I watched this yesterday: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z9SD2TgiZTU
He says a lot of things I have been thinking and saying. I noticed twenty or more years ago that people get stuck at certain ages. To overshare, as I do, I think my father got stuck about 8 and my mother about 17. He died without growing beyond that, and I suspect my mother will too.
Apparently Freud called this Fixation. I didn’t know that.
But more generally, healthy individuation is healthy SOCIALIZATION. It is internalizing the standards of your society and within broad limits accepting them. Each of us does it in our own way–this is individuation–but we do it, which is socialization.
And to be socialized, acclimatized, to BELONG in a social order, is to be conservative. Conservatism is simply about conserving. It is about respect, which might be seen as a synonym for mature individuation. It is NOT in my view about stasis, but about skepticism particularly with regard to radical, untried ideas that tear apart long standing patterns of largely healthy social interaction, which is obviously what Anti-Liberal ideas do.
I was reading a bunch of kids in paramilitary drag, showed up with AR-15’s to “defend” a “kid friendly drag show for kids in Texas, which included “partial nudity and sexualized minors.”
Ponder that. Where on this planet would that be acceptable? Anywhere in Latin America, outside large cities? Anywhere in aboriginal Australia? Anywhere in Asia, outside places like Afghanistan and Pakistan, where the show almost certainly would have included sex acts, since pedophilia is culturally condoned because of their weird fear of women? Africa? I don’t think so.
You have on the one side kids who have become more or less overt Fascists because of failed individuation and following fusion with an essentially irrational and indefensible cause, and who are increasingly willing to signal violence. Such kids historically can be easily made to commit all acts of violence and sadistic cruelty. This is simple fact. Yes, even Germans (Cambodians, Chileans, Greeks, the list goes on), then, and even Americans, now.
To put it another way, these kids have all the reflective capacity of trained and conditioned dogs. They feel nothing but fear, but are aware of nothing but self righteousness, all in the defense of a “worthy” cause. It’s always like that. No actually evil group of people ever sees themselves that way. The Nazis didn’t. ISIS didn’t. The Communists don’t.
What we face is a crisis of maturity. Of individuation.
What we have historically had is reasonably mature and sober adults running this country; not perfectly, to be sure, and they made many mistakes, but they were serious and knew by and large who they were and what they believed and why.
We lack this now, more and more and more. This is the real problem. This will remain a problem even if actual conservatives get control of our government. This is the actual problem which I myself am working hardest to solve. Over and above its intrinsic benefit, this is one reason I put so much effort into my own growth. I want to be able to say without words “THIS”.
I ran across this article in National Geographic the other day. It was a Latin American women who had recently resettled from New Jersey to the Midwest. She was struck by how similar the cultural patterns in the Midwest were to those with which she was familiar. The name of the article in fact is “How the Midwest is Latin America”.
Author Daisy Hernandez writes:
The image of flight is so dominant that I had forgotten its opposite: people STAY in the Midwest. They value having their grandparents close by, the cousins down the block or across town, the old high school friends nearby. They have a relationship with the land and small towns and each other that is complicated and that those of us who are outsiders fail to appreciate.
These are the people who put Trump into office the first time, and whose votes were cast aside to prevent his reelection. And they think and feel much like Latin Americans. Or most Africans. Or most Asians.
People are the same in many ways around the world. We all need order. We need ideas and people and practices and outward markers to cling to, to help us navigate this confusing world, where it does not matter a lot what sort of hat you wear, but a lot if other people join you, so that there becomes a visual Us.
These kids with the guns just want to belong somewhere. They were not socialized into a coherent society, so they are creating their own; and being kids, they are not doing it with any wisdom, foresight, or common sense.
Here is the thing, though: you cannot socialize any kid into a society which does not exist. If you set them no limits, if there is no yes/no operator, if there are no boundaries, then their natural behavioral avarice will grow indefinitely, such that no coherent self is ever formed.
And this is happening right now in large numbers of American kids. I would wager it is an absolute majority of them, once we factor in screens. This is a real problem. This cannot lead anywhere but Fascism.