I want you to be free. I can’t do it for you, but I can tell you about the prison in which we all live. Then you can decide for yourself when and how much freedom you want. Let me challenge you to see those chains more clearly, because you’ll be amazed how easily they fall off.
Let me rattle those chains. This is by no means a long and organized thesis, but a short challenge to common mythology on just one issue. But I have to explain the context first.
What we see is merely the latter symptoms of collapse, because the destructive turn was taken quite some time ago. Civilizations on the rise will begin to develop a moral code, growing in complexity as the culture deepens, particularly in the arts and intellectual pursuits. Immediately upon reaching the intellectual apex, decline follows. That is, while the majority begin warming to some portion of this peak of achievement, those who lead in exploring are already chasing the front wave down the far side. It’s a cycle which can be found in every great civilization of the past. If you chase ideas in a particular direction long enough, you’ll find its flaws.
Oh, and the time scale of rise and fall is a function of the speed of communication. Yeah, the Internet means it’s going to be very fast.
Since no civilization arises totally free from previous influences, it’s a matter of choosing wisely. Our Western Civilization in particular, for example, is utterly and foolishly materialistic. That simply is not a realistic viewpoint of the cosmos. It leaves you with nothing except the here and now, and all your struggles will aim for something which you cannot ever have — security and peace on this plane. But this was the fantasy of Western Civilization; it has run its course, and is coming apart in our hands.
This is why so many are in chains, bound to a lie so big few bother to challenge it. I want you to outlive Western Civilization, which may well come fully apart before I die of natural causes (I’ll be 55 this year). Barring that, I still want you to be free to step back and not be consumed by its fiery end.
Take any issue — the more visceral, the better. When it makes our stomachs churn it shows us our weaknesses. How about sexual molestation of children? That’s so visceral, even the scum of the earth are hostile about it. Career criminals in prison will beat to death anyone convicted of that who is thrust into their midst. If you can think about child molestation rationally, you are already more free than the vast majority of humans in Western Civilization.
As society collapses, you should expect to see a soaring increase in human predation. You can also expect those who rule to scream and cry about it all the louder. Whether we actually have a significant rise in child molestation is a subject for debate, but we surely see a lot more about it in the mainstream press. However, I suspect we haven’t seen near as much as we soon will. In general, when things go bad, vice prospers. Preying upon the weak is what we should expect, and children are inherently weak.
Infants are nothing but appetites, with no sense of individuality. When they are hungry, the whole universe is hungry. Toddlers are developing a sense of individuation, and learning they aren’t in charge. They’ll still do whatever feels good at the moment, but begin to recognize it might get them something which doesn’t feel so good later, either by discipline or by experience. Young children understand rules, but won’t obey unless they are watched. At some point, they internalize the rules as necessary for their longer term best interest. Somewhere around age 8 or 9 they develop a sense of logic which slowly shifts to the abstract. In adolescence they’ll challenge the rules on logical grounds. Should they actually continue to develop and mature, they’ll understand what rules are for, and will operate under self-restraint with a larger moral purpose. We call that adulthood.
Adults who don’t finish the tasks of child development will exhibit behavior which is no better than where things stopped for them in any particular area of human personality. Western Civilization is ripe for inculcating arrested development, and we should hardly be surprised when the majority never quite made it. Most folks have managed to internalize the rules, but never got beyond that. Quite a few haven’t even gotten that far. A huge number of really bright and talented folks are stuck in adolescence. At any rate, our world is filled with human predators, and an adult intellect is not necessarily paired with adult morality.
So we shall have a soaring rate of all sorts of predation. A rise in child molestation, in all its forms, will be a mere reflection of that. Get used to it, in the sense that prevention is hardly possible in our culture. Since the majority are stuck in the rules stage of development, they are easily panicked when the structure of their world seems threatened. They are utterly dependent on that external structure. And saddled with an utterly here-and-now orientation, they will surrender to whatever the authorities offer as a solution.
I’ve seen post-molestation therapy up close and personal. More than once, I’ve been under strictures of policy forcing me to embrace whatever philosophy ruled the system. At least, they tried to force me. I managed to escape before the system found it worthwhile to imprison me in more literal terms. In the US, in particular, being insufficiently enthusiastic about policy orthodoxy is a sin. Yes, it’s a theology and operates like an organized religion.
That theology is largely a revival of the Amazon Cult. Not the river valley in Brazil, but the ancient Greek Mythology of a man-hating. These days we call it “feminism.” Feminism marks all males as predators, either caught or soon to be caught. The only way to avoid this is to embrace the neutered or metro-sexual behavior pattern, and gay is even better according to this cult.
So with all the shrieking hysterics you would expect, post-molestation therapy does more damage to children than the molestation in most cases. It strives to make them fearful and hateful of adult males, utterly dependent on the system to protect them, and totally unable to evaluate anything at all on their own. It is the central orthodoxy this molestation was irreparably terrorizing, and any child who resists the notion they were severely injured for life is considered a therapy failure. Then they are kicked out of the system and into juvenile confinement. It’s pretty much the same treatment for children who are simply physically beaten. Nothing is done to restore sanity because sanity is considered perversion, and perversion is sanity.
Yes, children are hardly ready for sexual relations. Neither are most adults, but that’s another matter. However, children can recover from this and go on to a normal life, same as any other victim of abuse at any chronological age. Dr. Thomas Szasz is a really good starting place if you want to understand what’s wrong with Western psychiatry. Instead, our current system churns out permanent victims who never mature, because if there is one thing the modern state must have, that is your devotion as if it were God.
If you feel like exploring the evils of the Modern Nation State, examine the philosophical tectonic shift which arose with the Peace of Westphalia. In terms of politics, that was the beginning of the end for Western Civilization. It is deeply wrapped up in why we can’t have a sane program of recovery treatment for victims and perpetrators of child molestation. It’s why the West is doomed.
Wonderful post.