The Benedy Benediction: Deploying fiction to set children on a better course – for life.

I’ve been talking to Brian Brady on Facebook about an epiphany I had last week:

I want to talk to eight-year-olds.

Wait! Don’t call the Kiddie Kops just yet. I don’t have creepy designs on children. I just want to take over their minds.

No. Really. Wait. There’s more. A lot more.

Stipulate that everything I say is true: Civil society is breaking because rational egoism is broken because fatherhood has been eviscerated from modern families. Quibble me no quarrels and take it as given that what got us here was Hoplite fatherhood – father-led families – and civil order is collapsing in a chaos cascade because fathers no longer lead their families to ever-better destinies.

That much is curable, surely. It’s what I’ve been talking about for two years, deploying the story arc of the benedy – in which the action of the story moves from worse to better – to help people improve their lives. At Church this week, I sing the praises of the film Chef as an excellent example of an egoistic benedy – an individual becomes a better person, and, in consequence, his whole world comes to be better. I love that story. I could reap it – and sow it – every day.

But: There are complications. Adults don’t like to change. I define adulthood by relationships, when you wake up to the fact that you owe responsibilities to your family, you are not just owed tributes from it. But another definition of adulthood is the young person who has matured to the point that he believes he is beyond thinking, that there is nothing of value left to be learned. Labradors are always puppies, but some dogs just get lazy. That’s the way life runs, and there’s not a lot you can do about it, not by then.

But if you can get to the puppies while they’re still puppies, you just might-could get somewhere…

And that’s my big-duh! epiphany: That I need to be selling the ideal of Hoplite fatherhood to the people who have the least cause to believe it ever could have existed: Children growing up in America now.

I want to sell radical traditionalism to children as an outrageous teenage rebellion. I want to show children how to build the families they wish they were growing up in.

And that’s Church this week, The Benedy Benediction: You know, for kids.