Without the encouragement of your father the world is a dismal place. It is difficult to be a courageous person unless you have your father behind you in body and spirit. It is very demoralizing. … If your father rejects you, or doesn’t form a relationship with you, it’s as if the spirit of civilization has left you outside the walls as of little worth. It is very difficult for people to recover from that.
Query: What becomes of a society that mocks and despises fatherhood? A society that creates cohorts of tens of millions of people over several generations without fathers? These generations have been cut off from their history, from any continuity. Of course they hate America. Of course they hate Western civilization. They have been left outside the walls. They are not part of it. They want to destroy the thing that has excluded them.
It all makes sense.
I strongly recommend going to his podcast and listening to them. Either start from the beginning, or find the first “maps of meaninig” collection, listen through that set, then go back to the beginning.
He’s also had some good discussions with Stefan Molyneux and Dave Rubin
I think there is a very interesting book to be written focusing on the last 4 presidents and their fathers. You have two Democrats who had loser fathers who they never knew (Clinton’s father was just a plain old loser, Obama’s was on track to be very highly accomplished but ended up nothing), and two Republicans with extremely highly accomplished fathers who they tried to match and/or outdo. It would have to be written by a non-lunatic who could try to tell the stories honestly and objectively, but there’s some incredible material to work with.
LastRedoubt, I have listened to all twelve Biblical lectures, and I am through 9 of 12 of the 2017 Maps of Meaning lectures, and I have listened to many others. The interview with Stephen Hicks, author of Explainjng Piatmodernism, was especially good.
Brian “the last five Presidents …three Republicans with extremely highly accomplished fathers…”. Prescott Bush was no loser: Wall Street millionaire, term and a half US Senator.
I believe all this is important but it is complicated- look at Washington & Lincoln, Lyndon Johnson and JFK. The reactions to natural disasters, the view of the government’s role, a lot of things depend on how much or how little we see ourselves as responsible – see ourselves as the adults in the room. Too cossetted is one problem, having no virtuous adult as model is another.
One of the ways that I think we as boomers often fell down was not recognizing that relationship to our children – that kind of Rousseau politics and that kind of Rousseau child raising. The child is passive, not responsible, at the mercy of a world in which the adults are responsible.
I’ve just begun Sasse’s book — his descriptions are disturbing but he has a point. (And I hope he is learning that his responsibilities are themselves complicated and just being irritated with Trump isn’t accepting the discipline of reality.) We are too removed from the discipline that natural law, that reality, uses to instruct us; the connection between consequences and causes (taxes, balanced budgets, health choices: public & private, political and cultural) often obscure.