The Pathologization of Human Nature

The Tiger Woods scandal is an excellent example of why I don’t watch the news on TV or take a regular newspaper; instead I read bloggers who filter through all the chaff and discuss underreported but vitally important events rather than gossiping about the sort of people my father once described as “trailer trash with money”.

But this link caught my eye.

The story is sadly familiar: a rich, famous and powerful husband cheats on his undeniably gorgeous wife, apologizes and wants a second chance.

In the case of Tiger Woods, the reason for his “transgressions” may stem more from the fact that his own life is missing something than from problems with his wife, experts say.

“People who have affairs typically do so because something is lacking,” says psychotherapist Stacy Kaiser. “You can be the world’s best golfer, role model and endorsement spokesman and still not feel good inside.”

A quick Google found numerous other examples of various people taking it upon themselves to psychoanalyze Mr. Woods.

Helen Fisher is one of the few to point out that this is a moral issue, not a psychological one, and that his motivations have their origins in biology, not in neurosis.

Let’s face it: most men, given the opportunity and free of restraining moral codes, would have a harem like that of Mr. Woods. His urges are completely normal. His behavior shows only that he had the opportunity and lacked Judeo-Christian morals about sex. (I have no idea what Mr. Woods’ own religion is, if any.)

Earlier generations would have laughed heartily at the spectacle of educated people trying in apparent bewilderment to come up with an explanation for a man feeling anything so unaccountable as a desire to sleep with multiple women.

This caught my attention because just a few days before, I read a blog thread which I cannot now find in which people were speculating about the reasons behind the habit many people regrettably have of shedding good friends in favor of shiny new ones. Most of the proposed reasons drew on things like neurology (our brains try to save us time by making snap judgments which are not always good ones), evolutionary psychology (which posits that such unethical behavior often has survival value), natural youthful immaturity (which most people, one hopes, will outgrow in time), or the general decline in moral standards.

In the midst of this, a new commenter butted in to condescendingly inform everyone that this behavior is extremely rare and would only ever be displayed by people with serious psychological problems, and informed the blogger and other commenters who had reported their own anecdotes about this behavior that they “needed to get out more”, a course of action which, he implied, would inevitably lead to their encountering millions of people who never shed old friends because fresh new people come along.

Of course, everyone has observed this behavior. It is particularly common among the young. Who, besides the commenter mentioned above, does not remember the ever-shifting alliances of their grade school classmates? Who, besides this commenter, has not observed college students jettisoning their values and the old friends who shared them because they started hanging with a different crowd with a different code? Who else has not seen attractive young people going through members of the opposite sex like a hot knife through butter, jilting loyal admirers who would make excellent spouses in favor of someone exciting and unreliable?

To most of us, the reason that people do this is fairly obvious: it brings short-term satisfaction. That is why it is such a common behavior. People with an internalized moral sense, who understand that “Nature is what we were put in this world to rise above,” will resist the impulse, but it is still there, in every one of us. Not only those with serious psychological problems.

This commenter was trying to claim that impulses that everyone has and that many people act on are actually rare and require, not self-restraint, but therapy.

This utopian premise, that human relationships naturally function smoothly and any problem is a sign of an exotic mental malady, has become very common. I quoted this a couple of months ago:

Sociobiological theory also has profound implications for the nature of the family. Generations of psychologists have presumed that evolution (or some very powerful force) must have intended the family to function more smoothly than it generally does. A naive model of the nature of the family assumes that it is harmonious under ideal conditions, since that is allegedly how it was designed. But it was not so designed. Like the male-female pair, it is an association among individuals with partly distinct evolutionary purposes. Family members are often at odds with each other’s ultimate (not merely temporary) purposes, and their relations are naturally conflicted rather than naturally harmonious. This conflict is not friction in what should or could be a smoothly functioning system but is intrinsic.

~Melvin Konner, Only The Reckless Survive and Other Secrets of Human Nature

The problem with the utopian delusion that relationships “naturally” go smoothly and that if they do not, it is a sign that something is inherently wrong with one of the parties, is that it makes the behavior of sloughing relationships at whim even more common. Before the pseudo-science of psychology led people to start making this assumption, everyone knew and understood that relationships are difficult. It was simply the nature of reality. I would hazard a guess that the commenter mentioned above has himself ended numerous friendships because trivial problems in their interactions proved to him that his friends had terrible psychological problems and wouldn’t be fit for friendship until they had more therapy. Such premises help our soaring divorce rate, not to mention our soaring rate of romances that never lead to marriage; the slightest problem convinces people that “s/he is not The One” and they drop them to look elsewhere, for that perfect soul mate with whom there will never be any problems whatever.

I am one of those who the commenter would deem in need of getting out more, because I have had “friends”, some of whom I thought were good friends, ditch me for the most superficial reasons. One dumped me for not liking the Lord of the Rings movie. Another ended a brief but intense friendship because I sent her a link to an essay that she didn’t agree with. I had a two-week friendship which I thought looked promising, but I made a mild complaint when she was two hours late meeting me and she kicked me to the curb. (This evokes the old saying: “If you lend a friend ten dollars and never see her again, it was probably worth it.”)

These “friends” all had an image in their minds of what friendship is supposed to be like. To them, it is an ecstasy of perfect harmony in which the other person never causes you a moment of irritation, never misunderstands you, never disagrees with you, and never makes any demands upon you. If not for the notion that relationships are naturally harmonious unless sinister forces, like psychological problems, “society”, or something interfere with their normal smoothness, these women probably would not have considered these sufficient reasons for ending a friendship. I might add that all of them have unsurprisingly tempestuous relationship histories. The last one had been divorced three times.

When people understand that friction in relationships is inevitable, they are far better equipped to deal with it. This is related to my complaint about the contemporary attitude that there is no reason for people not to marry someone from a very different background. I am not decreeing that such marriages are always a mistake or never work. I am denouncing the current notion that it is old-fashioned and unenlightened to believe that they will inevitably be fraught with problems. If two people from different backgrounds fall in love, they might be able to work out their conflicts, if they are prepared for them. But if they have been told that there will be no conflicts, this means they are making a commitment with no clue what they are getting themselves into. I don’t think lying to such a couple helps them in any way.

Another way in which normal human behavior has come to be seen as pathological is in assumptions about children. Go to youtube and watch some old cartoons about Little Lulu or Lil’ Audrey, or read some pre-1970 Family Circus or Dennis the Menace cartoons. Download some Baby Snooks radio plays. The mischievous child used to be a stock character. Everyone understood that children will inevitably misbehave, get into trouble, and make messes. Some of the cartoons dramatize the childish fantasies that inspire some of the mischief, or clearly show that the mischief comes from an incomplete understanding of the world, not from maleficent intentions, let alone deep-seated neuroses. The proper response was to scold them, punish them, and maybe laugh about it with the other adults.

But now Calvin is the only such character still around, and the assumption seems to be that children are by nature perfectly behaved, not even requiring instruction in desired behavior. Mischief which a couple of generations ago would have been answered with a swat and an order never to do it again is now reason to drag the child to a shrink for Ritalin and analysis.

The problem, of course, is that therapy and psychiatric drugs cannot cure perfectly normal behavior. But this era is so confused that we no longer remember what normal behavior is.

The Decline of the Bar

Note: This was originally posted some months back, but was accidentally deleted. I just finally found a copy on my hard drive. Please forgive the repost!

Shortly after World War II, male bartenders tried to bar women from their profession. They saw bars as the poor man’s version of the gentleman’s club, a male refuge from the wider world. They were places women rarely went. There might be a jukebox crooning softly in the corner, but there was no dancing. Men would sit alone, wrapped in their thoughts as they drowned their troubles, or in small groups, talking (the jukebox wasn’t loud enough to prevent this).

Consider for a moment how much the humble bar has changed. By now, most of them are “singles bars”, an institution that has become so embedded in our culture that it is difficult to remember that within living memory, it did not even exist.

Until the 1960’s, people usually met prospective partners at social gatherings designed by their families for that precise purpose. When we think of it today, we tend to think of parents and other authority figures in bygone eras as the sworn enemies of heterosexuality. Those mean old parents were always chaperoning their youngsters so they couldn’t have sex, forcing them to marry people they didn’t like, etc. But think of the novels of Jane Austen, Margaret Mitchell, Nancy Mitford. These ought to have alerted popular culture to the pre-1960s practice of parents setting up parties, such as debutante balls, whose chief purpose was for their unmarried offspring to dance with and talk to members of the opposite sex so that grandchildren could ensue. Yeah, there were always duennas hanging around to prevent the young people from having sex before they got married, but nonetheless the atmosphere seems to have been a profoundly favorable one.

I’m always given a jolt every time a mother in a classic novel or old movie is actually happy to see a young man looking at her daughter. Nowadays, parents who care about their children at all have to face the fact that given the cultural climate, if their teenagers are allowed out of the house, the odds are excellent that they will have sex. Even apart from the psychological damage of sex without commitment and at a too-young age, damage that liberals insist does not exist, there’s also the uncompromising danger of pregnancy or disease. This means that parents who care have to view every date with the utmost suspicion. Is this boy going to make their daughter a mother at 15? Is this girl going to give their son his first VD before he even goes to college? At an age when young people ought to be exploring the delight of having two sexes in the world and finding the person they will spend their lives with, their parents have instead to do whatever they can to discourage any attraction they see because of where it may lead, or else press condoms and pills on their children so that they will not suffer too much from their folly. But back to parties.

Nowadays most parties, unless they are family reunions, are made up of people of the same age group, mostly unrelated to each other. For most of history, however, parties were gatherings of multiple age groups, multiple extended families. As opposed to today’s habit of warehousing teenagers with other teenagers to prevent them from observing and learning adult behavior, adolescents would be attending the same parties as their parents and grandparents. The concept was that the young people were being introduced and brought into the adult world, which they were to be a part of. The modern notions that the younger generation should be kept quarantined as if its members had some deadly disease, and that every generation ought to wrench control from their elders and jettison the values and customs of previous eras, was mercifully unheard of.

A major objective of these parties was to give young people an opportunity to find a mate. Marriages to unsuitable partners were rare, because unsuitable people were simply not admitted. If some wastrel or drunkard or woman of loose morals could not be kept out because of family connections or some such, his (or her) prospective victims were still unlikely to be taken in, because the room was full of people who knew of the scandal and who relayed the details in whispers throughout the room. If some charming cad made overtures to a naïve young lady, her parents and a passel of other relatives were on the spot to shoo him off and expose his true character to the girl.

Nowadays, of course, we are too “liberated” for such safeguards and so every young person is cast adrift on the world to fend for him- or herself as best he can.

In the parties of yore, the mere presence of a man at a gathering demonstrated that he was of reasonably sound moral character, that his past and connections were known and were unalarming, and that he had mastered the basics of civilized behavior. A singles bar, of course, has no such barriers to admission. In addition, the old parties made it possible for young couples to actually talk, to learn if their personalities were compatible. People learned things about those they met, and any attempt to lie about one’s fortune, character or profession would be swiftly exposed, as the room was filled with people who knew the truth! Dancing – used often as a symbolic demonstration of a man’s fitness as a husband in the novels of Jane Austen – was done according to set patterns that had to be learned, and it required paying attention to one’s partner so as not to break the pattern or tread on her feet.

Compare that to the singles bar. Anyone can stroll in, unvetted, unscreened. The “dancing” consists of gyrating randomly, a “skill” that does not need to be learned and requires little attention to one’s partner; indeed, often today’s “dancing” is partnerless. The “music” is so artistically worthless that the central element of a song, melody, is subordinated to the beat (if not altogether nonexistent), which is played at ear-splitting level, making conversation impossible. A singles bar, virtually the only place where young people in search of partners can go looking for them today, consists of a lot of people standing around sustaining hearing loss, shrieking “Would you like to dance?” an inch from each other’s ears, and knocking back drink after drink to escape the sordid reality around them.

A woman approached by a strange man has to rely entirely on her own intuition to discern if he really is a doctor, if he has what used to be called a “social disease”, if he is a serial killer, or if he is simply a blackguard who will desert her after a single night. No one else at the bar knows him, so if he has a string of abandoned pregnant girlfriends or felony arrests behind him, no one can warn her. Instead of judging a man by his demonstrated ability to keep his word and carry on a profession to determine if he might be a suitable husband, a woman is forced to judge by his body language and the clothes on his back if he is worth taking home tonight. She can only hope that afterwards he might come back for a second night, and possibly for life. Indeed, the practice of sleeping with a strange man because he has appealing body language has become so prevalent that an entire subculture has arisen of men teaching each other the proper way to carry oneself, speak to a woman, and make advances towards her so as to get her into bed.

Back when women were not expected to have sex with men they weren’t married to, the “male gaze”, flirting, and compliments were affirmation women could enjoy. A whistle or a wolfish look was a request for something the man and woman both knew he wasn’t going to get. It was safe. With modern pressure to have extramarital sex, women feel on some level that they are “obliged” to come across, and responding to flirting with anything other than hostility could be considered leading the man on. The Sexual Revolution has made male appreciation a threat instead of a compliment.

This is what “liberation” has led us to: women being put in a position where strange men make a science of how to get into their pants, and men in a position where honesty, kindness, and hard work are deemed worthless by women who go home with the guy who carries himself the right way and has learned to steer the conversation like a car. Like all other elements of feminism, it has left women as well as men worse off, not better.

Let us return the bar to what it used to be, and make parties family affairs once more.

A New Dark Age

A few days ago, I was plundering the archives of Gates of Vienna and came across this:

Islam and the Dark Age of Byzantium

The impact of Islam was devastating for all of Christendom, both East and West. It was the event that terminated Classical civilization. The destruction of Classical culture in Europe was due to largely, though not completely, to the economic blockade of the Mediterranean by Muslim piracy. Yet the termination of that culture in regions such as Egypt and Syria (formally great centers of Classical and Hellenistic civilization) which came under the control of Islam, was produced by the new faith’s utter contempt for the cultures and histories of the peoples it came to dominate. Right from the start, the Caliphal government in Egypt established a commission whose purpose was to seek out pharaohnic age tombs, for plundering. So complete was the destruction that, perhaps little more than a century after the Islamic Conquest, no one in Egypt had any idea who built the Great Pyramid – this in spite of the fact that very substantial histories of this monument and the pharaoh who erected it were contained in the works of many Classical authors, most notably Herodotus and Diodorus Siculus. Immediately prior to the Muslim invasion the libraries and academies of Egypt, Syria, and Babylonia, were packed with the works of these authors. Their disappearance and the disappearance of the knowledge they contained can only mean, as Christian polemicists argued for centuries, that the Muslims had deliberately destroyed a great quantity of Classical literature.

In the West of Europe and in the East, in North Africa and the Middle East, Classical civilization came to an end in the mid-seventh century; and the reason for its demise can be summed up in one word: Islam.

This had me thinking that now, we aren’t dependent on Egyptian papyrus for affordable paper, so Islam might find it somewhat harder to wipe out knowledge this time around. Aside from the ready availability of paper all around us, there’s also the Internet, crammed with the great works of past and present, bursting at the seams with information. And they can’t just set fire to it. No, they can’t destroy it unless they do one of those things like the villain in Goldeneye wanted to do, or like Snake Plissken did at the end of Escape From L.A.

This morning:

An EMP in Your Future

Our Flemish correspondent VH has translated a series of reports from the Dutch media about the frightening possibility that Iran will use nuclear weapons to create a catastrophic electromagnetic pulse (EMP) over the coast of Europe as well as over the United States.

I’m starting to think survivalists might not be so crazy after all.

How Humans Work

Bizarrely enough, modern intellectual thought has actually managed to make most people forget what human nature is and how it works. Here are a few passages that will help to remind us:

Young people seek power and status. This is natural. It will always be the case. However, they are young; so they seek not the things that will bring them power now, but the things that will bring them power when they are of age to rule. Not, of course, that this is a conscious strategy; it is more a matter of evolutionary biology. But it still works. The number of former ’60s radicals in positions of power today is remarkable.

Thus, it is better to say that young people seek potential power and status. If an elite is open to new talent, they will seek it in that elite. If an elite is not open to new talent, or if the process of entering it excludes much of that talent…

In this case, we see a prerevolutionary condition. The classic case is late 19th-century Russia. Young elites, instead of being attracted to careers in the administrative or clerical arms of the Czarist state, were attracted to revolutionary activism – plotting to replace that regime. They seek a different path to power – not an existing path, but a potential and hypothetical path.

A gentle introduction to Unqualified Reservations (part 9d)

Physiologically adult humans are not meant to spend an additional 10 years in a school system; their brains map that onto “I have been assigned low tribal status”. And so, of course, they plot rebellion – accuse the existing tribal overlords of corruption – plot perhaps to split off their own little tribe in the savanna, not realizing that this is impossible in the Modern World. The teenage males map their own fathers onto the role of “tribal chief”…

Rebelling Within Nature

Sociobiological theory also has profound implications for the nature of the family. Generations of psychologists have presumed that evolution (or some very powerful force) must have intended the family to function more smoothly than it generally does. A naive model of the nature of the family assumes that it is harmonious under ideal conditions, since that is allegedly how it was designed. But it was not so designed. Like the male-female pair, it is an association among individuals with partly distinct evolutionary purposes. Family members are often at odds with each other’s ultimate (not merely temporary) purposes, and their relations are naturally conflicted rather than naturally harmonious. This conflict is not friction in what should or could be a smoothly functioning system but is intrinsic.

~Melvin Konner, Only The Reckless Survive and Other Secrets of Human Nature

THINGS I HAVE WASTED A LOT OF TIME AND ENERGY LEARNING THE HARD WAY

In which I reveal far too much about the folly of my youth.

1. Marry someone of your own class and background. Yes, I know that your DNA and his DNA have identified each other as an excellent fit, and consequently have ordered your hormones and his hormones to make beautiful music together. This will not help you five years down the road when you are having twenty trivial, insoluble and increasingly acrimonious arguments a day about things like whether paper towels make acceptable napkins or if the fact that you laughed three times during an episode of Friends is sufficient reason that you should endure an hour of the show every single week. The old joke is right: male and female is opposite enough.

2. When people say that in relationships, the most important thing they look for is “a sense of humor”, what they really mean is not that they want someone who has one, but someone who has the same kind as theirs. Two incompatible senses of humor cannot peacefully coexist under one roof.

3. Do not study occultism. Even if there is anything to it – and I think that there is a little – it is not enough to repay any significant time investment. The only exception is if you intend to make a career of telling other people about your useless but hard-won knowledge. It worked for Crowley and Leek. The market is pretty small, though; LaVey spent his last couple of decades on welfare.

4. Traditional notions of the differences between men and women exist because they are accurate. There are a very few people who are significantly gender atypical. If you are one of them, your atypicality will manifest itself with no effort on your part. If you are not, you will spend decades trying to wipe out your natural inclinations and at the end they will still be there. It wastes your time and annoys the pig. Invest your time in an endeavour more likely to succeed, such as completely eradicating dandelions from your lawn.

5. Without wishing to discourage anyone from cultivating qualities such as honesty, integrity, intelligence, and so on, I regret to inform you that unless you also acquire the skills of making a good first impression and displaying the shibboleths that will convince the people around you that you are of their tribe, very few people will ever discover that you have the former. Sure, beings with large brains “should” be able to dispense with all that. Convince the other six billion people on this planet, not merely to intellectually agree with this premise but also to act upon it, and then we can stop pretending to like the same bands as our buddies. (Note: most people will claim that they are above such petty signals. They are not.)

6. Ayn Rand was one of the great minds of history. She did not, however, have the whole story about anything. It just seems that way because today’s so-called “schools” and “colleges” and the MSM have filled themselves with so much poppycock and so well concealed the existence of most of history’s greatest minds (I did not even hear the name “Edmund Burke” until I was in my thirties) that when we encounter the one who they couldn’t cover up, due to those pesky best-selling novels, she seems to be the only person in history who ever made any sense.

7. Do not try to be an atheist. In recent years there has been a spate of books showing that belief in God comes, essentially, pre-installed on our hard drives. (Oddly, many people take this as proof that the belief is incorrect. Do they consider it impossible that the Creator would create us with the means of sensing Him?) Very few people are really capable of disbelieving; we’re just not wired for it. Most of those who claim not to believe actually spend a lot of time and energy trying to convince themselves that God does not exist. And since this disbelief is unnatural to humans, it tends to do nasty things to one’s temperament. Admit that He’s there and get on with your life.

8. While we’re on that subject, organized religion is, in fact, a good thing. If you want, you can say otherwise between the ages of 15 and 21; it will impress other people who are also between the ages of 15 and 21. After that, oh good grief read a history book. There’s way more to “organized religion” than the Inquisition. A lot of people much smarter than you have spent many centuries building up the organized religions. That these organizations have lasted so long is a pretty good indication that they’re on to something.

9. People who are mean in trivial little ways are probably also going to be mean in big important ways. If they only use their moral code in emergencies, it’s going to be rusty and unreliable.

10. Don’t eat too many carbohydrates. Limit your sugar and caffeine. Don’t try to limit your fat intake. (See Gary Taubes for why.)

11. If someone lies to you, or rewrites the history the two of you share, run. No matter how sincere and reassuring the talk the two of you have is, he (or she) will do it again.

12. Don’t try to rescue people, except from literal physical danger. People who beg you to “save” them are actually just hoping you’ll give them some company in the pits.

13. The fact that you have never fit in does not automatically confer virtue upon others who also have never fit in. They may be perfectly nice but awkward persons like yourself, but it is statistically more likely that they are speed freaks who are on the dole in between paying gigs of marginal respectability. Such people can be extraordinarily charming if you are not superficial enough or sensible enough to flee them on sight. (See #5; those instincts are so deeply ingrained for good reasons.) It is how they survive.

14. Don’t go to a therapist, and especially don’t let them mess with your biochemistry with medications (unless you are hallucinating or genuinely close to killing yourself or someone else). For one thing, psychologists and psychiatrists have spent years having their heads intensively crammed with mountains of the most absurd nonsense. For another, they go into that field in the first place because they are more screwed up than you will ever be and are trying to figure out why.

15. Smart people are not necessarily more ethical than stupid people. There is limited correlation, because higher intelligence goes with a greater future time orientation, so smart people count consequences more, but a lot of the time smart people just figure out sneakier ways to harm others.

16. Never assume that anyone else has the same sense of honor and fair play that you do. Don’t put yourself at the mercy of anyone else’s ethics. Odds are, they don’t have any.

17. Free love is neither.

18. That which does not kill you will not necessarily make you stronger. Just as likely, it’ll soften you up so that whatever comes next will kill you. Bear in mind that the man who originated that fine-sounding quotation ended his days in a lunatic asylum.

19. Do not attempt to tell any of this to people who have not already figured it out for themselves.

After the Collapse

This article disheartened me, even though I didn’t expect any better from a San Francisco paper.

Rights watchdog hints Swiss minaret ban could go

A Swiss ban on minarets could violate fundamental liberties, Europe’s top human-rights watchdog said Monday in an indication that the heavily criticized vote could be overturned.

The London Times said pretty much the same thing:

Swiss voters back right-wing minaret ban

Swiss voters defied their Government and clerics yesterday and approved a ban on building minarets — reflecting an alarming hostility to a rising Muslim minority.

Just like how every time a European nation has a referendum in which the people assert that they wish to stay out of the EU, it gets overturned. All the claptrap about voting and the consent of the governed, but it’s only allowed when the sheep do as those in power wish them to. Things haven’t come to quite that pass in America, but can there be any doubt that they will soon?

I cheered myself up a bit by rereading two recent blog posts that I bookmarked. This sort of pessimism is cheering because it is a relief to know that I am not the only one who sees what is going on.

A Type of Protest I’d Like to See

Now, our society is so rotten, so corrupt and weak in so many ways, that there ought to be numerous weaknesses that we traditionalists can exploit. The very passivity, lack of clear thinking, lack of loyalty, and venality that lead our politicians and businessmen to roll over and surrender to invaders who are largely inferior in ability to their hosts (or victims) and without exception dependent on the largesse of those hosts, ought to be exploitable by those of us who are tired of living under the conditions they set.

Yet for me, a clear path for action has yet to emerge.

The Coming Crash

I think we need to be realistic and realize that the current political-ideological order is completely broken and beyond repair. Instead of wasting time and energy on attempting to fix what cannot be fixed we need to prepare as best as we can for the coming crash and hopefully regroup to create something new and stronger afterward. There will be a pan-Western and perhaps international economic and social collapse in the not-too-distant future. I fear that this is too late to avoid by now. The people who support the ruling paradigm are too powerful and the paradigm contains so many flaws that it cannot be fixed. It needs to crash. We should focus on surviving this crash and on developing a new paradigm to replace the failed one.

It’s true: the decline of our civilization cannot be halted now. The corruption has run too deep. Worst of all, the people who retain a moral sense have been convinced that there is no problem. Outside of the traditionalist blogosphere, I do not know anyone who realizes or believes that we are heading towards a tremendous collapse. Most of my Republican friends shrug and say that all we have to do is elect another Reagan and everything will be fine. Point the problems out to them and they insist that most of them are not problems. Sure, crime is a problem, but it has nothing to do with the societal changes that have increased the numbers of fatherless homes. Sure, terrorism is bad, but it doesn’t mean we should ever in any way resist the importation and indulgence of large numbers of practitioners of a violent and oppressive faith, or even publicly disapprove of that faith. Sure, our schools need improvement, but there’s nothing inherently wrong with corraling at gunpoint the entire next generation to brainwashing at the hands of Marxist pedophiles. And so on.

I suspect that at least European conservatives no longer believe, thanks to events like the minaret ban and the way the EU has devoured the entire planet, that the democratic process can protect us.

We cannot reverse the decline. What we need to be considering is how we can preserve as much as possible of our values and knowledge, and how we can go about rebuilding on the rubble a few decades hence.

Link recommendation

By the by, do read the series From Meccania to Atlantis. It’s one of the clearest depictions I have seen of how we are destroying our civilization.

Default Settings

All of our lives, schools, movies and magazines bombard us with a specific set of counterintuitive ideas which everybody is to understand are correct and “enlightened”. So pervasive are they that even most conservatives and libertarians have absorbed some of them. It has taken me years of reading old books and scientific articles to untrain myself and understand that the default settings with which we humans come pre-installed were in fact correct.

First impressions really do matter. Intuitions about people are right an awful lot of the time. Women really do prefer jerks. Repressed people really are psychologically healthier. Different races really don’t get along very well. Beautiful people really are better at a lot of stuff. (Scroll down to the fifth paragraph.) Men really are more aggressive and better at math. Nepotism is natural. Genetic parents really are usually the best bet for children. People really are means sons of bitches, and very few people ever think for themselves. Class really does matter. How other people treat you and feel towards you really does affect your own emotions, whether you “let” them bother you or not. Jealousy is not a social construct. Boys and girls really are born different. A lot of our personalities really are just inborn. Letting everybody vote is a really bad idea. Teachers – people who choose to spend most of their time around people who are compelled to endure their company and have no means of defense against them – really aren’t very bright and really do have major mental problems. Religious people really are happier and generally better functioning and give more to charity. Sleeper was right: they’ve been lying to us about nutrition for years. Idiocracy really is happening. Despite the temporary rebound, we are on the brink of a massive Depression. We are well on the path to dictatorship.

I could give several more references to prove each of these points, but for efficiency, I tried to just choose one for each which contained hard, well-supported data. But as I searched for each point, I came across legions of articles and blog posts firmly asserting the opposite, usually with little or no supporting evidence, sometimes trying to interpret the same data I am resting on in such a way as to explain it away. Take as an example this rather desperate effort to corkscrew and serpentine away male aggression.

I find it intensely discouraging that vital decisions are being made by people who have been immersed in this degree of misinformation.

A couple of links and a few random thoughts

Another example of the tyranny of unelected bureaucracies:

Secret court seizes £3.2bn from elderly… and even forces furious families to pay to access own bank account

A secret court is seizing the assets of thousands of elderly and mentally impaired people and turning control of their lives over to the State – against the wishes of their relatives.

The draconian measures are being imposed by the little-known Court of Protection, set up two years ago to act in the interests of people suffering from Alzheimer’s or other mental incapacity.

The court hears about 23,000 cases a year – always in private – involving people deemed unable to take their own decisions. Using far-reaching powers, the court has so far taken control of more than £3.2billion of assets.

The cases involve civil servants from the Office of the Public Guardian (OPG), which last year took £23million in fees directly from the bank accounts of those struck down by mental illness, involved in accidents or suffering from dementia. …

The organisation has 300 staff, costs £26.5million a year to run and is headed by £80,000-a-year career civil servant Martin John, a former head of asylum and immigration policy in Whitehall. It prepares reports for the Court of Protection, based in a tower block in Archway, North London.

Dr. Robert Epstein, author of The Case Against Adolescence, offered some good links about the folly of artificially prolonging childhood:

http://Teen20.com

http://NationalYouthRightsDay.org

http://TheCaseAgainstAdolescence.com

http://HowAdultAreYou.com

Thoughts:

* One more thing which has led to the modern underestimation of youth: urban dangers. I think it was Richard Leakey who pointed out that we “waste time” being afraid of snakes, spiders, lions, and other animals, which were a great threat to our ancestors but not to us, but don’t feel anything like the fear we should of technological malfunctions. Thus, we have urban children having nightmares about wolves but unconcerned about cars, electricial outlets, and stoves. Ayn Rand, who asserted repeatedly and incorrectly that humans have “no instincts”, used this sort of thing as an illustration of her theory that emotions derive from the logical mind: if you point a gun at an adult, he will be afraid, but if you point it at a baby, who has no idea what a gun is, he will laugh and may even reach for it, thinking it is a toy. She did not mention, and probably did not know, that if you give a baby a snake, he will not reach for it, he will scream, even if he has never seen a snake before. Parents observe their babies sticking their fingers in electric sockets or trying to grab the handles of pots of boiling water and conclude that their children are idiots who need to be told everything. They do need to be told everything, but they are not idiots; put a snake or a wolf near them and they will respond very rationally.

But it isn’t surprising that having to spend years teaching children to stay out of the street and keep their fingers out of the blender should lead parents to conclude that children’s brains are nonfunctional and that the natural equipment won’t preserve their lives. Put some wolves in the street and a spider on the blender and you’ll have no trouble at all.

* Progressives always respond to scientific evidence of innate differences between individual humans as well as groups of humans with hysterical shrieks of “Nazi!” They seem to believe that the moment you concede that there are more men with high IQs than women, or that some ethnic groups (i.e. Ashkenazi Jews) have generally higher IQs than others, or even that some individuals are born with higher IQs and greater talents than others and thus far nothing has been discovered which will change this, that the logical next step is murdering all the “inferiors”.

This is because to them, it is the logical next step. Right now, it is their justification for murdering the unborn: the unborn have little ability, even to breathe unassisted, therefore they are less than human and it is all right to murder them. In the Soviet era, it was their excuse for the mass murders of the USSR: they were killing the unactualized, less than human ones so that they could manufacture more highly evolved, actualized humans. It is also their excuse for trampling over the rights and wishes of “middle Americans” in this so-called democracy; the yokels in the flyover states and their European equivalents must be deprived of everything they value so that the enlightened ones may cram enlightenment down the throats of everyone.

Progressives have no comprehension of the Judeo-Christian valuing of all human life, even that of “inferiors”. They can’t imagine that we do. We say, “Joe is not up to a difficult, intellectually demanding job,” and they hear, “Send Joe to the gas chamber!”

* Historically, progressives have always been eager to go to war to further their utopian aims. It was progressives who insisted upon invading the Confederacy rather than let those states exercise their sovereign right to self-government. It was progressives who dragged the U.S. into World War I, a war in which there was no logical reason for us to be involved. There is speculation that progressive Franklin Delano Roosevelt allowed the attack on Pearl Harbor to happen so that he would have an excuse to get us into the Second World War, a war which destroyed the British Empire, allowed the Soviet Union to expand its territory, and robbed many European nations of their rightful sovereigns and protectors. Even nowadays, they view highly aggressive Islamic regimes with great affection.

Today’s progressives gave Slick Willie a pass on Kosovo, and have been remarkably silent on the fact that there are currently more American troops in Afghanistan than there ever were during the Bush administration. Nevertheless, they have identified themselves so thoroughly as an “anti-war” ideology that it has become difficult to imagine them any other way. I have even seen their anti-war rhetoric used as support for the untenable theory that the Nazis were “left-wing”. Sure, they practiced socialism, pseudo-paganism, and affirmative action favoring ethnic groups considered to be less intelligent and able at the expense of those considered to be smarter and more able, but they were warlike, so they must have been on the right!

I was wondering why in recent decades a movement which has historically been exceedingly bloodthirsty should have attempted to cloak itself in dove clothing. It is no doubt partly because everybody claims to be in favor of “peace”. Even military strategists claim so: “Si vis pacem para bellum.” Let him who desires peace prepare for war. Sherman, probably the most brutal butcher America has ever produced, claimed that he yearned only for the peace which would have frustrated his murderous urges. Hitler said that he wanted only peace. Sure, peace after he had all the Lebensraum he wanted – a little piece of Poland, a little piece of France.

I think the real reason was that at the time this “peace” babbling began, progressives still had a realistic hope that the Soviet Union would invade the U.S., after which Europe would likely have joined the bloc as well. They wanted Westerners as unprepared to deal with it as possible so as to hasten the victory of the Worker’s Paradise.

Let’s Decriminalize Adolescence

Yesterday I came across an absolutely heartbreaking article.

Running in the Shadows: Recession Drives Surge in Youth Runaways

Some teenagers are running away because their parents, stressed by the recession, are taking their frustrations out on their kids, physically as well as emotionally abusing them. The promoters of anti-youth laws love to claim that runaways are brats who took off in a snit because their parents wouldn’t buy them an iPod, but in real life, nearly all runaways are fleeing horrific conditions. But in many cases, the parents are themselves throwing their teenagers out of the house. This is illegal, but they’re doing it anyway.

The boys were also runaways. But unlike them, Betty said, she had been reported missing to the police. That meant that if the boys let her stay overnight in their hidden tent encampment by the freeway, they risked being arrested for harboring a fugitive.

Giving a young girl shelter in which she might escape rape or assault is a crime.

“We keep running into this,” said one of the boys, Clinton Anchors, 18. Over the past year, he said, he and five other teenagers living together on the streets had taken under their wings no fewer than 20 children — some as young as 12 — and taught them how to avoid predators and the police, survive the cold and find food.

“We always first try to send them home,” said Clinton, who himself ran away from home at 12. “But a lot of times they won’t go, because things are really bad there. We basically become their new family.”

Nice someone is willing to do what these kids’ families won’t.

Too young to get a hotel room, sign a lease or in many cases hold a job, young runaways are increasingly surviving by selling drugs, panhandling or engaging in prostitution, according to the National Runaway Switchboard, the federally-financed national hot line created in 1974. Legitimate employment was hard to find in the summer of 2009; the Labor Department said fewer than 30 percent of teenagers had jobs.

So here’s a radical proposition for relieving the horrors of homelessness, destitution, and crime to which these teenagers are subject:

LET TEENAGERS GET JOBS AND APARTMENTS.

When it’s legal for a teenager who isn’t lucky enough to have decent parents to be a law-abiding citizen without living with constant battering and rape and possible murder, they will be. Right now, if they get tired of being the constant victims of felonies, they have no choice but to turn to crime. And if leaving their parents means they’ll have to get a job and support themselves, they aren’t going to leave unless things really are bad at home.

Besides which, “adolescence” is a fake phenomenon. Until the twentieth century, nobody noticed that it existed. At that age, girls were looking for husbands and boys were entering the workplace or going for higher education – of a sort only found in master’s degree programs today, but then, this was when preteens were considered capable of studying ancient Greek.

And what is the result of allowing teenagers to do real jobs? Surely it must be terrible, as everyone knows (read: is constantly assured) that all teenagers are creatures of constant deranged, powerful impulses who must be watched every instant lest they go on mad sprees of killing, stealing and using illicit substances.

Once again, that pesky thing known as history gives this myth the lie:

Lord Taylor of Gryfe

Thomas Johnston Taylor, businessman and public servant: born Glasgow 27 April 1912; President, Scottish Co-Operative Wholesale Society 1965-70; created 1968 Baron Taylor of Gryfe; Chairman, Forestry Commission 1970-76; Chairman, Scottish Railways Board 1971-80; chairman, Morgan Grenfell (Scotland) 1973-85; Chairman, Economic Forestry Group 1976-81; FRSE 1977; Chairman, Scottish Action on Dementia 1989-95; married 1943 Isobel Wands (two daughters); died St Andrews 13 July 2001.

From being a 14-year-old school leaver from Bellahouston Academy in Glasgow who had lost his father in France at the age of three in the First World War, to chairmanships of the Forestry Commission and the Scottish Railways Board and membership of the international board of Morgan Grenfell and House of Lords select committees, Tom Taylor’s journey was one of constructive achievement. Having to earn a living at 14, he became an office boy in the Scottish Co-Operative Wholesale Society, then the biggest commercial organisation in Scotland; he was eventually to become its president.

Andrew Carnegie

Andrew Carnegie was born on 25 November 1835 in Dunfermline, Scotland in a typical weaver’s cottage with only one main room consisting of half the ground floor which was shared with the neighbouring weaver’s family.[2] … His first job at age 13 in 1848 was as a bobbin boy, changing spools of thread in a cotton mill twelve hours a day, six days a week. His wages were $1.25 per week.[4] …

In 1850, Carnegie became a telegraph messenger boy in the Pittsburgh Office of the Ohio Telegraph Company, at $2.50 per week,[5] following the recommendation of his uncle. His new job gave him many benefits including free admission to the local theater. This made him appreciate Shakespeare’s work. He was a very hard worker and would memorize all of the locations of Pittsburgh’s businesses and the faces of important men. He made many connections this way. He also paid close attention to the telegraph’s instruments and within a year was promoted as an operator.

Carnegie’s education and passion for reading was given a great boost by Colonel James Anderson, who opened his personal library of 400 volumes to working boys each Saturday night.

Jose Silva

Jose Silva’s life is more than a great American success story. It has transcended time and space to become one of the world’s all time great success stories.

Orphaned at the age of six, he began to support his family by selling newspapers, shining shoes, and doing odd jobs. Jose learned to read and write on his own – in both English and Spanish.

He became an entrepreneur, inventor, and pioneer of self-hypnosis and meditation techniques.

John Wanamaker

He attended the Landreth Public School until he was 14, when he was employed as an errand boy in the publishing house of Troutman and Hayes on Market Street below Fifth at a salary of $1.25 a week.

He became a hugely successful merchant, as well as a philanthropist and public servant.

Admiral Farragut

Farragut entered the US Navy as a midshipman in 1811. At 12 years old while serving in the War of 1812 he received his first command, a captured british whaling ship.

Here’s a few more examples. Also, Laura Ingalls Wilder had her first teaching job at the age of fifteen. The law required that teachers be a minimum of sixteen years old and pass a test, but they neglected to ask her age, and she passed the test with no trouble. I doubt many of today’s college-educated schoolteachers could pass that test. This was an era when by the age of ten most children had memorized the Declaration of Independence (in fifth grade, I was required to memorize the first three sentences, and we never read it in school – I read it on my own) and much of the Bible, and could diagram sentences. In my years of school, we only diagrammed sentences once, the year I had Mrs. Peeler, and Mrs. Peeler was probably one of Laura Ingalls’ students. (Okay, I exaggerate a little.) I remember the distress of one of my professors, a very old man, that he had to explain to us that an ellipse must be followed by a period, something I routinely see omitted in published books and magazines. He said, “Grammatical rules should not have to be taught in college.” I concur, professor, but not only were you the first person to tell us this and other rules, you were probably the first person we encountered who knew these rules. Except for Mrs. Peeler, and not everybody had Mrs. Peeler in seventh grade, more’s the pity. In high school, one of my English teachers, asked whether the past tense of “sneak” is “sneaked” or “snuck”, had to look it up.

In recent years, dubious scientific research has purported to “prove” that teenagers biologically have no self-control, and that such things as the understanding of cause and effect, the moral sense, and empathy do not begin to neurologically develop until the twenties and other such rot. These studies have been seized upon eagerly by parents who like to beat their children in lieu of any other way of teaching them proper behavior, the rationale apparently being that children whose brains cannot comprehend cause and effect will temporarily acquire this ability long enough to grasp the connection of the cause of bad behavior with the effect of being beaten. (I am not opposed to all corporal punishment, of children or adults, but I have witnessed much too much child abuse not to believe that it must be administered carefully, and a distressing amount of the talk I hear about it is based on obviously wrong premises, such as this one. I will probably write a post on this at some point.)

I will continue to dismiss such studies out of hand until one of these articles explains such things as why teenagers and children are frequently observed to have morals and empathy, why well-reared youngsters display more self-control than children subjected to chaotic homes, how babies who do not understand cause and effect are able to learn to crawl without their little brains noticing that when they move their arms and legs in such a way they are able to locomote themselves, and most of all, why nobody noticed any of this before the twentieth century. In point of fact, if all this rubbish is true, why did the first naked ape to rear onto its hind legs not get eaten by a bear during those crazed adolescent years, nipping our species in the bud? Our species would never have survived if our brains really take as long as these people claim to work.

[ETA: Alrenous linked this article which provides a scientific debunking of what was obviously nonsense to begin with.]

The bar mitzvah, when a Jewish boy is understood to reach the age of moral responsibility, happens, according to these researchers, a decade before any such responsibility can possibly be expected. Judaism is about 4,000 years old. In all that time, we haven’t seen any reason to move the age up, so evidently it’s worked out okay.

In counterpoint to the fashionable theory of the adolescent brain, I would like to point out that a greater willingness to take risks only makes sense for teenagers. In pre-industrial societies, this would be their time of greatest energy and fertility. This was when they needed to demonstrate to their society what they could do, to win a place in their society. Risk-taking is, well, risky, but it’s also a necessary thing. Especially, it’s necessary for reproduction. I’m almost forty. If I were looking for a spouse now, I would be so discerning that I would probably remain single; years of experience and the natural cynicism of age make me see the downside to every possible relationship. If twenty-year-olds felt this way, the species would die out. The idea is, we pair off in our teens or twenties when we feel the optimism to believe that we can deal with whatever problems come with committing to the person who has caught our eye. By the time that risk-taking feeling has worn off with age, we are generally already married with a couple of kids, and in most cases, even if our spouse has been in some ways disappointing and no longer makes the hormones flow, the years of looking after each other and raising children together has given us something to make the relationship still worthwhile. In fact, the decreased willingness to take risks happens precisely to make us less likely to leave our spouse of twenty years and our children to run off with somebody young and goodlooking. To put it less clinically, over time a different form of love develops from the original infatuation, but only time can make that kind of bond possible.

Too often we confuse the normal cycles of life with maturity and immaturity. Normal changes over time in hormones and neurology are not the same thing. Maturity is an intellectual and spiritual quality which not everybody achieves with age. The normal changes, such as becoming more risk-averse and less passionate about things in general, are no more signs of maturity than arthritis is. It’s simply what best serves our survival, and that of our children, at a later age.

Also: ‘Brain decline’ begins at age 27

If the researchers I cited earlier are correct, this means that we have about five years of our lives when we can be trusted with responsible behavior.

A couple more items on why adolescence is a pathological construct:

Let’s Abolish High School By Robert Epstein

Well, not quite. But while writing a new book called The Case Against Adolescence: Rediscovering the Adult in Every Teen, I explored some ideas that go almost that far.

Why Nerds are Unpopular

And as for the schools, they were just holding pens within this fake world. Officially the purpose of schools is to teach kids. In fact their primary purpose is to keep kids locked up in one place for a big chunk of the day so adults can get things done. And I have no problem with this: in a specialized industrial society, it would be a disaster to have kids running around loose.

I have to take exception to that last bit, of course, but the article is excellent. What we really need to do is bring back apprenticeships.

By the way, if we allow adolescents to have jobs, legally, for enough hours that they can support themselves if conditions at home are intolerable, they can do the boring, unskilled jobs we are currently importing large numbers of unskilled, criminally inclined, leftwing voters from the Third World to do.

ETA: As if in answer to this post, today Gates of Vienna posted this:

An Ohio court today ordered that authorities monitor telephone and Internet use of Fatima Rifqa Bary, the 17-year-old religious runaway who left Columbus for Orlando over the summer.

The girl has yet to return from Florida.

At a dependency hearing today, both sides in the case agreed to continue the case until next month.

Her phone and Internet use will be monitored by Franklin County Children Services.

Rifqa Bary is an honor student who ran away because her father intended to execute her for converting from Islam to Christianity. Because she is 17, she was arrested for attempting to escape murder. I have read editorials by people pretending not to believe her father’s threats to kill her. Time Magazine claims that she was pressured by her church to tell the lie to make Muslims look bad – because, you know, Muslims never commit real honor killings, Christians have to make them up. The Orlando Sentinel, salivating at the happy prospect of getting a teenage girl killed, published a lying editorial claiming that her life was in no danger.

If she were a few months older, she would be in no danger of being dragged back at gunpoint to the man who wishes to murder her.