Sultan Knish
For most of human history the family was the basic social unit of the
species. Family was a way of passing down genes, beliefs and wealth. It
was a retirement plan that you paid into by keeping your children alive
long enough for them to grow up and support you. It allowed the
individual to pass on his ideas to people who would care about them
because they were part of their heritage. Family was a collective
endeavor, small enough to reflect the individual. It was a practical and
philosophical aim that made life beautiful and meaningful.
But who really needs it anymore?
The basic practical functions of the family have been replaced by the
nanny state. It is the nanny that takes over the care and teaching of
the child as soon as possible. And when their parents grow old, it is
that same nanny that oversees their care and death.
Governments have come to serve as undying guardians of human society,
ushering new life into the world and ushering old life out of it. New
parents are as likely to turn to the government for help as they are to
their extended family. When their child is old enough to look around for
a career, it is the government that they expect to provide the
education and the jobs. And when they grow old, the child can keep on
working at his government job and paying off his student loans knowing
that the government will be there to make all the difficult and
expensive decisions about their care.
With all that taken care of, who needs parents or children anyway?
People once had children to pass on wealth, genes and beliefs. But
wealth is now thought to be the collective property of society, which is
taxed to death or often just given away on some quixotic quest to stamp
out disease in Africa or illiteracy in Antarctica. The thought of
passing on genes carries with it a tinge of racism for the European and
European-descended populations whose birth rates are dropping, but
raises no such concerns for minority groups with high birth rates. That
only leaves beliefs, which are also thought to be the collective
property of the society and the state. Public education, mandatory in
some countries, means that the best way to reproduce your beliefs is not
to have children, but to get a job as a teacher.
The family has been displaced and replaced. In some places it is even
repressed. Like an old station wagon, it idles by the side of the road,
while its former owners drive away in their new sleek electric government compact
car built for two or a micro-car built for one into a wonderful
childless future of unfunded pensions, social collapse and death panels.
Marriage rates have dropped sharply. Not only is divorce more
commonplace, but many couples aren't even bothering to marry at all. And
many of those who do marry don't bother having children. Childfree is
the new Zero Population Growth, not on behalf of the planet, but on
behalf of the self. Modern society has made the price of children
extremely expensive and many couples have found it easier to end the
family with their own deaths.
The future of the West has been aborted or never conceived. It has been broken up, divorced and never married.
The state gave its citizens the impression that it could fulfill all the
functions of a family far better than the real thing. Its appeal was
the power of bigness, the stability of a system too big to fail and
rooms full of experts working night and day to improve on the fallible
family. With its vast industrial social services bureaucracy, the state
would be able to provide a more stable social safety net, save everyone
money on health care, educate their children, care for their elders,
perpetuate their values, protect their income, safeguard their way of
life and usher in a bright new future.
Unfortunately not only can't the state do any of these things better
than the family, but it can't do them at all without the family. And the
family has collapsed, falling apart into disassociated lonely
individuals, looking for their father and mother, their children and
their future, in the great soulless body of the state.
"The State is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to
live at the expense of everybody else," Fredrick Bastiat wrote. At its
most basic the state is a pyramid scheme into which everyone pays into
and from which everyone expects to extract more than their fair share.
At the very least they expect the state to function like a wise
investment fund, taking their taxes and investing them in ways that will
maximize their social return.
Unfortunately
the state is more like an actual pyramid scheme whose schemers squander
as much of the money as they can while pressuring the suckers to throw
in more and more, promising big returns and parading around the model
investors who made a fortune as their success stories.
Invest more in education, the schemers of the state urge, presenting as
an example a few individual students from the diminishing percentage of
college graduates who are actually able to find a full-time job based on
their degree. Invest more in healthcare they cry, trotting out the
elderly and the children who depend on social services, even while those
same schemers are robbing those services blind. Invest in foreign aid,
in the war on poverty, in infrastructure and the environment and a
thousand other social funds, they cry, even as all the trillions of
their former investments have gone up in smoke.
Money however is replaceable. Children are not. And nowhere has the
pyramid scheme of the social state schemer proven more disastrous than
in the collapse of the family. The state has usurped the family, but it
depends on the family to crank out industrious little taxpayers, small
men and women who will work the shops and factories, toiling night and
day, paying their fines and fees dutifully while raising the next
generation of taxpayers. Without the family, the pyramid scheme of the
state faces a demographic collapse.
Europe has turned to the American solution, bringing in huge numbers of
immigrants to fill the demographic dead zone left behind by the
progressive state. And America has doubled down on that same solution.
But the solution is no solution.
Importing large numbers of immigrants into a vital and booming society
is a shot in the arm, but doing the same in a troubled society in
decline is a shot in the head. The difference between integration and
conquest is a matter of demographics. If the numbers are not on your
side, then you aren't expanding your own country, you're giving it away.
Immigrants from the Third World have fared the worst. Caught between a
declining West and a backward East, they have produced large and broken
families that explode into violence as their children carve out their
own rough tribal identities in ethnic gangs and religious terrorist
groups across a lost and bewildered land. Not only have they failed to
become the taxpayers of the future, upholding the oversized pensions of
tomorrow with the labor of today, but they have become an even larger
drain on the social services that they were meant to bail out.
In 1848, Marx and Engels published the Communist Manifesto fearsomely
declaring, "A spectre is haunting Europe — the spectre of communism." At
that time the birth rate in Germany was five children. Today it isn't
even two. The spectre of Communism is no longer haunting Europe. It has
come and gone. Under Socialism, it is the spectre of demographics that
haunts Europe. It is the dead children, no longer killed in factories or
protests, but in clinics and for convenience's sake, that float
aimlessly through the streets of Munich, London and Paris. Europe is no
longer haunted by its dead, but by those who were never born.
Socialism has left behind a terrible bill and there is no one left to
pay it. The population is crashing in every Western country. The elderly
are losing their generous benefits, the men and women of middle age
worry for the future and the youth no longer believe in the future at
all. The streets are full of angry foreign teenagers, grinning and
glaring, cutting and smashing, and the veiled women shop for goat in
small dirty butcher shops. The old native men and women, of the stock
that once made world empires, dream of leaving it all behind for Greece
or Spain where they hope for a familiar foreignness, rather than the
foreign foreignness that has overwhelmed their countries and made their
cities no longer their own.
The state replaced the family. It told men and women that they no longer
needed to make permanent commitments to each or to their parents and
children. So long as they paid their taxes, the state would bear the
burden of their commitments. And so men and women gave up on each other,
parents gave up on their children and children gave up on their
parents, the family fell apart and now the state that took its place is
also falling apart.
A building cannot be built on nothing. The tallest tower is only as
strong as its foundation. A skyscraper may touch the sky, but it is its
grip on the ground that truly counts. A civilization may reach for the
sky and the stars, but it is sustained by the soil of the family and the
roots of the basic social structures created by individuals
perpetuating individuals, not the gargantuan social mechanisms of the
state.
When a civilization destroys its families, then it destroys itself. A
man cannot cut out his own heart and live. A society cannot destroy its
own capacity for life and regeneration, and continue on blithely
occupying itself with the wars on obesity, poverty, racism, cough syrup
and gendered pronouns. The state may seem impressive, but it is only a
scheme by which people pay officials to make life better for them. When
the number of people begins to decline while the number of officials
increases, then the man touches the place where his empty heart was,
stumbles and falls.
American cities and states have built up a vast social infrastructure of
schools and hospitals that there will not be enough children to use.
From Detroit to California, the future is four teachers to an empty
classroom and eight nurses to an empty hospital. The state that is too
big to fail has grown bigger than its people. Like Saturn, the
progressive revolution has devoured its own children leaving behind only
the empty hallways and empty treasuries of the state.
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