I’m going to start with saving civilization by starting with the largest, most common institution that has been around for a long time now: marriage.
Marriage is probably the most crucial part of civilization. It encourages long-term planning. It encourages growth in civilization. It ensures that our more destructive urges are kept in check.
Marriage, it could be argued, is one of the few things that individuals can do that will ensure societal stability and potential growth. With stable marriage comes stable children (usually, there are always exceptions) and the passions of sex are tempered by regular sex with a spouse.
In the last century or so, we have seen what appears to be a changing in the traditional standards of marriage for more modern ideas about marriage. Many socially conservative people in America have argued that this trend started in the 1960s, and to some extent they are right, but that was when it was most noticeable.
In truth, it started before that, largely as a result of the two total wars that the United States felt compelled to participate in. This participation resulted in sending hundreds of thousands of young, healthy, mentally stable men into a situation that left many of them less than what they could have been.
War is Hell. It robs men of their lives and barring that, robs them of their sanity. You cannot see men killed around you and come out with a clear head unless you are a total psychopath. It will affect you and you will have nightmares about it.
And so, healthy, physically strong, and mentally stable men came home broken in some way. There is a reason that God demanded that all young men who have recently married to not be conscripted into military service for at least a year. The point is, men came back broken, to varying degrees, and this left them unable to properly relate with women.
This was seen with the Lost Generation in the roaring 20s, which gave rise to the Great Depression and the expansion of government services. Men were broken and thus unable to withstand the onslaught of communist policies be enacted in the name of fixing the economy. And so kids starved for the sake of keeping milk prices high.
Then along came the next total war. And the generation of men who endured the last one sent their own young men to be damaged and broken in that one. At this point it was almost a rite of passage for manhood in the United States. Thus, the so-called “Greatest Generation” was then thrust into a world of violence before they could learn to love and care for wife. And then they came back.
Into this world was born the Baby Boomer, widely considered to be the most selfish generation on the whole. The war was done but the effects were still lingering. The United States entered a phase of unprecedented economic growth, largely because it got through the war without any damage to its infrastructure.
So the middle class grew, the children of war veterans had comfortable lives but lacked a solid relationship with their parents, to some degree. Again, there are always exceptions. And so we saw a rise in selfishness and the damaged parents could do nothing in the face of it. The entire Baby Boomer generation seemed to have suffered from a collective inferiority complex.
At this point, just before they came of age, the parents of the Boomers gave their children the gift of no-fault divorce. Before that, divorce was usually conditional where you could only get it if one spouse had made a serious breach of the covenant or sacrament, depending on your religion. Now, divorce was obtained for any reason or no reason.
Of course the most selfish generation squandered this “gift”. Instead of obtaining divorce for the right reasons without having to worry about proving abuse or adultery in a court, they instead used it to divorce for stupid reasons like a spouse not living up to the fairy tale ending. You know, those “happily ever after” endings that were prominent in the Disney movies of the time?
It got worse as the decades continued. It really was more noticeable in the 1960s and 1970s because that is where the problem increased exponentially. But the problem was there for much longer than that as I believe I have just demonstrated.
In addition to the freeing of divorce, we saw the rise of so-called women’s liberation. This trend started in the late 1800s but really picked up steam in the early 1900s. National alcohol prohibition was started primarily by those ancient feminists. Feminism has always viewed the government as a vehicle to impose morality. This largely due to the absence of a solid church community or, more importantly, a morally stubborn husband or father.
Feminism was nothing more than the politicization of envy. A woman’s primary vice is envy largely because her brain is wired to desire to be part of a group. And when she sees the men going to their clubs, drinking their beer, and having a grand old time with their buddies, she covets. And somehow, a bunch of malcontented women with spineless husbands decided to turn their feelings and sinful desires into a political movement.
Thus, they demanded the “right” to vote for the sake of all women, despite not even representing all women. And then they demanded marriage freedom in the form of no-fault divorce. And finally, they demanded the right to murder their unborn children and called it abortion. All arguments for those three policy pushes were based in emotive rather than rational thinking.
And men went along with them all. Some men wanted to be able to divorce their quarrelsome wives. Some men wanted to be able to have sex with women and not worry about the biggest “consequence” that is called pregnancy. And some men wanted the support of women in order to gain more and more power. Just like the Nazi Party in Germany.
And so, we see that with every freedom afforded to women, there were a few men willing to exploit it for their own gains. The result is that marriage and child-bearing became optional. Women these days are encouraged to be independent and seek out a professional career, which means live like a slut, go to college, get a useless degree, find a useless job, and waste the best child-bearing years doing all this.
For men, these affects are devastating. The vast majority of men are not able to attract their wives and have to constantly win their affections like a never-ending fairy tale. You want to know what Hell on Earth is for married men? It’s a wife who believes she’s entitled to constant romance and love without giving anything in return. Not even God gets that good of a deal in His relationship with us.
Many men are starting to withdraw from this madness. The divorce court system discourages men from getting married because it mostly favors women. On top of that, many American women are unattractive both physically and socially. They hardly put in any effort to make themselves attractive both physically and socially, except when confronted with a psychopathic Alpha male.
The Alpha male is uncommon, but not all that rare. Usually the Alpha male is one who is able to attract women through his good looks, charm, and, above all else, assertiveness. He is not concerned with the desires of women and, in fact, only cares for his own needs. He dominates all the women he has relations with. And all those women love him for it.
Most men cannot act that way. It is not the ideal path for a man because it is not the only path. In the past, the Beta males were able to marry to women who were willing to submit to them. These days, men have to work for submission, a fact that is unfortunately encouraged by women and even in Christian organizations. Some even declare that if a husband isn’t living up to a wife’s expectations, she should divorce him, which is in direct opposition of what Jesus taught.
In any event, the effect of this is that most men who might have had a chance at a stable, life-long relationship with a woman has been diminished. And so many men are either settling for a raging slut or simply dropping out of marriage and dating altogether.
This is not good. What is sold as freedom is, in fact, one of the greatest slams against civilization as we know it. Without marriage, we see the decline of potential future generations who could build a better city, write a better book or song, or develop a better treatment or cure for a disease. Human potential on the whole has very few limitations and great people always arise out of situations that are, at best, mediocre stations in life.
The current model of marriage has failed. A person who defends the modern institution of marriage only does so either out of delusion or greed. With divorce rates at 50%, where even among true-believing Christians it is 38%, and with women basing most of their sexual decisions on a whim while taking advantage of the courts to fleece the Beta males who are suckered into marrying them, it would be foolish not to argue of its failure.
So what can be done? Marriage is crucial for civilization to grow and prosper because it cultivates long-term thinking and future generations. The solutions are tough ones, ones that will run counter to current mode of thinking for the vast majority of Americans.
But those solutions are for another post for another time.