Dealing With Leftists And Other Barbarians

There's a great article over at Takimag offering advice on how to deal with leftists, i.e., brainwashed masses of people who viciously defend pre-packaged ideas that they refuse to analyze or discuss. From the article [some frank language]:

Try as I may, all the evidence suggests we are on the brink of an ideological Dark Age the likes of which America has never seen. It seems we’re only inches away from living in a world where stating the obvious will be criminalized.

Online, the chief enablers of this situation are the smirking young progtards, who are unwilling to even touch any viewpoint that hasn’t been spoon-fed to them in school or beamed into their eyeballs via TV. Their brains have never hatched a single original idea in their lives. They are mere hollow carriers of infectious ideas, not so much Trojan horses as little pink Trojan ponies. . . .

Bandwagon-riders that they are, they tell everyone who doesn’t think in lockstep with them to “Get with the times,” which is a dishonest way of saying, “Be a conformist like I am.” Hence their smugness as they tilt at windmills that were destroyed generations ago. They are still deluded that they are fighting the power rather than working for it—often without pay or benefits.

It’s one thing to be unwittingly brainwashed, yet quite another to assent to one’s brainwashing once it’s been made clear. These hateful little fuckers are defiantly brainwashed, and whether it’s cognitive dissonance or doublethink or pathological lying, they’ve made it impossible to rationally engage with them. Believe me, I’ve tried. For decades. Honestly. Foolishly.

Just try to have a civilized debate with such a person about any number of topics ranging from abortion, affirmative action, feminism, government spending, the environment, immigration, etc., and see what happens. They will not engage in rational discourse, but rather will attack you. The article goes on to recommend abandoning rational discourse with such people, and I wholeheartedly agree.

Those of you who are civilized need to remember something: leftists and other barbarians view your civility as weakness. You must either avoid them entirely, or engage them on their terms (i.e., without mercy). There are fewer and fewer places left to run away to; at some point, when your back is up against the wall, you're going to have to fight back.

EDIT:

It just occurred to me that in leftist thought, as it were, there is no such thing as objective truth -- everything is merely a clash of competing interests, and truth is nothing more than an artificial construct meant to keep people down. Why should any of us who acknowledge truth and its various branches (honor, reason, justice, mercy, etc.) give the benefit of them to such creatures?

Family Court Gulag Claims Another Victim

And it's Robin Williams. Just recently I cited research in my post The Breakdown Of The Family showing that divorced men are far more likely to commit suicide, and trust me, it's not because of the heartache of losing the ex-spouse. It's because of children and/or massive amounts of wealth stolen away. Though I managed to dodge these nuclear weapons, Robin Williams did not -- he suffered both indignities twice, forcing him to work like a dog to support not only himself and his children, but also two women who had supposedly moved on with their lives. At the age of 63, Robin Williams was still in hock and forced to look for demeaning work.

So a comic genius is ground up in the gears of our insane and brutal family regime, along with countless other men. Reason #1,025 not to indulge in what passes for marriage today.

The Greater The Sin, The More The Ego Will Defend It

There's an interesting blog post by Laurence Vance over at Lewrockwell.com today about the recent death of the last crew member of the Enola Gay. Since nobody remembers history anymore, the Enola Gay was the bomber that nuked Hiroshima toward the end of World War II, an action that many have condemned as 1) unnecessary because the Japanese were already willing to surrender; and 2) Hiroshima was not a military target, but rather full of civilian men, women, and children. In his post, Vance ruefully observes that the crew members were unrepentant the remainder of their lives for what they had done, even though they seemed to grasp the horrific nature of it.

Yet this comes as no surprise to me. No less an authority on evil than Adolf Hitler once remarked, "The greater the lie, the more people will believe it." It sounds paradoxical but makes perfect sense. A little lie is easy to own and carries few consequences. A great lie, however, threatens the foundations of society and people's entire belief systems if exposed. The truth becomes too terrifying to contemplate, which goes a long way toward understanding why humanity attacks (or crucifies) truth-tellers while adoring habitual liars.

My corollary to the lying paradox is this: the greater the sin, the more the ego will defend it. A minor peccadillo can be confessed and overcome with relative ease. With greater sins such as betrayal or murder, however, the ego desperately clasps them to its chest and refuses to admit wrongdoing, since such an admission would cripple the person's self-image. It doesn't matter if the person is caught red-handed or even recorded on camera in a despicable deed; he will deny having done anything wrong, or argue that his transgression was necessary for the greater good.

There are only two exceptions I can think of. First, if the person has strong character and a healthy sense of sin (rare). Second, if the person confronts consequences even worse than confessing, such as a prison sentence or a near-death experience (more common).

The Breakdown Of The Family

My book project exploring the illness plaguing modern America has slowed down due to the stresses of trying to grow my business. But while I may be slow, I am very, very sure. The work will continue. In the meantime, I'll go ahead and share one of the earlier chapters for free (after all, I don't do these things for money, but for necessity and joy).

The whole of human history does not contain a single instance of a group becoming civilized unless it has been absolutely monogamous, nor is there any example of a group retaining its culture after it has adopted less rigorous customs. ~J.D. Unwin, distinguished ethnologist and sociologist

Civilization represents humanity’s rebellion against nature. Nature is feral, amoral, and pitiless, so it is only through persistent defiance of nature that humanity has moved beyond the jungle. To destroy civilization requires no effort, merely relaxation.

Perhaps the most vital bulwark against nature’s chaos is monogamy, enforced by marriage, whereby one man and one woman bind themselves to each other for life and thereby channel their sexual impulses toward the productive ends of building stable families and rearing healthy, civilized children. This arrangement is decidedly unnatural and contrary to men’s and women’s instincts, which if given free rein would make civilization unworkable.

Men have a natural tendency to mate with as many women as possible while expending as little time and energy as necessary. Marriage combats this tendency by obligating a man to invest his energy in his wife and children, ensuring their survival and relieving society at large of carrying this burden. But marriage has an equally important role to play in restraining women, who have a natural tendency to discard one man in favor of another whom she perceives as a superior protector or provider. Men thus are generally reluctant to make a commitment; women, to keep one. Though men endure almost all criticism in the battle of the sexes, it is fair to say that both men and women are polyamorous, with men preferring concurrent variety of women, and women preferring consecutive variety of men.

Absent countervailing restrictions, these tendencies burst forth and result in a small number of powerful men who monopolize the vast majority of women, a pattern observable in the animal kingdom and duplicated in primitive human societies. Masculine energy is diverted and squandered in Darwinian struggle, a deadweight loss of innovation and productivity. Worse, the vast majority of men who lose this struggle are left unattached and have little incentive to work for the betterment of a society that has denied them a genetic future, leaving a powder keg of aimlessness and discontent. And worse still, society loses many of the traits necessary to support and refine it, such as justice, prudence, patience, restraint, intellect, and mercy – all far less likely to be found among the ruthless men who prevail in a pure Darwinian struggle.

Marriage thus offers all men a genetic future and gives them a vested interest in promoting and preserving society. Marriage yokes men’s energy and pulls society forward. Whereas a man previously locked horns with other men for sexual access to women, he now has the security of knowing that his legacy will pass through his wife, who is sworn to him alone. This allows and encourages him to pursue higher endeavors that will enhance his family’s and society’s future, such as medicine, law, art, science, and a general improvement of our understanding of the universe. Rather than peer over his shoulder, the civilized man can gaze onward and upward.

Marriage is the linchpin of a stable family, and a stable family is the linchpin of a stable society. It is through the family that the combined wisdom, language, and traditions (i.e., culture) of society are transmitted to children, who flourish most under the care of both masculine and feminine halves of humanity. The family also is a vital source of identity, pride, and power offsetting the influence of the state; only with robust families can government be restrained to its narrow protective sphere at the far outposts of society.

Apart from these practical concerns, marriage plays a fundamental role in the Judeo-Christian tradition. Marriage is ordained by God as the institution whereby men and women explore the gifts of love and sex. Marriage requires a solemn vow and a conscious act to defy our impulses and pursue a lifelong commitment that only we as humans are capable of. By maintaining that commitment through times of loss, alienation, and temptation we embrace our higher nature and achieve a fulfillment greater than any fleeting pleasure could impart. True love transcends pleasure and comes alive with the deliberate act of cherishing a kindred soul. The ancient Greeks named this purposeful and selfless love agape, distinguishing it from the simpler and impulsive sentiments of eros (lust) and philia (friendship). As G.K. Chesterton once put it, “To love means loving the unlovable. To forgive means pardoning the unpardonable. Faith means believing the unbelievable. Hope means hoping when everything seems hopeless.” This sentiment undergirds Western marriage and civilization.

For centuries marriage worked because a variety of social and legal norms protected it. On the social side, premarital sex, divorce, adultery, illegitimacy, single parenthood, bachelorhood, and spinsterhood all were frowned upon and carried a heavy stigma. Legal penalties tracked the social mood. Sex outside of marriage (i.e., fornication), seduction, polygamy, and adultery all were crimes. Divorce was allowed only in the event of serious fault such as adultery, abuse, abandonment, or habitual intoxication; moreover, a spouse betrayed by adultery or abandonment could assert a claim for damages against the offending third party. With these social and legal protections firmly in place, marriage could perform its functions of encouraging and rewarding productive behavior; punishing and constraining Darwinian rivalry; esteeming selfless love over selfish lust; providing a stable environment for rearing children; and keeping society civilized rather than allowing it to slide into barbarism.

Which brings us to the present. In the short span of two generations, the relaxation or removal of marital safeguards has transformed us into barbarians.

Beginning in the 1960s, the sexual revolution opened the floodgates of raw desire and flattened all social taboos, making way for a narcissistic outlook that sex is solely a personal matter and that any internal or external sexual restraint is puritanical or outright evil. The only consideration that mattered any longer was whether those engaging in sex consented, nothing else. No longer need sex wait for marriage. No longer need sex be confined to marriage. No longer need shame be visited upon fornicators, adulterers, cads, divorcées, or unwed parents. Civilization was stripped of its crucial investment in sexual relationships, and the animal id roamed free to do as it would.

Removed from its sacred place, sex is now ubiquitous and cheap. Movies, music, television, popular literature, and the Internet blare sex from all quarters. Schoolchildren are taught to engage in “safe sex,” the presumption being there is no use discouraging underage fornication. School teachers are routinely found having dalliances with children. College campuses have become overpriced brothels. Marriage is treated as one option among many to explore love – now interpreted merely as personal joy – and thereby inverts the former understanding that only through marriage could love be explored and nurtured. Love is now merely a commodity to be sampled by voracious consumers who discard lovers and spouses when the novelty fades.

Legal restraints have fallen by the wayside as well. No longer is there any fear of punishment for adulterers; to the contrary, entire industries have sprung up that are devoted to facilitating adultery, and they do so in broad daylight. Perhaps the only legal restraints left with any teeth are the prohibitions against underage sex, incest, and polygamy, yet even these are faltering. As mentioned before, underage sex is openly encouraged and unlikely to be punished, unless perhaps one of the participants is an adult. Even incest now has advocates where the participants are adults. And while it remains illegal to marry more than one person at a time, married people often keep lovers on the side or move from one spouse to another, establishing a sort of de facto polygamy. It is only a matter of time until polygamy is recognized by judicial fiat, against the will of the people, on the fatuous argument that love should never be impeded.

Then there is divorce. What was once a narrow emergency exit is now a yawning void over which every marriage precariously teeters. With the advent of “no-fault” divorce, a mere nudge by either spouse sends the family plummeting into darkness. Rather than submit themselves and their whims to marriage, people now expect marriage to submit itself to them and their whims. In such an environment it is fair to say that marriage no longer even exists – the vows are powerless and meaningless, erased on a moment’s notice, a feature grossly unsuited to the most important of all contracts. Making matters truly perverse is that a spouse may profit from no-fault divorce, subjecting the innocent spouse to both abandonment and punishment under seal of law. While many divorces are a justifiable response to adultery or abuse, many others are frivolous and motivated solely by the narcissistic desire to seek fulfillment through breaking the marital bond, and the innocent spouse has no recourse (not to speak of the children). Post-marital support was designed to protect the innocent, yet now it often rewards the guilty. The fact that one spouse may destroy a family for no good reason yet still reap alimony, child custody, and child support from the innocent spouse – on the threat of fines and imprisonment, no less – is an abomination.

American men are shying away from marriage in greater numbers because they recognize it as a serious threat rather than a reward for devoting themselves to a family. Men have no rights within modern marriage, only responsibilities and potentially massive liabilities. If his wife is considering an abortion, a man has no say in the matter but bears full financial responsibility either way. If his wife gives birth to another man’s child, once again the husband has no choice but to provide support. He can lose his wife and children on a moment’s notice yet be required to continue supporting them as if he were still married, regardless of how good a husband or father he was, and regardless of what his wife’s motives might be. In other words, he is signing a contract that gives his wife open-ended power to destroy his marital rights yet force him to continue shouldering marital responsibilities, even to the point of poverty. The very existence of this threat, no matter how remote, renders modern marriage inherently and thoroughly unjust. And the threat is not remote, for it is well documented that women are much more likely to file for divorce, and they are almost certain to win child custody and financial maintenance when they do. To add insult to injury, popular culture now celebrates adultery and divorce as liberating for women, as showcased in countless novels and films such as The Bridges Of Madison County, The Piano, Thelma & Louise, or Eat, Pray, Love. In the modern imagining, the husband is always at fault for a marriage’s collapse. If the husband commits adultery or abandons his wife, he is responsible for his own actions. If the wife commits adultery or abandons her husband, she is not responsible for her own actions, but rather the husband is responsible for not making her happy. Given such a twisted legal and social landscape, the question isn’t why some men shy from marriage, but rather why any indulge in it. Indeed, a diaspora of single men now devote their energies solely to themselves. The proliferation of “pickup artists” (PUAs), “men going their own way” (MGTOW), and similar refugees represents a growing deadweight loss to society.

In one fell swoop, therefore, modern marriage encourages the worst in us all: in men, the avoidance of commitment; in women, the destruction of it.

Predictably, the family unit has crumbled. Only about half of American adults today are married, down from 72% in 1960. Among young adults from ages 18 to 29 – the prime years for having children – only about 20% are married, down from 59% in 1960. A child born in the United States today has a disgraceful and unprecedented 40% chance of being illegitimate. Census data reveal several other sobering facts:

• 41% of first marriages end in divorce.

• 60% of second marriages end in divorce.

• 73% of third marriages end in divorce.

• The average length of a marriage ending in divorce is only eight years.

• The average age for couples going through a first divorce is only 30 years.

• Half of all children will experience their parents’ divorce.

• 43% of children today are growing up without a father.

• 28% of divorced, single parents live below the poverty line.

Atop all this misery, divorced people (particularly men) are far more likely to commit suicide, perhaps more than twice as much. Though divorced women do not demonstrate a statistically significant increase in suicide, women overall are less happy on this side of the revolution that liberated them from the supposed chains of domesticity. One study indicates that over 25% of American women are taking medication for a mental-health condition. We also are witnessing an explosion of sexually transmitted diseases, with 110 million total infections reported; 20 million new infections reported each year; and half of those new infections among young people aged 15 to 24. And we cannot ignore the fact that single men – as well as men raised in a household with a single parent – are more likely to commit crime.

So, what do we have to show for all our newfound “freedom?” What has the sexual revolution wrought? A wasteland of casual sex, bachelors, spinsters, divorcées, single parents, traumatized children, depression, suicide, sexually-transmitted diseases, crime, and something that statistics cannot measure but is no less certain – the destruction of America’s cultural identity and continuity. Our former “puritanical” restraints are precisely what kept sex noble and productive; those who claimed to liberate sex have degraded it while harming us both spiritually and physically. America would be facing demographic collapse if not for the steady flow of legal and illegal immigrants, whose swelling numbers do nothing to offset our cultural death and, in fact, accelerate it.

Ironically, just as sex supposedly became a private affair between only those engaging in it, government stepped into this soulless void to force other people to pay for it. Government now usurps the role of men and compels them to support women and children to whom they have no family connection. With plundered wealth, government provides food and shelter; government distributes contraceptives; government administers vaccines for STDs; government finances abortions; and government “educates” children in an artificial environment spliced away from any parental input or authority. The welfare state has become so systematic and entrenched that it not only replaces families, but disrupts them from ever taking root because they require values such as cooperation, sacrifice, and self-discipline that Americans have lost the habit of practicing. Why be chaste before marriage if pregnancy can be easily avoided or terminated at public expense? Why get married when government will put a roof over your head and food on the table? Why stay married when you can exile your husband, take his children, and force him to continue supporting you on pain of imprisonment? Government has coarsened us while enslaving us to politicians, bureaucrats, and family-court judges. In paradoxical fashion, women now demand – and are granted – all the fruits of an industrial civilization built by men without any corresponding duties toward men. This cannot last and is a recipe for strife, much of which already has manifested.

As if to dance on the grave of this once-sacred institution, the political and cultural elites now proclaim that marriage cannot be confined to man and woman, but rather must extend to homosexual couples as well. This spiteful iconoclasm is framed as a “civil rights” matter even though nobody has barred homosexuals from marrying each other or imposed legal penalties on them for doing so. To the contrary, the citizens of various states (notably, California) declined to bless such unions with a public seal of approval, choosing not to reward or encourage them. Such a mild refusal was well within the people’s sovereignty under both the Constitution and centuries of civilization, yet the federal government through its courts has declared that we have no say in the matter and must approve of homosexual unions against our will, perpetrating violence and injustice far worse than any confronted by homosexuals. The twisted, unconstitutional, and ahistorical logic demanding that the enhanced public status of marriage be shared by all has no stopping point, for single people and people in polyamorous or incestuous relationships can just as easily demand that their lifestyles be blessed even if the public does not wish to. In all likelihood they will, hastening the process of de-civilization.

Even children, the fruit of union between man and woman, are now held hostage to the modern totalitarian impulse. Homosexuals demand the “right” to adopt children and act as parents, even though adoption is not a right even for heterosexual couples. Adoption always has been merely an act of legislative grace, but there is no grace in our brave new world, merely the insatiable demands of the id.

If we compare marriage to a fire department whose job is to douse the flames of animal instinct, our actions over the past two generations amount to replacing the water with gasoline. We have done far worse than relax our guard against the forces of chaos; we have amplified the chaos in a fit of collective, orgiastic suicide.