SelfAdoration.com

Let’s start with a sad story:

Picture your own life at age three – but subtract the love.

How do I know there was a lot of love in your home? Because you can read me. I am tough sledding just as grammar, but I also frequently and intentionally put people through excruciating pain – like I’m doing right now. Only folks who learned deep emotional resilience in childhood can put up with me.

So go back to being an awakening child-mind, but take away all the interaction, all the conversation, all the shared events, all the affection – all the teasings and ticklings and snugglings – all the attention. One or both of your parents – or a grandparent or an older sibling – paid an enormous amount of attention to you when you were a baby, or, baby, you could not be here now.

Probably it was a lot of people: A couple or a few all the time, and many more now and then. And each one of those people was working – by intention or not – to cultivate your humanity. Virtually all children get at least minimally-adequate nurturance, since they are ultimately able to walk upright and to bathe nearly often enough. But those of us who are delighted to embrace the life of the mind – my way or any way – are beneficiaries of an enormous amount of attention we can never hope to repay.

So take all that away. What does your life look like to you? What does your future look like? Everyone is somewhere at the age of three. Had you been there then – tended to but never attended to – where would you be by now?

Why does fatherhood matter? Why does art matter? Why does empathy matter, for heaven’s sake? Yours is a cultivated mind. What you are today is what someone wanted for you to (more…)

It’s this simple: We will not defend what we have so long as we refuse to defend what we are: Rational egoists. We lose everything that matters to us because we twice betray what makes our lives work: We not only affect to deny our egoism, we fail to show our neighbors why it is the only possible source of human thriving. The change you’re looking for in the world can only come about when you resolve to live up to your own humanity – and help your neighbors live up to theirs.

You ain’t never been to a church like The Church of Splendor:

I sing the praises of The Clan Testudo – the adamantly father-headed home. If the goal of civilization is to thrive enduringly in civility, The Clan Testudo achieves that objective better and more-reliably than any other family configuration – this because it engenders civility from the inside out, from within the home, but also from within each person in that home.

There is no alternative to existential reality, so you will have played the hand you were dealt by your parents, but the folks who were dealt the best hands, overall, grew up in a Testudo home: Dad was the unchallenged moral leader – and his leadership was exemplary. Mom and Dad both had high expectations for the children, and they lived up to them – not alone because their parents shielded them from any awareness of alternative paths. The ideal was self-responsibility, and the children, in the main, grew up to be self-responsible parents – though, alas, not always Testudo parents.

That configuration, The Clan Testudo, is the modern expression of the Greek Hoplite’s freehold: The a-man’s-home-is-his-castle idea that precedes all of Western law. It was the union of Hoplite freeholders that gave birth to democracy in the first place, and that union was secured by the freeholder’s guarantee of autonomy – his liberty of action to manage his own affairs.

What makes the West the West is not democracy – nor any more-evolved states of rapacious predatory rent-seeking – but that Hoplite freehold. That family is our moral ideal – the source of all peace, of every plenty and of generation-after-generation of remarkable children. And the West falters and founders now precisely because we have systematically undermined the father-led home.

We make it easy for fathers to ditch their obligations to their children, and we make it easy for mothers to ditch their (more…)

The story behind every other story in the news is fatherhood.

Spree killers, as we’ve discussed, are tragically underfathered, as are their all-too-bloody blood-brothers, Islamic homicide-bombers. In between are the ever-petulant grievanchists and the criminals who are licensed by them to prey upon them – thus to aggravate ever-newer grievances. Even weather news turns out to be a story of fathering, in the way that the affected populations prepare for and respond to storm damage.

What makes news news is maledy – things got worse – and what makes maledy maledy is the absence of masculine virtue. Benedy – things got better – can be driven by a woman or a child, but only by deploying a man’s way of thinking: “We’ll get the job done now and we’ll cry about it later.” The worst of awful fates – the tornado leveled the town – is made benedic by men digging in to clean up and rebuild.

We prize those men in those moments – when we need them to fight and die for us, to rescue us, to pay our way – and none of the rest of the time. This is a mistake in every way I can think about it, but this is the way that is most consequential: The men who bring the most maledy to the news – the men who shoot themselves and other people, the men who blow themselves up in crowds of innocents – are the same men who are most neglected, most marginalized, most disposable in our culture.

But every man in the modern West is disposable. We raise our sons to be our useful tools. When we have used them up, we throw them away. How foolish of us to behave this way. How horrifying for them that they know it.

Everyone swears he wants to change the world, but the world is a distant place, best influenced, apparently, by heartfelt sentiment. When it comes to actually doing something (more…)

I’ve been hectoring Ayn Rand Institute Grand Poobah Yaron Brook for four months now, wondering why he will not rise to the defense of Ayn Rand’s atrocious utilitarian argument for abortion, now that the facts of that mass carnage are widely known.

His response so far? The same as that for all of libertarianism across its entire schismatic spectrum: Blank out.

But the quick answer to the question imposed by the headline is just that easy: Ayn Rand has almost no presence at Missouri or anywhere else because Ayn Rand’s followers kill their young, on her strident advice. Murray Rothbard’s minions, too, and all their minionettes. Libertarianism grows only by charismatic economics professors by now – which means it does not grow at all. Even religious libertarians deliver too little, too late, but the atheists end up being atomists by default. They are not represented on colleges campuses because they can’t be. The kids that could and should be there don’t exist.

Do you want to say, “So what? The Marxists don’t reproduce, either.” That’s true, but the Marxists take everyone else’s children from birth – by means of the anegoistic art parents ram down their children’s throats even before those kids are born. Rent-seeking academics short on charm crave carve-outs, but the problem at Missouri didn’t start last week – and the war to be fought with these kids as soldiers was won by Marxism long ago.

Ayn Rand’s explicit advice to young people on love, sex, marriage and family is parallel to the Marxist argument, so she cannot be represented to the #Mizzou-vians even by proxy. Her anti-family value structure is the same as theirs and that of the Marxist professoriate, so the fact that John and Dagny left all their little Galtlets at the abortuary doesn’t matter anyway.

Ayn Rand was right about a lot of interesting things, and interestingly wrong about others. But she was massively, irredeemably wrong about everything that matters to the fully-human life – the father-led family, the well-spring of all of human (more…)

It’s Veterans Day as I write this, a holiday so important to the Ruling Class that they didn’t turn it into a three-day weekend. Fear you nothing, though: This will not prevent the federal government and the banks (but I repeat myself) from taking the day off anyway.

It’s vitally important to celebrate the sacrifices of the brave men who served our country, which celebration will entail having nothing to do with any of them. It’s vitally important to have a cargo-cult holiday once a month or so, and those nettlesome vets ought to be glad they haven’t been entirely eclipsed by Thanksgiving.

And thank goodness Columbus Day is there to soak up all the excess autumnal outrage, or else someone might notice that military veterans – especially the ones who died in battle – are overwhelmingly male. We can celebrate the upside of war – begrudgingly, with department store sales and family get-togethers – but we cannot openly rejoice in the fruits of masculine virtue.

That would be just, of course, but justice toward men is… Old-fashioned? Uncultured? How about sinful…?

For it is a sin in our culture to notice and praise the virtues of ordinary men. We have plenty of attention for the extreme outliers, for the best and the worst at everything. But for the just-plain-regular stand-up guy who gets up every day and goes off to do a shitty job for minor ducats, often risking life and limb in the process, we can’t even spare a yawn.

And yet that man is the backbone of Western Civilization, the get-it-done guy who actually gets things done. He produces five-times his own living costs in income, passing all of that along to his wife and kids and grandkids – assuming he is not robbed of his family. He takes all of the risks imposed upon us by perilous reality, incurring all of the resultant injuries. He defends us in wartime, and for this he is scorned and neglected in peacetime. And unless he is lucky enough to (more…)

Why does Sisyphus keep pushing that rock up the hill? Because he’s doomed – or he believes he is – that’s why.

What happens when he realizes he can quit whenever he wants?

As it turns out, he eats a bullet.

This was big news last week, for about a minute-and-a-half, but in fact it is news to no one. If you haven’t noticed that you’re losing too many white middle-aged male friends and relatives to suicide, it could be you’re clueless enough to be an academic.

Consider this, from the linked article:

For Vancouver psychologist Dan Bilsker, what’s striking is how little we really understand about why the numbers peak when men are in their 50s. “It doesn’t fit previous models of things driving suicidal behaviour.”

In those models, by their 50s, men should “be feeling more in control of their lives, have worked out a lot of issues, be coping pretty well,” he says. After all, most of them are working, they’ve had jobs, relationships, children, life experiences. So the high suicide rate “raises a more disturbing model.”

Say what?!

Do you want to hear something interesting about poor dead Sisyphus, lying there in a puddle of his own brains? He left us because, from his point of view, he had nothing left to live for. Pretending that he was the dad in Father Knows Best in order to pretend not to understand his despair is simply to visit still further cruelties on the dead.

Why would Sisyphus quit, once he realizes he can? Duh…

Work hard, settle down, get married, build a home and a family – then have it all ripped away, all at once, with everything you’ve worked for destroyed and with what should have been lifelong storgic relationships torn asunder, never to be fully repaired.

Trade that treasured home for a cramped rental as you try to get by on what’s left of your income, after (more…)