doesn’t mean they are wrong, and I was looking forward to academics finally taking postliberal thought seriously. To say I was disappointed with the result is putting it mildly, and reading “Why Liberalism Failed” feels like a time-warp to the pearl clutching, guilt by association, and refusal to argue fundamental concepts I thought was left behind in the 2010’s. Unfortunately, instead of a work that has the guts to challenge foundational postliberal thinkers, it is a prime example of how uncurious the academic world has become.

Squid Ink and Handwaving Tactics

The problem starts right away with their definition of postliberalism:

What is postliberalism? We answer in more details in a later chapter, but for now a brief definition is that postliberalism is the name for an authoritarian ideology dedicated to using state power to impose a reactionary Catholic vision of the Church, family, and labor.

This view of post-liberalism is very constricted and only applicable to a narrow range of thought. You also already see the emotive terminology in place with “authoritarian” and “reactionary” that comes close to a strawman. The authors seem to define postliberalism in these terms for a sort of “inside baseball” among the increasingly powerful bloc of Catholics with anti-liberal leanings, of whom he considers J.D. Vance a participant in. Vance likely considers himself a postliberal, but I don’t see him accepting this definition. might agree, and the authors spend an excessive amount of time analyzing him, but the vast majority inside the coalition one would deem “postliberal” would not. , whose book “Why Liberalism Failed” the authors based their title on, certainly would define it differently. At best, this is an aggressive subset of a subset of the postliberal sphere.

While postliberalism, like liberalism, can be nebulous to define, a a more charitable definition would be something like: Postliberalism is the rejection of the idea of a neutral public square as well as the elevation of personal license above community needs. Postliberalism advocates organic traditions over rapid upheavals and understands that human flourishing requires the State to have a paternal role in encouraging the public good.

It’s certainly not a good start to a supposedly academic book written to convince, and comes across more as a way of circling the wagons around an enemy using the most loaded language possible.

These biased and rhetorical definitions are legion in this text, often using a classic tactic of asserting what they are tasked with proving.

Catholic integralism is—or was—a discredited, authoritarian interpretation of Catholic social teaching.

In what way is integralism discredited? Is a strict separation of Church and State In what way is it authoritarian? Would banning abortion, even if the majority accepted it, be authoritarian? It is impossible to pin down the authors on what their idea of liberalism is, and the extent one’s religious views can account for how to run a country. They wave this away by stating the book is not a defense of liberalism:

As a final note, this book is not a defense of liberalism. One of us is comfortable calling himself a Catholic liberal and the other prefers to think of himself as a Catholic republican.

The authors never state what a “Catholic liberal” or a “Catholic republican” means. This comes across as a cop-out, and I am certain that the views of the two authors would be measured in centimeters along the vast span of the Overton Window. Does this liberalism mean the 1800’s laissez faire type of only negative rights. Do they coincide with the current civil right regime or an earlier one?

They do allow postliberals to define liberalism though:

Liberalism, for Deneen, refers to the emancipation of the person from natural limits, and these limits include economic, political, and communal limits. Before liberalism, Deneen wrongly imagines, people took for granted what human nature was, believed the role of an economy was to serve the common good, and wanted a politics of order to constrain license. Liberalism, however, sought to redefine the person as without limits. In science, the person becomes mutable, able to change the meaning of marriage, reassign genders, and escape death. In economics, the person becomes subject to endless efforts to grow the economy regardless of whether that growth disproportionately benefits the few.

This description of liberalism is very bad,

Usually when someone disagrees with a definition, especially one becoming more ubiquitous, one would go through the the flaws in its logic and come to a better frame of reference. This is especially true when your enemy is attempting to define your movement. Yes, Deneen’s definition is rhetorically loaded, but that’s when you come in and explain what it actually is. If liberalism IS NOT a social definition of an emancipated person as an individual without natural bonds and with infinite mutability, what is it?

They don’t answer this, taking it as a self-defeating definition stemming from the 2010’s due to the collapse of conservative moral capital. There’s no relation between the two things, as much as the authors want to associate them. They point and immediately throw squid ink, trying to pull the reader another direction by associating it with frustrated members of the conservative coalition.

The closest they get is to their stance is delineating American liberalism from Continental liberalism, a distinction they accuse postliberals of not understanding. Fair enough, but they then proceed to step on a rake.

There are much more plausible accounts of American “liberalism,” but these focus on the continuities of American constitutionalism with natural law. Paul DeHart has shown how the American conception of constitutional republicanism departed from continental republicanism in a myriad of ways, but most of all in the American position that rights and duties come from God. Continental republicans believed rights and duties came from individual consent.

……

A postliberal could respond by saying that the American republican tradition has largely declined in favor of a liberal one that surfaced during the years after the Second World War. This response is somewhat true, as secular liberal theorists like John Dewey and John Rawls worked hard to offer a secular foundation for a progressive reinterpretation of the American Constitution. For Dewey, this reinterpretation liberated “intelligence” to experiment scientifically in matters of public policy and creatively in forms of public expression. For Rawls, this reinterpretation was one committed to efforts at economic liberation by way of redistribution through a centralized welfare state. However, this argument also proves the point of this section—that these are innovations that have nothing to do with the American republican tradition.

This is an hilarious and utterly damning concession to the postliberals, and more or less destroys the premise of the book. The authors basically admit the classical liberalism they are espousing NO LONGER EXISTS. The Deweys of the nation won, and the current managerialism in public policy in the FDR era has swept away the old American liberalism in favor of a modern welfare state, and the authors have no clue how to regain it.

With regard to government intervention, the authors seem to have a very libertarian approach to state power.

Even in Deneen’s final pages in which he speaks about the need for a common Christianity to fortify “forms of family, community, church, and a cultural inheritance,” he defends them not on their own terms but to thwart “thralldom to addictions afforded by big tech, big finance, big porn, big weed, big pharma, and an impending artificial Meta world that will assuage the miseries of an increasingly unbearable world we have actually built.” The priority is not on the common good but on the hatred common among the postliberal elite they wish to instill in their would-be clients.

The assertion seems to be that Deneen only speaks about family, community, church, etc. to attack his designated enemies. What’s bizarre about this assertion is assuming advocacy for family is a cynical framing used to attack modern vices, rather than disgust at porn, weed, and other social vices stemming from their love of family and community. It’s natural and right to hate that which tries to destroy what you love, and it’s obvious these modern vices left unchecked will destroy Christian society.

Frankly, this calls to question what a society where you can set up a weed shop next door, where big finance makes housing unaffordable, and corporations are free to fill their customers full of addictive substances looks like. If this is liberalism, it’s no wonder so many people want off the train.

Myopic History

Many pages are printed documenting the various battles between temporal and spiritual powers. The power of the Catholic Church waxed and waned through the history of the Holy Roman Empire, and the authors go into great lengths about many of the conflicts. The purpose is to paint the authority of the Church over temporal powers as a vessel for mass corruption and creating unnecessary instability, ultimately falling apart during the wars of religion.

The reactionary position was that the alliance of throne and altar was necessary for the preservation of good order. However, this alliance had historically created rivalries that spilled over into countless wars and failed to prevent or reverse the Reformation. Throne and altar ruled over France when the revolution broke out. How is it, then, that they are necessary for the preservation of order, when they seem constantly to promote disorder?

The main direction for this argument is the more integralist states of times past brought conflict and strife, and the ascent of liberal republics finally brought the necessary stability. Of course, politics is never orderly, and this attempt to portray hundreds of years Medieval Christendom as a mess of instability and constant warring is jarring, given liberal republics have shown themselves to be far more unstable. The Republic after the French Revolution didn’t even last a generation before turning into a dictatorship, then into a constitutional monarchy, then a dictatorship, then a monarchy again, then a republic again. When when one looks the upheavals of the 1800’s and interwar period, you see a distinct pattern.

• The original “throne and altar” was destroyed.

• An unbalanced liberal regime formed

• The liberal regime could not sustain balance between existentially conflicting power blocs

• The liberal regime collapses and a strongman enters.

• A new regime forms.

Astute readers will understand this process is Carl Schmitt 101. When the friend/enemy distinction can’t be curtailed through deliberations, the center collapses, and someone decides the state of exception and takes power. Then anew, illiberal regime rises from the chaos to restore order. Sometimes they still call themselves a republic, but its substance has irrevocably changed. The American Civil War is a prime example of such an outcome.

The authors go into depth on some famous figures, such as Salazar, Franco, and others, explaining their inability to build a lasting “postliberal” state. They excoriate what they considered to be ruthless measures to maintain order while never assessing the total anarchy they needed to impose order upon. The authors condemn Franco as a terrible authoritarian, but what’s lacking it any idea of what statecraft entails. Did they think Franco could achieve military victory, create open elections and economic freedom, and everyone would just get along? The Spanish Civil War was orders of magnitude more vicious than the American Civil War, and an amicable peace was never achieved. Forming a republic out of that chaos would have just created more bloodshed and likely a communist takeover.

When postliberals logically counter with the abysmal track record of liberal republics in the interwar period, we get the typical handwaving.

issues like economic instability, foreign interference, fear of invasion, poor statesmanship, little experience in self-government, and low rates of literacy all contributed to the critical political and social problems nations faced during the interwar years. To tie these back to an inflated concept of liberalism is nothing more than a cheap intellectual shortcut designed to satisfy the concerned yet busy reader and excuse postliberal authors from doing anything more than telling ideological ghost stories.

It’s not an “ideological ghost story” to point out the failure of liberal republics to keep stability in times of strife, and it is not a “cheap intellectual shortcut” to question whether the priors of such a state contributed to its downfall, especially when the writers themselves depend on pointing to a postliberal state’s priors to the downfall of their regimes. The authors rely heavily on the relatively peaceful post-WW2 era, where America and its satellite states triumphed after the collapse of the USSR.

Of course, boasting of a relative peace of less than 100 years is stretching things, and ignoring the main reason for that peace, a military hegemon with incredible natural resources, vast amounts of space, a massive water defense barrier, and an industrious and high-IQ population that was able to impose its military and cultural might abroad. The authors imply this with the fall of the last holdouts of anti-liberal governments.

Economic liberalization followed, and Franco’s grip on the nation loosened as he grew older and western Europe fell more firmly under the American sphere of influence.

While, as with all their views, the authors leave their opinion on foreign intervention close to their chest, there is good reason to believe they support such a hegemonic relationship.

One final part of the postliberal politics is its isolationism. Postliberals regard America as a “liberal imperium” that has historically sought to impose objectively immoral beliefs like individual liberty and economic opportunity onto more traditional foreign nations—all with the aim of exploiting those populations in some way. Hence, the only good foreign policy for America is to roll back American military positions and assume global neutrality in all conflicts.

You see a lot of the “shining city on the hill” Reagan mentality here, a sort of manifest destiny for America to be the harbinger of liberty to the world. The framing of this as implying that postliberals consider individual liberty and economic opportunity as “objectively immoral” is an amusing strawman. Talk to a postliberal and he’ll explain how US foreign influence in reality is allowing gays to proselytize to minors, forcing immigration on a populace that doesn’t want them, and using a vast NGO apparatus to subvert client populations and kowtow politicians. The reader can decide which one is more accurate. They were against the Iraq war, so I’ll give them that though.

This separation into authoritarianism and personal freedom gives no insight into the balance between individual vice and the common good, and the fact that balance is not going to be the same for every nation. It may increase GDP to outsource business, but the deterioration of communities dependent on it is a cost on everyone. It might sate the masses to play on gambling apps all days, but it is detrimental to living a good life. Postliberals understand these tradeoffs and knows restricting vice is part of necessary statecraft.

They consider the postliberals the anomaly against the clearly triumphant liberal systems, but maybe liberalism and democracies were the anomaly, put on life support for a short time by American power. Maybe the cracks we are seeing now that American power is dwindling abroad will only widen until the entire artifice collapses.

“Anti-Semitism”, “Nazi”, “Conspiracy Theory”, and Other Thought-Terminating Cliches

By far the most disappointing aspect of this book was the relentless guilt by association. They spend most of their energy explaining how post liberals are way too online, unserious. prone to wild conspiracy theories, and anti-semetic. They argue this stems all the way down to foundational figures figures in postliberalism. Somehow though, these extremely online goofballs are close to attaining the presidency.

First, postliberalism is weird. Second, postliberalism is very online, as so much of it involves in-group memes and references. Third, postliberalism relies on authoritarian ideas, even relying on Nazi political theory to defend using political authority to attack private actors. Fourth, postliberalism is now one heartbeat away from the American presidency. How did a weird, very online form of right-wing authoritarianism rise so quickly to the top of American conservatism?

The worst is the anti-semitism accusations, a sort of thought-stop that, in the authors’ minds, tells the reader these are bad people and can be ignored. For example:

The reactionary literature is anti-Semitic conspiracy theories

Lets put aside that you can find political theorists across the spectrum with politically incorrect views regarding the Jewish people. Frankly, negative views of Jews has been the rule rather than the exception until the post-WW2 era, and now modern times are reverting again to older norms. The authors go to great lengths not to address their arguments, but try to associate with with “Judeo-Masonic” conspiracy theories. Another such example:

Pico eventually rejected his work and became a follower of the radical Dominican priest Fr. Girolamo Savonarola before dying at the young age of 31. Perhaps this was the source of concern in the Simonini letter, but these events precede the French Revolution by centuries and have no obvious relationship to it. More likely this is simply anti-Semitism, as explained below.

The header of the section for French counter-revolutionary Louis de Bonald is “The Founder of Modern Anti-Semitism”. The onslaught is so relentless I wonder if the working title was “everyone I don’t like is an anti-semite.” Most of the “rebuttals” of the thinkers is done not through reading their texts and dissecting theory, but associating the people themselves with ideas of a “Judeo-Masonic” conspiracy theory. If such tenuous associations is enough to disprove their thinking, The authors are going to have to dismiss a large portion of the Church fathers as well.

Pages are also spent on De Maistre’s associations with freemasonry. If you want to get into depth about his views in his classic “Considerations On France”, you’re not going to get it. One small quote and a snarky response is the most they offer.

The worst part is Carl Schmitt. He has, by far, the most formidable argument against classical liberalism.

The work of Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt (1888-1985) is the culmination of reactionary political thought. Schmitt’s mature political work began in response to the evident failures of the Weimar parliamentary system that governed Germany after its defeat in the First World War. He found liberal proceduralism simply incapable of reckoning with the true nature of the political, which he defined as the power to declare the “state of exception,” or emergency powers during a period of crisis, and the subsequent reemergence of the “friend-enemy distinction.” Rather, parliamentary systems buried the political beneath endless hearings and regulations to avoid reckoning with crises, but the political always returned at the point of a true crisis, at which point even liberal parliamentarians would concede the need for a dictator to destroy the enemies of the state.

This is a fairly good synopsis actually. While the Friend/Enemy distinction is harsh, it lies bare why politics exists at all. While “the sovereign is he who decides the exception” is a terse and disturbing assertion to more democratically minded people, the logic follows from its premises. In order for the liberal idea of open discernment and universal agreement to seem feasible, one has to wrestle with the scenario of two groups whose views are existentially conflicting and no compromise can be made. One has to know when the process breaks down who has the ultimate authority. The authors never try to rebut him. They call him a Nazi, anti-semite, and conspiracist then call it a day.

Probably the most baffling quote is the following though:

And the labels reveal the deeper problem. Postliberals traffic endlessly in nominal categories—right-liberals, left-liberals, regime liberals, neo-liberals, neo-conservatives—yet they rarely pause to fix principles. What is human nature? What are the natural forms of human association? What are the conditions under which families form and sustain themselves, under which men and women find productive work and educate their children? These are not questions the postliberals ask,

This will come to a surprise of the theorycels who can’t get enough of Schmitt, De Maistre, Spengler, Evola, Nick Land, etc. This doesn’t even get into Yarvin’s famously loquacious posts. If anything, the post-liberal sphere is awash in incessant theorizing while often lacking in practical action. To argue that they aren’t thinking about the “conditions under which families form and sustain themselves“, you would have to ignore pretty much every popular writer in the sphere, since they all have an opinion on this.

Not only do they ask these questions, but they are fundamental to postliberal thought. The most basic principle of post-liberal thought is people are tribal, and human biodiversity means a system of government that works for one people will not work for another. They argue importing people from Somalia1 will not magically make them Americans, and they will adhere to their old customs and tribalism from back home. Of course, such obvious realities would are the ultimate crime-think, a rebuttal of modern liberal thought, and the authors have no interest in pursuing it.

It’s Already Dead

The authors admit that postliberals are rising, while taking the stance that they will ultimately fail. The authors fail to figure out any means to stop this instability though.

Postliberals wish to adopt these techniques to use against the Left. However, historically, conservatives had rejected using the “long march” because they opposed not only the ends of the Left but also its means. What conservatives aimed to conserve was not just individual liberty and traditional morality but also the proper institutional arrangements found in the American Constitution, federalism, and originalist interpretation in the courts. Postliberals see this kind of conservatism as an unwitting collaboration with the Left because of how badly the conservatives have been beaten by the Left.

Note that the book doesn’t even question that the left won institutional control, nor does it argue the takeover was not done through illiberal means. What’s left unsaid is baffling, as the authors seem to admit the left uses illiberal methods of institutional capture to gain power and wield it, but talk about the threat postliberals pose by deciding to use the more effective illiberal means. How do you gain back power after your government has been corrupted to pursue detrimental ends? I guess preach about the Constitution some more.

The authors have no answer to illiberal means of gaining power. They simply paint it as wrong by association. Maybe power has always been through conspiracy and coalition building, not “convincing the masses”. Deliberation has a place, but to argue every political issue can be solved through such processes is hopelessly naive.

They try to point to the success of conservatives, saying that postliberals are “cherry-picking conservatism’s failures as more significant than its successes.”

Finally, with respect to the diagnostic claim, the postliberal criticism of purportedly conservative failures is highly selective. A social conservative should lament the way the Biden Administration leaned in on flying Pride flags from every public building. They should not forget, however, that the “liberal” regime also accomplished the following:

Won the Second World War

Won the Cold War

Landed on the Moon

Ended Jim Crow racism

Pulled tens of millions of children out of poverty

Developed modern medicine and dental hygiene Dramatically raised standards of living

The Second World War was won through putting the United States in a wartime economy and curtailing many freedoms. Ending Jim Crow racism and other parts of the civil rights revolution were not done through liberal means, but mostly judicial fiat by defining an entirely new category called “protected classes”2. We landed on the moon by giving sweetheart deals to Nazi engineers. To call these victories of liberalism is a stretch, and one can’t help but notice the last “victory” was forty years ago, and we have continuously been strangled by managerialism, the destruction of freedom of association, and anti-white fervor since then. If this is victory, I would hate to see defeat.

This inability to see the writing on the wall is rife in this book and comes across as rolling the red carpet for the worst of society to continue to trounce their enemies with impunity. Regarding the most existential issue of Heritage Americans, immigration:

Indeed, another dark element of American habits is to reject foreigners, especially now as they compete for social welfare programs. American Catholic migrants were once such foreigners and some, in case of many of the Haitians in Springfield, Ohio, still are.

Who voted for this? Do they have any clue how corrupt it makes the Catholic Bishops, who receive hundreds of millions to support this, look?3

If one looks at American history, most upheavals weren’t from a wellspring of liberal, constitutional discourse, but raw power and constant states of exception. Lincoln arrested entire state legislatures and eliminated due process in the Civil War during the time the authors have the rosiest picture of their ideal form of government. FDR famously transformed the Washington bureaucracy by strong-arming the Supreme Court. The Warren Court found all sorts of new constitutional rights under the sofa4. The COVID panic showed the power of the administrative state when it closed churches while keeping liquor stores open. Are we actually arguing this is Liberalism? Are we seriously saying our way of life is getting conserved?

To put it bluntly, arguing that conservatives actually have conserved anything is going to give you negative converts to your cause. People can see defeat after defeat with their own two eyes.

Probably the most damning issue for Liberalism is that no one believes in it anymore.

While the temples of Liberalism are empty because faith in it is dead, “Fascism has created a living faith; and that this faith is very powerful in the minds of men, is demonstrated by those who have suffered and died for it.” In short, for Mussolini, Fascism was postliberal.

“Faith in it is dead” is a key insight. Mussolini understood that Liberalism is not a neutral space. It is an ideology with a moral framework that gradually shifts towards hedonism and infinite license. It was never a neutral framework, but built out of very specific geopolitical realities. While the authors tend to push liberalism as the null-hypothesis, with the burden of proof lying with its opponents, when there is no generalized consensus anymore, you’re on an even playing field.

They argue that a state based on Catholic social teaching will be near impossible without a wholly Catholic population.

The transition to the modern world—with its more complex social organization, technology, high education and literacy levels, and economic prosperity—destabilized and eventually dissolved Christendom, and it is difficult to imagine a stable re-emergence of it under modern conditions. Moreover, there is some historical asymmetry that prevents such a return because unlike medieval minds, we are now aware of alternative possibilities that could secure civic peace and the Church’s own freedom, without succumbing to indifference, all while better respecting human dignity and conscience.

It’s unclear what “alternative possibilities” the authors point to here, given the aggressive secularism imposed largely through judicial fiat on the entire Western world. It’s not even indifferentism to religion, but active hostility. While the authors argue that such judicial tyranny has waned, what’s forgotten is how rare the ratchet goes back. The only significant reversal to these court edicts of the 1950’s to 1970’s is Roe V. Wade and reversing the Chevron doctrine. The Civil Rights regime is still firmly in place, and the postliberals are the only ones with the intellectual arsenal to push back against it.

As for a non-Catholic population being unwilling to become a hard-line confessional state, fair enough, but if laws based on “reactionary” Catholic social teaching restores order, reinvigorates the middle class5, and builds long-term family stability, people will support it. After all, the entire point of Catholic Social Teaching is to create world that directs humanity towards positive material and spiritual ends, correct? Will it look the same as medieval Christendom? Of course not, but the principles remain the same. If such principles are “reactionary”, then call me “King Alan.” It’s a more tenable goal than to assume their ideal constitutional democracy still exists or can be restored.

No political system is perfect, but constitutional democracy has outdone all alternatives. If the case is that parsimony, generality, stability, etc., are desirous aspects of a system of rules because they allow for a more creative and innovative civil society, then it looks much less desirable to have a highly discretionary rule by experts, even if such experts rule by law.

I’m wondering what “Constitutional Democracy” the authors are referring to here. Are we talking the new Constitution after the Civil War? The new managerial Constitution built after the FDR administration? The Post-1960’s Civil Rights Constitution? While only a few amendments have been written to the Constitution, the interpretations have morphed into “de facto” new forms of government. The legislature has essentially abdicated its responsibility to “rule by experts” and the judiciary is the prime mover of increasingly unhinged social engineering. In what way is “discretionary rule by experts” not the norm now? We already live in a society run by judges and bureaucrats, with the President the only possible balance against their tyranny. When was the last time a judge got impeached for a clearly farcical ruling?

The rebellion against Kritarchy and Managerialism is what is driving the discontent, and the platitudes that we somehow live in a “Constitutional Democracy” when every politician seems to betray his constituents, when every judge is dead-set on anarchy, and every so-called organic wellspring terrorizing the public seems to be coordinated through a vast network of rabblerousers paid through NGO patronage networks.

Postliberals understand that there are no names and faces associated with the social upheavals they are seeing, and their elected representatives are ineffectual at best. They are sick of being controlled by rogue judges, faceless bureaucrats, and social engineering by an untouchable caste of academics and journalists, whom Yarvin describes as “the Cathedral”.

The authors spend a lot of time with post Vatican II social documents to bolster their case for a soft separation of Church and state along with an unrestricted market that is unconvincing. The core of Catholic social teaching is that the family, not the individual, is the fundamental unit of society. This means the state has an obligations, first and foremost, to ensure proper family formation. Modernity is destroying those bonds with lax divorce, destroying middle class incomes through outsourcing, sanctioning every sort of vice known to man, and the ubiquitous discrimination against breadwinning males in the name of equality. This also puts it at total odds with the individualism of liberalism. While it’s easy to lambast failed family formation policies such as tax credits6, at least they have their priorities straight.

Second, the Church has always taught that the spiritual realm trumps the temporal realm. It has always argued there are values every nation must espouse, regardless of the opinion of the populace. The common good has always had precedence over individual license. Small business has always taken precedence over mega-corporations. One can argue where the balance lies and how much you put the thumb on the scale, but neutrality has never been a principle of Catholic Social teaching.

While the authors want to castigate postliberals for living in the past, the truth is the authors are the ones pining for glory days. Whether it is the classical liberalism of the 1800’s or the republicanism of the days before FDR, they refuse to admit their ideals no longer exist. They can thump their chests and complain that a minority infiltrating and taking over a government apparatus is Machiavellian and immoral, but they are at odds to explain why, except it’s against their pre-determined rules. Unless they have a better plan than poorly argued works of rhetoric like “Why Postliberalism Failed”, the long march to irrelevance will continue unabated.

My main disappointment was this book could have been good. There are many insights from libertarians that are beneficial in understanding the world. I like Schmitt and De Maistre, but know they’re not bulletproof, and it’s frustrating that an supposedly academic work refused to seriously wrestle with their thought. Postliberalism is, after all, an effort to restore old traditions and social structures that were lost, and some of that are the good aspects of liberalism.

I for one support freedom of association and condemn the government destroying Catholic communities.

Postcards From Barsoom

White Ethnic Cleansing as Social Control

The author of today’s guest post is Alan Schmidt, who many of you are probably familiar with from the excellent Social Matter. Which, while so far as I know having no direct connection to the sadly departed Social Matter of NRx lore, is an erudite and eclectic blog in the best tradition of the old Social Matter, with recent entries including…

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2 years ago · 442 likes · 168 comments · Alan Schmidt and John Carter

I condemn no-fault divorce and want to strengthen the family to match Catholic ideals.

I believe in subsidiarity and reject the hyper-financialization of society.

I’m sure the authors are serious about returning to older constitutional norms and won’t blanch at such common sense reforms.

It could have been a wake-up call not to reject everything from the old order, but instead the authors wrote not to convince postliberals, but to rally their ever-shrinking cadre of supporters. The future will not be some sort of hardline Catholic papal satellite, but it will certainly not look like what the authors consider ideal. For all their talk of postliberal nostalgia, the authors are the ones stuck in the past. By refusing to grapple with postliberal thinkers in a serious way, they have not only shortchanged their readers, but themselves.

Thank you for reading Social Matter. If you liked this article, please share and subscribe. If you want to see more of my work, consider becoming a paid subscriber.

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4

The word “privacy” does not appear in the Constitution. The Warren Court found it there anyway. In Griswold v. Connecticut (1965), the Court struck down a state law that banned married couples from using contraceptives. Justice Douglas, writing for the 7-2 majority, reasoned that several amendments in the Bill of Rights — the First, Third, Fourth, and Ninth — create “penumbras, or zones, that establish a right to privacy,” and that the government has no business intruding into the bedroom of a married couple. - https://legalclarity.org/what-was-the-warren-court-and-why-does-it-matter/

“penumbras, or zones, that establish a right to privacy”

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Windfalls do give a small but statistically significant bump in fertility when the males receive them. This, of course, unlocks a lot of uncomfortable facts and necessary policy changes the authors likely don’t wish to engage with-

Cremieux Recueil

Fertility Goes Up When Men Win

This was a timed post. The way these work is that if it takes me more than one hour to complete the post, an applet that I made deletes everything I’ve written so far and I abandon the post. You can find my previous timed post here…

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9 months ago · 153 likes · 2 comments · Cremieux

There was an amusing disturbance that inflicted the diversity rainbow a couple years back in Hamtramck, Michigan. As demographics of the area have dramatically shifted in the last decades, the Muslim majority area took advantage of its numbers and began imposing their will against leftist pieties and banned gay flags from public buildings. The schadenfreude was hilarious, with leftist scolds in dismay that their pet minorities didn’t actually care one whit about their sacred beliefs.

Muslim residents packing city hall erupted in cheers after the council’s unanimous vote, and on Hamtramck’s social media pages, the taunting has been relentless: “Fagless City”, read one post, emphasized with emojis of a bicep flexing.

…….

“There’s a sense of betrayal,” said the former Hamtramck mayor Karen Majewski, who is Polish American. “We supported you when you were threatened, and now our rights are threatened, and you’re the one doing the threatening.”

Welcome to politics 101, Karen.

While justly lambasted today, conservatives in times past often talked about the “natural conservatism” of many minority groups. They expressed how Muslims had more traditional family structures and moral codes, explicitly rejecting many aspects of modernity. On paper, they had a point. Muslims are patriarchal and traditional, with many of their social mores much more in line with traditional Americana than modern hedonism. Reality is more messy than paper though, and they vote with progressives for reasons other than ideology. They see the democratic party as a counter to the still powerful bloc of the white, Christian majority as well a method of resource extraction from the majority for their minority group. The fact that feminism and LGBT ideology is anathema in their culture is met with a shrug. That only applies to white people. The progressive coalition extracts resources for them but are unwilling to demand anything but their votes in return. It’s a good deal.

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To get a glimpse of how this looks, we can use a somewhat outlandish hypothetical. Imagine if, somehow, progressives treated traditional Catholics with a sort of divine awe. They give hundreds of millions in funding to Catholic covenant communities of dubious legality after they somehow manage to drive every other religious group out of the area. They even get promised their own federal representative in the Democratic machine.

The other evangelical communities are justifiably outraged at the TLM Catholics getting these sort of carve-outs and want them forced to play by the rules everyone else has to. Say you are a TLM Catholic in this area. The progressive coalition is antithetical to all the Catholic’s values, but they are giving you resources and power in return for a vote. They look the other way at your way of life being antithetical to their public pieties. On paper, looking only at the party platform, it makes no sense to vote for them. Looking at the wider political realities, it does. You can argue about the morality of such a coalition, but you can’t argue against its effectiveness.

Karen Majewski made the mistake of assuming a vote meant compliance with wider party norms instead of a shrewd political calculation.

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In the finale of Rome, Lucius Vorenus comes home after being mortally wounded in a skirmish. Like most relationships in home, his family issues were… extensive. His attempts at keeping the family together after his wife’s tragic death failed, and the culminating despairing father gave up and took a distant military post. His friend Pullo explains how the man should have died days ago but held on through force of will to visit his broken family. In his death bed, Lucius comes to the realization that they don’t want to see them. Instead of collapsing into despair, he simply exclaims, “I still love them.” The children finally relent to see their dying father one last time and they reconcile before he passes on.

The scene has always stuck with me. Even after his children seemed to disown him to the very end, there was no anger in his voice. He did what he had to do, and was at peace even in failure. It encompassed every parent’s worst fear in a poignant and all-too-real way, especially in this era of alienation between parents and their children.

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One aspect of the culture war I’ve had the luck to never experience is the “man up” pastor. I’ve never been scolded on the pulpit for not doing enough housework, for ignoring the kids, or for working too much. On the domestic side, of course, everyone those conversations, and in general society there is a clear template for what is considered fatherly duties when any need for a dad is admitted at all. It goes without saying these have duties become nebulous and restricted, leaving modern dads at a crisis as to what being a father even means.

In earlier times, a poor father would work himself to the bone so his son could inherit a prosperous farm. He would not be playing catch, but working with his children in the fields showing the skills they would need to survive. Oftentimes he would be gruff and harsh, as the children would be entering a world far more unforgiving than their father’s stern words. Behind every correction though, was the knowledge that keeping a child soft and coddled would mean death.

If one was from a more prosperous background, the father would be the one working through his network to find a suitable trade or alliance. He would send his child off with a relative or ally to stay and train under another house. The father understood childhood ended quickly, and had the resolve to ensure his child would not spend time where he should be learning and achieving something doting around the household. The household became wealthy through the efforts of countless ancestors, and only eternal diligence would keep it that way.

Probably most importantly, marriage prospects had to be arranged with the father’s approval. Often the father would have a strong hand on who his child married, if he didn't choose the spouse outright. The father would be responsible for family alliances and the continued security of the family name. In short, picking the next generation’s political and social alliances through marriage fell to the father, though it goes without saying the child had say in the matter as well.

You see some of this today, but in different forms. The father is often researching the best sports coaches to give his child an edge, or maybe the better school. While he is often not involved as much in the day-to-day tasks of education, he has a keen eye on the macro level skills the child is earning and their future work prospects. He does home improvement projects around the house. He is present at the dinner table. He takes everyone to Church. He still gives “the talk” about girls to his sons while the mother gives “the talk” to his daughters. One can see how these old responsibilities have faded away or been diluted.

Most fathers work for a corporation, and the vast majority have no small business for their kids to inherit. The best they can do is save money, which is no small thing, but not a legacy. Even if there is a business, it is considered immoral and unseemly to pressure a child to keep it running, and general culture sees such transfers as uncouth, a sort of nepotism. Dads can teach practical trades, but it’s increasingly seen as “free labor”, a chore instead of a rite of passage. It’s seen as an imposition to demand one’s child goes to religious services after a certain age, and making a child learn the father’s trade is seen as narcissistic, an unwillingness to let their child be their own person. And heaven help you if you disapprove of who the child brings home.

If one looks at the role of “good fathers” in general consciousness, ignoring the majority who sees the role as that of a buffoon or a faulty mother, all the activities are focused on giving a happy childhood to his children. He plays video games with him. He helps with his schoolwork. He encourages the child’s new hobbies. He accepts whatever girl he brings home. Everything is built around spending time doing what the child wants and accepting the child’s decisions. Dad is a cheerleader whose primary goal is to build up his children’s self-esteem. The only time it is acceptable to force your child to do anything is modern, socially acceptable disciplines, like making him do homework or punishing him for anti-social behavior. And even this is limited.

The man who want to be a “good father” more than anything are most susceptible to making themselves pitiable in front their children. They are the ones with no backbone, who try to be a friend, and who are eager for their children’s approval. With the terrifying specter of alienation either by divorce or estrangement when the child reaches adulthood always a possibility, his only strategy is to please everyone. He wants to know he is “doing a good job”, that he is “putting his family first”.

Often it’s a sort of desperation, as he hates his job but accepts it to put bread on the table. His dreams have passed away in middle age, and he copes about his loss in social contacts by doubling down on the household. It’s a desperate grasp for a thread of identity that unravels due to too much strain, and his children can smell the weakness.

Times past has many stories of the distant father, the drunken father, the controlling father. All of them fell to some sort of insecurity and rightly became despised. Yet the new father that is supposed to replace these archetypes, “the cheerleader dad”, is just as scorned when kids enter adulthood. It’s no wonder why. He is superfluous, a non-entity, a limp rag who didn't give his children anything but vibes. There is a reason male cheerleaders are not respected, so it’s no wonder why it turns out this way.

There’s nothing wrong with being supportive of your child’s interests, nor is there anything wrong with being kind and supportive. Aloof fathers are just as toxic as needy fathers, and foster just as little respect. That’s not our core responsibility though. While a mother’s primary role is to keep a child safe and secure, a father’s role is to ensure the child is equipped to enter to world and thrive, and that requires effort beyond “fun” activities.

He knows when to let go and let the child become an adult, and also knows the child is part of a legacy that is bigger than him, spanning a vast chain of fathers through the ages who worked themselves to the bone so the family may survive and thrive. Your child is no more exempt from caring for this natural gift than you were, and it entails responsibilities. This requires direction, and while such direction can devolve into unhealthy domineering, it needs to be there. The father, most of all, needs to instill a sense of who they are. “I just want my child to be happy” is the mantra of a worm, not a man. It’s the dirilection of responsibility and conflict in the hope that things just work out.

Modernity has tried to make the father superfluous, and they have done an astounding job. While the mother has seen this same corrosion in her relationship to her children, the father is seen as the bigger threat. In the quest for creating the perfect individualistic, de-racinated consumer, the father is seen as the impediment in creating a world bereft of natural hierarchies and responsibilities. The father, as head of the household, is the prime recipient of such attacks.

Instilling virtue, discipline, and a sense of place will leave a stronger legacy than a thousand “fun” excursions. Carrying the family honor forward is the greatest gift a man can bestow. The neediness, lack of backbone, and need of affirmation is the end state of a man who wants to be accepted but no longer knows what he is supposed to do. A good father knows that sticking to his guns may cause friction. He knows that directing his child away from a spiritually vacuous existence will likely cause anger. He knows that standing by his principles may mean, especially in this age, complete loss of contact.

In few eras has it been harder to be a good father. The social contract now demands the father waive all his rights in return for delegating his old responsibilities to the State, except financial responsibilities of course. He is to stand aside as his child is inoculated into the new therapeutic culture that emphasizes self-actualization over natural bonds. The father is to raise the child, feed the child, encourage the child, but never insinuate a child’s own responsibilities or family honor he is tasked to maintain. This isn’t to say the child is a slave to his father’s desires, as a mature man knows there are many paths to a good life. The child is not just an independent, autonomous, person without deep, inherited responsibilities either. The father needs to keep this balance, even when general society screams about the backwardness of his ways.

He’ll do it anyways, because anything else but doing his duty is impossible to fathom. The most terrifying prospect is losing access to one’s children, but even worse is the existence where every action is a desperate bid to avoid such a possibility. Much of the time, his role as father will get everyone angry, and his moral compass will be the the only guide. The responsibility goes further than one’s immediate family, but those in your line who lived before and for those you want to live after. It’s the understanding you may be hated for doing the right thing, and no one will be giving you a pat on the back for being a “good father”.

Still, no matter the ups and downs of the relationships, no matter the pain, the frustrations, the tears, the thankless labor, and all the stupid mistakes, he’ll still love them.

Happy Father’s Day

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Few institutions have been fought over as much as education, and none have fallen to modern fads to the extent of the classroom. It’s been a total rout, with only a small subset of private schools and homeschool co-ops escaping the massive, hyper-standardized education juggernaut. History textbooks lost what little nuance they once had in favor of a bland, moralizing, Whig version of history. Bare excerpts have replaced long-form reading. New and poorly researched fads in pedagogy are developed and implemented every few years. Radical concepts of childhood development are mandated with no consideration of whether theory and practice mesh.

While academia pursues the latest craze, those of a more conservative bent are calling to return to the tried and true. Made history books patriotic instead of deconstructionist. Reinstate maligned drilling and memorizing dates. Instill classroom discipline. Make standardized tests more objective, run classrooms more like an imagined pinnacle of pedagogy in the 1950’s.

In recent years though, there is a push to go before Dewey’s educational framework inspired by the Prussian method became the standard. They demand a return to classical learning. Dorothy Sayers called these methodologies “The Lost Tools of Learning” in her famous lecture in 1948, more widely read now than when she was alive. The classical philosophy of education rested around three distinct developments in a child’s education: Grammar, Dialectic, and Rhetoric. The youngest focus on learning the rules of language. Later they move past memorization to analyzing the links between disparate facts and ideas, followed by the final stage where the student has the knowledge base to use logic, analytics, and poetic language to sway his audience. Contrary to rhetoric being frowned upon, the classics emphasize its necessity to transmit understanding by unlocking the audience’s senses and imagination. These deeply conflict with modern educational practices and philosophy.

While classical styles of learning have had resounding success in homeschool communities and are embraced by a small cohort of private universities, its influence has not extended far into secular education. As much as its ideology expresses love for pluralism and diversity of thought, its intrinsic respect for the Western tradition and its pursuit of “The Good, the True, and The Beautiful” is deemed too stodgy and, ironically, propagandistic in modern times. A prime example of this clash between the secular relativism of academia and the spiritual aspirations of classical education was the formation and eventual destruction of The Integrated Humanities Program (IHP) run by John Senior in the University of Kansas during the 1970’s.

John Senior would seem like a strange avatar for renewing classical education. A runaway who lived as a rancher, a dabbler in the occult and symbology similar to poets like W.B. Yeats, he had a restless soul that refused to live inside an intellectual box. Yet time and time again, his curiosity into the new and exotic left him with a deep, unfulfilled spiritual longing. It was only when he spent a long time truly studying the great thinkers of antiquity and the traditions of the Catholic Church that he felt a sense of purpose. After his conversion, to say he was opinionated is an understatement, and he constantly lamented how colleges espoused moral relativism and had nothing but contempt for the state of modern culture.

When Senior and his colleagues had the opportunity to run a “college within a college” focusing on the humanities, they took full advantage. They quickly recruited a couple dozen students that would soon balloon to three-hundred. The fundamental books of Western thought were studied, the entire works read before anyone else’s commentary. That meant no prefaces, no afterwards, no scholarly papers. They read the works and attended a seminar discussion where note-taking was banned. The purpose was to be engaged in the current conversation without worrying about remembering details or being corrupted by an “expert’s” opinion. They were to be awash tangling with the great questions, akin to being thrown in the deep end of the pool. Grading was simple. For the final exam, the students were given a blank notebook and 80 minutes to write an essay. The focus was not analyzing in an impersonal, academic manner, but truly wrestling with the works and implications to their lives. It was akin to being thrown into the deep end of the pool, but the students learned to swim.

The students had a set schedule of classes, allowing them to build rapport instead of seeing unfamiliar faces every semester. Outside of class, the students participated in stargazing sessions, poetry recitations, and extended seminars. The students quickly learned that “barbarism is a bore” and expanded even further, with many discovering ballroom dancing. The professors emphasized the importance of every sense being activated along with the intellect, instilling a love of creation to the whole man. Not only was the intellect formed, but their emotional well-being and connection to the divine as well.

The results were astounding, and the IHP soon became a victim of its own success. The professors were accused of brainwashing the students when many converted to Catholicism, with some even discerning monastic life. The university, while it didn’t bat an eye at students of conservative parents who embraced the sexual revolution, thought the professors were proselytizing, though investigations yielded no evidence. The IHP was soon suppressed by not allowing the classes to be tallied towards graduation, then slowly squeezing it of funding until it was disbanded.

While The Integrated Humanities Program was destroyed, its underlying philosophy did not. The program produced a bishop, a provost, an abbot, and several other notable alumni. The theory and practice of the college created spiritual offspring in the form of Wyoming Catholic College, a small liberal arts school with a great books emphasis, an extensive outdoors program, and strictly controlled internet policy.

Many educational traditionalists have latched onto IHP’s example, seeing it as a template to follow in getting education back on track. Most important in this mode of thought is the insistence to tangle with what has been deemed The Great Books. While many individual works are open to debate, the core works of Plato and Aristotle, the medieval scholastics, and the enlightenment thinkers are given space, letting the student digest the formation of new ideas and mindsets to see the world. In order for the student to grasp the great questions, he has to be acquainted with the giants who came before him. They are tough works, and to even comprehend them at a basic level is far beyond the capability of many students. It’s a way to really challenge a student with hard material, and a way for him to understand the roots fo Western Civilization.

However, for all the grandstanding and conservative’s antipathy towards modern secular education, they have a mercenary mindset, a focus on immediate practicality just as vapid as the progressives they despise. While they often spout platitudes about respecting the great historical thinkers and having values greater than material comfort, in reality they see education as largely a practical affair. Even the Great Books are used in this manner, and far too many espouse reading them for the challenging prose and familiar value system rather than wrestling with difficult questions. Worse, it’s often used as a “safe” form of learning that protects the reader from the problems of modernity. Instead of seeing them as a gateway to understanding the human condition, it is a blanket to hide under while pretending to be educated, a cocoon to wrap oneself in to avoid battling the current cynical age.

The last two decades of conservative media have blasted that youth should go into STEM or enter the trades to find a well-paying job and become a useful member of society. Discrediting the humanities as being progressive and hopeless, it’s been widely mocked and denigrated as, at best, a waste of time. In the last decades, significant cultural ground has been ceded. Far too many conservatives surrendered the humanities in the hopes that they will work to get “real jobs” and out-earn the gender studies majors. Now, conservatives have neither the money nor the culture. While many inroads have been made in recent years in supporting the arts in education, it’s based far too much on a different form of striverism, almost as corrosive to the young mind as the worst modern pedagogy.

What’s lost in educational discourse is the faulty core premise of modernity. Both progressives and conservatives pontificate on how they want to teach the child how to think, as varied as their techniques are. What’s lost is that before you can teach a child to think, you must teach him how to wonder. A child who is incapable of awe will be just as robotic whether he reads preachy and progressive modern works or Aquinas. How is a child going to relate to the Ingall family from “Little House on the Prairie” if they’ve never smelt a horse stable? How is a child supposed to understand the trials of David Balfour of “Kidnapped” fame if he never explores on his own?

Last winter a snowplow ran through a local parking lot, leaving the spaces bare of snow but forming massive mounds of snow in its wake. My son, along with his visiting cousin, was immediately attracted to the sprawling white mound, grabbing their gloves and sleds and sprinting out the door. This instinctual drive in young boys goes beyond reason, beyond the mechanics that define modern-day life. That rush of life was the biting wind whipping around their faces and the snow creeping under their gloves to bare skin. When they saw the boulder at the top, practically begging to be freed, they spent the next hour grabbing shovels and digging underneath, straining their muscles against the obstinate mass. They tested their young bodies to the limit, battling against an immovable foe for dominance. Once they were locked-in, nothing could cull their determination. After ceaseless effort, the boulder broke free, and they watched in satisfaction as the boulder tumbled into the concrete below.

In striver culture bent on optimization, such behaviors are seen, at most, as a reprieve from their real education. From books and studying. Maybe such activity is a treat after getting their math homework done. Some would say how the children were actually using the scientific principles of physics with levers, force, and kinetic energy, just like every toy now how to show its practical educational value. The focus is how the particular can be abstracted, how personal experience can be formalized into a general framework. This systemization is assumed in our technocratic society. Very little value is put on the experience itself, the interplay of the individual with his environment, the instincts and deep understanding formed that can’t be abstracted away. These exhausting, coddling, and stodgy schoolmarms infest both sides. In removing autonomy and real adventure in favor of simulacra and dry classrooms with mundane lessons, we’ve destroyed wonder.

While even farm-boys in the 19th century could grasp the ancient conception of honor in The Iliad, recent generations have found such works imposing and confusing. Even at the college level, many boys have never been in a real physical altercation to understand battle with another foe. Our strict social codes make personal honor an anachronism. Worse is trying to mold such ancient concepts into modern moral categories, trying to box in Achilles as “toxic masculinity” or making a weak commentary on the horrors of war instead of understanding the minds who lived in a wildly different culture. The constant attempts to flatten the difficult thinkers into a more palatable category shows the paucity of minds and the scourge of hyper-moralism while also espousing relativism.

It also diluted the alien-ness of the culture in favor of a crude deconstruction instead of taking the virtues of the ancient world at face value. Hyper-moralizing and focus on modern works make it difficult to understand those who didn’t play by modern rules.

It’s ironic that as the American population has classroom time than ever, they are less educated with every passing generation. They are awash in symbols and abstractions while having a paucity of experience. They know what cold is in the abstract but never experience the pain of near-frozen hands thawing under the sink. They know the concept of a forest but have never spent idle hours wandering through its organic logic. While complaints of this sort are often blamed on the ubiquity of electronics, the issue has much deeper roots.

Several generations ago, people like John Senior had the foresight to realize the up-and-coming generations never really lived. While redirection to better pedagogy and clear standards is an improvement, it still lies victim to the technical optimization mindset that permeates modern thought. It relies on quantifiable tests, tests that are by their nature designed to be optimized for. While there is commendable effort to replace the faltering SAT and ACT with alternatives such as the Classical Learning Test (CLT), you’re replacing one set of optimization parameters for another. While it might optimize for a slightly better world model and skillset, it still obfuscates the core meaning of education, to raise a man’s soul.

To be clear, there is nothing wrong with reading The Great Books. Everyone should read them. What’s flawed is construing them as an endpoint in themselves to digest instead of a tool to be wielded by competent hands. The students at the IHP did not expand their world simply by reading, but through the passionate and formidable personalities of the professors directing them. It was an encounter with another human being who gently led the neophyte into different ways of being. Even if the class was an introductory Latin class, the professors put their hearts and souls into it. Just like a master musician gently going over how to read notes to a child, the professor introduces those naive students into the great conversations of history.

John Senior was such an inspiring man that his former students often visited him, even as his heart issues made teaching at the University impossible. He was an opinionated and often cantankerous man, but every student could sense the life and will emanating from him. The quaint-looking philosopher was a force of nature, a wellspring of wisdom one could only experience in person.

If, by some miracle, the current useless and haphazard pedagogy of the academy was overturned and classical learning was reinvigorated, many of the same problems will be present. They will probably write better and learn more in less time. They will likely have less contempt for their ancestors, but the boredom will remain. Reading a textbook does not immediately instill pride in one’s culture and wonder. Words on a page will not, in themselves, instill culture. You need another human being to interact with. You need to intentionally grapple with the world’s current manifestation together. You need a guide to understand the glory of the stars above, the joyous subtleties of the dance floor, and the otherworldly smell of the cathedral. None of these visceral experiences will increase test scores, nor will it directly improve your career prospects. It’s not “useful” in the direct sense, but they instill the character and virtue that makes one’s culture worth fighting for,

As educational academies have gone from useless to actually damaging, many aspiring educators have been turned off, leading to an overwhelmingly uniform teacher base. Even if one wanted to read the Great Books, the amount of elders with this knowledge a child has access to is dwindling to nothing. The child’s parents aren’t familiar, and internet classes don’t have the same powerful intimacy as face-to-face learning. There are few John Seniors to learn under today. Luckily, alternative institutions are sprouting forth, whether from classical private schools or homeschool co-ops. My children are learning from recent graduates regarding the great thinkers of every age and earn peanuts for their efforts. They do it anyway because it’s important, a vocation. The current institutions are willing to lionize their teachers and artists, and the social prestige makes the low pay more palatable. Traditionalists need to do the same.

The only way to destroy meaningless careerism, studying for the test, and the incessant rat race of credentialism is to refuse to play. The only way to re-invoke the sense of grandeur over the world is to let go of it. Not every Great Book needs to be read, but the ones traversed need to be read well. It’s more important to let one’s senses be awed by grand architecture than to deconstruct and analyze it. Once the awe comes, such scientific details can be attacked with rigor. A cynical mind is a poor learner. Teachers have to let go of immediate practicality for the higher cause of forming the full man. Those doing “worthless” pursuits in the arts should be given leeway to create their works, even if they never are financially successful. In our age, our most important tasks as educators are re-instilling what has been lost by modernity: Enchantment.

The world is filled to the brim with educators flashing their master’s degrees and doctorates, and yet are barren of those who can instill awe and joy in a child’s heart. Our sanitized world is safer than ever, but only capable of forming passive and risk-averse adults that never adventured from their mother’s skirt. The wisdom of the ages, from antiquity to the modern marvels of science, is there for anyone to study, but the relentless striverism has sucked awe from our vocabulary. The future will not be won with simply a better curriculum. A different form or being, a different form of teacher that has the will as well as the agency to stray outside the platitudes of modern textbooks, from the technocracy of modern pedagogy.

We must remember the IHP’s Motto before all else: “Let them be born in Wonder”

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I could easily go to a store or search on Amazon and find mass produced wooden crafts in my office. Of course this wouldn’t be the same, as the entire joy of having them is that a loved one bared his soul in making it, that human hands crafted it, that a human mind smiled in satisfaction when it was done. He’s been gone for over a decade, but that craft in the office helps me remember him in a way nothing else can. The sculpture became more than a block of wood, but an extension of my grandfather.

Similarly, when one enters a social space, whether online or in person, you want to have an encounter with someone else, an other. By its very nature there are going to be rough edges, little tics that tell more than the words being said, means of communicating that are less than optimal. Every person has a cadence, a stream-of-consciousness that shines through, giving a glimpse into their interior life. Even if he’s role-playing or wearing a mask, some of that humanity seeps through.

When one encounters writing, it’s the same phenomenon. While the written word lacks the physical context and is more refined, it maintains that connection, an interiority shown to the world. Especially in cases of commentary, how one expresses such thoughts is often more important than the information given. In short, the person’s writing becomes an extension of himself, just like any artist who paints or knits or builds. The labor of love makes the text more than just words on the screen. It’s an expression of one’s core being. The Logos, Pathos, and Ethos critical to any writing has to shine, forged from an actual mind who feels these sensations.

While there is a need for dry, impersonal texts that remove this inner realm in law and other formalized realms, those who wish to truly learn and understand a viewpoint have to feel that connection with another human mind. This need for bonding is why AI will never replace human teachers, and why it’s so dangerous for people to think of AI, something that doesn't wonder, dream, touch, or feel pain as a human-like entity.

When you find out someone plagiarized writings or had their work ghostwritten, there’s a sense of betrayal to those who want that connection. Even in a parasocial environment like the Internet, there’s still the assumption of a human being on the other side with the understanding that even if they are hiding as an anon, they are a real person who is making a real effort at connection and understanding. When that work is offloaded, the connection is broken. The inner nuance of their thought is not displayed on the screen, even if their opinions are. With the acceleration of AI writing, now anyone can offload writing to exterior staff, and with it eliminate the inefficiencies of putting thoughts on paper, warts and all.

For a long time, you had to rely on a “sixth sense” to sense AI writing. The tools for detection were easily mitigated and were notorious for lack of consistency. The accusation of AI slop is a serious accusation, and people were loath to toss it out without good evidence. Luckily detectors are getting better, are harder to dodge, and give fewer false positives. While there is still error, it can reinforce the “AI smell” sixth sense. Look at a few articles with the same 100% AI Conclusion, and you are almost certainly dealing with a slop merchant.

To test Pangram, I ran the experiment on my own articles and posts I knew were before A.I, and therefore safe. It ran flawlessly. In my entire SS career, I used AI input in precisely one. In that case, I wrote the entire article and then used AI to go through the draft and change the narrative voice. I’ll leave it as an exercise for the reader to guess which article I’m referring to. Even after significant modifications because the A.I.s output modifications were now that great, Pangram picked it up. Mixed at 50% A.I… well played. Even though it was largely a jokey article, it gave me a bad taste in my mouth and I vowed to never to do it again.

Picking up slop has become easier too, as they now have a plugin feature to quickly ascertain the level of AI., meaning you don’t have to manually input a snippet of text. When I installed it, I expected a few here or there with most in small accounts with no paid subscribers. Needless to say that hopelessly naive thought was brutally dashed, and my frustration and curiosity led to a little experiment.

I took the 20 Top Rising substances on the site as a whole and found a random article to test with Pangram. Note these are Substacks where people are paying to read, and many have thousands of subscribers. The results are below:

Note: There are some obvious slop ones here, but there is the possibility of false positives, especially mixed. YMMV.

Top 20 Rising:

1. 100% slop.

2. Gad World - Not English, did not check

3. : 100% human

4. Dan Djik - Not English, did not check

5. - 100% slop

6. Pod Street Walk - Podcasts

7. - Human

8. -100% human (this seems to be a business portal)

9. - 100% slop

10. - Mixed (Maura said it is 100% human in the comments, and I believe her, though looking at other articles, it’s all over the map where most posters are very consistent)

11. - Human

12. - Mixed

13. - French. Did not check

14. - 100% human

15. - Mixed

16. - Mixed

17. - All Paid Articles

18. - 100% slop

19. - Not even text, just stock charts

20. - 100% human

A lot of these are investment and get-rich-quick articles that feed on gullibility. It makes me realize what a silo I am in when I never heard of any of these before checking the rising feed, and I consider that a blessing. To be frank, most of the investing and business portion of SS is slop, and this should not surprise anyone. There may be a false positive, but the direction is clear.

For the next experiment, I took a category one would hope would not use AI, cultural commentary. Looking at some of the top Substacks for cuture, this seemed a little better. Of the non-podcast Substacks in English, five were human, one was mixed, and one was slop. Not great, but not catastrophic.

Culture:

1. - Italian, did not check.

2. - 100% human

3. - 100% slop

4. - Human (All paid posts with few substantial blurbs)

5. - 100% Human

6. - Podcast

7. - 100% human

8. - French. Did not check

9. - Mixed

10. - 100% Human

I took another example of a category that one would hope was not mostly slop, Education. It was a disaster, with the top five being one human, three slop, and one mixed.

Education:

- Mixed

- 100% Human (Ironic, given this is on how to use AI)

- 100% Slop

- 100% slop

- 100% slop

In short, Substack is bursting at the seams with AI.

These are interesting metrics, but what really mattered to me is what people in my actual feed are doing, the ones I have conversations with and supposedly align in the same cultural and political sphere. I ran with a “benefit of the doubt” view whenever I saw something that smelled not quite right, and unfortunately every “smell” proved correct. There is a ton of AI slop in my feed. We are not talking 10 percent AI or a little bit of assistance, which I can tolerate, but the entire article being written by Claude with basically no human input. If I wanted to talk to Claude, I would talk to Claude. It feels like a betrayal, like a body snatcher taking the place of a brother in arms. I thought a human being was on the other side, but only got messages in ones and zeroes.

Luckily, none of them were in the “top tier” of this space, with people like , , , , and others being completely free of AI. My biggest disappointment comes with the smaller accounts I wanted to support who ended up being too lazy to write their own stuff, shortchanging both me and themselves. There are also some larger ones in the slop pile. I can handle a little bit of rough editing, and anyone who has read my Substack knows I’m in no position to complain about grammar errors, but when the narrative voice is not even your own, it makes the reader feel sick inside.

I decided not to put these particular people on blast, even though they fucking deserve it. If you are a slop AI poster reading this, you know who you are, and I want to make clear you broke my trust and the trust of your colleagues. And for what? A few likes? A little attention? A few paid subscribers? Why did you sell yourself out for so little?

I know it will just get worse. Anyone on X knows that AI slop is getting out of control, with not even paid subscriptions capable of stemming the tide. It’s almost pointless to read comments now, and Substack will soon be in the same boat. The Human to AI ratio of writing on here will continue to get worse, and more stringent gatekeeping will be necessary to keep the LLMs out.

With every new bit of effort required to keep your feed clean, a few more people will decide it’s not worth it and leave. Not only is it a time sink, but every time one is caught reading an LLM, he is passively inputting machine modes of writing and thinking, and corroding his own writing and thoughts in the process. LLM writing is a body snatcher, and its target is your mind, accessed through unwitting agents you were foolish enough to trust.

I now look with trepidation as Pangram makes its analysis, wondering if I am reading a human mind or a digital one. I wonder who will betray me next. I wonder if the entire sphere will devolve into algorithmic garbage and drive away the good writers forever. When I started on this site a couple years ago, I had a small follower count but a treasure trove of great thinkers I looked forward to reading. I now feel surrounded by human-like body snatchers eating away at my time and my soul. I just wanted to have a meeting of the minds. I just wanted to have a conversation.

Thank you for reading Social Matter

The United States’ Federal Deficit is ballooning with no signs of stopping. The last surpluses were during a few years during the Clinton presidency, otherwise the government has acted like embarrassing spendthrifts for generations. We now operate on a two trillion yearly debt, with total debt-to-GDP a whopping 124%. This is not a party issue, as it hasn’t mattered what party is in the White House. Outside of some impotent complaining in Congress, the entire Washington D.C. machine is committed to ignoring the problem, and you don’t need a PhD in political science to understand why. When you have to worry about elections every couple years, kicking painful reforms down the road is what any rational actor will do.

Expanding entitlements is good for acquiring dependent loyalty in urban vote banks, and lowering taxes is catnip for the average worker. There’s a reason government has only grown for decades, and now over thirty percent of citizens pay no taxes at all. Yet even in this era of irresponsibility, some congressmen have the gall to demand seniors don’t pay property taxes, that childcare should be free for all, and rent controls should be set indefinitely. No one is interested in diffusing the fiscal cliff approaching.

We could make long-winded policy papers how this little change to the tax code will solve the problem, or maybe a different monetary policy and benefits reform. We could, for instance:

• Tighten up the welfare state that takes up around 15% percent of government spending.

• Reform our bloated health care system to lower health care expenses that cost 25% of the federal budget.

• Restructure our deficit to help alleviate the 13% of the budget we pay to interest like a credit card junkie.

• Close bases, lower mission creep, and streamline processes to ramp down the 15% of federal income we spend on defense programs.

Of course congressmen don’t even do this, choosing to grandstand on discretionary spending that does basically nothing in reducing the debt, arguing they are fiscally responsible by refusing that 100 million in pork expenditure as we are increasing our national deficit by orders of magnitude more. It’s like the world’s fattest man congratulating himself after refusing the after-dinner mint.

To solve the crisis, there are three basic paths to solvency:

• Inflate the deficit into oblivion

• Lower expenditures

• Raise revenue

At the current trajectory, the first option is the most likely choice if nothing drastically changes, and will lead to the worst outcome. The second option is impossible, as any lowering of entitlements will lead to accusations of killing babies, single mothers, grandmas, or all three simultaneously. The only other option is raising revenue.

Maybe a miracle will happen and the AI revolution increases productivity so much that GPD rises 10+% every year for the next decade, creating a new golden age of abundance as everyone has a self-driving electric car to drive to work, only needing to push a button daily like The Jetsons and thereby entering a post-scarcity world. If this doesn’t pan out, we will have to get more creative. Given the catastrophic financial hole we are in, the type Dave Ramsey would make his especially angry face over, dramatic actions will have to be taken to avert crisis. Methods way off the beaten path will have to be taken seriously.

There are a few ways to spur federal revenue growth:

• Higher Taxes

• Capital infusion into the economy, i.e. a stimulus package

• Raising education levels to create a more productive workforce

• Removing regulatory bottlenecks, i.e. deregulation

Higher taxes is political suicide, so that’s off the table. Government stimulus does not gain back in revenue what it put in, as can be seen from the stimulus packages put in during the 2008 financial crisis as well as Covid, both of which caused massive inflation and immiserated the growing underclass of America. Education reached its peak decades ago and college grads now find themselves with massive amounts of debt and a useless credential, We are left with the most feasible option, deregulation, and we’re going to have to put that bad boy on steroids.

One trade-off of modernity is sacrificing efficiency for safety. To a certain extent, this was not a bad thing. Deaths have plummeted and we have a reasonable expectation of quality control in our food, water, shelter, and health care. This helps decrease friction in commerce and increases social trust, allowing scaling to happen through standardization. There comes a point of diminishing returns, a point where the innovative are suffocated by onerous protocols that help no one but only increases cost and removes innovation. An incredible amount of invisible costs in our economy is in avoiding litigation, and the can-do American spirit of risk-taking has been sidelined.

The usual progenitors of innovation and risk, young men, are increasingly constricted, unwanted, and hapless to improve their plight. They are stuck between a stifling corporate job or low-paying trades, both of which subject him to humiliating social games. Their pay is poor, so mating options are off the table. There’s no adventure in the sanitized, risk-averse society. Many ventures that could improve their plight is off the table, illegal, even if they decide the risks worth it. If you want to really boost the economy, not by 3% a year, but 10% or more, we’re going to have to take the safety rails off and let them cook.

Renewing the National Economy Through Innovation Exceptions

It’s well known the cost of compliance across labor laws, worker safety, and countless specific industry practices is onerous, often so intensive only massive corporations can swallow the loss, leaving more nimble entrepreneurs dead in the water before they even start. It’s also well-known a large portion of regulations are kayfabe, designed to give the illusion of safety while actually doing nothing but enriching a corporate lawyer and keeping a useless regulator off your back.

Congress has abdicated responsibility to write regulations, giving them to a body of un-elected bureaucrats with a wide mandate to justify their jobs. The effects aren’t just in the most visible parts, like OSHA requirements or bank and food regulations, but all the rules that exist in a fuzzy territory, especially with regard to civil rights law. Real Estate agents have to talk in code about good school districts, HR departments wield enormous power due to the looming specter of federal regulators and racial hucksters. Food regulators have created oligopolies due to overhead that doesn’t make food any safer. Full deregulation is not on the table, but that doesn’t mean enforcement has to be universal.

We’re not saying anyone can pay the government break the law1 but to modify legislation to allow a little more wiggle room for those who either want to take more personal risk or bypass certain rules contrary to their desired way of life. For a monetary bribe fee, of course. Maybe for a little higher taxation, you could participate in what we will call black markets Innovation Exceptions. Maybe you want to live in a neighborhood of only a single religious group. Say you’re a farmer who wants to process cattle on the premises, or a nurse who wants to make nighttime house calls. Say you have a new invention but can’t afford to follow the federal government’s safety regulations or your bros want to make a software company employing a specific type of gamer exclusively. All of these can get the “Innovation Exception” treatment.

It goes without saying it can’t be the Wild West. The commons still exist and need a modicum of predictability. You can’t build a nuclear power plant in your back yard. You can’t drive a vehicle that’s unsafe for other drivers. You can’t allow vigilante behaviors with a financial get-out-of-jail card. Given how much doesn’t fit into these categories, and how many laws are only in place to ensure certain fashionable social ideals as opposed to general flourishing, there is near limitless potential. The ability to employ or be employed in a field with far less stringent compliance metrics is largely a victimless crime exception. Laws designed for personal safety can be removed for those willing to accept the increased risk.

Of course, customers will also have to get buy-in. All such Innovation Zones and their products will be explicitly stated, and those who want to opt out of these innovation zones can live life as normal. The question becomes “Are you willing to get 20% more pay for a more dangerous job?”, “Are you willing to go to an unlicensed therapist for half the cost?”, “Are you willing be pay 10% more in taxes to live in a neighborhood that explicitly keeps unwanted people out?”. It might be as simple as “Will you pay twenty dollars to avoid the ridiculous child car seat requirement?”

This isn’t new or as anarchic as it seems, but is simply an extension of similar ideas. Charter schools are designed to create innovation in teaching outside of the educational bureaucracy. Innovation zones in large cities give generous subsidies to areas the foster growth in the wider community while looking the other way regarding zoning laws and cumbersome processes. This is just universalizing the general concept so everyone can take part instead of a select few.

Such an initiative will not only require loosening regulations, but also updating banking policy. Currently, banks prefer standardized, easily consolidated packages like mortgages, and this becomes the standard approach. As Emir Phillips in American Affairs wrote:

Three channels matter. First, prudential rules and examiner culture: Capital and liquidity frameworks often treat well-underwritten mort­gages as low-risk and highly “eligible.” That can be defensible at the micro level. But it becomes macro-distorting if the system collectively treats housing leverage as safer than financing productive cash flow. Examiner culture matters too: a bank officer can justify a mortgage with standardized documentation and a familiar collateral story; a loan officer underwriting a new production line has to defend judgment, and judgment is penalized when cycles turn.

In short, loans will have to prioritize productive uses over asset inflation. The banks will serve as fuel for the new economic machine being forged.

The brilliance of this scheme is it serves as a catalyst for market growth while directly increasing tax revenues to the federal government. Even better, it gives incentive to take regulations off the books once the innovation exceptions show how unnecessary they really are. It shifts economic focus to actual production and new technologies at a smaller scale, thereby removing bottlenecks that removes small players from the field. It also shrinks occupations that are antithetical to growth and serve largely as credentialed gatekeepers, forcing them into more productive lines of work.

Renewing the World Economy, or The Soldier of Fortune Model

Unfortunately, massive economic growth likely won’t be enough without a robust world economy. We truly are a global marketplace now, and a high tide lifts all boats. The world economy stands at around 123 trillion. In other words, the US deficit is a quarter of the annual world GDP. In order to save the US economy, we gotta pump those numbers up.

As corrupt as the United States seems, we’re still the most stable nation on the planet. No one is starving, no one is expected to give bribes to officials, no one is going to jail on trumped up charges.

Where the corruption exists, it’s streamlined and manageable. The world is full of resource rich countries stymied by rampant corruption and poor infrastructure. The worst of these countries all exist on one continent: Africa.

As the World Bank says:

With about 30% of the world’s mineral reserves, Africa is poised to meet the growing demand for critical minerals, as the global shift to clean energy could require an additional 3 billion tons of minerals and metals by 2050. The Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) already produces roughly two-thirds of the world’s mined cobalt; South Africa holds the world’s largest reserves of platinum and manganese; Zambia and the DRC are major copper producers—each central to electrification and renewables.

Increasing fiscal revenues from natural resource extraction is an important step to ensure countries get their fair share and to boost much-needed public investment in their economies. However, as we saw during the previous commodity price boom from 2004 to 2014, over-dependence on natural resources can also pose dangers. Africa has experienced an increase in the number of resource-rich countries following that boom, with recent discoveries converting more countries into major resource exporters (see Figure 1). Currently, a majority of the region—26 out of 48 countries—demonstrates substantial dependence on resource-derived income, subjecting them to both the advantages of increased fiscal inflows and to the risks associated with price fluctuations, governance challenges, and economic mismanagement.

Governance challenges and economic mismanagement is putting it lightly. The post-WWII governance model treats individual states as a sort of platonic form that can’t be altered. It also played a role in dismantling the old colonial powers. While this seems like an effective way to keep peace, stability, and equality, it has in reality kept kleptocrats in power artificially through American influence, allowing exploitation and deterioration of their nation’s breadbasket. How bad is Africa’s corruption? Some estimates put the costs it as high as 580 billion. This is just with their current level of development and doesn’t even scratch how such mass corruption has stymied development. The continent of Africa is begging for good governance, patiently waiting for a hero to answer the call.

The old post World War II model is breaking down, and new ideas need to make their way in. We could initiate colonialism economic sustainability initiatives where a brave band of mercenaries explorers arrive to secure underutilized or exploited resources and form their own governance model. It might just be staking a claim to countless unused resources. It might be forming a small country within a country and bringing in industry. It might go as far as overthrowing the tin-pot dictator and becoming the new benevolent ruler. As important as stability is, many of these countries have no clear governance, the law being there solely to extract and graft from the general population. In this new age, it’s best to wipe away any pretenses of international order and find out what works.

Since antiquity, there has been a surefire way of dealing with an excess population of ambitious males who want to make something of themselves, war exploring the world. Luckily for America, there is an entire underclass of young men with no prospects along with counter-elites with no access to the levers of power. There are countless angry Global War on Terror veterans itching for an adventure they can actually profit from instead of dealing with IEDs in Fallujah. There are young, ambitious men who want danger and a chance at spoils who never enlisted because they no longer trust Uncle Sam. Give them the prospect of wealth and power a great humanitarian effort and watch their tune change. We already have private armies consultants who know how to bring such ambitions to reality.

While some might counter such initiatives will only create another nation of kleptocrats, we already have evidence to the contrary.

We even have a documentary of what happens when responsible governance decides to leave.

Just like failed companies deserve to fail, failing countries should be put under new management. Of course the United States, as the current world hegemon, could let the regime change happen and maybe even invest in extracting the countless resources to enrich both the conquerors entrepreneurs and the general population. As the borders stabilize again, a diaspora of Americans itching for a new life could be imported in to build the new civilization. We are, after all, a nation of immigrants. Through it all, Uncle Sam would get his cut, and the new warlords leaders will be happy to pay the tribute.

Reinvigorating the Cosmic Economy

So far we have a good deal for the risk-taking businessmen and military folk, but what about the nerds? For that we will have to go to the final frontier. While there are vast untapped resources on planet Earth, there are even more in outer space, and the cost to extract them isn’t as bad as one might think. There are several asteroids close to earth that contain precious materials, especially platinum-type minerals. Companies are popping up that hope to use current breakthroughs in technology to begin missions to create a sustainable space ecosystem.

Founded by entrepreneur Teun van den Dries (CEO) and space strategist Daynan Crull (Mission Architect), Karman+ aims to make asteroid mining more accessible and cost-effective. As the space industry expands, it requires a reliable supply of materials and fuel to sustain satellites, research, and manufacturing. Instead of launching these resources from Earth at great expense, Karman+ seeks to harvest them from asteroids.

Karman+ was established in 2022 and headquartered in Denver, Colorado. The company’s goal is to realise viable asteroid mining by developing autonomous spacecraft and using off-the-shelf technology to reduce mission costs from $1 billion to under $10 million. The company plans to launch its first test mission and customer missions in 2027.

The Trump administrations is well aware of the economic potential of space, and has aggressively asserted its right to mine such resources for its own benefit, and protect its gains if need be.

“Americans should have the right to engage in commercial exploration, recovery, and use of resources in outer space, consistent with applicable law. Outer space is a legally and physically unique domain of human activity, and the United States does not view it as a global commons,” the order, signed by President Donald Trump, states. “Accordingly, it shall be the policy of the United States to encourage international support for the public and private recovery and use of resources in outer space, consistent with applicable law.”

It’s honestly shocking how relatively inexpensive some revolutionary technologies are. A technology just begging to be green-lighted, the space elevator, comes in with a price tag of a measly 100 billion, only about a tenth of our military budget, creating the possibility of bringing people or materials to space with ease. The elevator would lower costs of entering orbit by an order of magnitude, and those cost savings will create secondary ripple effects that will transform space exploration. Even amateurs could get their equipment up in space, and what was once an impenetrable expense now becomes a race of which enterprising individual will become the next Elon Musk. As costs to enter and leave space plummet, we will move past space tourism for billionaires and build real things in zero gravity. Maybe it will be space based solar panels. Maybe they’ll need men manned for those asteroid trips. A new frontier of adventure awaits a century after all of them being closed off on Earth.

Sure, this will create up-front costs. But unlike previous stimulus packages that were used to bail out local governments or create make-work programs, there is a real return on investment, a symbolic return to national greatness, a grand effort to conquer explore the stars.

The Return of American Grit

The deficit is a symptom of America losing its sense of identity. As the West receded and the public commons became overrun with moral hectoring and fear, we lost the core tenets of what made us great. Today we don’t see the same wild-eyed optimism, the toughness, nor the supreme self-confidence that tamed the countryside. We thought money could alleviate our sense of guilt for our past successes. Too long we have listened to the browbeating of the unproductive busybodies who live in fear of their own shadows. It’s time to reacquire our moral courage.

It’s time to be more aggressive and live out our national ethos. Let’s re-engage with high-risk high-reward businesses. Let’s remove our aversion to instability and guilt over colonialism to embrace excellence abroad. Let’s put people in space just for the hell of it. The national deficit crisis will not be solved by clever policy papers, but a spiritual transformation, a return to the frontier grit that made us a superpower to begin with. Our manifest destiny never stopped, it just needs to be reawakened.

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"And suppose I am man," answered the other. "And suppose that I give the answer that shatters even a laugh. Suppose I do not laugh back at you, do not blaspheme you, do not curse you. But suppose, standing up straight under the sky, with every power of my being, I thank you for the fools' paradise you have made. Suppose I praise you, with a literal pain of ecstasy, for the jest that has brought me so terrible a joy. If we have taken the child's games, and given them the seriousness of a Crusade, if we have drenched your grotesque Dutch garden with the blood of martyrs, we have turned a nursery into a temple. I ask you, in the name of Heaven, who wins?"

The Napoleon of Notting Hill

Like many young boys in the 1990’s, my family had a Book-It tradition. Pizza Hut was the next town over, and every month the family would drive out there so we could redeem the reward slip for our personal Pan Pizza. Given our middle class background, this dine-in chain was as fancy as it got. The exterior’s two-tiered pavilion style roof was instantly recognizable driving by. It had a quiet, slightly dark interior with its unique chandeliers over the table and red booths with wooden trim. For a kid who didn’t know better, it felt pretty fancy. We got out drinks in semi-opaque scarlet cups where Pepsi seemed to have an elevated taste. Their unique tactile feel and thickness left an impact to this day. The jukebox sat on the corner, awaiting your quarters to play the greatest hits of times past. Next to it was an old Pac-Man where my siblings had the esteemed tradition of competing for the high score.

Yet time passed by, and Pizza Hut lost market share due to the transition to delivery and an influx of competitors. The Pizza Hut my family frequented is no more and the building now sells farm supplies. One sees the classic gabled red roof everywhere, but repurposed to Churches, general stores, and even Domino’s Pizza. While Pizza Hut’s meteoric success was astonishing, spearheaded by lots of gimmicky pizzas and its unique style, they couldn’t keep the momentum going. The pizza was overpriced compared to competitor’s offerings and quality control issues seeped in. It wasn’t more than ten years from when they were at the top than their dominance ended, and mass store closures brought the era to an end.

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Yet millions look back at the restaurant chain in its heyday. They still feel the ridges of those red plastic cups, picture that cute high-school waitress serving them, the little grandeur of those happy times with loved ones. They remember the cheery atmosphere devoid of screens, feel the glossy menu in their hands. In all honesty, the pizza was never that great, but the ambiance gave it a sense of place in a world where everywhere else is an infinitely interchangeable no-space, an airport society. Whether it was celebrating a birthday in second grade or hanging out with your high-school buddies during a night in the town, you could count on that distinct space that oozed comradery and fun.

There are such good memories that an eccentric millionaire has made it his mission to resurrect the old franchise, taking it upon himself to recreate the old-school feel many millennials and gen-xers yearn for in our convenience-focused age.

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Even in this age of flattening, there are several layers of hierarchy in a functioning state. Across the ocean, the multi-nation European Union has powers vested to its domain. Individual countries are beholden to those mandates and create mandates of their own. The local provinces enforce the State’s mandates, and creates ordinances to their community. The individual is subject to all these laws, but also has personal rights regarding self-autonomy. While the family in times past was understood as a distinct social unit, modernity has largely eliminated that role, preferring to treat each person as an individual instead of a kin group member.

Of course, human beings are not born completely independent adults, and the time and care involved in raising children is arduous. While the parent has an interest in seeing his family line continued, the State also has an interest in the child’s development, as one day he will be an adult and a member of larger society. The State wants to ensure the child has the education to be a productive member, has similar values to others, and an understanding of the social order and his role in it.

As technology proliferates, wealth increases, and governments become more sprawling and complex, the State’s intrusion into domestic life has dramatically increased. Compulsory schooling is, at civilizational levels, a very new thing. Child welfare agencies are only possible because of the vast resources at the state’s disposal. This increased complexity, in conjunction with the dissolution of organic bonds, has made the state, for all its vast resources, far more brittle. Educational requirements are understood not so much for creating productive citizens, but ensuring the children are indoctrinated into the modern and impersonal cultural apparatus.

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While The United States has actually increased parental authority in recent years with push-back on mandatory educational, health, and disciplinary laws, much of Europe has followed a different path. Family life is continually becoming more constrained, with both hard and soft power making it difficult to avoid the State imposing its value system on the children. The modern idea of children’s rights supersedes the assumption the parent knows what’s best for his own child.

While the steelman argument for government intervention is that it’s designed only to ensure the child is healthy and gets a reasonable education, the truth is it’s to ensure that the child submits to the secular ethics of the state. One such example is the case of parents who refused to have their child participate in mandatory sexual education classes that they felt were deeply immoral. The priests of the European High Court, after ritually slaughtering a goat and observing its entrails, unsurprisingly came down on the side of the government.

The Court had previously found that the German system of compulsory elementary school attendance, while home education was generally excluded, aimed at ensuring the integration of children into society with a view to avoiding the emergence of parallel societies. Those considerations were in line with the Court’s case-law on the importance of pluralism for democracy.

You might be confused how these states importing masses from the most culturally differentiated societies on the planet helps them ensure a cohesive society, or how how enforcing a strict, singular educational system encourages pluralism. Yet they will say this with a straight face while arguing Germany’s homeschooling ban does not break the European Convention of Human Rights. Western Society likes to pontificate on objective moral frameworks to work under, that the concept of Human Rights has some meaning outside the societal context where it is employed. Anyone who makes even a cursory analysis will realize the modern conception of universal rights is very recent and based on cultural assumptions that don’t transfer to other places. More and more of the time, the idea of Human Rights is simply a catch-all for any new social upheaval those in power want to enforce. As Alastair Macintyre famously quipped:

From this it does not of course follow that there are no natural or human rights; it only follows that no one could have known that there were. And this at least raises certain questions. But we do not need to be distracted into answering them, for the truth is plain: there are no such rights, and belief in them is one with belief in witches and in unicorns.

Whether we are talking about human rights, minority rights, children’s rights, or any other subset, the same problem remains. It lies in the realm of sentiment more than any cohesive abstract theory. It doesn’t follow that all rights are meaningless, however. Every society has an idea of rights procured to its citizens, many of them legally enforced. With those rights are implied obligations, though those aren’t talked about much anymore. While the European courts want to look at human rights as an objective universal, they are simply stating that the citizens of the wider European Union don’t have the right to separate children from state-mandated education for religious reasons. The parent’s right to raise their child in a certain tradition is aggressively curtailed. A person’s rights are entirely a construct of the community they live in, not a metaphysical entity.

The tension between the family unit and general society has always been there, and the delineation of where the parent’s authority ends and the State’s authority starts has never been static. It has run the gambit from the parent' having totalitarian authority over the household to the parent being little more than a resource provider as the child is raised by the state. Both have their philosophical assumptions, and both extremes come to conclusions abhorrent to modern ears.

All Rights, No Obligations

The anarchist Murray Rothbard likely has the most hardline attitude regarding obligatory parental involvement mandated by society. None. In his controversial essay, Children and Rights, he stated:

Applying our theory to parents and children, this means that a parent does not have the right to aggress against his children, but also that the parent should not have a legal obligation to feed, clothe, or educate his children, since such obligations would entail positive acts coerced upon the parent and depriving the parent of his rights. The parent therefore may not murder or mutilate his child, and the law properly outlaws a parent from doing so. But the parent should have the legal right not to feed the child, i.e., to allow it to die. The law, therefore, may not properly compel the parent to feed a child or to keep it alive.

Rothbard argued that until the child had agency to leave the house (through growing up or running away), the parents had total dominion over the life of the child. Rothbard isn’t concerned about the extremes of such statements, such as this necessarily entailing the ability to sell one’s own children. He embraces it and considers it a moral good.

Now if a parent may own his child (within the framework of non-aggression and runaway freedom), then he may also transfer that ownership to someone else. He may give the child out for adoption, or he may sell the rights to the child in a voluntary contract. In short, we must face the fact that the purely free society will have a flourishing free market in children.

To those wondering, no, Murray Rothbard did not have children.

While this sounds monstrous to modern ears, in ancient times it wasn’t uncommon. Often the patriarch had control over matters of life and death, and full mastery over those in his household. In harsher, less socially intertwined times, the business of a man’s household was solely his business.

This is quite liberating for the parent, as he has total control over the domestic household. They can decide whether one’s child is worthy of their time and support at any point and remove it at will. The parent’s autonomy is absolute and unquestioned, and the child only has a say through showing self-agency by removing himself from the household.

While an extreme example, society has to grapple with the application of a parent’s will on a child. At what point is a punishment extreme and abusive? Many countries ban corporal punishment entirely. Many go as far as to say banning their children from social media is abusive. There’s the question of whether a parent can let a child run feral and give him zero education or whether the State can intervene. At what point are we dealing with parental abuse? At what point are we dealing with parental neglect?

No Rights, All Obligations

When became an ex-pat in Sweden, he knew there would be a culture clash. He never thought it would culminate in his entire family fleeing the country as the Swedish equivalent to Child Protective Services came to take away his children. Their family ran amuck of the aggressively egalitarian and conformist nature of Sweden, and his child’s innocent faux pas were seen as a menace to their quiet society. They also have a far different notion of parent’s relations to children, as Nordic countries are extremely restrictive of parenting outside of very rigid norms.

This was the context for the publication of Bergström’s Divorcing With Children. Addressing the new “parental teams”, Bergström advises parents to give up the idea that they have a basic “right” to care for or control their children. Rather, parenthood is about obligations.

This mindset is due to their individualistic attitude, where natural hierarchies such as Church, family, or other organizations are seen as oppressive constructs that inhibit people from living as they see fit. The parent is not the authority over the child, but the caretaker at the mercy of the State’s whims. The Swedish ideal of freedom is an individual free from constraint, which paradoxically conflicts with the American conception of freedom that includes these natural bonds. As the American expats realized:

In the Swedish mind, the ideal is to isolate individual people from each other via the government.

Swedes and Americans---as cultures--- value freedom. But how they conceptualize it and engineer freedom are quite different.

In the Swedish mentality, no person should be able to exercise dominion or control over another person. This extends even to the parent-child relationship. It especially applies to married or romantic relationships.

The means by which Sweden has engineered their version of freedom is to have the government deeply involved in an individual’s life from cradle to the grave. Sort of an omnipresent genderless parent to which a person can always turn. And this frees them from burdening and being burdened by family and friends.

In the American mindset, the enemy of individual freedom is the State, while the family, community, religious congregation, and others are the means to enforce virtuous behavior and cooperation. In other models, freedom is imposed by the opposite, diluting common familial, religious, and local bonds through State action. The State sees itself as the active caretaker of its citizens freedoms that ensure no citizen is conscripted into unwanted bonds, no matter what they are. The child is more the ward of the State than the parents, as the parents in this framework has no right to impose its worldview or code of ethics. Of course, this fanatical level of egalitarianism requires a powerful state to mandate, and there’s still the contradiction of the state mandating its own views of individualism on the general population.

Because of this conception of rights, the State has final say regarding every aspect of raising and rearing children. The parents have no rights in this moral framework, and are more unpaid caretakers of the next generation than anything organic. This is not going away, as Sweden is doubling down on such policies as children in unmarried families skyrocket and the two-house model of childrearing continues unabated. The question remains, though, whether anyone will be willing to have kids in such an environment.

You Get the Society You Tolerate

While it’s easy to point and sputter at the excesses of both sides and it’s easy to contemplate the happy medium that is ideal for a functioning society, it doesn’t accomplish much. When dealing with the levels of rights and obligations, it runs the gamut of total autonomy to slavery, with justifications for both. Most people would blanch at the thought that their neighbor has the right to kill his six-year-old son if he became a nuisance, or could put their newborn daughter in the elements to freeze to death. They would justifiably be appalled if a child was beaten by a drunken father or allowed to run feral in tattered clothes around town. It is not only a travesty on a child, but the wider community, as such bad behavior begets more of the same, the same way as when one couple divorces it spreads like wildfire. There has to be a line that can’t be crossed, and social norms that can be enforced. On the other side, taking a child away because the family does not believe in new secular fads, does light corporal punishment, or has specific political beliefs the bureaucrats don’t like is also a travesty and terrorizes even those who are more “normal”.

As an American, my traditions give large latitude to the family. I’ve seen kids whose dad relied on the belt far too often, kids who came to school in tattered clothes, and a good share of nut-jobs mothers. Even with these tragic circumstances, barring one I knew involving sexual abuse, the kid was better off with the parent. Without even getting into the details of the horrific foster care system, a sub-par parent is better than a stranger. Still, the parent’s will can’t be absolute, and a parent’s rights must be curtailed by certain obligations due to bringing a helpless human being into the world.

I will argue that giving this wide latitude is likely best for stability, as models like Sweden, regardless of your views of it morally, is very unstable long-term. It relies on a very top-heavy bureaucracy and secretive channels to operate. While it leaves many parents in terror now, once the welfare state cannot support itself, the existing social structure will come tumbling down. Also, an all encompassing State looking over every parent’s shoulder is a fertility death trap for a nation with already far below replacement reproduction.

You can argue about the ethics of parent’s right, children’s right, and the rights of the State to your heart’s content, but such moral arguments doesn’t tell what the status-quo will be, but power. For parents who tolerate an intrusive state, they will get more of it. For those who look the other way at a kid getting beaten, they will get more of that too. Cohesive communities in the last century have been effective at self-policing, which has been a blessing and a curse. There’s the neighbor who sounds the alarm when he thinks a kid is being starved, and there’s the ninny who freaks out because a nine-year-old is biking around town alone. The overprotective shrew has helped murder classic Americana, but the concerned citizen reasonably looking out for others keeps everyone honest.

As zero-tolerance policies in education, psychology, and other fields have terrorized many innocent parents and an influx of childless adults want a hand in how other people’s children are being raised, the ratchet is always moving towards more control, more suspicion, more obligations without associated rights. As demographics change, and there are more childless voters, this will only accelerate. The voting booth won’t give a reprieve, but only parents who refuse to comply and are willing to fight to maintain their sphere of control. It means keeping self-policing norms without ceding power to neurotic busybodies and fighting an encroaching bureaucracy to allow your child to flourish.

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One pivotal movement in American history that is often glossed over is Women’s Suffrage. While the causes of slavery abolition and the 1960’s civil rights revolution is well, known, little ink is given regarding prominent figures of universal suffrage. The best known proponent of women’s suffrage, Susan B. Anthony, failed to achieve her goal, dying decades before women’s suffrage was established. It would seem there should be a mythology of the movement on par with other great upheavals, but little attention is given. It’s given as a moral inevitability.

The reason is not sexism, but rather that the story is embarrassing and makes for bad propaganda. The suffragettes were hardly a sympathetic bunch. Not only were they loud and abrasive, but they also weren’t above terrorism to get their demands met. Worse yet, most women had little interest in suffrage. Even as late as 1913 put up for a vote in Massachusetts, it was met with strong resistance or apathy by the majority of women, leading the suffragettes to actually resist letting women vote on the question, as they knew only a pitiable minority had a strong opinion behind the bluster. There is also the embarrassing fact that the voting rights women had, such as in school boards election, were notorious for incredibly low turnout.

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The narrative on the left regarding the anti-suffragette women often revolves around oppressive social conditioning they couldn’t untangle themselves from, or simply not understanding their potential outside a boring domestic life. On the right, they understand the anti-suffragettes as being more interested in hearth and home than politics and power games. Both are inaccurate. Women understood their collective power, wielded it very effectively, and had ways of getting their interests met outside the realm of party politics. Women’s groups were some of the most effective actors for social change in this time, and it was often the most active and powerful women that resisted suffrage.

They understood suffrage was a double-edged sword, and while they would gain power in the abstract, the organizations they developed and the social role they played would be transformed in a way that would serve as a long-term hindrance in getting their interests met.

I came across a fascinating collection of essays called Anti-Suffrage Essays by Massachusetts Women that laid bare the misconceptions by both sides. These women understood power, but that power took a different form. They weren’t ignorant leftovers from a previous misogynistic era, nor were they humble housewives uninterested in a public voice. To understand this dynamic, one has to understand their rights and responsibilities that, while different from men’s, allowed them to leverage influence in different but arguably more effective ways. One must also understand that universal suffrage had aftereffects on their social standing that, while they could now vote, made it harder to advocate for their interests.

Woman as Non-Partisan

A dispatch from Topeka, Kansas, describing the recent campaign in that state says that three years ago the Kansas Federation of Women’s Clubs lined up solidly for suffrage, and won it—and that they have not been lined up solidly for anything since! Instead of throwing their influence as a unit for good legislation, as women’s clubs are wont to do in male suffrage states, these women are divided into Republicans, Democrats, Progressives, and Socialists, and the friction among them is greater than ever before.

---

They do as the men of Portland did a short time ago, when a number of citizens became convinced that the moral conditions in Portland were not what they should be. And what did they do? Did they vote about it? Did they form party organizations? No; they resorted as nearly as they could, to what is known as ‘women’s methods,’ and formed a non-partisan citizen’s committee, just as detached as possible from politics. And why did they resort to women’s methods? Simply because they had all had the vote since coming of age, and they all knew how useless it is as a means of accomplishing reform work.

Margaret Robinson

The ideal of democratic institutions is a public expression of grievances and policy preferences. It assumes all interested parties will eventually agree on a happy medium that, while not ideal, is at least tenable. Modern mass-politics does not work like this due to the complexity of listening to every policy proposal from every person. Political parties are formed that, if you want any voice at all, you must at least partially conform to. As can be seen, internecine squabbling becomes rampant as loyalty to one's side and maintaining power takes precedence over good policy.

It’s not a coincidence that the most effective modern organizations have avoided naked partisanship, even if their advocacy is definitely coded to a certain party. While the NRA gets a lot of flack, they have been more successful in protecting their interests than those who tie their flag to a political party. Another example, the homeschool lobby, has punched dramatically above its weight by being a single issue, nonpartisan entity.

Before they received the vote, women's advocacy groups were well staffed and very effective. Freed from the constraints of partisan loyalties, they could designate themselves as above politics, the reasonable people that could find a solution amenable for everyone without taking a visible side.

For representatives of a cohort with no voting rights, they were incredibly effective. While they were not voters, they were wives, daughters, respectable society women, and philanthropists men running the legislatures admired and, sometimes, greatly feared. Upper class women had incredible organizational abilities and with it the ability to create good and bad publicity. Snubbing the wife of a prominent individual was as bad as a personal insult. Dismissing the grievances of a society of mothers made for bad optics. Standing outside politics gave leverage, and also the ability to organize without being beholden to a party.

Woman as Moral Force

One of them is that a few women, representing perhaps ten per cent of the sex, have under present conditions too much influence. These women, the World says, “have maintained at times a reign of terror over legislative bodies, in consequence of which half the country is now bedeviled by some form or other of harem government, and legislators are forever making ridiculous concessions to women agitators.” These “women agitators” are, of course, the club women, social workers, and others interested in social welfare. In order to make it unnecessary for legislators to make “ridiculous concessions” to this type of woman, the World advocates—what? Giving the vote to all women!

Margaret Robinson

I never saw so many women working for social betterment as I have seen in the American cities I have visited. In England women have turned their attention to politics and have accomplished nothing like so much in civic reform.

Mrs. Pethick Lawrence

The ability of women to appear truly non-partisan also meant they were seen as above the petty ambitions of politicians. One didn’t have to worry about someone pushing an angle for personal political vainglory, giving the impression of a class truly concerned with the public good without outside ambitions.

While there are plenty of examples of writers in this era lambasting the moral busybodies of society, far more talked about their innate virtue in a way that would make even the biggest boomer simp blanch. While the mantra of modernity is “well-behaved women rarely make history”, the reality is their enforcement of norms and ability to work within such norms gave moral weight to their sex, and with it moral deference.

Woman as Educator

Every man is born of woman and almost every man is cared for by a woman throughout his earliest years. The Jesuits, in their wisdom, founded on much experience, have said: “Give me a child until he is seven and after that you may do what you like with him!” It is these early years that count most in a man’s future. What have the mothers done in these years?

Women, through their training of their sons and daughters, hold the future of the world in their keeping. This training cannot be given by the enactment of laws; we cannot legislate the control of human passion. The law-maker bears no relation to the character builder.

Mrs. William Putnam

The chances are that woman suffrage would tend to make the school more truly the servant of the party in power than of the general good.

…..

Would her judgments be cooler because she is in the thick of the fight, and her statements more convincing because she is in direct conflict with the fathers and mothers of half her class? It is of the utmost importance that the child shall look upon the teacher as impartial. He may consider her in some respects his natural enemy, but he must none the less regard her as one of the immutable things of the universe. For this reason public commotions over school affairs, however well intentioned, injure the institutions they design to benefit. Anything which tends to increase the possibility of opposition between the teacher and the child's family, and makes the child's attitude partisan is a menace. Suffrage in this field as in so many others, offers no compensation for the increased friction and unrest.

Elizabeth Jackson

Men are not raised exclusively by other men. On the contrary, much of the rearing was done by women. They grew up with mothers who nurtured them, young teachers who advocated for the virtues in which to live their lives, and understood their responsibility to protect and provide later in life. The soft power of the schoolhouse allowed women to instilled these mindsets, and have men act on them long after leaving the classroom.

This moral training was largely instilled by women, buoyed by their status as unsullied by politics and personal ambitions. Since women did not exist in the partisan sphere, they could instill values on the young without political infighting. As they were not active partisan participants, there was a level of trust one’s child was not being indoctrinated into particular political causes but instilled with the virtues to be a good citizen. Feminists aren’t wrong when they say men need to be taught to control their sexual impulses and to help those weaker when they are younger, but such advocacy will fall on deaf ears if part of a power struggle between the sexes.

As Elizabeth Jackson stated, once the women who fill the halls of schools become political partisans, being able to say you are simply instilling values is simply untrue, as the schoolhouse from a young age on becomes a battleground of partisan politics. Instead of being able to be see as above such power games, every one of their lessons become suspect. She asks the pertinent question, does this help women’s causes? Instead of being relatively unencumbered in educating children, they are now foot-soldiers of other powers. Instead of the demeanor of serving general society, often to women’s benefit, they will be forced to take sides. Trust erodes, parents question the teachers, and young boys their own mother’s loyalties.

Woman as the Protected Sex

Thus far we have made a few crude experiments in double suffrage, but nowhere has equal suffrage been tried. Equal suffrage implies a fair field with favor to none—a field where woman, stripped of legal and civil advantages, must take her place as man’s rival in the struggle for existence; for, in the long run, woman cannot have equal rights and retain special privileges. If the average woman is to be a voter, she must accept jury service and aid in the protection of life and property. When the mob threatens, she must not shield herself behind her equal in government. She must relinquish her rights and exemptions under the law and in civil life, if she is to take her place as a responsible elector and compete with man as the provider and governor of the race. Such equality would be a brutal and retrogressive view of woman’s rights. It is impossible, and here we have the unanswerable answer to woman suffrage theories.

A. J. George

Massachusetts gives to her women the best protection of any state in the Union. In January, 1915, New York ranked first, but since our legislative enactments of 1915, Massachusetts is again in the lead. We have, in the first place, the Maternity Act. Then we have the law prohibiting women in industry from working more than fifty-four hours per week. We have the absolute prohibition of night-work for our women in textile, mercantile, and manufacturing establishments. We are one of the five states in the Union to have such a law. All the five states are male suffrage states. Not a single woman suffrage state prohibits the night employment of its women; and yet among the laws safeguarding the health of women workers, the prohibition of night work is of the most fundamental importance.

Catherine Robinson

Because of women's status as non-partisan moral educators of the next generation, there was a healthy paternalism in the culture. It was acceptable, and even morally required to ensure women weren't mistreated, often given special consideration in legislation. State labor laws, especially for night work, protected women better than suffrage states that veered towards equality while ignoring the clearly different lived realities of both sexes. Also, contrary to common sentiment, marriage law was heavily skewed towards women even in the 1920's.

When the Titanic sank and the declaration of “Women and children first” came through without a second thought, men were not acting just on instinct, but social conditioning instilled upon them since they were babies. In their youngest years, the rules of proper behavior were bestowed on men, including the treatment of women. The social contract was that women would receive protection and deference in some matters in return for safeguarding and protection.

It was considered unmanly, a violation of this social contract, to not come to a woman’s aid when in danger. It was shameful to not assist a woman in a physically arduous task. This is not the natural state of man but built from culture build over several generations that instilled values necessary for society to flourish. He was trained by women that a man did not speak ill of a lady, a man did not take advantage of a lady, and a man went out of his way to assist a lady.

Equilibrium Over Equality

More talk and less thought is expended on the subject of sex today than on almost anything else.

Mrs. William Lowell Putnam

If only Mrs. Putnam could witness the modern day.

Probably the fundamental disconnect between the suffragettes and the anti-suffragettes was where the basic building block of society lied. The suffragettes saw it as the individual, and saw women as a distinct class with political grievances that needed to be fulfilled. The anti-suffragettes did not see women as a class, but a sex, and considered the family society’s fundamental building block. Because of the nature of the family unit, there needed to be incentives for everyone to have their needs met and fulfill their responsibilities within this unit to raise the next generation. Once the family is dissolved in favor of the individual, the natural cooperation turns into squabbling over dominion. Instead of the sexes asserting their power in different but complementary domains, they all fight in the same sphere.

It goes without saying a lot of the fears of the anti-suffragettes were fulfilled. Men and women have become politically antagonistic; marriage has become a brittle and non-sensical institution as trust has broken down and there is little groundwork for cooperation. The reality of easy divorce has entered the calculations of husbands and wives with all-too-predictable results. Women believe they have to earn an income, even if not necessary, for divorce insurance. Men fear long hours in the office to build a nest egg, fearing it will be used against them in a custody battle.

The moral panic over the mikes of Andrew Tate, Nick Fuentes, or another boogeyman of the week has festered due to this out-of-control partisanship. Schoolteachers lost their leverage as non-partisan entities generations ago, and the gap keeps increasing. Young boys rightfully see these women as hacks trying to indoctrinate them into mindsets that benefit a particular political project rather than common civic mindedness. With this, chivalric impulses have gone to the wayside as men and women have become partisan adversaries. Argue you should risk your life to save a woman you don’t know and be prepared to get mocked mercilessly. White knight online and get called a simp.

As the internet is inundate with slurs such as Karen, Becky and others, it’s apparent the kind deference that previous generations exhibited has gone to the wayside, and many see no reason to follow the old social mores in modern times. As women entered the workforce in larger numbers, the they demand marriageable men make more. In the quest for equality, these are obviously contradictions and need to go. As much as conservatives lament the breakdown in these norms, it’s part of the renegotiation regarding roles between the sexes. One can’t demand equality in every sphere while maintaining special privileges. One doesn’t show deference to a political rival.

Still, even with all the upheavals, women do have the vote now. They are the majority of college graduates, and they get preferential treatment in the workplace. Doesn’t that mean they have more leverage to live their lives as they see fit? On paper, all the standard indicators state they are more powerful than ever.

The truth is likely more nuanced. It bears to mention that the rise of women’s philanthropy groups and other social organizations was partially a reaction to the rise of industrialization, and family businesses and estates to manage became a thing of the past. They were deprived of many traditional means of status, and women’s suffrage and their rise in the workforce was a reaction to that change.

While women have gained power in certain spheres, one might ask how much power is really here. Is a woman working as a high-powered executive more powerful than a lady a hundred years ago who could successfully petition governments for social reform? Is a teacher now more morally influential than educators in years past? The truth is, women still have a boss, and arguably one far more demanding than the overbearing husband of feminist mythology. Social atomization has fostered the creation of a propaganda apparatus that has strange new social demands and taboos, and there is no individual one can speak with to redress grievances.

Technology has sullied traditional means of personal interactions and relations that made power dynamics possible. You don’t pay your local doctor, but an impersonal medical leviathan. You don’t have a relationship and mutual back-scratching in working with a local business, but deal with a global conglomerate. The ability to assert power and influence has dwindled as impersonal technology has flattened human interaction.

The amount of power wielded is also not a static entity, or even a universal value. Trying to make the power dynamic between men and women equal is a fools’ errand. Biology is real, and men and women operate in different worlds, have different motivations, and relate to power differently. What’s needed isn’t equality, but equilibrium, the ability for both sexes to move in the social sphere and get their interests met. It’s only in such an equilibrium, when both sides can let their guard down and cooperate, that family formation can stabilize.

When there is not equilibrium, parties start to “sit out”. As family formation is becoming more and more difficult, and the sexes unwilling to play the current rules of the game, it’s clear this phenomenon of “sitting out” is going to get more pronounced, whether by mindless entertainment or empty and unrooted “live, laugh, love" ideology. While some state this is due to men not stepping up, the truth is as women wield more male coded power, the more resentful they are with men as a whole. As the anti-suffragettes feared, many women see themselves as a class, not a sex, and men are following suit. And his has made both men and women more miserable as the lack of cooperation has ended up failing to get both side’s needs met.

Of course, demanding equality between the sexes is akin to wishing unicorns into existence, and the ugly head of biology and innate psychology will win over in the end. One can argue about equal work conditions, equal pay, equal housework, equal childcare, and equal emotional labor until the heat death of the universe and get nowhere. Social norms that only serve the 5 percent of male-brained women and female-brained men will create abject misery for the rest of the population.

In some cultures the men work, but the women handle the finances. In some arrangements it’s vice versa. Some couples have harsh barriers between responsibilities, some are more fluid. The fanatical impulse for equality has inhibited the sexes from ascertaining what they really want, and what they’re willing to sacrifice to get it. The oppressed/oppressor dynamic makes it impossible to engage in good faith. Technology has reshaped the landscape, and the new equilibrium will not be a fanatical equality or the “trad” 1950’s.

Legal requirements of equality under the law has stymied the only indicator that matters, revealed preference. It has disallowed legal and cultural norms that might not give everything they want, but makes the tradeoffs worth it for most of the population. “Are things equal?” is a nonsensical question. “Are the tradeoffs acceptable?” is a framing that allows conversation and rapport.

Of course, the 19th amendment isn’t going to get repealed. Even if it could, it would not guarantee equilibrium is reached. That being said, as feminine means of non-partisanship, non-combativeness, and indirect means of persuasion as avenues of power has been forgotten, there is a vacuum in modernity that is begging to be filled. While it would be suicidal to abandon partisan politics, there is an opening for anyone, man or woman, who can be “above it all” and not worried about getting personally ahead, simply a concerned citizen who wants things to be better. There’s a place for a moral force that can disarm and influence a partisan neighbor. Paradoxically, it will likely need to be men who employ this more feminine approach, at least in the short term. Of course, a difference will be men won’t be able to play the victim. No one cares. They can, however, look like strong, reasonable, confident actors in a declining society. The adults in the room who just want both sexes to flourish. They can gently offer an alternative to both men and women.

A subculture that can replace combativeness with cooperation will allow easier mating off. Replacing power struggles with flexible and complementary norms that eschew rigid scorekeeping can build lasting trust, even if their relative “equality” can’t be spreadsheeted optimally. Of course, many will refuse any tradeoff, oftentimes by parties believing themselves to be on the side of angels. It’s not relevant whether everyone is convinced, but to find a critical mass of outsiders who find the arrangement a healthy equilibrium to get their wants met and buy in. This will not be won through arguing online, but living a new reality.

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And that is called asking for Dane-geld,

And the people who ask it explain

That you’ve only to pay ‘em the Dane-geld

And then you’ll get rid of the Dane!

Rudyard Kipling

When dealing with an enemy, one has a few options. There can be a temporary peace, total conquest, or extortion. When one side has an overwhelming advantage, peace makes little sense, but total conquest may not be optimal either. The military campaign may be too expensive, the risk might be too great, or there could be a destruction of capital in terms of skills and resources that would make a victory pyrrhic at best. In these cases the stronger power can simply extort the weaker power into giving exchanging tribute for peace, thereby strengthening themselves while losing nothing of value. It makes more sense to bleed them than destroy them, and the victims are often more willing to pay off their oppressors than risk annihilation.

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After a military defeat in 991, King Æthelred the Unready1 offered the Vikings under King Sweyn Forkbeard a tribute of about 10000 pounds of silver to cease hostilities. This tribute, the Danegeld, brought vast riches to the Vikings, but they weren’t above raising the rate. In 994, the Vikings came back demanding more tribute, and King Æthelred was forced to pay another 16,000 pounds of silver. Thus began a vicious cycle where the riches extorted were then used to make the enemy stronger, and therefore able to demand ever more payment in the future. Soon, the kingdom operated not so much for the general welfare of its subjects, but to transfer wealth to an external, hostile force. The extortion racket continued for decades until Sweyn Forkbeard's son, Canute, became King of England.2

Similar types of extortion are done at every scale, from an individual threatening to ruin a colleague by releasing damning information to mafias demanding “protection money” from neighborhood businesses to governments redistributing wealth through taxation from their productive constituents to ideologically aligned patrons. As power is gained with little to no loss, such appeasement only serves to invite more demands until the tribute becomes so onerous that the victims have nothing to lose.

While such extortion could be seen as all uses of force to secure resources, this is a gross oversimplification, though one embraced by radical individualists such as libertarians. The most infuriating part is how close they are to getting it, but falling just short. While mantras like “taxation is theft” and the “non-aggression principle” are woefully inadequate to handle the harsh realities of the real world, they understand fundamentals that are glossed over in modern civics, namely the primacy of violence.

Their main flaw is their philosophical dichotomy between individualism and mass, cohesive action. The ideal libertarian is a man on the prairie, a sovereign citizen with full control of his resources and wielding a rifle to protect them. While romantic, it’s clear why such a mindset doesn’t scale. Outside of Randian fantasies, armies can easily dispatch rugged but disorganized opponents with ease. It is why the Libertarian Party is, and always will be, a joke.

However, if one tries to scale the libertarian mindset to a unified collective, the libertarianism of the Hans-Hermann Hoppe variety, it becomes more tenable.

There is a government of sorts, and whether you consider the entity public or private is immaterial; the outcome is the same. It is emphasized that the government exists for the flourishing of its constituents. The police are there to protect the law-abiding. Fees are used to maintain roads. Building codes are enforced for the safety of the neighborhood. While there are some restrictions on freedom for society to function, the denizens know it benefits the group as a whole, even with some wasteful spending.

The ideal never lasts long, though. Bad actors will always find a way to worm into the organization. Maybe they’ll infiltrate the roads commission and build a little fiefdom. If you want your pothole repaired, get ready to make nice with them. In the beginning the demand might be minor, maybe a special favor or tickets to an exclusive event. As these interactions become normalized, other agencies are forced to pay their own tribute. Their funding spirals upward as less work gets done. The money forms a patronage class that can agitate other agencies and infiltrate those as well. Soon the entire bureaucracy becomes rotten. Roads aren’t being built, and the entire organization seems to exist to appease the worthless parasites. The bad actors that originally entered to exploit resources now have a little kingdom of their own to defend, built off pirating those trying to earn an honest living. The police now exist to extract wealth from the productive while doing nothing for public safety. The entire government apparatus becomes an extortionist racket as the productive members are milked as tax-cattle to fund their enemies.

High-trust, civic-minded citizens are most likely to fall prey by not acknowledging the ground shifting under them. They are most susceptible to the myths of good citizenry long after such a worldview is hopelessly counter-productive. The slow ratchet of higher taxes and lackluster services is viewed as a fact of life. Often, it takes more than a generation to pivot, as the young see with fresh eyes the collapse their elders refuse to confront.

This doesn’t mean all taxation and means of force are the same. While libertarians see all forcible extraction of wealth as equivalent, in the realm of power relations, this couldn’t be further from the truth. It’s very different for a government to tax for defense of one’s homeland, to build an economic safety net to ensure anyone in hard times doesn’t starve to death, and to form a minimum amount of health care for the poor. While one can argue about scale, efficiency, and levels of graft, these are at least tangible uses of government that doesn’t exist to simply serve someone with external loyalities.

Cronyism in local, state, and federal governments has always existed. In the years from the New Deal to the Great Society to the present, such cronyism has reached a fever pitch with new, legal avenues of graft open to anyone of the right political persuasion. Every year money flowed from the pocketbooks of productive citizens to radical progressives and foreign influencers, who then used that money to jockey for more power. Danegeld was offered by local governments, corporations, and cultural institutions to make the rabble-rousers depart for a time. The average taxpayer saw costs in every level of society rise, not just in taxes but compliance costs for increasingly nebulous regulations, all the while being frozen out of high-power positions and watching them be given to cronies instead. Agencies went from being a positive contributor to a wasteful but necessary component to an active enemy of those paying into the system.

For the longest time, this clear extortion was viewed as run-of-the-mill waste, the predictable outcome of government spending. While conservatives saw fat to be cut, progressives saw income used to form and maintain a vast patronage network. The sums of money got larger, the graft more blatant, and the terrorizing of normal citizens more pronounced. When Elon Musk came in with the well-intentioned but poorly executed DOGE initiative, the average person was awe-struck by the corruption. Money, likely in the hundreds of billions, went to a mass network of progressive NGOs that survived by government largesse. These orgs seemed to exist solely to be rabble-rousers. Intricate networks of NGO employees, loyal foot soldiers, and paramilitary wings of Antifa made people wonder if all the revolutions and turmoil of The Summer of Floyd, The Covid Hysteria, and the Rodney King Riots were indirectly funded through the federal government. It’s likely DOGE didn’t find half of the graft, as the Military-Industrial Complex, the Israel Lobby, and other sacred cows of the establishment right likely have the same level of corruption.

When police in several cities do little to nothing to deter crime, but will come down like the wrath of God to those who took matters into their own hands, people question the civic pieties they learned in school. When hucksters like Jesse Jackson gleefully extorted businesses for decades in clear cases of racketeering, they wondered why the legal hammer only went one direction. When America bombs Iran to sate the bloodlust of a foreign country, they wonder where loyalties lie. When non-profits like the SPLC are caught funding the very radicalism they pretend to be fighting, they wonder if these organizations thrive on chaos. They start to wonder if much of their taxes are being used by enemy forces to continue to crush their resolve. They wonder if the Vikings have taken over in all but name.

The first step in fighting paying the Danegeld is realizing you are paying the Danegeld, and for all of Trump’s foibles so far, he has laid bare the venomous contempt this patronage network has for the traditional American way of life. Billions of dollars were spent for the express purpose of alienating heritage Americans and importing their replacements. It isn’t relegated to Washington D.C. either. Religious congregations are realizing their higher ups hate their guts and will require churches to pony up funding for their own destruction. Hollywood now openly sneers at a large portion of their customers. Professional sports leagues are embarrassed by their own fans. It’s hard to pinpoint any organization that doesn’t have hostility towards their own conservative constituents.

This didn’t happen overnight, but through demanding little Danegelds that steadily increased. In the beginning, it could have been as simple as a small diversity statement or maybe a message against anti-Semitism to appease a small but loud minority. This small but loud minority had several distinct advantages. They were brash with their wants, unflinching in their moral superiority, and could handle social discomfort with ease. Outside the aggressive rhetoric of “Don’t Tread on Me” and talk of taking up arms, the natural libertarianism of the right is very susceptible to these pressures. The mindset of just wanting to be left alone makes these little compromises to “keep the peace” seem reasonable, a little pinch of incense to the gods, a little bit of Danegeld to keep things running smooth. The current disaster is something that has built up over generations.

The core belief of wanting to be left alone is untenable. No one can be totally left alone, and someone is paying the Danegeld. Conservatives in times past would loathe to put pressure on their progressive neighbors to donate to a pet cause, or hassle Human Resources to give a statement on a patriotic holiday. The progressive coalition has no such scruples, and that’s why they won. They had no issue with strong-arming either through social unrest or legal means to make everyone pay tribute to a moral crusade.

And why shouldn’t they? Why should a business be about just making money and not being a vehicle for social betterment? Why shouldn’t taxpayer money be sent to patrons of your own ideology? Even a culture warrior has to eat. While it’s true that throwing money haphazardly creates graft, it’s a failure of moral fortitude to be unable to say that everyone should have to contribute to social betterment. That guy might not be the best programmer, but he is competent and believes what you do and therefore should be hired. It doesn’t matter if your neighbor is pro-abortion, he should donate to the pregnancy resource center. It doesn’t matter if that DINK couple never wants kids, they can subsidize those who do. It’s called being a good person.

If universities can’t be objective, a financial penalty might straighten them right up. If Human Resources is discriminating against whites, make it as financially painful as refusing to hire a minority. Maybe they can grease the skids a little by hiring one of your friends or donating to one of your pet causes. The only way to keep bad actors out of a system is to have mechanisms to bleed them dry by both legal and extra-legal means. And the only way to defeat an out-of-control patronage network is to bleed it dry and make one of your own.

Of course, some might complain this will only create corruption in the other direction, and they have a point. Bad actors on either side can grind productivity to a halt and create enemies, but this doesn’t mean building patronage through one’s opponents resources is verboten. In fact, it is necessary. For the right, regaining a cultural foothold again after the other side has been subsidized by public funds for generations will require picking winners.

In a world of heavy partisanship, being able to extract wealth from your enemy isn’t a moral failing, but an effective strategy to keep your enemies down and your friends elevated. Maybe sometime in the future a better equilibrium will hold, partisanship will evaporate, and a new high-trust, civic mindset will form. Maybe, but for now, someone is paying the Danegeld, so you might as well be the Viking.

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Back in college, I was friends with what seemed to be the ideal couple. She was small and kindly but with a mild neurotic streak that her muscular boyfriend easily countered with a smile and teasingly tossing her over his shoulder. Unfortunately, they broke up, and I assumed it was typical young lovebird drama. The reality turned out to be far darker.

The man’s mother was a hyper-pious Catholic who despised the girl, going as far as telling him that “the devil brought you two together”. The man, while outwardly happy and secure, was weak in keeping his mother’s outbursts in check. Needless to say, she had no intention of spending the rest of her life with an unhinged mother-in-law and broke off the relationship. The fact that the woman ranting and raving about demons was a devouring mother was not lost on me.

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Whether or not one is in a religious community, everyone has a story. Maybe it was the erratic street-corner preacher shouting at bystanders to repent and escape the devil’s grasp, or the self-righteous churchgoer who is all too willing to relegate everything he dislikes as “a tool of the devil”. There is the “satanic panic” regarding role-playing games, day-care centers (some of which was true), and rock-and-roll. Such hysterics over time led the general population to roll their eyes and scoff when old scratch was mentioned.

Yet there is still that doubt lying in even our secular times, that modern psychiatry more explains away than explains problems of living, that there is a manifestation of malice and cruelty wafting through society, a certain spirit that emanates time and time again that scientific manuals can’t quantify. One can speak to his heart’s content about chemical imbalances, DSM-V classifications, and standards of care, but such cold, clinical words can’t penetrate the language of the spirit.

We have been a materialist culture for several generations, and the march of science continues to relegate religious thinking to empty individual pieties. Psychiatry explained mental illness, psychology healed without using the language of a priest. After the social and religious revolutions of the 1960’s, even the Catholic Church seemed to cede most of its territory to psychology. Demonic possession was relegated to mental illness that could be helped with a mix of medication and talk therapy. The exorcist, likely the most unscientific of all professions, became a dying breed, with only 12 in the United States in the 1980’s. It was a near certainty they would cease to exist within the next couple of decades. Yet underneath the seeming victory of secular thought, a spiritual emptiness took hold, along with the realization that material philosophy did nothing to explain the strangeness of existence. Now there are now 150 exorcists in the United States, and they can’t keep up with demand.

Father Chad Ripperger, an exorcist and minor celebrity in the trad-Catholic sphere, recently went on the Tucker Carlson Podcast. There he discussed his experiences as an exorcist, how demons operated, and the foibles us mere mortals do to invite their presence. What’s interesting about his appearance is his indifference to whether anyone believed him. While his worldview was completely foreign to the average man, and he had no intention to debate the logic of an exorcist in the modern day, taking the need as a given. Because of his attitude, a fully secular man will probably see a kook discussing shapeshifting and dialoguing with diabolical beings. Some more religious will be fascinated by his stories and explanations, glad that such spiritual matter can be discussed openly. Other religious will wonder why an exorcist makes podcast rounds like a celebrity and question whether discussing demons to the general public is a good idea. Both religious sides have a point.

wrote on the spiritual pitfalls of contemplating the demonic, arguing such actions will cause nothing but misery. It is akin to forbidden knowledge, divination that can only spiritually damage one listening.

I had no warning that I was going to be instructed by the tongues of liars and thieves. I had not given consent. It was a violation. Keep the hell away from me! This was not profanity when I said it, but a literal command to the most popular exorcist in the world from the middle of my kitchen. Since then, I have seen Father’s content pop up seemingly everywhere, and it is often and increasingly objectionable as he offhandedly recalls the words of demonic encounters and places the burden of such knowledge upon the little ones of Jesus’ flock.

The Disobedience of Fr. Ripperger

Others argue that such knowledge is necessary to survive without falling to naivete.

The fact is this - although Scripture tells us to be ‘like little children’ this does not mean we are to be enfeebled as little children. Especially in the modern age, with devilish lawlessness running riot, we have our tools and weapons, the Sacraments, Guardian Angels, the Rosary, and, crucially, His Holy Spirit to equip us for spiritual battle because there are not enough Father Ripperger’s to go around and this is something he clearly recognizes which is why he teaches us and educates us in these things. This is part of why I respect him.

In Defense of Father Ripperger

When one talks of the heat of evaporation in different compounds, this is detached, outside of oneself. Contemplating the demonic is another matter, and rests on actively contemplating a malignant, wholly inhuman force. As seen by how it drives some to hysterics, taking the form of demons while railing against them, it’s a valid point that some people aren’t equipped for such contemplation. It doesn’t affect only the individual either, as irresponsible talk of the demonic brings all religious practice into question. Maybe accessing knowledge of the demonic is questioned for a reason, for the same reason books were once banned.

Of course, all this talk of forbidden knowledge, possession, and spiritual infiltration is a far cry from the triumphalism of Western materialist ideology. While all the words are in English, the connotations of the words described might as well belong to two different civilizations. Skeptics will question whether the speaker truly believes his own words.

While only God knows Father Ripperger’s heart, Let’s take at face-value he is sincere in what he says, that he really experiences what he says. He really believes he talks to demons, he really believes he casts them out, and he really feels he has been under demonic attack. It would be unfair to lump Ripperger in with this crowd. He is calm, detached, and often quite funny in his interviews. His definition of demons and his encounters are complex and esoteric, and whether or not you believe they exist, such beings make rational sense within his theological framework.

Unlike the shrill mother or the rabid street preachers, his thought is deeper and more layered. He’s also willing to discuss other factors at play that give a better explanation and cure to a malady than immediately assuming demonic possession. If one listens to the interview, he doesn’t even dismiss non-supernatural explanations. He knows you don’t need to talk of demons when someone has serious hangups about trust because of being sexually abused as a child. While few adults, thankfully, have what would be considered a full demonic experience, they have enough empathy to understand the struggles that creates.

The ways of the scientific mind through the last few centuries have put emphasis on the objective, to witness something that can be witnessed by any third party in a reproducible setup. Such a mindset has brought about the revolutions of physics, biology, and ecology that we take for granted. Yet it would be wrong to allocate everything to clinical objectivity. A classic thought experiment is whether an infinitely powerful computer existing outside the cosmos can predict with clockmaker’s accuracy the entire lifetime of the universe. In the time of Newtonian physics, this would seem to be a given. In the new age of quantum mechanics and modern experiments that show a strange non-locality, this isn’t as cut and dry.

Objectivity has also been made synonymous with reason, that unless something can be demonstrated to an outsider at will, it belongs to the realm of sentiment. Testing the velocity of a particle is part of the scientific process, while intuitions are not trustworthy without hard data to back them up. When Father Ripperger discusses types of demons like Lilith and Loki, commiserating how their presence torments a man, there is an implicit understanding, an instinct, but nothing that can be relegated to objective analysis. After all, aren’t these matters subject to cultural prejudices and social stigmas? Yes, of course, but does that discount individual experience. Does that nullify his mental model of the world?

Ripperger: So supernatural is those things which are above anything that is created, and that pertains to God. Whereas preternatural comes from the Latin word praeter natura, which means aside from nature. So that would be things that are above what we experience as human beings in this world, but it's not supernatural because it's not God. It's kind of in that in-between state, which is what the demons are. But they're still considered natural in the sense of they have a specific nature that God created them with. They're created beings and that they actually have a natural law. They have all that, they're structured to think in certain patterns in certain ways. So it's kind of a middle tier, but it's preternatural. Supernatural would be something like being able to suspend the laws of nature. So demons can't cause miracles, for example, but they can cause things that to us as human beings are outside our normal experience. And so it looks miraculous, but it's actually not. Something that they can do on their own.

From a purely materialist perspective, this will sound like total balderdash, but is it balderdash to a person who has experienced a dark presence, a malignant voice in their psyche that seems to stem from nowhere? The materialist may talk of chemical imbalances driving these sensations, but that just begs the question of how a chemical reaction can emit a non-material output. One’s own consciousness stands as a refutation, and the idea of consciousness being an emergent property of molecular complexity serves more to obfuscate than edify. That being said, overt superstition obfuscates as well, and Ripperger says some pretty wild stuff in which some pushback is justified.

An individual is still an individual, who has subjective experiences no one else can fully understand. A brain scan might pinpoint general emotions, but the experience remains hidden to everyone but the subject. An exorcism requires this kind of encounter, as there is no process or procedure, no specific rite that can with certainty cast out the demon. It depends on the subjects using these tools. It’s also why exorcisms are as contrary to science as one can be. Instead of objectivity, is it subjective to its core, an encounter of two souls, with maybe a demon lurking inside. It’s why the personal virtue of the exorcist is considered important, why his connection to the divine is necessary for being able to bestow deliverance.

In the realm of humans understanding the world, there’s a place for metaphor, for the fuzzy details that fit in no theoretical framework. A physicist can pontificate on the properties of matter, but such theoretical knowledge will not get him far against a professional tennis player’s instincts built over a decade of hard practice. You can prattle off stats to your heart’s content on how to raise the perfect child but you’ll be useless compared to the hard-boiled father who sacrificed and suffered to raise his own six children. Theories, at their core, are just models, and every model hits the wall of reality. This goes for the minutiae of theology as well as the frontiers of scientific research.

At its core, this is the distinction between the spiritual and material. The material is, by its very nature, lifeless. It can see atoms in powerful microscopes, observe cells reproduce, and tell what wavelength makes the color red. It can’t, however, speak objectivity on experiencing "red”, stubbing one’s foot on that bunch of atoms called a rock, or pinpoint when a mass of cells becomes something more and can experience the world. The sensation doesn’t exist in a certain time or place. No one can point and say this is where the experience of “red” lies. In the spiritual realm, the words to explain what an encounter with the divine entails will seem like straw compared to the encounter itself.

Yet the spiritual and material are intertwined in countless ways. One would have to be mad to be unable to map hunger to lack of physical nourishment or a brain injury to limiting cognitive abilities. There will be those who argue the panic over devils will keep those who need mental health care from getting their needs met, while others will accuse the medical establishment of wanting to numb their patient’s mind instead of handling a real spiritual crisis more in line with the faculties of a priest.

Since the time of Plato with his theory of forms, philosophy has tried to understand the interaction of ideas on the physical plane. Some consider the entire material plane an illusion, maya, while others believe only what can be measured is real. Wittgenstein argued such questions were simply problems of language. Such ideas have been discussed for millennia and will probably be discussed until man takes his last breath.

This isn’t to argue Chad Ripperger is correct. Even many who like him think he’s a mixed bag. Still, he represents the hard extremes and conflicts in such modes of thought that have no conclusive answer, and likely never will. There are those obsessively beholden to hyper-rationalist scientism and those who get a little nutty with superstitions. Both are immensely dangerous.

On Angels

While there is the demonic, one must not forget about the angelic. One of my old classmates became a priest after the usual conflicts between wanting to be married and raise a family and his higher spiritual purpose. When we worked together in the fields during the summer, the farmer looked over to him and said, “that guy’s just different.” And different he was. I still see my work partner throwing hay bales on those humid summer days and getting into antics at school, even after he entered the clergy and has become a local legend with stories of miraculous conversions and healings. While I have witnessed none of them, I have no doubt of his sincerity, nor of the many who swear he healed them. In another example, an extended family member who almost died in a routine c-section miraculously stabilized after her priest administered the Anointing of the Sick.

Can I prove that these are real miracles? Of course not. But believing the subjective experiences of fellow human beings is hardly irrational either, and neither is believing in phenomena outside our technological trappings to observe. As the levers of truth-telling our institutions once wielded rust out, other modes of thought are escaping. Such new interest in the preternatural can be seen as a longing for a re-enchantment.

Yet in our world there is much more talk of the demonic than the angelic, of Lovecraftian horrors than guardian angels. Perhaps it is because we live in a world festering with devilry, perhaps we can no longer see the angelic if we tried, our minds hopelessly mired in cynicism and despair. Yet there are miracles all around us for those willing to see.

As stated:

In this fallen reality we have built, the Lord has not been quick to drive out demonic beings nor ghostly beings nor still odd beings, for it is these oddities and terrors that often remind the world how much we require a deliverer.

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Back in my twenties, I was part of a co-ed young adults’ group. Like most cliques of this nature, people attended them more as an avenue for finding a romantic partner than anything else. One of my buddies was an established software developer taking home a reasonable paycheck but missing all social tact. He inherited a house from his grandparents, still adorned with all their archaic furniture. Dressing like a nerd out of the 1950’s, he was notorious for incessantly asking every single girl for dates. Needless to say, he gave them the ‘ick’. A newcomer came and, as expected, he asked her on a date within a couple weeks. Surprisingly, she said “yes”. They continued dating and after a few months he proposed to her. To the horror of the others, she said “yes” again.

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The women’s clique went to lunch with her and staged what amounted to an intervention, asking what in blazes she was thinking. She was established, reasonably attractive, and still young. In the interrogation, she stated he was stable, would be a good father, and she could count on his loyalty. The romantic infatuation of early love was non-existent, and she spoke in terms of utility more than anything. To some ears this will sound like a grotesque compromise that goes against everything a marriage should be, but anyone who is honest knows there’s a spectrum between exciting romance and practicality, and everyone makes decisions based on what their priorities are.

They’ve been married around thirteen years now with three kids. When I catch up, both seem content. She’s not getting an exciting life, but a reliable husband who is present. He’s likely not getting a love life that knocks him off his feet, but it’s not a dead bedroom either. A lot of people would kill for that arrangement. These sorts of transactional thoughts go to the highest echelons of power, such as when Ivanka Trump was famously asked if she would have married Donald Trump if he wasn’t rich, she replied back that he wouldn’t have married her is she wasn’t beautiful.

Over time you see every sort of family dynamic. Quite often, you see ones that make you wonder how the husband or wife can refrain from running out the door. I have a friend who is a total workhorse while his wife is the opposite. Ornery, obese, and very lazy. He’s also the most maritally satisfied man I know. I also know an opposite case where the husband lulls around on the couch scrolling his phone while his wife handles both the kids and cooking. Again, she is perfectly happy with the relationship. Of course, I also see everywhere else in the middle. Needs are being met, even if they are unconscious or irrational.

These mediums of stability did not occur through long, drawn-out conversations. Equilibrium did not form through an objective framing of the facts of life or their personal abilities. They happen in the unconscious level, primed through hormones, past experience, instinctual wants, forward-thinking goals, and plain old practicality. As much as people want their spouse to change, they have a large number of immutable aspects you just learn to deal with and come to an understanding that complaining isn’t going to change anything, and sulking about one’s situation is a waste of emotion.

Little of what is deemed objective criteria for marital health pertain to every couple. Some couples talk all the time, some barely ever. Some go out constantly, some are homebodies. Some have an active sex life; some barely ever get under the sheets together. If you read through relationship advice online, especially social media, talking about some of the above situations will likely create responses with “toxic” or “emotional abuse”. The internet is full of advice on how to turn your marriage from “okay” into “electric”. While there’s nothing wrong with improving one’s relationship, quite often the disappointment with realizing that your ideal “electric” marriage is never going to happen turns an “okay” marriage into an insufferable one. They run into hard limits and take it personally.

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