FBXL Social

Leftists want to abolish family because it's a form of power they can't wield universally against their enemies. It's a club they can't bully their way into.

Perhaps you hate your kids and your kids hate you, but I love my parents, and I love my kids, and at least at this point my kids love me (We'll see if they still do when puberty hits).

But you don't need to love your family for it to be a source of power. A fish who has always lived in a pond is made up of whatever was in that pond, and in the same way parents have an overwhelming effect on their children, even if the children don't like their parents.

The difference in outcomes between intact families and non-intact families is overwhelming. There's sources out there claiming that 63% of youth suicides are from fatherless homes. 90% of all homeless and runaway children are from fatherless homes. 85% of all children who show behavior disorders come from fatherless homes. 80% of rapists with anger problems come from fatherless homes. 71% of all high school dropouts come from fatherless homes. 75% of all adolescent patients in chemical abuse centers come from fatherless homes. 70% of juveniles in state-operated institutions come from fatherless homes. 85% of all youths sitting in prisons grew up in a fatherless home.

Many of these differences in outcome seem to remain after being corrected for incomes.

According to Pew Research, most U.S. parents pass along their religion and politics to their children. Their data suggests an overwhelming correlation, nearly 80% and in some cases closer to 90% in terms of both religion and politics, in all directions. This finding came about despite most parents on surveys not prioritizing this result.

The state of the art in early childhood development shows that families model human behavior for their children as early as before birth. Before children can speak or play, they see how adults around them behave and how they interact and those become fundamental social lessons that early on. Early on our brains have all kinds of neural connections and those connections die off as they are used less and strengthened as they are used more, so the stimuli provided by families in the earliest years of life have a lasting impact on children's neurological development. A natural experiment in Romania under a communist dictator had many children living in state orphanages where they stared at a white ceiling for 8 hours a day and the impact on doing that was effectively permanent brain damage.

Finally, bonds of family are still some of the strongest in humanity, and that's been the case for most of human history, and it's still the case for most of the world today. A few strange societies such as the English have a true nuclear family system, but most of asia, the middle east, and large chunks of north africa are various clan based social structures even today (often with cousin marriage allowed), and even Europe has many cultures that are based strongly around the clan structure without cousin marriage.

Various forms of nuclear family can be sustainable because they're still based around the family, but what isn't sustainable is the idea of an atomized world that tries to destroy the family as a structure. Our atomized existence today is unusual, and not particularly sustainable. The future is with families, in one form or another.

That's all testament to the undeniable power of family, and that's something an outsider can't just bully their way into -- the moment they interject, they're interjecting as something other than family.

I don't just arbitrarily blame the problems on growing up without a father, it's the data that says it's people growing up without a father who have these problems. While it does not necessarily follow that fatherlessness is the cause of these things (few owners of new luxury cars live under the poverty line, but giving poor people luxury cars will not raise them from the poverty line and is likely to make things worse), it nonetheless is strongly suggestive that intact families are an important factor. Logically speaking, if two people differentiated only by having an intact family exist and one is much more likely to do a bad thing than the other, then it doesn't prove there's a connection, but it strongly suggests there is a connection, which acts as strong evidence that the thing. Paramagnetic oxygen sensors are a crazy device. They operate by running two gasses in between a magnet mounted on a swing-arm attached to a magnet. In one side they run nitrogen, in the other side they run oxygen. Nitrogen is not paramagnetic and oxygen is, so there will be an unbalanced force created proportionally to they oxygen content of the gas sample. This force acts against the spring to turn a needle. Does that mean that the oxygen is the thing turning the needle? Not necessarily, maybe there's a strong magnet nearby, or some other paramagnetic material, or the spring could be damaged. But it's a strong suggestion that there's oxygen in that particular gas.

A lot of your criticisms end up coming off as a fish complaining that water is wet -- that's just the nature of the thing, and it isn't good or bad, it just is the way that that thing is.

Family structure relates to many things, and has subtle but important impacts on many parts of society.

The true nuclear family structure comes mostly from England. It exists in America because the culture in America (and many other countries) is largely derived from English culture, as you can see by the fact that we are all speaking English.

In the true nuclear family structure, a man and woman have a child, and they raise that child, and that child is expected to go out into the world become something worthwhile and find a mate of their own. When a child's parents die, there's no real expectation of what happens to their financial assets afterwards. They could end up choosing to leave those assets to their eldest son, but they could just as easily leave it to the 2nd or 3rd or 4th son, or divided equally amongst all the children, or donate it all to church or an orphanage, or their cat, it's all considered socially acceptable. You claim there is no tradition, but this family structure alone is a long-standing tradition in some cultures. You don't have to like the tradition's implications for that to be the case.

Many of the things that you criticize in your post are simply attributes of the true nuclear family structure. Children are expected to go off on their own and start building their lives once they come of age because that is the nature of the true nuclear family system. And at the end of their lives, it is not expected that children take care of their parents because they've already gone off and built their own lives, and the parents may or may not leave any inheritance.

There are many benefits to the true nuclear family structure.

Women tend to have the best treatment under a true nuclear family structure because unlike a clan family structure where the person you are going to marry is often selected before your birth, women will choose who they are going to marry from the eligible suitors, meaning that those men need to fight for the affections of those women.

You mentioned the cost of education for kids, and the cost of raising kids, but those elements are ways of looking at the world that you have inherited from the nuclear family structure. Children under the true nuclear family structure tend to be the best taken care of because the men spend so much of their early adult lives making something of themselves in order to become worthy of wife that they tend to have fewer kids, and because of that paired with the fact that the parents know full well that the kids are going to have to go out into the world and make something of themselves in turn, parents in the true nuclear family system will tend to make some of the highest investments in individual children of any family structure.

I actually write about something similar to this several times in my book The Graysonian Ethic. In the preface I talked about how one of the reasons for writing a novel length book filled with advice is my expectation that he goes off into the world at 18, and he'll need to be making a name for himself because I'll be busy making sure I'm taking care of myself and I'm not a burden to him. In the chapter entitled "our family", I explicitly talk about the walz, the tradition that tradesmen in Germany who finished their apprentices used to take where they would leave to go work under many Masters in different cities, and how I expected him to go off on his walz when he gets to the right age because that's how he will find success in life.

And because unlike other family structures you aren't constantly surrounded by your kin, the true nuclear family structures tend to have the highest levels of social trust when societies are made up of them because they have to rely on others to survive and thrive, they can't just rely on their families.

Now contrast this with endogenous and exogenous clan structure, which is much more insulated (the difference between the two is whether cousin marriage is taboo or not). In such systems, you are indeed expected to take care of your family from cradle to grave, including housing your children, arranging their marriages from very early on, and sharing assets during everyone's lives such as the family home. Such family structures tend to be significantly more controlled, usually with the family patriarch making major life decisions for individuals within the family, since the family is expected to take care of wayward sons, daughters, and cousins, you never said there's much less Liberty in selecting one's path. The family chooses your path because you are an extended unit.

Now all of this actually just goes to show how powerful family is. You might not necessarily agree with the methods of a certain family structure, but it is undeniable that family itself has a lot of power to have such massive effects on the very structure of the society that those families live within. The nuclear family structure built some of the largest and most powerful countries on earth or in world history, and contributed to both pax Brittania and pax Americana, eras of hegemonic world peace.

Whether you're a Russian novelist or a stripper named Desiree, you should stop trying to mindread others through projection because you keep getting things wrong. Being a parent, for the act of parenthood, they are both things that one does because they are your duty not because you love those things. And you do your duty because you love your child.

My son is just a little bit needy like I am, and I love that about him. Any time I'm sitting down he'll come ask me to play with him. He's also a trickster like his mom, he jokes around all the time. He loves nature, and unlike most children I've ever seen in my life he is so gentle towards it. He will touch a leaf or a flower, and most kids would just tear the leaf right off the tree or destroy the flower, but he just very gently touches it leaving it exactly the way that he found it. Today we were at the park, and several times he took a piece of litter off the ground and walked all the way over to the trash can and dropped it in a bunch of times, without any prompting from me. So don't tell me I don't love my child, because you're wrong and it makes you look stupid.

Your statement that "passing politics and religion without giving a choice is indoctrination" is not in line with the facts presented. Everyone has a choice as to whether to follow their parents. According to the numbers, between 10 and 20% of people choose not to follow their parents. One of the powers of family is that people willingly choose to do the same thing as their parents, not that they are forced to follow their parents.

Your final paragraph is a non-sequitur and appears to assume I'm from the US? Congratulations on your moral outrage that society isn't replacing fathers, but that moral outrage seems to prove my point rather than disproving it. Family is a powerful thing. It isn't always right, that's not where power comes from. There are criticisms of may thing with power such as the state, the church, family, but they are still things with power. Unlike most of those things, family is something inherited and inherent, and this whole discussion has proved beyond any shadow of a doubt that it is powerful.

I don't need to prove that family is good, or that a given family tradition is good, I only need to prove that family is something with power and the data that I've presented, and the arguments that I presented I think overwhelmingly support that idea. You don't need to prove that family is bad, or a certain family tradition is bad, was that a certain society is bad, you need to prove that family doesn't have power, and instead, your arguments inherently support the idea that they do have power because you wish that power was used differently.

(I like letting ideas stretch their legs. That's why I run a fediverse instance with 60,000 characters as the post limit and most of my posts are over 7,000 characters)

Assuming that we've moved on from the original subject, there's a line from The Graysonian Ethic ( I swear I dont cite the book in every post, but these are directly applicable ) in the chapter of having grit that goes something like: "My generation is filled with people who want to save the world. The problem is that they cannot even save themselves"

I spent quite a lot of time thinking about it this problem of trying to save the world, and the answer to me is quite simple: you need to start small. Don't try to save the world, try to change your world because you actually can.

First, try to be virtuous in your own life. To model the correct behavior for those around you to see is a lifetime pursuit that should take all of your effort for most regular people. Most people aim at being generally inoffensive, but in my view the goal should be to go to sleep every day trying to be someone you could look in the mirror and be proud of yourself.

The next question might be about "how will you know what good is? Society has so many things to say about that!" But in reality you know what makes you feel impressed, what makes you feel disgusted, so you should use your internal compass to guide you.

It is my belief that when you live virtuously, you do it to do the right thing, but there are ultimately rewards for doing so. The world is hungry for virtuous people, and so if you are virtuous you will find yourself rewarded. That also gives you opportunities to do small local things to make others lives better.

For those who try to act with virtue, they will start off with a small slice where they try to make their immediate surroundings better, and as their little slice of the world gets better they will get further opportunities to increase the size of that slice of the world that they're making better. I've personally witnessed it where a Frontline worker eventually is able to assist in steering a Fortune 500 company in different ways because they have put in the work day after day month after month year after year and build a cache of virtue with which they can move forward. History is written by those who show up, and a lot of people don't really care to show up.

If you live a life you can be proud of, that's where you can start trying to surround yourself with other people who are virtuous. It isn't easy to find virtuous people but they do exist, and you start building a community -- a real local community that can make the local world better.

It isn't easy, but there are good women out there who will exhibit virtue in spite of the government or society. I've been married for 15 years going strong, and most of my married friends are the same.

When you end up as a father yourself you are modeling how to be a good father to your son, and you model what a good man is to your daughter.

You mentioned before that people have kids just to have kids, but most people don't have kids. The replacement birth rate is 2, and throughout most of the industrialised world the actual birth rate is closer to 1. America only has a slightly higher birth rate because they import a lot of people from the developing world, but even then within a generation or two they are at the locals birth rate (and just so that we stay out of the pop-political realm here I am not speaking to this act of importing people from the developing world as good or bad, it's just a statement of fact). This is going to result in population collapses on every continent except for Africa. This means that there's going to be far fewer people, and the people who exist will be the ones from parents who chose to have kids. If those kids are likely to choose the ideology of their parents then it becomes rather important to be a parent and to model proper ideals such that the ideals you would like to see move forward are carried forward.

Some might suggest that this plan I presented starts too small, does too little for too long, takes too long, for a relatively large amount of work. I would counter that statistically speaking no one on earth is in charge. That is, there is one president of the United States every four years out of 8 billion people. If we assume that there's one head of state for every nation, maybe there's 200 heads of state at any given time, and many of them stay in that role for a very long time. Of countries with Republican forms of government, the Republic is formed of a vanishingly small number of people. In that sense, discussions about how the statistically non-existent rulers should rule is fan fiction, since individual players are statistically never going to be in that role. Therefore it is most sensible to make plans based on the things that we are likely to be able to change in our lives rather than things we will never be able to change in our lives. That doesn't mean that we ignore the world around us, far from it. Individuals acting with virtue who understand what is going on in the world can make subtle changes that can eventually result in those big outcomes. For example, in my own country there are typically three parties who have the most power at the Federal level, and the likelihood of anyone other than those three parties making much progress is pretty low. However, in the last election a fringe party got 5% of the vote. Now you might think that 5% is a meaningless number that would have no impact on anything, but in reality it acted as an effective protest to vote for one of the three parties that wasn't doing its job, and there's been a major shake up in that major party now which is now on track to win massively in the next election. This never would have happened if people just did what they were told, they understood the actions they were able to take, and to collectively were able to make an outsized change to the world by doing the things that they could do. (Humorously enough, that one's small political party is now back at 1%)

Another counter-argument to my proposal is that nothing I have proposed will force anyone to change. And when it comes to the way that they live their life on a day-to-day basis you can't force people to change. Even dictators only have so much power over the everyday lives of individual people. Therefore if you want to convince people to do the right thing, you need to show them that doing the right thing is better for them. Once somebody right in front of them is modeling that ideal and living a happier life because of it, that is much more powerful than any law telling men that they need to take care of their families.

In the same way, good men taking an active role in their local space can have an outsized impact on other men bye helping to model ideal behavior.

Now, I keep on talking about ideals but I do want to remind everyone that in small ways and in big ways none of us ever fully meet the mark. Even people who are proud of themselves when they look in the mirror have things that they would like to change for the better, or regrets about things that they did wrong. In this way you need to be careful not to put too much pressure on yourself for the times that you don't hit the mark, and instead just accept that you didn't fully hit the mark today and you're going to try to get a little bit closer tomorrow. It is that striving for greatness that is going to get you to somewhere excellent, not necessarily always attaining it.

I'd like to briefly talk about how this would feel, this little corner of the world where we have hypothetically created virtue around us. The truth is, in order to feel at peace with the world you don't need to change the entire world, you just need to have a good situation right in front of you. There have been a lot of big things in the news lately, but usually I'm reading the news after I just spent 2 hours at the beach with my son, and that really put things in perspective that everything's going to be okay. Being able to create at first a small zone of sanity and virtue and then slowly expanding that zone to encompass more and more of your world results in a much better emotional feeling then a much more trivial but global achievement. To be happy and proud in one's own skin, and in one's own house, and in one's own neighborhood, that is certainly a great start to feeling happy and proud and calm in one's own life in general. It's a great basis for dealing with things outside of your control such as politics in the World at Large.

I haven't moved because there's nowhere to move to, desiree. The fact you hate your dad is your problem, not mine.