I have good news: The world outside your mind is a a glorious paradise of infinite possibilities. The right kind of art will show you – and your children, and everyone’s children – how to see it that way from the inside.Photo by: Josh Pesavento
Full disclosure: I am one of the underfathered. It’s good odds you are, also. Your own parents, too, probably, and certainly mine. The Marxist war on fatherhood predates Marx, which is saying something in the brisk world of global atrocities. By undermining and eventually eliminating the father’s moral authority over his family, the Marxists have all but succeeded in eliminating the Hoplite freehold – the actual bedrock of Western Civilization and the last redoubt against tyranny – returning humanity to its pre-Hellenic glory of satraps and slaves and mountainous mass graves.
How did Marx go one-up on Archimedes? By moving the Earth the other way, for spite. But give the Marxists their due: It’s a devastating accomplishment, particularly taking account that it was done entirely by subterfuge, right under everyone’s noses.
Where do self-responsible adults come from? Self-responsible fathers. Let us deny mothers nothing, but we deny fathers everything when we refuse to take notice that the less fully-committed fathering children have, growing up, the longer they take to, you know, grow up.
Not always, not everyone, blah, blah, blah. Why are our kids so fat, and why are they fatter year-by-year and generation-by-generation? Why are they so scattered, unfocused – lost? Why aren’t they raising self-responsible kids of their own? Why are only the least-fathered among them even half-fecund – allowing for all the abortions? Why do our children grow up to be adult babies?
The father too much absent from our minds will now say: “Duh!”
Easy problem to fix, though, right? Just put dad back in the driver’s seat. It’s his romance from the first, necessarily, and his marriage, his offspring, his family, his freehold, his estate. This is the way monogamy works, and it is the only way monogamy works. That’s good news for you: You don’t need for anyone else to discover the truth. If you build your family like the Clan Testudo, no outside force can ever destroy it.
But what about the culture at large? Marxist ideologues head up a vast army of full-time professional rent-seekers whose job it is to rid intact families of their fathers, thus to turn mom and the kids into still more full-time professional rent-seekers. Underfathered boys spawn even-less-fathered babies with underfathered girls, often without the pesky redundancy of a marriage – or even an actual romance. Rinse-and-repeat, generation-by-generation – and behold the devastation.
So who bells that cat?
My answer: Benedy, the art that helps people do better by showing people learning better and doing better.
Such a simple story, but you can tell it seven billion different ways. We are each one of us telling a story, either a benedy or a maledy, with our lives. Who are we telling it to? Ourselves, mainly, but to everyone who is aware of our externalized choices and actions. How you see your life – and other people’s lives – is a reflection of your values, themselves reflections of your world-view, your own personal, private metaphysics.
Is the world a garbage dump, where every seemingly good thing rusts and rots and reeks in the end? Where hope is an insane illusion and despair is the only reliable constant?
This is the world Marxism wants you to see – since your despondence breeds dependence – so it is the world it shows you in its every product: News, drama, pop music – even sports programming!
Or: Is the world a glorious paradise of infinite possibilities? Is hope the fuel that feeds your frenzy, with any frustrations seeming somehow always to lead to even greater triumphs?
It’s the same world, either way, with the only difference being how you choose to see it – and respond to it. But here’s a question that should give self-responsible adults pause:
Where can an underfathered kid – or adult – go to confirm and reinforce his belief in that glorious paradise of infinite possibilities? Where can a little girl go to find a prosthetic, at least, for the father she’s missing? Where can children – and their parents – see and model better ideas, better habits, better behavior? Where can children growing up with adult-baby parents learn how to raise themselves?
The answer to every one of those questions would be art – especially drama, prose and music – except that, in large measure, that art is not there. The Marxists have catalogued the dump in every detail, but paradise, apparently, is all-but-unexplored.
It’s easy to understand why: The West tolerates rational self-interest, but just barely. It almost never champions the idea of making the universe more perfect from the inside out, even though this is exactly what every successful human being – including all the proficient Marxists! – has done with his own life. If we are not deriding self-improvement as being the ultimate evil, we are hoarding it for ourselves and for our own children. And we almost never celebrate it – unambiguously – in art.
We have robbed our children of their fathers, and we have robbed them of any means of trying to grow into self-responsible adulthood without their fathers.
To the Marxists: Well executed.
And to the rest of us: Not just “Duh!” but “Feh!”
Politics is downstream from culture? What culture? For whom? The only purpose of a rational culture – and the ultimate purpose for everything made by the mind of man – is to engender self-responsible parents. Our culture is entirely Marxist, and, accordingly, it produces nothing but irresponsible parents, each new generation less fathered and less prepared to raise self-responsible children than the last. This is a policy that cannot end well.
Oh, but you’re opposed to all that? Opposed how? By what means are you evangelizing all those underfathered kids in the belief that hard work pays off? How many of them could you proselytize, even if you were actually trying? How good a job are you doing with your own kids? People like to natter about The Gods of the Copybook Headings, but where are the god-forsaken copybooks – and the morality plays each heading summarizes?
Why don’t our children grow up right? Why would we expect otherwise, when we raise them so wrong? Dads aren’t allowed to be fathers, and their children are not even permitted to see fathers.
And that’s why I keep hammering away on benedy: We can raise better children, our own and everyone’s, by giving them better art. Everyone, even in good families, can learn to do better by consuming the art of doing better – and people in not-so-good families can learn that better really does exist, that it’s possible to move that way, step-by-incremental-step. And children growing up without reliable grown-ups can learn how to raise themselves.
The libertarian/conservative messaging strategy is right next door to being useless: We chortle, we hector and we always stoop to condescend. The art we think should sway people repels them – and we blame them for that. And we almost never make art that shows ordinary people how to improve their lives incrementally by learning and mastering better ideas.
How’s that grand strategy working out for you? How is it working out for your kids?
Isn’t it time to try to do better?
I have good news: The world outside your mind is a a glorious paradise of infinite possibilities. The right kind of art will show you – and your children, and everyone’s children – how to see it that way from the inside.
