When the government tells you that you don’t know how to rear your own children and wants to assume that role, totalitarianism has either arrived or is just around the corner. From Anthony Esolan on a guest post at theburningplatform.com:
Whenever I’m in a diner or a family restaurant, I look around for the most cheerful thing in any day’s experience, and that’s a young husband and wife and their children. Today the two children sitting with their parents at the table next to us were a baby boy and his four-year-old brother. The four year old had glossy blond hair, tousled over his forehead, and was all skinny arms and legs, elbows and knees. Foolishness regarding the supposed sameness of men and women cannot stand up against a moment or two of looking at how they are shaped, and that is true even of little boys and girls. In the boy we can see the man-shape in miniature: the straight-angled legs, the shoulders made for throwing, the jaw line, the snowshoe feet. I imagine that it delights the heart of any ordinary mother and father.
Ordinary—but these are not ordinary times. They are dis-ordinary. Try to pretend that they are ordinary: that the most important things in life strike everyone as a matter of course. So the parents of the little boy look at their son, and imagine what he will be like when he grows to manhood. They imagine him as marrying a woman and begetting a family of his own. That is a matter of course. It is what all parents have always done, on the banks of the Hwang Ho or the Father of Waters, on the treeless expanses of Alaska or in the rain forests of Borneo, in the Roman forum or on a village green in New England. It is normal, not in a mere statistical sense, but in the sense of the Latin noun norma: a carpenter’s square. It is what ought to be, when you raise your son in a healthy way. To do anything other would be like building a house with crooked walls. Why would you do that? The thing will buckle.
So they do those things that ordinary parents have always done when they delight in reality. The father rough-houses with him, tackling him or pretending to be tackled by him, hoisting him over his head and dangling him upside down by the ankles. The mother calls him “my little man,” and lets him “help” her when she is digging in the garden to plant some flowers and vegetables. They cut his hair short to show his masculine looks to best advantage. None of this is mere “socializing” or “social construction,” because human beings are by social by nature, and nature helps to determine the social arrangements they are going to have. There never has been a society in which parents have not done for their small sons the equivalent of what I have described, and there never will be—there never can be. It would be like imagining a world in which parents had no special love for their children, or in which men and women were not attracted to each other, or in which people spent all of their waking hours indoors, and only went out under the open sky under state compulsion.
No, we do not need the state to compel us to do what comes naturally. But the state can compel us to do, under sufferance, what does not come naturally, or what is downright unnatural.
To continue reading: Totalitarians of the World, Unite!
