I am an American and this is a US-centric political treatise. Phrases such as “our” country, “this” government, etc. refer to the United States and “we,” “us,” etc. refer to Americans unless obviously meant otherwise.
Citizens of other countries in the Anglosphere, or indeed any Western liberal democracy, may have a small experiential overlap with what I write. However, most will doubtless find they disagree with me on many points. That’s fine, but it shouldn’t come as a surprise. Keep in mind that the United States of America was established in direct contradiction to most European political sensibilities - and we did it that way very much on purpose.
I’m writing on a subject that is very dear to me. If this seems to you to be an angry treatise, that is because it is. I’m trying to walk the fine line between legitimate polemic and outright diatribe. After proofreading, I’m pretty certain that I can live with the way I’ve written it. Ultimately I just want to write the truth while being fair. I am adamant on the content, but I will always be open to constructive criticism on the packaging.
"How small, of all that human hearts endure,
That part which laws or kings can cause or cure!"
“Nanny state” is a pejorative term for perceived overreach and meddling by the government. It compares the government/citizen relationship to the nanny/child relationship. (I chose the “kindergarten” analogy in my title with a similar sentiment.) As grown adults chafe at being treated like children, so opponents of the “nanny state” chafe at being governed like them.
There are people who truly believe that we exist and live at the mercy and magnanimity of the government. Central to this frame of mind is the unconscious assumption that the government generously “grants” rights to citizens, in the same way that the kindergarten teacher “grants” a hall pass to a child or allows him to speak if he first raises his hand. This is emphatically not the way the United States is constituted. Our Declaration of Independence recognizes the existence of “unalienable rights” granted to men by God. (The “Human Rights” endorsed by the U.N. are a cheap imitation. Without explicit reference to the Creator, they are totally arbitrary, thus doomed to the logical self-destruction of atheist-materialism.)
For example, the Second Amendment to the US Constitution does not “give us the right to own firearms” any more than the First Amendment “gives us the right to publish our opinions” or the Sixth Amendment “gives us the right to a fair trial.” The Second Amendment (like the others) is a protection of that God-given right against infringement. Owning a weapon to defend yourself and your family is your God-given right and the Constitution explicitly declares it off-limits to the government.
I’m aware that the Second Amendment is a contentious subject for many non-Americans (and Americans who wish they weren’t Americans - but I digress.) It’s understandable that non-Americans might find it baffling - see the disclaimer up top. What concerns me is the number of Americans who have been hoodwinked with various hoax beliefs concerning the Second Amendment. These include:
The Constitution is not some permission slip. It is not a “hall pass” granted by our benevolent Kindergarten-Teacher-on-the-Potomac. Rather, it is a straitjacket on the government itself. It could accurately be called a “whitelist,” as the Tenth Amendment restricts the federal government to perform only those actions that are explicitly allowed in the text (e.g. declare war, issue money, enter into treaties with other countries, etc.) Any power not explicitly allowed by the Constitution to the Federal government is delegated by default to the governments of the various States and their people. This is the very bedrock of Federalism and of the American philosophy of government.
At least, it still is for now.
State-worship in the US got weird during COVID, but it’s been a trend for much longer. So how did we end up with people in our country who practically believe they need the government’s permission to breathe? I have a few theories:
Unfortunately, the decline of American education has not been limited to mathematics. Gone are the days when anybody but the rare personally-dedicated teacher will spend any time on topics like civics or government. Many times, this is not due to conscious censorship. As with mathematics, the teachers don’t effectively teach civics because they don’t know it either.
Also, schools (to include our universities) are no longer places of discourse, but of indoctrination. Behaviors like healthy debate or criticizing an author are seen as disruptions rather than as parts of the process of true education. The only behavior that’s rewarded is the kind where you accept what you’re told and snitch on those who don’t. As an example, a former English literature teacher of mine actually complained on F*cebook years later that the boys in class would try to “assert their male privilege” or whatever by daring to disagree with Henry David Thoreau - or at least with his sainted status within her lessons. The idea that we would actually engage with an author and push back on points of disagreement just did not compute with her. One supposes she thought the proper thing to do with literature is to let it all fall into your head without any evaluation whatsoever. For her, disagreement with The Curriculum was simply unthinkable. Consider that people just like her are teaching children throughout our nation as you read this - and that this is a relatively mild example from more than twelve years ago.
I have another example of this kind of thinking that’s a little tragicomic. In my 5th grade math class, the teacher was demonstrating a problem on the board. When she got to the end, she noticed that the book had a different answer. Figuring she must have made a mistake somewhere, she retraced all her steps, but got the same answer a second time. After this, she consulted the book a little longer, then turned to the class and announced that the book’s answer was wrong and that it had been a misprint. One kid was actually horrified and wouldn’t accept it. The teacher tried to explain it to him, but he just grew more agitated. Evidently, he thought the rest of the room was crazy. “But it’s in the book!” he kept repeating.
I alluded to this in Were You Mathematically Abused as a Child?, but I will come right out and say that I’ve been affected by this one personally. My parents (through no fault of their own) were pressured by the school to put me on ADHD medicine (basically amphetamine.) This kicked off a journey where I was also diagnosed with “depression” and given SSRIs. Once this drug cocktail began causing me to experience paranoia and sleeplessness, Big Pharma was right there to push more drugs. They prescribed me Clonidine to help me sleep.
Drugs, drugs, drugs, everywhere you look, pushed as the answer to everything. A drug to fix the “problem” of being a normal elementary-school boy who didn’t want to waste his days sitting in a classroom with the children “not left behind.” Another drug to fix the “depression” caused by the circumstances surrounding the first drug. Then, a third drug to try to counteract some of the side effects of the first two drugs. Thank God this was twenty years ago, or they may well have tried puberty blockers next. My parents wouldn’t have stood for that, of course; that’s where the line was drawn back then. Who knows what fresh horrors parents these days are being coerced into?
I’m extremely blessed that I have no lasting effects from those drugs after stopping them many years ago. Unfortunately, my case is not typical. Plenty of kids are grabbed by this system and are never let go, even through adulthood. Can we even know the extent of the damage caused by one or more generations of children, predominantly boys, growing up under the influence of psychotropic drugs, being chemically deadened into the next generation of complacent drones? Could this be one of the reasons so many people are now abdicating all personal responsibility to the state? Might their learned helplessness in fact have been created pharmaceutically? At best, this is the arrogance of scientism run amok: a small and arrogant cadre of materialists who believe Utopia is within reach if only they can tinker enough with the human race. At worst, it is a calculated evil from the pit of Hell itself.
The previous theory may be explainable in terms of a larger conflict. Despite popular screeching to the reverse, men and masculinity are held in contempt by the culture at large, contra women, who are portrayed in a much more flattering light, either as poor oppressed victims or as some civilizing force acting on men. This is due in part to the fact that life truly imitates art.
We elevate in our art that which we view as true or worthy of imitation. Thus, in ages past, when fathers and fatherhood were truly respected, we had fathers like Atticus Finch in literature, or Andy Griffith on television: wise and respectable men who loved their families and were worthy of trust. When buffoons like Homer Simpson first came on the scene, they were funny because they were so peculiar. Inversion can lead to great comedy: the idea of a father, the captain of the ship, being a bumbling idiot who makes a mess of everything, can be pretty funny. However, what started as absurd comedy became, in time the way we really think about fathers and men in general. Now it’s a vicious loop, with the toxic media informing real peoples’ beliefs, which feeds back into the media again.
Lest you think I’m placing too much importance on “low” art such as television, don’t forget where all this stuff comes from. We in the public audience can fall into the trap of regarding mass media as some phenomenon that just “happens.” We see it as part of the scenery, like the cityscape or the weather. In reality, mass media is written and produced by some of the most powerful organizations in our nation (and indeed, on the planet) to influence popular thought. The words spoken in storyboard meetings at Disney or Time-Warner are battle plans.
Even the previous several theories can be explained in terms of yet a larger one. Unfortunately, this is more than a theory. Destroying the family is a well-known Marxist goal. Shortly after Karl Marx’s death in 1884, his compatriot Friedrich Engels published Der Ursprung der Familie, des Privateigenthums und des Staats (The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State), a work which Engels said Marx had wanted to publish before his death. In it, Engels expounds the thesis that primitive mankind was organized in matrilineal clans, where fathers had no rights, all goods were shared freely, and everything was rainbows and butterflies. However, once those dastardly men got control of things, they introduced the idea of alienable property and this led directly to disempowerment and the excesses of capitalism. (It led to, you know, actual civilization as well, but since neither Marx nor Engels really had a grip on life, it’s understandable that they would resent this.)
Bottom line, Marxism has always had a vendetta against the family from the beginning. Therefore, Marxists of all stripes, whether they call themselves Communists, Socialists, or students of some “Critical Theory,” are waging war against it. The family is God’s design. When people openly fight it, it takes all the guesswork out of figuring out who’s right and wrong.
Could this be a reason for the learned helplessness and increasing reliance on the nanny state in this country? By working to destroy the bonds of the family through Marriage 2.0 and no-fault divorce, has the chain that transmits the truth of our God-given rights down through the generations been severed? Surely no outcome could be better for the oligarchs than for the disillusioned public to view the state as their replacement family. Big Brother, indeed.
“In a knife fight, the loser dies at the scene. The winner dies at the hospital.”
There is yet another theory that unifies all the others I’ve mentioned so far. It is entirely probable that the subversion pointed out by defectors like Yuri Bezmenov, or the decline warned of by men like Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, or the ideologies proclaimed openly by groups that hate us, are the culprits for the wave of ignorance, indifference, or outright hostility to the idea of God-given rights.
It may turn out to be a sad mistake to believe that we “won” the Cold War. Our geopolitical knife fight with the Soviet Union ended in 1991. They died at the scene. We may well die at the hospital.
Each theory I’ve expounded up to this point has explained everything in the previous ones while adding a new perspective - a new link to the chain. This is the end of that chain.
What is the source of all these stealth weapons operating in our nation? None other than the Evil One himself, the god of this world. He exploits the worst parts of our fallen human nature to attack the very concept of God-given rights. We insist on being men, he would have us be made beasts of burden. He would have our social and intellectual “betters” populate the government and use it to institute a level of tyranny that would exceed the wildest fantasies of history’s worst despots.
Pray for our nation. Do what you can to make it strong within your sphere of influence. But, ultimately, “Put not your trust in princes, nor in the son of man, in whom there is no help” (Psa. 146:3).
But should the People of America, once become capable of that deep … simulation towards one another and towards foreign nations, which assumes the Language of Justice and moderation while it is practicing Iniquity and Extravagance;
and displays in the most captivating manner the charming Pictures of Candour frankness & sincerity while it is rioting in rapine and Insolence:
this Country will be the most miserable Habitation in the World.
Because We have no Government armed with Power capable of contending with human Passions unbridled by … morality and Religion. Avarice, Ambition, Revenge or Gallantry, would break the strongest Cords of our Constitution as a Whale goes through a Net.
Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.
Topics: politics