I went to the school play last night: it is on for the next few nights: the first song, with Lego animation, is below.
In the play, Tevye, who firmly believes in the traditions of the elders finds that his daughters subvert this. The first refuses to marry the man he contracted her to wed: the second left to follow a “revolutionary” prat, and the third (horrors) married a Russian.
As he listens to his daughters asking if they can follow their hearts… he bends. Until one marries out. That, he cannot accept. But at the end of the play, his love for his daughter means that he does accept her back.
At the time this was written (1964) the idea of leaving old ideas behind and moving forward into some kind of Brave New World was part of the revolutionary idea that we could let the structures of society go by, and all we would need would be love.
Yeah, right. We used to stigmatize the children born outside of marriage. This motivated women to give up their children for adoption. But that was seen as too nasty. It offended people’s feelings. And that had consequences.
NZ Statistics has a recent report on this From that:
The other factors, for what it is worth, were having children young, having more than six children, and being Indigenous, that is Maori.
Among the vulnerable we are suffering a slow motion collapse. When this was only occurring among the ghettos, society could ignore. But now it is starting to infect the general society. The rate of bastardry is now high (I find it interesting that the marital state of the mother is very difficult to find in the NZ statistics dataset.
Now, there are consequences to this. I’ve talked about them a bit. You end up with a slow motion collapse. Vanessa notes:
It’s become nearly impossible to get reliable crime stats. NYC revamped them last year (or was it the year before?) and rape rates dropped by half. We really have no idea what’s going on out there anymore. There’s no crime, just as there’s no unemployment and no inflation.
I don’t think it’s here yet, though, especially in more rural areas like mine. I do see more and more crime-spillover from the more downtrodden parts of town to swankier areas. That’s the first movement. But it’s not yet scary for me because of the increased police and security presence.
At any rate, this interested me because I’m been watching for parallels to Argentina. In my first article, I wrote the following points for our near-term (5 year) future:
* The marriage rate increases, as does prostitution. (Divorce was only recently legalized.)
* Crime rates increase at an astonishing rate. Rape, murder, and robbery become commonplace. Kidnapping for ransom money becomes a minor industry.
* Class warfare is common in politics and on the streets. Everyone is armed to the teeth, and the shrinking middle and upper class lives behind gates and barbed wire. It becomes de rigueur for women to be brutally raped during robberies, so their husbands learn to shoot invaders on sight.
* Middle-class (i.e. married) women’s and children’s movements are greatly curtailed, due to safety concerns. Protected women live under increasingly strict patriarchy, as men can no longer afford to be lax and permissive. Protected women are increasingly discouraged from working outside of the home, as travel is precarious. Children stop playing outside, and teenage girls are increasingly chauffeured and chaperoned.
* Domestic violence increases, and white-knighting for victims becomes a winning sexual strategy again. In other words, abusive men both give and receive beatings in higher numbers. A related problem is that drug use and alcohol use increased.The end of the “Take my valuables, just leave us alone” phenomenon was always interesting.
At the same time, as society collapses, there is simultaneous deflation and inflation. The local University Mac shop was selling windows computers for $395 today. A year ago they would have been $1000. And service jobs become hypercompetative, leading to the middle class being able to both hire more services (and security) while finding the important things, like food and education, becoming more and more expensive.
Well, look at me. Kids in private school. Married to a certified HVAC technician who hires people to service the air conditioning system. Dairy and egg delivery. Produce delivery. Nails done. I’ve even started going to the salon to have them style my hair for special occasions, once I found out that it only cost $10. BD was like, “I lose $10 a month, just by accident.” We eat out at least once a week now, when we used to hardly ever do it before. We travel more often and stay in quite elegant hotels, which have never been cheaper.
And now we’re talking about hiring a gardener because he’s too busy and my back is bad.
And we’re not rich, by any standard, it’s just that everyone else’s labor has gotten so freaking cheap. But… you know.. that’s inequality. I do like to think that I’m at least providing them with honest employment, but that sounds so “let them eat cake” of me.
I do the same kind of thing. I deliberately buy a coffee from the local store, go to the local market, support local makers (and I hire in domestic help). It supports people, but the well employed can afford this because there are many underemployed competing for any work.
Secondly, this leads to a sense within the underclass, encouraged by the progressives, that being in an oppressed group and poor is an active evil that justifies you simply taking from others. Consider this.
But this is what entitlement ends in. I want. You have. This mine. Moreover, this is what happens when the owners cannot defend their property. This is anarchy. The strongest and the youngest rule while the rest look on in fear.
…. Welcome to the new world, where we are stripping away all that we erected to keep ourselves from becoming barbarians again.
Natural law emerged to cope with human greed, violence and lust by confining it and hitting it with checks and balances. “Enlightenment” has replaced these few but important walls with a multitude of useless, pointless and powerless paper walls with which the wicked tear through with ease.
Well we know what that looks like. When the society goes bankrupt, and that is happening, you need social capital to keep things together and the basic trust that allows trade (or barter) and the recovery of a nation.
But lose tradition, lose the boundaries, and anarchy will arrive. We know what that looks like.
