Saturday, March 03, 2018

Sexual Revolution's Reward: Chaos and Massacre

This is excerpted from a mid-length essay which actually begins with a discussion of immigration policy (!!) and eventually gets around to the meat of the matter.

...In recent years, as our country, like other first-world nations, has taken a nationalist turn, many scholars have turned to Alexis de Tocqueville, emphasizing the great moral psychologist’s belief that democracy requires virtuous characters. For de Tocqueville as for the Founding Fathers, democracy in America worked because it was a Christian nation. He thought especially well of American women, to whose moral excellence he attributed the excellence of the citizenry. 

Those women, however, were the products of a patriarchal culture, and here I come to my central insight. It is that the loss of male authority in the family creates a social conditioning that is adverse to democracy. In the past, the West’s Christian moral framework may have been imparted by men and women alike, but the vital task was led by men, who, as the stronger and therefore more fearsome sex, served to enforce the moral precepts. Boys and girls grew up learning to behave in certain ways, and the failure to do so, they understood, would entail punishment from a father—an authority figure whom they (ideally) both loved and feared. Having been conditioned in childhood to obey, adults, once they came to exercise power in the culture, would be far more disposed than they are now to respect and submit to a rule, or convention, or law, or whatever, whether they agreed with it or not. 

To a significant extent, the loss of male authority also entails the loss of morality in general. It is important to understand that when people do a good thing, or what they are supposed to do, it is not necessarily because mere reason has prompted them to do so. After all, reason by itself is value-neutral. If a man is brave or generous, you can be sure he feels internally motivated to be so, and that will typically be rooted in past experience, ultimately going back to the moral conditioning by which he was shaped as a child....

Well, yes.  That's not news, of course; the old Rockford Institute (The Family in America) was sending up flares and rockets about the consequences of fatherless children in the 1970's.

Anyhow.

...Removed from the family, authority is now the province of the bureaucratic state, which rules over mass man with an obscene, Kafkaesque impersonality. We find Rieff’s thugs in the boys who shoot up schools, and in Antifa, Black Lives Matter, and other violent phenomena. All striving to meet human nature’s difficult need for esteem, they are testaments to a social order gone wrong, terribly wrong....

So, with the termination of male authority and the rise of the Bureaucratic State, we have a new phenomenon.

...masculinity itself has come to be perceived as a pathology from the very beginning....

Sound familiar?

...As everybody knows, men and women don’t understand each other, so in a context dominated by the latter, whether it’s an elementary school or Harvard, normal male behavior may be deemed “bad” or “toxic.”...

He's not very keen on the 'chick-i-fi-cation' of schools; he should have mentioned churches in that same context.

It's the end of the world, folks.

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