Not with a Bang but a Muffled Scream

Everybody loves children. So we keep telling one another. Even the cruellest dictator, to show what a decent sort he is, will pose kissing babies. Because everybody knows that everybody loves children.

But those who live by the lie will commonly state the opposite of the truth. It is actually dangerously common to hate children. The narcissistic will look at a child with deep if hidden resentment, aware that, one day, they will be dead and that child will still be alive. This is intolerable. It is the key to that inevitable beginning to every ancient Greek hero story, the oracle’s prediction that this child will grow up to supplant the parent. Of course he will; children do, in the natural course of things.

And a good number of us will hate them for it.

It was rightly said by Gandhi that a society can be judged by how well it treats the weakest and most vulnerable of its citizens. Children are the true weakest and most vulnerable among us.

And, contrary to protestations, we are treating them badly.

Most obviously, with abortion. We are killing them at their most vulnerable. Even when the alternative of adoption is readily available, and there is a shortage of babies to adopt. This looks like malice.

We are sacrificing the interests of children in allowing and commonly committing no-fault divorce. 

We are sacrificing the interests of children in accepting and commonly committing deliberate one-parent families: women choosing to have children without a husband.

When pedophiles want to prey on children sexually, with their rainbow flags and unicorns and drag queen story hours and pornographic books in school libraries; government, schools, big business unite to aggressively support the pedophiles. It is hard to explain this without assuming malice.

When somebody runs a pedophilic pleasure island, we do not learn or demand to know his clients.

We recently demanded all children get vaccinated for Covid, even though, at their age, the vaccine was more dangerous to them than Covid. The health of children was sacrificed for the health of adults; or even just for the sake of harming children.

We are sacrificing aboriginal, “First Nations” children and young people wholesale. First by closing down the residential schools, which were largely orphanages for those from broken or desperately poor or dysfunctional homes. Then we objected adamantly to putting them up for adoption—the “Sixties scoop.” Abandoning them, in many cases, to a terrible fate. We then studiously ignore the issue when aboriginal young people form suicide pacts to escape the abuse. We ignore the true cause of an epidemic of missing and murdered aboriginal women—invariably young women fleeing an intolerable home life. We grasp at any alibi to avoid solving the problem. If a young Indian woman escapes, and inevitably ends up on the street in the city, our “solution” is to force her back into the abusive family. Insisting it is all her fault.

More generally, if a child is abused, we rarely or never blame the family. Instead, we declare him or her “mentally ill.” Giving us a license to not listen to their cries for help.

And then there are the schools. Not the residential schools, the public schools. Our public schools are deliberately designed, as a matter of historical fact, per John Taylor Gatto, to prevent children from succeeding in life. They are held there incommunicado, unable to follow their own natural impulses for knowledge, and deliberately not taught what they most need: the meaning of life, the rules of life, the skills of rhetoric, of organizing in groups, of bookkeeping and managing money, of formal logic and logical fallacies, the scientific method. No, they are not taught science. They are taught the opposite of science, and it is called science, as though the point is to obscure science in their minds. Instead, they are taught to stand in lines, respond to bells, sit still for long periods, do as they are told, accept as absolute the judgement of designated adults on themselves and the world around them, not to question or to dream or to think independently. 

Yes, children need to learn discipline. But not this arbitrary and ungrounded discipline; not this template for dictatorship.

Much of our economy, and our regulatory apparatus, seems then designed to make it hard for young people to get out on their own and to establish themselves once they leave school. The minimum wage, eliminating jobs for those just starting out and learning. The demand for arbitrary and elaborate credentials to legally work at a given job: needless certifications for every specific job: haircutting, teaching, journalism, massage, serving coffee; almost any field. And each certification costs large amounts of time and money. These regulations and certifications exist to profit those already in the field at the cost of young people starting out.

Now we’re mutilating and sterilizing the young, in the drive for “gender affirmation.”

The point of a culture is to pass on the best rules for life to the next generation. A culture that turns too obviously against the next generation is a culture that must be destroyed; and that will be destroyed, since it is destroying itself. One thinks of the ancient Canaanites, who practiced ritual infanticide. This justified eliminating them. Ritual infanticide justified the Romans in salting the earth of Carthage.

This is the way a civilization ends.