If this is a time to rest and recover, then be sure and do so without guilt. God made rest a part of His commands to us. Enjoy the joy and remember that He made us human beings, not human doings.
Fr. Joseph Krupp.
Fr. Krupp's Facebook post here was synchronicitous for me.
I didn't take much time off last year. And my not taking "much", what I mean is that I took three days really off, just off, because I had surgery and was laying in the hospital.
That's not really good.
I'd like to claim that it was for one reason or another, but truth be known, i'ts something I imposed upon myself. And I do this every year.
Indeed, I'm much worse about it than I used to be.
All the things you hear about not taking time off are 100% true, if not 200%. You become less efficient, for one thing. And if you work extra hours, sooner or later, you'll acclimate yourself to working the extra hours to the point where you need to. That's become your work life.
Christmas in my work place essentially always works the same way. We work, normally, the day before Christmas, December 24, until noon. At noon, we dismiss the staff and all go to a collective lawyer's lunch. That institution is, I think, a remnant of an earlier era in our society in general, when it could be expected that most professional institutions would remain a certain size and everyone who worked there would have a sort of collegiality. It sort of recalls, in a way, the conditions described by Scrooge's original employer in A Christmas Carrol, in the shop run by Mr. Fezziwig.
This use to really prevail in firms when I was first practicing. I recall being at lunch on December 24 at a local club restaurant in which other firms would also be there. Everyone was doing the same thing. I haven't seen another firm at one now, however, for years. Maybe they just go somewhere else, but I sort of suspect that they're not doing it.
Well, good for us. It's hard not to have a certain feeling of sadness about it, however, as three of the lawyers who once were part of that are now dead. Others have moved on long ago. New faces have come, of course.
Anyhow, that institution sort of ties up the afternoon of December 24, but it's an afternoon off. If you are a Catholic with a family, it's always been a bit tight, as we normally go to Mass on Christmas Eve and then gather after that. Christmas is obviously a day off, as is Boxing Day, December 26, although most Americans don't refer to Boxing Day by that name.
This year Christmas came on a Sunday, which was nice as it made December 23 the day of the lunch and effectively an extra day off. We took, of course, Boxing Day off.
Sometime in there, I began to wonder why I hadn't taken the whole week off. With just three days off, beyond Sundays, and having worked most of the 52 Saturdays of the year, I should have. I had the things done, pretty much, that I needed to get done.
What was I thinking?
If this is a time to rest and recover, then be sure and do so without guilt. God made rest a part of His commands to us. Enjoy the joy and remember that He made us human beings, not human doings.
Well, I'm actually at the point, in spite of myself, that I'm so acclimated to going to the work that I feel guilty if I take time off. And frankly, the Internet hasn't helped much. On the afternoon of the 23d, I received a text message asking me if I was working that afternoon. I wasn't, and they were gracious about it, but this is how things tend to be. It's hard to actually escape the office.
On Boxing Day I went goose and duck hunting. Conditiond were great.
I should have had my limit of geese and ducks, but I shot like crap. It'll be part of an upcoming post, maybe, but my hunting season has been messed up due to surgery.
I was going to go with my son, but events conspired against it, so it was just me and the dog.
Earlier this year, my wife had us buy a bigger smoker. We had not had one until fairly recently, when we won one at a Duck's Unlimited banquet. That one is a little traveling one, sort of a tailgating smoker, and can work from a car's battery system. You can plug it in, and we've enjoyed it, but due to its size, we decided to get a bigger one and did. It's been great.
This was my first occasion actually using it, something necessitated by the fact that our oven is more or less out due to some sort of weird oven thing that happened to it which will not get addressed until sometime this week. Besides, I'd been wanting to try smoked waterfowl.
It turned out great. I should have taken a picture of the finished bird, but I didn't. Maybe one of the top two roasted geese I've ever had.
Anyhow, I should have taken this whole week off, but didn't. I may take some time later this week, however.
Lex Anteinternet: Down the rabbit hole.: Down the Rabbit Hole And so, we find, a contemporary warped Zeitgeist, virtue signaling, cowardice, and bad reporting, have taken the state ...
a person might reasonably ask what we think of the large billboard on the same street as the hospital.
You know, the one with the woman in bikini bottoms and her chest covered up by the logo "Think Big".
Well, I feel the same way. That's not natural.
I've actually posted on this before, but in my view, undergoing medical procedures for mere appearance is wrong. Not as wrong as attempting to mimic the appearance of the opposite gender, but wrong nonetheless.
Now, a person can go down another rabbit hole with this. What about getting braces for cosmetic reasons, for example?
Well, actually, braces normally actually serve a medical purpose. Straight teeth look nice, but properly aligned teeth can avoid physical problems. Inflating boobs does not do that.
And that's where the line here is really drawn. We're not prefect, and we all have ailments, injuries and defects. But medicine for purely self-centered psychological reasons is contrary to nature, whereas medicine to address injuries illnesses and legitimate deformities seeks to restore it.
Now, no doubt, some would say that mental status is no doubt real, and it no doubt is. But here too, there is a mean to run buy. If a person is agitated or disturbed in some way, yes, address it. But confirming in them that their self perception of a defect which is not real isn't addressing it.
Oh, what's the harm, others might note. But something invasive always does some harm by definition. And even in a minor thing, like chest size, a larger societal harm exists by deforming the human reality. Some are big, some are small, that's the way things are. Whether they work or not is the ultimately real question.
And so, we find, a contemporary warped Zeitgeist, virtue signaling, cowardice, and bad reporting, have taken the state down the rabbit hole.
CHAPTER I.
Down the Rabbit-Hole
Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank, and of having nothing to do: once or twice she had peeped into the book her sister was reading, but it had no pictures or conversations in it, “and what is the use of a book,” thought Alice “without pictures or conversations?”
So she was considering in her own mind (as well as she could, for the hot day made her feel very sleepy and stupid), whether the pleasure of making a daisy-chain would be worth the trouble of getting up and picking the daisies, when suddenly a White Rabbit with pink eyes ran close by her.
There was nothing so very remarkable in that; nor did Alice think it so very much out of the way to hear the Rabbit say to itself, “Oh dear! Oh dear! I shall be late!” (when she thought it over afterwards, it occurred to her that she ought to have wondered at this, but at the time it all seemed quite natural); but when the Rabbit actually took a watch out of its waistcoat-pocket, and looked at it, and then hurried on, Alice started to her feet, for it flashed across her mind that she had never before seen a rabbit with either a waistcoat-pocket, or a watch to take out of it, and burning with curiosity, she ran across the field after it, and fortunately was just in time to see it pop down a large rabbit-hole under the hedge.
In another moment down went Alice after it, never once considering how in the world she was to get out again.
The rabbit-hole went straight on like a tunnel for some way, and then dipped suddenly down, so suddenly that Alice had not a moment to think about stopping herself before she found herself falling down a very deep well.
Either the well was very deep, or she fell very slowly, for she had plenty of time as she went down to look about her and to wonder what was going to happen next. First, she tried to look down and make out what she was coming to, but it was too dark to see anything; then she looked at the sides of the well, and noticed that they were filled with cupboards and book-shelves; here and there she saw maps and pictures hung upon pegs. She took down a jar from one of the shelves as she passed; it was labelled “ORANGE MARMALADE”, but to her great disappointment it was empty: she did not like to drop the jar for fear of killing somebody underneath, so managed to put it into one of the cupboards as she fell past it.
“Well!” thought Alice to herself, “after such a fall as this, I shall think nothing of tumbling down stairs! How brave they’ll all think me at home! Why, I wouldn’t say anything about it, even if I fell off the top of the house!” (Which was very likely true.)
Down, down, down. Would the fall never come to an end? “I wonder how many miles I’ve fallen by this time?” she said aloud. “I must be getting somewhere near the centre of the earth. Let me see: that would be four thousand miles down, I think—” (for, you see, Alice had learnt several things of this sort in her lessons in the schoolroom, and though this was not a very good opportunity for showing off her knowledge, as there was no one to listen to her, still it was good practice to say it over) “—yes, that’s about the right distance—but then I wonder what Latitude or Longitude I’ve got to?” (Alice had no idea what Latitude was, or Longitude either, but thought they were nice grand words to say.)
Presently she began again. “I wonder if I shall fall right through the earth! How funny it’ll seem to come out among the people that walk with their heads downward! The Antipathies, I think—” (she was rather glad there was no one listening, this time, as it didn’t sound at all the right word) “—but I shall have to ask them what the name of the country is, you know. Please, Ma’am, is this New Zealand or Australia?” (and she tried to curtsey as she spoke—fancy curtseying as you’re falling through the air! Do you think you could manage it?) “And what an ignorant little girl she’ll think me for asking! No, it’ll never do to ask: perhaps I shall see it written up somewhere.”
Down, down, down. There was nothing else to do, so Alice soon began talking again. “Dinah’ll miss me very much to-night, I should think!” (Dinah was the cat.) “I hope they’ll remember her saucer of milk at tea-time. Dinah my dear! I wish you were down here with me! There are no mice in the air, I’m afraid, but you might catch a bat, and that’s very like a mouse, you know. But do cats eat bats, I wonder?” And here Alice began to get rather sleepy, and went on saying to herself, in a dreamy sort of way, “Do cats eat bats? Do cats eat bats?” and sometimes, “Do bats eat cats?” for, you see, as she couldn’t answer either question, it didn’t much matter which way she put it. She felt that she was dozing off, and had just begun to dream that she was walking hand in hand with Dinah, and saying to her very earnestly, “Now, Dinah, tell me the truth: did you ever eat a bat?” when suddenly, thump! thump! down she came upon a heap of sticks and dry leaves, and the fall was over.
Alice was not a bit hurt, and she jumped up on to her feet in a moment: she looked up, but it was all dark overhead; before her was another long passage, and the White Rabbit was still in sight, hurrying down it. There was not a moment to be lost: away went Alice like the wind, and was just in time to hear it say, as it turned a corner, “Oh my ears and whiskers, how late it’s getting!” She was close behind it when she turned the corner, but the Rabbit was no longer to be seen: she found herself in a long, low hall, which was lit up by a row of lamps hanging from the roof.
There were doors all round the hall, but they were all locked; and when Alice had been all the way down one side and up the other, trying every door, she walked sadly down the middle, wondering how she was ever to get out again.
Suddenly she came upon a little three-legged table, all made of solid glass; there was nothing on it except a tiny golden key, and Alice’s first thought was that it might belong to one of the doors of the hall; but, alas! either the locks were too large, or the key was too small, but at any rate it would not open any of them. However, on the second time round, she came upon a low curtain she had not noticed before, and behind it was a little door about fifteen inches high: she tried the little golden key in the lock, and to her great delight it fitted!
Alice opened the door and found that it led into a small passage, not much larger than a rat-hole: she knelt down and looked along the passage into the loveliest garden you ever saw. How she longed to get out of that dark hall, and wander about among those beds of bright flowers and those cool fountains, but she could not even get her head through the doorway; “and even if my head would go through,” thought poor Alice, “it would be of very little use without my shoulders. Oh, how I wish I could shut up like a telescope! I think I could, if I only knew how to begin.” For, you see, so many out-of-the-way things had happened lately, that Alice had begun to think that very few things indeed were really impossible.
There seemed to be no use in waiting by the little door, so she went back to the table, half hoping she might find another key on it, or at any rate a book of rules for shutting people up like telescopes: this time she found a little bottle on it, (“which certainly was not here before,” said Alice,) and round the neck of the bottle was a paper label, with the words “DRINK ME,” beautifully printed on it in large letters.
It was all very well to say “Drink me,” but the wise little Alice was not going to do that in a hurry. “No, I’ll look first,” she said, “and see whether it’s marked ‘poison’ or not”; for she had read several nice little histories about children who had got burnt, and eaten up by wild beasts and other unpleasant things, all because they would not remember the simple rules their friends had taught them: such as, that a red-hot poker will burn you if you hold it too long; and that if you cut your finger very deeply with a knife, it usually bleeds; and she had never forgotten that, if you drink much from a bottle marked “poison,” it is almost certain to disagree with you, sooner or later.
However, this bottle was not marked “poison,” so Alice ventured to taste it, and finding it very nice, (it had, in fact, a sort of mixed flavour of cherry-tart, custard, pine-apple, roast turkey, toffee, and hot buttered toast,) she very soon finished it off.
“What a curious feeling!” said Alice; “I must be shutting up like a telescope.”
And so it was indeed: she was now only ten inches high, and her face brightened up at the thought that she was now the right size for going through the little door into that lovely garden. First, however, she waited for a few minutes to see if she was going to shrink any further: she felt a little nervous about this; “for it might end, you know,” said Alice to herself, “in my going out altogether, like a candle. I wonder what I should be like then?” And she tried to fancy what the flame of a candle is like after the candle is blown out, for she could not remember ever having seen such a thing.
After a while, finding that nothing more happened, she decided on going into the garden at once; but, alas for poor Alice! when she got to the door, she found she had forgotten the little golden key, and when she went back to the table for it, she found she could not possibly reach it: she could see it quite plainly through the glass, and she tried her best to climb up one of the legs of the table, but it was too slippery; and when she had tired herself out with trying, the poor little thing sat down and cried.
“Come, there’s no use in crying like that!” said Alice to herself, rather sharply; “I advise you to leave off this minute!” She generally gave herself very good advice, (though she very seldom followed it), and sometimes she scolded herself so severely as to bring tears into her eyes; and once she remembered trying to box her own ears for having cheated herself in a game of croquet she was playing against herself, for this curious child was very fond of pretending to be two people. “But it’s no use now,” thought poor Alice, “to pretend to be two people! Why, there’s hardly enough of me left to make one respectable person!”
Soon her eye fell on a little glass box that was lying under the table: she opened it, and found in it a very small cake, on which the words “EAT ME” were beautifully marked in currants. “Well, I’ll eat it,” said Alice, “and if it makes me grow larger, I can reach the key; and if it makes me grow smaller, I can creep under the door; so either way I’ll get into the garden, and I don’t care which happens!”
She ate a little bit, and said anxiously to herself, “Which way? Which way?”, holding her hand on the top of her head to feel which way it was growing, and she was quite surprised to find that she remained the same size: to be sure, this generally happens when one eats cake, but Alice had got so much into the way of expecting nothing but out-of-the-way things to happen, that it seemed quite dull and stupid for life to go on in the common way.
So she set to work, and very soon finished off the cake.
Chapter 1, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.
Indeed, we've fallen down a very deep well.
Let's recap how we got here.
Our genetic makeup, and all that goes with it, is something that has a 250,000,000-year-old, at least, history. We aren't "assigned gender", like we're given class assignments. Our gender is part of our DNA and in every single cell in our body.
And there's no confusion on that part inside of us, in our natural state or a more natural state. We're so ordered towards our natural gender orientations that recent studies have shown that not only boy meet girl where cultural boundaries exist, they even will where speciation boundaries exist, as long as they're not massive.
I.e., Cro Magnon boy meets Neanderthal girl? No problem.
And yet, now in contemporary, rich (historically speaking) white, European society, which we are part of, there's a segment of society which is claiming that their DNA, in essence, got it wrong.
That's not possible. Your DNA is your DNA, and your gender is not a "birth defect". Indeed, ironically, in an era in which genetic traits that previously were regarded as defective are now to be treated as normal, here's one that is in fact normal, your gender, being treated as defective.
Western psychology and sociology, which is Western, has taken up treating individual inclinations and biological mandates, or perhaps our psyches as divorced in some ways from our bodies, such that any whim and desire, save for a very few, is to be celebrated. In the area of sex, as disturbing as it may be, and it is highly disturbing, the only inclination which is not to be questioned, and not to be celebrated, is the one barring adults (mostly men) preying on children.1
Everything else is okay and not to be questioned, including behaviors that were only recently regarded as species of mental illnesses, among which is people believing that they should be a member of the gender which they are not.
There's no scientific basis for this. Indeed, in real terms, its current suddenly accepted status is a rebellion against science by narcissistic forces. It is, in essence, they argue, "all about me!". We are the centers of our own narcisstic universe, around which everything revolves, and everyone must acknowledge it.
Only a really rich society can engage in such delusions. And because the delusions are destructive, they will only do so temporarily.
Somebody suffering from such a delusion, a man, decided he was a woman, and entered a sorority at the University of Wyoming.
This was reported by the Cowboy State Daily back in October, in an article in which they stated:
Artemis Langford2, of Lander, became the first open-transgender student to be accepted into the Kappa Kappa Gamma sorority in September, according to the Branding Iron, UW’s student newspaper.
Born male, Langford identifies as a woman and attended high school in Lander.
So The Branding Iron reported on the story. That likely wasn't hard, as Langford reports for The Branding Iron. He didn't write the article, however.
Nowhere is it clear how far down the transformation process, if at all, Mr. Langford has actually gone. Photos of him show him dressed as a woman and affecting a female appearance, and indeed perhaps to a degree more successfully than is typically the case in this arena. But is he, as they say about horses in another context, "intact". The articles don't say.
At least one article elsewhere suggest that he is in fact intact, and that some members of the sorority, while it voted to admit him, were uncomfortable with it. One supportive news story just flat out said he was a male that had been admitted to a sorority. The National Review reported that members were uncomfortable about it, with an article about that stating:
A sorority at the University of Wyoming has opened the door to allow a transgender student into the group that has been historically known to only allow females.
Kappa Kappa Gamma (KKG) voted on whether or not the transgender student who is a biological male should be allowed to join the sorority. In a majority vote, Artemis Langford has been accepted to join the group. In an interview with the UW's student newspaper the Branding Iron, Langford says, "I feel so glad to be in a place that I think not only shares my values, but to be in a sisterhood of awesome women that want to make history."
But, not everyone in the sorority joins Langford's excitement. Before Langford was officially accepted, KKG gathered together to discuss the future of the sisterhood. One sorority member told National Review the president and membership chair dismissed the concerns of members who felt "deeply uncomfortable with a male being accepted into their sisterhood."
NR reports the leadership pressured the women into accepting their ideology. The anonymous member references comments made by senior leadership about the girls being "homophobic" if they voted no. Another leader allegedly said, "If you have something to say about this that isn't kind or respectful, keep it to yourself."
Moreover, while appearances on such things aren't everything, it's pretty easy to tell which "sister" Langford is in a group:
Like it or not, in our contemporary society, there's something more than a little ironic about a "taco 'bout mental health" sign in this context.
Assuming he is intact, and to put it honestly which therefore will come across as indelicate and crass, he's got a dick and balls and male DNA, and he's with a group of young women. His currently claimed psychological situation may be telling him he's a woman, but his testosterone and biology tells him he's a man, which he is. And if we know anything about the biology of our species, the mammal with the highest sexual dimorphism and sex drive of any mammal that ever lived, it can override a lot. Indeed, claimed homosexual men fathering children is not exactly unusual.
So, there's a man, perhaps intact, living in a sorority, simply because he claims to be a woman and has been dressing as one.
KKG allowed this to occur because it either must affect to be woke, in the zeitgeist of our times, or it doesn't want to appear to be offensive. It should be noted the sorority was recently in the news with bad press elsewhere as its members on one campus were reported to be hostile to their only black member. Based on its material linked in the article above, it's sincerely sipping the Kool-Aid.
UW when it learned of it, which it learned through the Branding Iron, chose to turn a blind eye, taking the position that it's often the best just to do nothing rather than risking offending somebody.
Baptist minister Todd Schmidt, however, did choose to do something, that being to note that Mr. Langford is in fact a man.
Rev. Schmidt was maintaining a booth in the Union which espouses his worldview, which is basically that the entire globe is around 5,000 years old (it's much older) and that evolution is a fib (it isn't, it's the scientific truth). Taking offense at Mr. Langford's decision that he was a "Miss" for sincerely held religious reasons, he was, quite frankly, probably the worst person imaginable to introduce scientific reality into the discussion, but he did. Given the situation, and his Weltanschauung, that was likely inevitable, if unfortunate.
Now UW had trouble. It should have known the trouble was coming.
It reacted to the trouble by booting him off campus for naming Langford by name. But Langford had already outed himself. The widely spread news story, the version we initially discussed here, was that Rev. Schmidt had outed Langford and was being tossed out for that reason. But in reality, that wasn't what had occurred.
Enter constitutional experts like Eugene Volokh, who have said that Rev. Schmidt's free speech rights are being suppressed. Given the full story, Volokh and his fellow travelers are frankly correct. UW had acted to suppress free speech.
Next enter the Freedom Caucus.
What and who the Freedom Caucus is in Wyoming is something that's flown beneath the wire, but as the recent ship jumping of Krysten Sinema had taught, when you are a member of a political party in a legislative body, you "caucus" with them. Basically, the caucus is a political organization within a legislature, nearly a proto political party or even more than that. In this case, the Freedom Caucus has come to be a de facto political party within the GOP, and the extreme right wing/populist one at that.
In that role, it takes Trumpite views, or the ones that work toward him, as part of their Führerprinzip. They also espouse Illiberal Democratic views, taking the outlook of Patrick Deneen to a full conclusion. In that sense, they are open in the sense that not only do they view social trends in the US as disturbing, which they are, and delusional in some areas, which they also are, and espouse the view that ground needs to be taken back essentially by force.
This issue was tailor-made for them as it presents a rare instance in which their Weltanschauung is supported by a concrete issue, and therefore, lead by Illinoisan Jeanette Ward, they've emailed the University, stating:
Well, they're right.
And therefore, what we predicted post Obergefell, has come to pass.
Justice's Kennedy's departing gift.
At the time of the Obergefell decision, which was obviously not supported by the law, we predicted that it would be used to advance an anti nature and anti-traditional liberal world view, even though the delusional octogenarian author didn't see that coming, and those advancing the view of Obergefell, which was to force the issue via a judicial coup, claimed that they'd stop there. The didn't, and haven't. And now a certain section of the American left are busy tearing down all standards.
In no small way, Obergefell lead to Donald Trump, and Donald Trump lead to the radical right antidemocratic Illiberal Democrats.
And stuff like this advances them enormously.
None of which gets to some other issue at work in this trend.
Let's pretend.
Something is massively amiss in a society in which a small but celebrated section of it is so distressed by their natural roles as men and women that they choose to radically opt out of it. Most of those so choosing do not really seek to take up the full roles of the other gender, but seemingly to escape that of the one that they are in.
What has brought that about?
The other day, I rode down the elevator with a woman dressed as a tiger.
She was not, of course, a tiger.
I don't mean that she was in a tiger costume, like for Halloween or a really advance New Year's costume ball. I mean that she was dressed as a tiger, with tiger stripped clothing, and a tiger cape (it was cold), and wearing cat ears.
She also absolutely stank.
I didn't ride all the way down, but halfway down. Boarding the elevator on the top floor of the building, she got on halfway down. You could tell she was surprised that the elevator was nearly full, but she got on, which means that she was in close approximation to all of us.
The weather outside was Arctic. There was a car waiting for her, which was good, as if not, she would have frozen within a block.
But she was dressed as a tiger.
A few years ago, I used to pass, fairly frequently, a girl on here way to high school who was dressed as a cat, completely with a tail.
At that time, I mentioned it to a friend who also had high school aged kids, and he informed me they were "furries", and there were a small community of them in the high school, not surprisingly all female, although not all furries are female. Over time, I'd see a couple more of them as I drove to work who walked the same route.
Furries are still around, and they've come to take themselves fairly seriously. They're people who heavily identify with an animal fantasy. Not just adorning costumes in some instance, but in some really taking it seriously, which has to be a debilitating lifestyle.
Why do I mention this?
Well, again, what brought this about?
People who want to be part of the other gender? Humans who want to be animals?
Hmmmm. . .
Much ado about emasculation.
Some years ago, there were widely circulating cultural trends that were the flip side of each other. One was a conservative concern over a perceived social trend of emasculating men, and the other was a liberal concern over "toxic masculinity". Indeed, at that time I started to post something on the topic, and never finished it. As that one was still in the hopper, and I think it's related to this, I'm going to fold it in here.
The question being posed at that time was twofold, what could we do about "toxic masculinity", and the flip side of it was there a war on men. I started off looking at that with a quote from, well, Sean Penn.
I don’t think that being a brute or having insensitivity or disrespect for women is anything to do with masculinity, or ever did. But I don’t think that to be fair to women, we should become them.
Sean Penn.
The short answer, I thought, was, no. I'm not so sure now.
But, I did think there is a war on biology.
I think that men have, in my view, become quite feminized. I have these very strong women in my life who do not take masculinity as a sign of oppression toward them. There are a lot of, I think, cowardly genes that lead to people surrendering their jeans and putting on a skirt.
Sean Penn.
I've started versions of that thread at least three times under different titles and never completed any of them. Going through my drafts, I saw that I had a semi satyric one called "Girly Men", one called "A Crisis In Masculinity" and one called "A Male Crisis". For no particularly reason, this is the one that I once decided to complete, although this was the "A Male Crisis" one and is now titled as per above, which was the title of a different draft (both of the then surviving drafts were called "The Masculinity Crisis").
This one got about this far before I left it in draft:
The New York Times recently ran an article claiming there is a male crisis in the country.
They have a point.
True, but not a very helpful beginning to this entry.
Let's see if we get this one done.
Well, there is something to this. Maybe not what the various pundits think, but I think there's something to it. And, in my typical evolutionary biology way, I suspect that it has a lot to do with our divorce from nature, which I'll post more about below overall. It has something to do with something noted by Strauss and Howe in their generational theory, and it has something to do with politics.
Okay, let's start with an observation.
While observations of this type are easy to casually dismiss, for anyone age 50 and up, its pretty obvious that there are a lot more effeminate men in 2017 than there were, let's say, in 1987, or 1977, etc.
And transgendered men? Well you rarely ran into this topic except as a really distinct subculture.
At the same time, what also ought to be really obvious, is that in urban areas, there's been a resumption of male affectations as well. There's more young men wandering around with heavy beards and dressed like 1910s lumberjacks now in urban areas than at any time since, well, for a really darned long time.
This isn't the best time in the world to be a male.
Maybe, anyhow.
At least quite a few people seem to think that, and frankly, I think there's something to that. We're going to be taking a little bit of a look at it.
While it may be mere perception, the idea that "it's a man's world" has really declined in the West to the point where some now debate if men have any place left in the world. That's clearly an overreaction, but there is something going on.
And that there's something going on is at least partially evidenced by the fact that there's a lot of press, both of the net type and of the conventional type, on this topic.
Indeed, perhaps the kickoff on this occurred some years ago when a feminist writer (I've forgotten when one) wrote a book called Screwed, lamenting how societal developments had taken away so many traditional male roles. We'll look at that a bit later (hopefully this series actually gets written and doesn't take five years, like some here do). But that book, with an ironworker from the 40s on the cover, was notable.
Since then there's been a plethora of similar treatments in a way. One fellow avoided a career in the law by converting an interest in this topic to a social media business platform, that eclectic treatment being The Art of Manliness, which exists as a website, a Facebook page, and podcast. He's taken some heat, however, from people who claim that his treatment of the topic isn't manly enough.
An example of raw manliness, and a good fun read as a rule as well, is Jim Cornelius's website Frontier Partisans. Frontier Partisans' is male in the raw. The men there are men, to be sure. The women are also women, and if they show up at all, they're likely "hot", as the vernacular would have it, and outdoorsy, and packing heat.
Taking another, more cerebral, approach there are also a collection of Christian sites that have the same focus (not so raw, and omitting, usually, the hot gun toting women). The Catholic Gentleman is one such example. Those Catholic Men is another. And there are more. Quite a few are Catholic in theme (that I know about, but then I'm a Catholic man), but some are protestant. Radically on the other end of things there is the excessively panicky alarmist writings of James Kunslter, who is worried about everything, but who derided millennial men some years ago for dressing like "toddlers in knee pants", perhaps his single greatest moment in print.
He wasn't completely incorrect.
It'd be easy to dismiss all of this, but frankly there's something to it. If you've lived long enough to observe. The question is what's going on, is it societal (what else could it be), or something else?
Well, in terms of it being societal, there's pretty good evidence of that. And according to the Strauss How Generational theory folks, this has happened before. I think there's pretty good evidence of that.
We've dealt with Strauss and Howe's theory before, but basically they hold that human cycles of history repeat with strict regularity.3 They also hold that human characters are fairly predictable in those cycles. And one of the things they hold, although I haven't dealt much with it here before, is that men become the men that women want them to be.
I think there's something to that to a degree. Indeed, here on this site, one of the laws of human behavior notes that young men tend to go through a period of fake character development for a time before reverting to their early characters. That goes against the Strauss Howe theory really, but to credit them, a careful observation of young men over time shows that they often do, depending upon the environment, form themselves in their teens and twenties based on what women appear to want out of them. It has a societal impact. I suspect it has a greater impact the more they are removed from their immediate homes and local cultures, FWIW.
So, if we look at an era like World War One or World War Two, or the early Cold War, manly virtues associated with war were really emphasized. Men became combatants, and they formed themselves to some degree in that role pretty distinctly. It'd be debatable, but it's notable that in that period, eventually, men tended to even groom themselves in their civilian occupations in the fashion that the military adopted. Crew cuts were big in the 1950s and lingered on, for us boys growing up in the 60s, through that era.
Long haired inductee getting a "mighty fine" in basic training, 1967. This was right at the beginning of the Hair epidemic, but the crew cut was still keeping on keeping on, even then.
In contrast, we can see other eras in which men with other qualities were seemingly desired by women. In Jane Austen's treatment of 18th Century England, the desirable males were all genteel in the extreme. Mr. Darcy, for example, was manly, but he wasn't on the Frontier wrestling bears.
But it's more than that.
Just as it's the case that men often go through a false personality period, cultures frankly do, too. Indeed, that's one really weird thing about culture in general, and it's particularly the case the more a culture is removed from nature.
One of my good friends, who has a son the same age as mine, is adamant in his view that there's a societal war on men, and in particular young men, and it's done them damages. At least a decade older than me, and with a very large family, he's raised sons and daughters now through more than one era, and frankly is really pessimistic about things going forward, as somebody with long experience can tend to be. And this relates to that.
The short term view, by which I mean the era extending from the end of World War Two until the present era, has seen a lot of social changes and quite frankly, starting in the 1970s, but looking back to the 1920s, and carried forwards, there truly is a "progressive" attack in some quarters on the basic nature of our human nature. And that has everything to do with this. That is realized in some quarters now, as it's impossible not to. At the point at which a person closes their eyes to biology and science and declares gender just a construct, things have gone more than a little off the rails. That's scientifically completely derailed.
In other words, it's impossible not to notice unless you blind yourself to it.
But it's interesting how this is now working out, which I wouldn't have anticipated when I first started this thread.
When I first started it, I would have noted the assaults on what it means to be male, which were at an epic level. "Toxic Masculinity" was the battle cry of those who wished to force a sort of Toxic Femininity on men and women. And during the last 20 years real intrusions of a destructive nature have been made in this area, including suppressing basic programmed in aspects of what it means to be male, the acceptance of surgical intervention, which is really surgical mutilation, to "reassign genders", to the even such things as pretending that women will do as well as men in combat. It's been surreal.
But during the last few years things have been bouncing back to a degree, which is most notable in the young, and which has become more notable during the Pandemic.
Back awhile ago, I posted a Twitter post from a young woman who was in agony over having to leave her children and work. More recently I've seen posts from a young female engineer who is in agony over being young, well-educated, and single, and finding that her young male cohorts only expect her to put out. She wants children and marriage. A young female doctor posts about her horror over being suppressed by older physicians for opposing abortion, and it is clear that she wants much the same as the engineer.
And this gets back to the industrial construct that we've noted before.
Men left the house and went to the factory and the office, not because they wanted to. They had to. Women followed them with domestic machinery entered the home and made their domestic labor surplus. Everyone has and should have a right to work wherever their talents and desire allow, but society has gone further and determined that they'll be compelled to work. Right now the country is in the midst of the Great Resignation, in which people have determined they'll avoid the work they do not wish to do. The only thing Progressives can think of is to fund the warehousing of children sot that women cannot use taking care of children as an excuse, although its unlikely to have the impact that they imagine.
That's because our view, including the Progressive view, of work is completely industrialized. We exist to serve the machine. . . to consume what it produces, and to work to produce. The benefit is "profit" and fulfillment comes through the service.
Except it doesn't.
But it's clear that this doesn't explain it alone.
Revolutions.
Patrick Deneen, whom we already mentioned, feels that liberal societies evolve towards self-destruction, and frankly all of this presents good evidence that they do. But if that's the case, we have to wonder why the pace of this seems to be a post 1945, and more particularly a post 1965, or even a post 1968, event. Wild social movements and trends have existed before, and not all of them lead to the downfall of standards and ultimately society. Conversely, in some culture, they did so rapidly, and in others, they started to and then were arrested before they did.
In an era like our current one, it's easy to state, as I have here, that the first principal of democratic societies is democracy itself, and that's true. But it can be argued that I've missed something, which is something that tends to be an anathema to Americans, but which is also true. Democracy doesn't really work unless there's a shared set of external values. Indeed, societally, there's really good evidence that "happy" cultures, like that of the Finns for example (often regarded as the happiest in the world), or the Danes, tend to have the singular feature of having very little diversity at all. Hugely diverse societies, in contrast, often devolve into strife and war. Take the example of what was once the British Palestinian mandate, or Rwanda, for example.
The US, of course, has famously fought a Civil War, but not all civil wars have this origin. Indeed, the American Civil War came about at a time when the population of the US was much less diverse than it is now, but the singular topic, an enslaved people who had been Americanized but who were held in bondage, brought it about. Contrary to the occasional criticism of the US on this topic, we've come a very long way since then, even though we still have failed to fully incorporate that population, to our shame.
But of note, in our early history, and lingering well into the 20th, we did have an overarching sort of national culture, albeit one in which what diversity we had was dealt with. What we had was a broadly Christian culture of Protestant origin. It was broad enough that it came to tolerate Catholics, although now without a lot of strife, and it came to incorporate Judaism as well, under the fiction that the culture was "Judeo-Christian", which it was not. It was, frankly, English Protestant. Catholics were tolerated as a minority Christian people as long as they weren't in danger of breaking out into the wider culture, and Judaism was tolerated as they were a minority who didn't threaten to ever become a majority. This gave rise to the overall American culture, which was commonly thought to stretch back, with some good reason, to the Puritans.
The Puritans themselves were, however, part of a rebellion, although they likely didn't see things that way. They were Calvinist dissenters against the Church of England, which they conceived of being too Catholic. The Church of England itself was the official Protestant church of England which had been brought about during the Reformation and which had evolved from King Henry VIII schismatic rebellion against the Church due to his concern about finding reproductive booty, and which had evolved under the cynical administration of Queen Elizabeth I resulting in the Elizabethan Religious Settlement.
The UK, of course, in this regard was following the lead set by Martin Luther. None of these people would have conceived of themselves as supporting men identifying as women, or vice versa, but what's important here is that they stood for an individualistic revolt against a well established order. That is, they stood for the individual over anything else, even if they did not realize it. Luther, in essence, felt that he knew the Christianity so well that he could revise it, even questioning the Canon of the Bible. That amounted to an individual revolt against the experts and expertise, ultimately leading to the anti-scientific revolt that has been going on in the West for some time. Indeed, it helps, to an enormous degree, to explain it. That did not, of course, lead immediately to the present situation by any means, and indeed, while revolutionaries, men like Luther, at least, were also deeply conservative for the most part.
The return of democracy and the liberal society came up through the Age of Enlightenment, which interestingly has been under attack, or perhaps counterrevolutionary attack, by hardcore right wing conservatives in recent years. This isn't a history lesson on a complicated era with complicated ideas, but generally the concept of people governing themselves rather than having a government imposed upon them started to make headway in the 1600s and 1700s.
The first real expression of this came in the British American Colonies of North America, which were under the Crown but self-governing. In fairness, self-governance had been evolving in the United Kingdom itself for a long time. So long, in fact, that it's difficult to say when it really originated. The English monarchy, contrary to the popular idea, had never been fully independent of the vote, but rather dependent upon an ever widening vote which at first was restricted to the nobility but which, by the English Civil War, when parliament went to war with the Crown, had become much wider. Indeed, this is so much the case that it's tempting to discount the influence of the Age of Enlightenment in the case of the English, but this really ought not to be done.
The English Civil War aside, the first real Age of Enlightenment revolution was the American Revolution. This is interesting and important to this story, however, as it was a deeply conservative revolution. While the American rebels sought to establish home and self rule on a democratic basis in North America, they had a broad cultural understanding that was largely the same as that of the body which they were fighting. The same body which would provide that the states were not to establish an official church, like England and Scotland had done, was itself overwhelmingly Protestant, with the majority of the population being in the Anglican Communion, followed next by the Presbyterian Church, and after that, churches like the Quakers. Catholics were present, but in small numbers for the most part.
This meant that the revolution was able to establish something radical, a broad democratic government, while also maintaining a deeply conservative population and, moreover, one that for the most part was fairly homogenous in its Weltanschauung. The revolution was, accordingly, a success.
The next revolution didn't fit this model, and it was not a success.
The French Revolution is often regarded as the mother of all modern revolutions, and in some very significant ways, it really is. Fueled by poverty, and stoked by radicals of the Age of Enlightenment, it was a revolution against everything. It took, therefore, the concepts first advanced by Luther, that of individualism and individual determination, and applied them very broadly. In doing so, they attacked not only the French monarchy, but French society and culture at every level.
Not too surprisingly, the French Revolution, having attacked every standard, descended into anarchy, with order being restored by a caudillo, Napoleon Bonaparte. Claiming to stand for the ideals of the revolution, equality, liberty and fraternity, he imposed a personal monarchy on the French and lead the nation into perpetual war. He was a revolutionary of sorts, but one that mixed liberalism with populism and conservatism, and who further centered France on himself. He succeeded in reestablishing order in France, for a time, but at huge human costs.
The French Revolution was the model for the Communist revolutions that followed World War One, but with the introduction of Marxism in between. The evolution was a natural one, based principally on a misreading of history and economics by Marx and an evolved "them vs. us" point of view. But missed in it is that Marx attacked the social orders once again. Included in Marx's Communist Manifesto was the rejection of the biological order, in the form of the complete rejection of marriage. Women, in the Manifesto, were to be the property of men, who would hold them in common.
Early Communists took that view seriously, and even into the 1920s American Communists continued to. Indeed, Whitaker Chambers, while still a Communist, defied the Communist ideal twice, once by marrying and a second time by having children. And Chambers is relevant to this story for another reason that we'll get to.
Even the Communists, however, where they obtained power, quickly found that destruction of the cultural order and attacking the human biological norm lead to disaster. Given this, every Communist regime everywhere very rapidly became very socially conservative in regard to men and women. They all found that they couldn't hold societies together unless they did.
In the West, however, the introduction of increasingly left leaning thought in "liberal" parties metastasized, in some ways, due to lack of exposure to the political sun. While hardcore radical right wing ideas, such as attacking the teaching of evolution in schools, tended to get exposed and fail, radical left wing ideas did not. Be that as it may, as the culture remained largely if loosely homogenous in its cultural views, no radical individualist attacks really came about until the disintegration of the late 1960s began to set in. By the early 1970s, however, it really was.
It started earlier to some degree. John F. Kennedy introduced the view that a member of a minority religion could be faithful to the country and his religion by observing it only on Sunday, something that had a huge impact on American Catholicism but which effectively introduced the concept that the Establishment Clause's prohibition on state endorsement of a faith meant faith wasn't to be referenced by politicians or governments at all. As Christianity had been the principal foundation upon which all successful post Roman Empire democracies had been built, that essentially rejected the core tenant of democracy, the unwritten rule that people of a common culture could decide political and policy matters.
That erosion meant that by the early 1970s widely held tenants based upon responsibility were eroding. California introduced no fault divorce and the United States Supreme Court forced abortion upon the entire country without a basis to do so. The same trends were advancing, post 1968, all over Europe as well.
With the dam breaking in 1968, it was only a matter of time before we ended up here. A large portion of the political makeup of the country has been attacking rationality and science for decades, and is now shocked that there's a counter reaction.
That counteraction started almost as early as the really big advances in a self-centered American ethos took hold. It first really gained ground politically in the late 1970s and early 1980s, but it continued to gain traction since then.
Then the Supreme Court entered again.
I've long held that there would have been no Donald Trump presidency without Obergefell. Up until that point the really radical woke cultural trends of our current era were only creeping along. I noted at the time that Obergefell was handed down that it threatened democracy, and it very much has.
Justice Kennedy in Obergefell grabbed an evolving social issue and claimed it for the Supreme Court, issuing a mushy opinion based on mushy left wing thinking and then hurling it back at the nation. Much of the populace of the country was shocked, even though, by the time of its issuance, they'd already accommodated themselves to lives deeply contrary to the natural order already. It was the attack on the core principle of biology that shook people. The bland acceptance of Obergefell by the right caused the slumbering populist to really wake up. Trump was there to grab their attention, even though he himself lived a life that was deeply contrary to the natural order.
A caudillo not living by the standards he proclaims is hardly unusual. Napoleon may have stood for liberty, equality and fraternity, but he had himself crowned Emperor. Hitler might have advocated for the German Übermensch, but he was a gassy, vegetarian hypochondriac himself. Indeed, caudillo's have a habit of driving their movements right over a cliff.
So, where are we now?
Well, just where we don't want to be.
As a liberal democracy, we're at a point that Patrick Deneen worried about. Since the early 1970s we've attacked the glue that held us together, sometimes politically but sometimes through the courts, to the point where we're at the delusional state that states governed by radical ideas often are. We won't credit or trust science at all, and we've enshrined individual discernment of reality as reality itself. Men declaring themselves to be women must be treated as women. Women declaring themselves to be men must be treated as men. Children, mostly girls, making such declarations must be provided with pharmaceuticals and surgery to make it so, even though at the same age you can't contract to do anything else destructive.4
And women dressed as tigers? Well, they are tigers.
Okay, but how does that explain. . .
Hypercapitalism.
Anyone still reading, and that's probably nobody at all, is probably asking themselves by this point, well, okay, how does this actually explain a story like that we started off with. Are we saying stripping away the barriers that culture had put up just inevitably leads to girls wanting to be men, and things of this nature?
No, that'd absurd.
And in fact, probably next to none actually do.
And that's not all going on.
At the same time, in the post World War Two era, that liberals in legislatuve office and occupying judicial benches began to hammer away at the guardrails, capitalism went into overdrive and ceased to be the means by which we made a living, to the point in living.
Capitalism has been such a huge economic success that even left wing figures now pretty much completely endorse it. Even such a leftwing figure as Paul David Hewson, aka "Bono" is now on record as saying, in regard to the economic development of Africa:
Commerce [and] entrepreneurial capitalism take more people out of poverty than aid. We need Africa to become an economic powerhouse.
And;
Entrepreneurial capitalism takes more people out of poverty than aid.
He's right.
Truth be known, capitalism is so efficient at generation of wealth that its buried Socialism. Even college reds who like to pretend they're socialist are capitalist. Left wing economist like Robert Reich who like to run around presenting to be really far thinking on this, spend their actual time arguing about slight adjustments to things like taxes and public funding of this or that. Current economic debates, in the real world, have all the content and meaning of two basketball fans arguing over which teams in NBA are good vs. really really good.
Missed in all of that, the system became so efficient that it went from being a tool, to the only purpose in living. Modern employees are like the galley slaves in Ben Hur, they live to serve the ship, and are told, in all seriousness, the same things the POWS are told in The Bridge On The River Kwai, "be happy in your work".
But people aren't.
And that's part of this.
This is a liberal, American, white, phenomenon for that reason.
The children of white liberal Americans are pretty much told that individually, they're really, really special, and that each of their individual needs, no matter what they are, have very special, if not cosmic, importance. They're also at this point basically unchurched, so they're not given any sense of how cosmic the cosmos is. They're special role in the universe is to consume. In order to best consume, they need to get good paying jobs, which their status in the upper middle class nearly guaranties, and then serve their individual wants, as consumers.
In short, they know nothing more important than themselves.
With so little grasp of themselves and with no guardrails, the world is a really scary place. The basic human drives towards community, reproduction and all still exist, but everything is disordered. People's activities are not natural. People don't burn off calories in pursuit of the things they were evolved to do, but at the gym. People secure their food from sources that are so remote and distant that their basic nature is a mystery. Pop fads scare people into eating unnatural diets, to the extent that an urban food production industry isn't doing that anyway. A pronogrified culture demands that they have sex, and has gone from that to demanding that they observe, accept, appreciate, and engage in sexual acts that are deeply unnatural.
It's not too surprising that a lot of people want to drop out.
And they're dropping out in every way imaginable. Out of the workforce. Out of being productive employees. And out of their natural roles.
The other thing that capitalism helped very much do, by putting a focus on nothing other than the bottom line, is to commence a war on nature. It's so engrained in our society that most people don't even know it.
Perhaps no one but a hunter can understand how intense an affection a boy can feel for a piece of marsh…. I came home one Christmas to find that land promoters, with the help of the Corps of Engineers had dyked and drained my boyhood hunting grounds on the Mississippi river bottoms…. My hometown thought the community enriched by this change. I thought it impoverished.”
Draft foreword, A Sand County Almanac, in Companion to a Sand County Almanac.
At heart, we remain what we always were. Hunters and gatherers on a wild landscape, that are part of it, subject to it, and a lesser in a greater whole. Capitalism has told us that we're to be mindless consumers who are the centers of our own personal universe.
Indeed, it's good for business. The more individual and alone you are, the more consumptive you will be. Looping back to transgenderism, for those who take the route down to radical intervention, they made themselves the subject of a branch of medicine that isn't about care at all, but merely about appearances. It isn't cheap, however. And those who consume that will become prisoners of pharmaceuticals for life.
Again, we're so used to this that we just don't see it. Even radical leftist, or those who think they are, serve the machine. Left-wingers rail against the Dobbs decision, as a societal elimination or reduction of abortion would mean that fewer women would exist to serve industry. The same individuals campaign for Federally funded daycares as that would "free" women to work, which really means it would compel them to do so. Everything must serve that ultimate goal.
You live to serve this ship. . . Consumer.
The male role in this goes back to the Industrial Revolution. The female role was impacted by the removal of men from the households to go to the mines, but putting women in the mines themselves is newer (we experimented with putting children in them, of course, but gave that up as too cruel). People who were not willing to cooperate voluntarily were compelled to do so in some fashion or another.
Following the Second World War, fueled by developments that occurred during it and during the Great Depression, the really radical shit to a consumer economy began. It was aided by new "industrial" developments and cultural trends that assisted it. The Sexual Revolution of the 60s and 70s, combined with pharmaceutical birth control followed in the wake of the Playboy assault on marriage, all of which basically served to remove men from real women and thereby liberate their wallets and time for more consumption. First Wave Feminism followed along and made the same push for women.
In this new world, what do young people have to look forward to? Careers, mostly. Lives in sterile boxes, broken up by occasional vacation and wide variety television, and the Internet.
It's no wonder we're at the Mad Hatter's tea party.
So how can this be addressed?
Opposed to the industrial society is the agrarian, which does not stand in particular need of definition. An agrarian society is hardly one that has no use at all for industries, for professional vocations, for scholars and artists, and for the life of cities. Technically, perhaps, an agrarian society is one in which agriculture is the leading vocation, whether for wealth, for pleasure, or for prestige-a form of labor that is pursued with intelligence and leisure, and that becomes the model to which the other forms approach as well as they may. But an agrarian regime will be secured readily enough where the superfluous industries are not allowed to rise against it. The theory of agrarianism is that the culture of the soil is the best and most sensitive of vocations, and that therefore it should have the economic preference and enlist the maximum number of workers.
I'll Take My Stand.
In actuality, this likely will be addressed all on its own, if not addressed, by sheer force of nature. Nature can't be conquered. It can be harnessed, directed, but not ignored.
Indeed, it gets even with those who attempt that.
Nature, quite truly, is a real bitch.
This provides the basis for some Conservatives of various types to argue that the culture is dying. It isn't really dying, but the culture of the Reformation is. Combined with it, the culture of the Industrial Revolution is being rejected.
Left wing hip, cool, and highly white, heirs to the WASP culture, but probably not observant in anything, like to wear shirts that say "the future is female". Well, in reality, the future is probably not WASP'ish but Latin, or Romantic in the original meaning of the word, in all sorts of ways, including culturally. What the founders of the Republic worried about up in Quebec in 1776 is probably likely to return with a vengeance, broadly speaking.
But not before the last gasp of the WASPish world damages a lot of things in its death throes, if this continues unabated.
There's no reason that things have to go the way they currently are, with so much destruction that it's bringing, at the present time. In other words, it isn't really the case that post Reformation Western culture has to let the madness snuff it out, it can adjust to arrest the suffering itself, and correct course.
If it doesn't however, it'll be addressed for it.
That's already starting to occur, to the great distress of some.
The overall question is, in our vast wealth, why can't we change course now? Two political parties, both products of the industrial capitalist age, provide a big part of the reason why. Bifurcation of every single issue on earth isn't possible. Some legislatures have begun to see that, which is why some have now gone to a ranked choice system, like Alaska. Wyoming looked to potentially attempt to head that way, but timing ostensibly prevented that move. Fear of what it would mean for the GOP's grip on the state likely had more to do with it.
In the political parties the knowledge that something has gone wrong is appearing, and we see all over the globe the rise of Illiberal Democracy, which seeks to reestablish the cultural standard by fiat. The throes of Liberal Society, are fueling it, as they make final efforts to force radical anti-scientific liberalism on society as a whole. Again, the bifurcation of things aids in the destruction of everything.
But at a lower societal level, there's some reason for hope. People seem to be waking up, but only very slowly, and mostly in younger generations that will have to live with whatever a Boomer controlled society leaves for them to deal with. Quiet Quitting and Laying Flat are really just votes on the Consumer Society, and big no votes at that.
Going home
We once observed here;
Yeoman's First Law of Behavior. You are going home again.
Thomas Wolfe is famously quoted as having written "You can't go home again.". I believe that the more accurate quote is "You can't go home again, and stay there." I'll be frank that I've never read Wolfe's work that this quote comes from, or much of Wolfe at all, so I can't really say how the quote should be taken in context. The bad thing about pithy quotes is that it's very easy to do that, and loose the meaning that the author intended for it.
Be that as it may, the quote that people like to cite to here, in the context that the quoter makes of it, is completely in error. Not only can you go home again, you are going to. At least you're going home again in terms of your basic personality.
From long observation, I'm pretty convinced that everyone's basic personality is set by the time they're about five years old. Likes, dislikes, intense interests, the whole smash, in some way, is there. Kids who are outdoorsy at five will be outdoorsy as old men. If a kid is fascinated with fishing at that age, he'll be fishing when he's 80. A dedicated reader at five will be at fifty. Nerdy at 5, nerdy at 95. And so on.
This is a fact, I think, that's hardly appreciated, but it's there. I've watched kids who loved one thing or another grow up and continue to love it. I've also seen those same people suppress something that they loved early on, and suffer for it.
This doesn't mean that people can't learn or develop new interests. They certainly can. But something of that spark of interests is in there very early as a rule, even if it's only really intensely brought out later.
What's also important about this, however, is that a person's real personality can be suppressed, but very often with bad results. Some people suppress it, to their misery, their entire lives. Everyone has seen people who are unhappy in a career or occupation, and wondered why. Well, perhaps that accountant saw himself as a kid as a commercial fisherman, and still does. Perhaps that cubicle dweller wanted to be a forester, and it hasn't left him. Perhaps that math teacher really loves baseball, and that's all that he thinks about each day. These things can't be fully repressed.
They can come roaring back, however, and I've seen that from time to time. Every adult knows one or more instances in which somebody in a seemingly solid career up and bolted for something surprising. I've known, for example of several instances in which successful lawyers suddenly quit and entered the seminary, or in one instance, Rabbinical school. I doubt that was a simply newly discovered interest, it'd likely been there all along in some fashion. I've known other instances in which which lawyers became teachers, teachers became lawyers, or successful business people took jobs as poor farm hands. I've seen a lot of instances in which a person left a rural area for career in business where they accumulated a fair amount of wealth pretty much with the exclusive desire to go back to their original hometown and live the lifestyle of their youth, often when they're too infirm to do so, which they could have done had they never left. And, most strikingly at all, I've seen people who lived face paced modern lives, focused on careers and wealth where they had abandoned a simpler rural lifestyle and the religion of their youth, struggle with it in middle age, and return to what they had originally been. That really was who they always were.
That doesn't mean that things don't wax and wane, in terms of interest. That's another oddity all to itself. Some people have genuine intense loves that they slowly loose. But they can come back. Absent some other sort of degeneration, people who were intensely interested in one thing, to seemingly loose their touch, can suddenly regain it and do.
This also doesn't mean that if a person was a snotty brat at 5 their doomed to a life of snotty bratness, although that can also happen. Indeed, for some, a personality trait can become a cross to bear that's lifelong, but still one that can be handled.. Being a brat is more of a personality defect, at least normally. Just as a person with abominable speech can learn to speak like a gentleman, a snot can learn correct behavior. No, what we're speaking of here is core personality traits. Those are pretty fixed by about age five.
What's true of individuals is true of cultures as well. This will not last indefinitely.
Nor should it. And people don't want it to. It's that last thing that makes this all so amazing. Fear of speaking their views, and of living a more authentic life, are everywhere.5
Apache woman.
At one time, it had become a cultural practice of the Apache to actually sacrifice a virgin, as so often fabled about various people. One year, however, a young man simply rode and grabbed the girl so chosen and rode off with her.
It never happened again.
Sometimes, that's what it takes. An individual action. Perhaps many of them, but in contravention to what is expected.
1. There is, however, a movement that seeks to change even this, although this is so extreme that it would seem unlikely to ever succeed. Having said that, much of what we're talking about was once regarded as nearly equally extreme.
2. A real oddity of this is that Langford has retained his name, although "Artemis" can apparently be a male or female name. To Americans, the name sounds male. The name descends from the Greek word for "butcher".
3. Since this text was written, we've referred to it much more often to the point where its definately a reoccuring theme here.
4. Indeed, while I support the bill, it's ironic that in the same age in which legislatures are making it illegal to contract marriages below 17 years of age, they're forcing society to allow girls to undergo treatment to permanently damage their bodies below that age on a gender assignment theory. If girls at age 15 are too mentally immature to marry, surely they are too immature to attempt to change their genders.
5. Groupthink and the press have really added to this.
While I generally like NPR, an example of this is provided by a recent NPR Politics podcast discussing what is going on at the state legislative level. All the panelist were simply amazed by the state level legislation regarding medical intervention in gender and freely used the term "gender affirming care".
Gender affirming care would affirm your gender, not surgically and pharmaceutically impose a new one on your nature. But the fact that they all acted like this was so obviously not the case demonstrates that the Press really is largely left-wing as a rule, and serves to shut people up who might otherwise be likely to join the debate on a non-extreme level.
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