Amerika

There are some issues only conservatives can address.

The left is the party of material, or concerns about individuals and their supposed equal ability to engage in freedom of self-expression. The left’s reasoning is that the cosmos order originates in the material, and that individuals must express themselves in order to find their own sense of purpose.

The right is the party of patterns, or consequentialists, who see order as originating in form and not matter. For them, the best type of society is a stable one that passes along time-honored wisdom, providing the individual with an organic society that provides clear direction and support.

From this dichotomy, we can see how leftists are hostile to the idea of community standards. They in fact want almost no standards, as these impede the individual.

Their attitude is fortuitous for commercial and governmental interests, as well as all the people who do not succeed in reality-based activities like producing wealth or knowledge. These also want no community standards as a defensive move; they want their products, edicts and personal drama to come first.

For this reason, if an issue involves establishing community standards — except by our “self-organizing” forces like popularity, commerce and demagoguery — it requires a Republican to notice it, document it, and whip people into a mood to support it.

An issue of this nature that is rising on the horizon: environmental factors in child-rearing. These include, but are not limited to, pollution, stress, unstable parents, hostile schools, electromagnetic radiation, television, and so on.

The researchers did not say which environmental influences might be at work. But other experts said the new study, released online on Monday, marked an important shift in thinking about the causes of autism, which is now thought to affect at least 1 percent of the population in the developed world.

“This is a very significant study because it confirms that genetic factors are involved in the cause of the disorder,” said Dr. Peter Szatmari, a leading autism researcher who is the head of child psychiatry and behavioral neuroscience at McMaster University in Ontario. “But it shifts the focus to the possibility that environmental factors could also be really important.” – NYT

Autism has been rising not just since industrialization; its most radical jump is post-1970s, at which point liberal social programs began to really take hold in America.

In addition, with the social chaos of pluralism, it is very hard to observe certain kinds of violations. Where there is no immediately visible community standard, deviance or simple criminality hides.

Where we once had a dozen or so types of businesses to watch for pollution, we now have hundreds, many of which are culturally different than mainstream Americana.

Even more important is that with the collapse of values resulting from the permissiveness of pluralism, we are seeing parents get more neurotic and confused about what direction they should take existentially.

In addition, their careers are more complicated. Both parents work; each gets paid half (in real value) of what they’d otherwise receive. Yet they pay for two commuters, two cars, and two psychologists.

The result is children facing the threatening home environment caused by emotional and mental instability:

Is your kid a “dove” – cautious and submissive when confronting new environments, or perhaps you have a “hawk” – bold and assertive in unfamiliar settings?

These basic temperamental patterns are linked to opposite hormonal responses to stress – differences that may provide children with advantages for navigating threatening environments, researchers report in a study published online July 8, 2011, in Development and Psychopathology.

“Divergent reactions – both behaviorally and chemically – may be an evolutionary response to stress,” says Patrick Davies, professor of psychology at the University of Rochester and the lead author of the study. “These biological reactions may have provided our human ancestors with adaptive survival advantages. For example, dovish compliance may work better under some challenging family conditions, while hawkish aggression could be an asset in others.” – MDXP

The terminology of “hawk” and “dove” is designed to simplify the issue, as is the sleight-of-hand around the term “threatening.”

A threatening home environment can mean physical threat, as we generally interpret it, but it can also mean emotional threat, which is probably where most of these situations arise, unless we believe we are awash in child-beaters.

This means that neurotic parents, angry parents, divorcing parents, or even emotionally abusive passive-aggressive or distracted parents can cause abuse-effects in their children.

Pluralism plays right into this by destabilizing not only the family order, but the social order, so that people have jobs and then must invent “meaning” on their own; there is no commonly-accepted standard for what makes someone a good person. Thus life becomes a job, a bunch of hobbies, and some altruistic public actions that are more for show than consequence.

“Doves” are kids who convert their emotional trauma into a sense of being nobody. They drop out; they avoid engaging with society; they are the infamous kid-adults and basement-dweller failure to launch cases of Generation X.

“Hawks” on the other hand aren’t just self-confident and assertive. They’re projecting that self-confidence to make up for what they did not find in stability at home. Where doves recognize the instability, Hawks pretend it doesn’t exist — and this is a bad psychological habit that can lead to another:

The narcissist who receives indiscriminate praise from his or her caregiver as well as signals of coldness and rejection may come to distrust the praise and exist in a perpetual state of insecurity. Back argues that peers also contribute to this dynamic, in that their positive first impressions fade: “Narcissists are popular so they get positive feedback, but are then devalued in the long term,” when people learn their true colors. – Psychology Today

Children who come from insecure homes tend toward narcissism, probably on a spectrum like most disorders. Mild narcissism is probably considered somewhat normal.

Insecure homes arise when they are given some parental affirmation, but also perceive a threatening or cold environment. The type of instability created by pluralism fosters this environment.

The Republican truth here is that we should be family-values oriented if we want future generations to be stable, and that kids need community standards.

Even though most people if asked will say they want unlimited self-expression, they are speaking from a position of only being able to see what they want in addition to what they already have.

This viewpoint eliminates the consequences of everyone going their own way and community standards dropping, and it has fooled good people into supporting liberalism since the dawn of time.

Narcissists thrive in big, anonymous cities, entertainment-related fields (think reality TV), and leadership situations where they can dazzle and dominate others without having to cooperate or suffer the consequences of a bad reputation.

Even on a practical level, it makes sense to establish community standards. The greater degree of anonymity and permissiveness, the more narcissistic our society becomes — and with that, inevitably more liberal.

Tags: child-rearing, community standards, family values