Monday, September 26, 2016

Our destiny

Contemporary media—television shows and series, feature films, and pop music—both drives the culture in specific directions and then reflects what is happening in the culture of its target social system. I would have liked to have written ‘target society,’ but broadly viewed, ours is no longer a true society.

Society is a network of families that lives its life and shapes itself as a conscious organism with distinct borders, a common language and values, and an intentional ethical base. In the tension between the individual and society, it is understood that individual derives from social, not the other way round.

This we do not have, after a century of social devolution which has gradually and imperceptibly undone the work of the previous four, its most visible means being the political, and then the cultural, revolutions which have rocked the West and westernized regions of the world since the Great War.

In the first episode of a new science fiction mystery series which I recently viewed, a scene opens with a familiar domestic situation. After finishing breakfast a boy is told by his mother that he must do something he doesn’t want to do. He challenges her and then turns to his father, hoping for support.

The father tells him to do what his mother wants. What is wrong with this picture? Almost everyone will view the scene and think absolutely nothing is amiss. The mother raises the children, and then father is a vague, numinous figure with whom the children, on occasion, interact, usually to override mother.

This reinforces the destabilization of the natural order in the family—father, mother, and children has been reordered as mother, children, and father. The social structures within which most of us live and which we accept, the legacy of feminism, have relegated men to where they belong—in the background.

Fifty years ago, the same conflict portrayed in popular drama was resolved in a different manner. A father might order his son to do something that the son didn’t want to do, so he went to mother to plead his case, usually privately, and if she agreed, she would try to convince father, again privately.

In the natural order, the father is head of the family and final authority, the mother is head of the children. Both can originate rules and requirements. They are visibly in agreement. They can influence each other’s judgment, always privately, but openly, they always support each other’s judgment.

This natural order has been so completely trashed by the media and by modern educational theory that no one is offended or even notices when it is violated. It’s expected that the mother will contradict and challenge the father and win, and that the father will at least be made to look ridiculous, in any conflict.

No one stands up for patriarchy—the natural order—in this environment of more-than-just-political correctness. It’s too easy, too convenient, and safer, to just look the other way when the foundations of our civilization are being dismantled. No, not being dismantled, they already are, except in our memory.

And perhaps among those who still live as a ‘society’ amid the anti-social squalor we call modern life, where every man is an island, every woman a better version of him, every child a household demigod, where youth is raised and age despised, and where pets are prized above the disposable human fetus.

Not surprisingly all this is about to come to an end. Evolution and the survival of the fittest, rejected by the ignoramuses of religious fundamentalism, is once again going to kick in, correct, and restore human society. What was called traditional and rejected will be vindicated as the only road to human survival.

Patriarchy will cease being a swear word. Matriarchy will again be enthroned in its rightful place. Childhood will be restored to the race. Law and order will be seen once again as a beacon of light. Individualism will yield to individuality. Human evolution will get ‘unstuck.’ We will reach our destiny.

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