Even at its scrupulous best, a delegated self-defense is an illusion, as any father who has killed a burglar can tell you – and as the father who was not there to defend his family can never bear to tell you.
And yet the nature of nature is that tragedy results not just from malice but from simple negligence. I hope I am wrong about the border crisis. I hope I am wrong that this is an intended genocide-by-epidemic, and I hope I am wrong about the epidemic regardless of the intentions of our lazy tyrants.
But if I am wrong in the instant matter, I am not wrong in the large: The essence of leadership, of the captaincy of a polis, is that the captain promises never to put your life or prospects into avoidable peril. Whatever spin anyone might put on these events, whether incompetence or malice, there is nothing of leadership in them.
To the contrary, it is increasingly obvious that the ruling class is too busy grasping in its own behalf to care at all about the fate of the people it presumes to rule. If our despots are not actively trying to kill their own burdensome clientele with an epidemic, they’re not doing anything to stop it, either.
Not this and not anything. The ruling class cannot defend the borders of the territory it insists it must rule, but it cannot keep criminal predators away from your home and family, it cannot even keep bedbugs from infesting your furniture.
The promise of the policed polis is that, since we all share a common interest in the policing, we can offload the burden of self-defense to a commonly-controlled disinterested third party. Government isn’t actually sold that way. If it were, no one would buy it, since we all know from experience that ‘disinterested’ will sooner or later come to mean ‘predatory.’
But idea of a government’s legitimacy is inverted to begin with: We are governed to the exact extent we pretend that we are not being preyed upon, and we are in rebellion – the legitimacy has forevermore evaporated – as soon as we drop the pretense.
I love, love, love the next question:
You rebel, when you do, in loyalty to what?
And thus are my three stories from Monday’s post united: The Return of the Hoplite. Dad reconciles with Mom so that together they can make their home and family evermore secure against the vicissitudes of cruel fate – including cruelly predatory government.
Considered as story it’s like a blended-family drama, but it’s the reblending of the original family. A lot of the same tropes, obviously: Junior’s got his Oedipus thing, Missy misses Mom’s past distraction, like that. But the larger tale is the recognition, on the part of each character, that it is their love for their family that makes them whole and human and lovable themselves. This is a fascinating story to me, a nice way to scale the immense down to a single family and to show why it’s all one thing.
But what is more interesting to me now is simply this:
This is what will happen. Reconciliations maybe, and I’d love to see a lot of them, along with the weird blended-reconciliations that will be occasioned by our recent disastrous dysmatrimony. But what will happen, going forward, is that the devolution of government into pure rent-seeking predation will put the burden of self-defense back onto the individual, with the result being that the only enduringly stable homes will be father-headed households.
Dad comes back home? Wonderful. Mom and Dad find each other after recovering from other disasters? Good enough. Mom and Dad never split up? That’s the best bet yet. Expect to see a strange new respect for fatherhood as Big Mother’s teats start to dry up.
But regardless of what other people say about any of this, well-fathered homes are the future of civilization. They are civilization to begin with: When you rebel against criminality for the sake of your family, you are rebelling in behalf of civilization. You are not committing treason, you are ceasing at last the treason of putting any loyalty ahead of your fidelity to your spouse and children.
But father-led families are the future, too, by necessity. Modernity is breeding itself out of existence. The future belongs to our children, and, right now, children are born only to the thoughtless and to people stoutly committed to good fathering. Assuming the ruling class isn’t trying to exterminate the thoughtless by epidemic, they will in their turn become Hoplites, too, because only father-led homes will prosper as the margins narrow.
This is where the Hoplites came from in the first place: The empire that presumed to rule – that is, to tax – the Hellas failed, and the individual father was all the defense there was for his family, livestock and land against predators, bandits and wannabe kings.
It was never otherwise. Even at its scrupulous best, a delegated self-defense is an illusion, as any father who has killed a burglar can tell you – and as the father who was not there to defend his family can never bear to tell you.
The collapse of the welfare state, now or later, will rub these facts in our noses, but they were never not facts:
Only fathers can raise self-responsible children, so, to the extent children thrive and themselves become good parents, this will happen in father-led homes. The future belongs to those children, because they are the children who will have a future.
