Amerika

Modern society worships the cult of the individual. We are equal, therefore every decision is equally valid, and we have no idea what to want except what external distractions tell us is important.

As a result, you get a land of zombies who follow the images they see on television:

“I used to race home to have sex with my wife,” says Perry, a 41-year-old lawyer. “Now I leave work a half-hour early so I can get home before she does and masturbate to porn.” Throughout the course of our conversation, Perry insists that he’s still attracted to his wife of twelve years. Still, he says, she can’t quite measure up to the porn stars he views online. “Not to be mean, but they’re younger, hotter, and wilder in the sack than my wife,” he says.

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Is it possible that porn is causing men to detach from their partners in more profound ways? Though porn research is the subject of much debate and barb-flinging (with religious groups seizing on any study to prove that porn and masturbation are wrong), scientists speculate that a dopamine-oxytocin combo is released in the brain during orgasm, acting as a “biochemical love potion,” as behavioral therapist Andrea Kuszewski calls it. It’s the reason after having sex with someone, you’re probably more inclined to form an emotional attachment. But you don’t have to actually have sex in order to get those neurotransmitters firing. When you watch porn, “you’re bonding with it,” Kuszewski says. “And those chemicals make you want to keep coming back to have that feeling.” Which allows men not only to get off on porn but to potentially develop a neurological attachment to it. They can, in essence, date porn. – New York Magazine

So let me get this straight: men are preferring watching sex acts to engaging in them. With girls they will never meet, and would probably not date in real life. What attracts us so much to porn, if not the fact that it is the attachmentless, obligationless sex that represents sex in its purest form, entirely detached from any other consequences or reasons why?

Family, pregnancy, long-term love… these things require not only commitment, but a commitment to doing them for their own sake. You don’t have a family because it pleases you (solely). You have a family because it’s the right thing to do, the right way to share love, and part of a life you can enjoy. But you can’t separate that life-ideal from the family any more than you can separate sex from the family, at least if you want positive outcomes.

Parental alienation syndrome is not a gender specific issue. It was once believed women were the main perpetrators of parental alienation, but no longer. “Fifty percent are men,” said Judith Ray, a licensed family therapist in Colorado Springs.

“Those who are men tend to be narcissistic, characterized by a sense of entitlement, arrogance and low empathy. Female alienators often have borderline personalities, marked by insecurity, neediness, a strong fear of abandonment and chronic emptiness.”

When we speak of parental alienation we aren’t talking about abusive fathers trying to further their misguided, ill treatment of a mother. We are talking about damaged parents, both mother and father whose children need to be protected from a different kind of abuse. – Huffingdogma Post

This is an article viewing the other end of the process: when people who want only to please themselves not only have a family, and not only have kids, but have to raise those kids. Parents who understand themselves as serving a sacred role toward a whole life raise healthy kids; selfish parents abuse their kids in the most covert and untraceable way, the most passive-aggressive way. It’s not what they do, like hitting a kid, but what they don’t do. They offer love when convenient, usually when the offspring is compliant. They withhold that same love when the offspring is inconvenient. They want it to be just like them, and to serve their needs, and when it cannot or will not, they retaliate by not doing things. Not offering affirmation. Not offering support. Not reassuring the little critter that it belongs in the family and has a place in the world in its own right. No, the narcissistic beings instead reinforce the idea that without the parent, the child is nothing.

No wonder we have a nation of man-boys and party girls who can barely manage to bond for a few weeks at a time, then flit off to the next set of genitals/pleasures/illusions. We hate the family. We hate it because it is inconvenient, in that it reminds us that we are all very small things that together serve a larger role. If we treat the family as it should be treated, it is a constant reminder that despite all our intelligence, we are not gods. We are like trees, animals, the wind or the rain. We fit somewhere in a hierarchy, and we serve toward its ends, and any calculation of our own ends is doomed outside of that context, like trying to breathe in a vacuum. That makes us feel impotent and small, and since we’ve made a modern society based on the empowered individual whose perspective is equally valid and thus all-important to that individual, we then feel like hollow failures.

More than half of all marriages — there were more than 2 million in 2009 — end in divorce, according to the National Council of Family Relations.

The probability of a first marriage ending in divorce within five years is 20 percent. After a decade, the chances of a divorce are 33 percent. As the number of marriages increases, so does the risk. By the third time around, about 73 percent will dissolve, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Women are often hit harder than men, as they try to navigate new lives with fewer financial resources, more child-care responsibilities and the challenge of dating again.

One report in Marie Claire magazine said a woman’s quality of life drops 45 percent after divorce. – ABC

The thing about low standards is that they always reinforce the process of lowering standards. If one person says we must uphold idea A, and another says we need to have no such fascist standards, that idea of lowered standards becomes de facto idea B. The first person could say why do we consider idea B to be any more of an obligation/choice than idea A, but most people will not see this simple truth. What they see is simplistic, not simple: idea B has no requirements, so idea A looks like an imposition, at least if you’re living for yourself. And so they reject idea A, default to B, and then repeat the process the next time anyone comes up with an idea more complex than keep sitting on that couch, going to that easy but boring job, watching sports and buying stuff, and being tolerant. It’s a circular, endless trap.

Your character is not defined by what you say you believe. It’s defined by the choices you make. History painfully records that when a people allow their personal character to dissipate, they become putty in the hands of tyrants and demagogues. Such tyranny often takes the form of actual rulers, but it can also involve the serfdom of our nobler nature to a lord of lustful impulse. Decadence can destroy democracy as surely as dictatorship.

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When a person spurns his conscience and fails to do what he knows is right, he subtracts from his character. When he evades his responsibilities, foists his problems and burdens on others, or fails to exert self-discipline; when he allows or encourages wrongdoing on any scale; when he attempts to reform the world without reforming himself first; when he obligates the yet-unborn to pay his current bills for him; when he expects politicians to solve problems that are properly his own business alone; he subtracts from his character – and drags the rest of us down, too. – CSM

Lowering standards is lowering character. When we lower character, we become less inclined to address the third party in any interaction. When party A and party B come to a disagreement, they can either demand attention to their own self-interest (a state known as anarchy, or disorder, which can ultimately only be solved by theft, violence and the corruption of authority) or they can pay attention to the third party, idea C. Idea C is whatever hierarchy, role, values system or goal that guides that civilization or social group to which A and B belong.

With abstract ideals that we can use to interpret concrete objectives such as idea C, we have a new basis for a society. It is no longer a race to the lowest common denominator, but a desire to fulfill roles and in so doing to transcend our limitations by being part of a larger, more important quest.

In our desire to avoid the need for an idea C, we have mutated our society from an orderly place to an open-air shopping mall where the meme of the moment prevails, equality prevents us from making any real choices, and the demagogues and panderers win in the shady corners where they transact business. Worse, it has made us selfish beings who hate anything but ourselves, and we may even hate those. This is why our society of Utopian “progress” has ended up creating a jihad against the family, and against real love even, and it’s why we increasingly fail from within, no matter what we try to fix the problem.

Tags: family-oriented, reproduction, sex