It seems to me this whole particle/wave thing applies here too. To be clear, “particulation” is what Socialists would refer to as “individualism”, which in the moral chaos within which they choose to live amounts to “pernicious”, “dangerous”, and “hertical”.
To individuate properly, though, you need have been loved, I think. I have more or less defined love as seeing people as they are, and helping them become who they want to be. It has nothing to do with you, and your aims and goals.
As I visualize it, children that are loved emerge from a sea of ennestedness, from a sense of belonging. In another day and age, this was also an identity tied to time and place and economic identity. When the Socialists finally admit that they want a return to Feudalism, the lie of their anti-classist rhetoric will perhaps be admitted even by the stupid.
Be that as it may, the task of the child is to live on land. They must emerge from the sea, on their own, but waves of love and belonging can guide them in. If they live in a very traditional order, they never get far from this oceanic sense of belonging.
In our social order, people are expected to individuate, but very few do. For most people this amounts to managing their own affairs economically, living apart from their parents (whose destiny is a cubby hole from which they periodically squeak), and some combination of sports affiliations and hobbies.
True individuals, though, can go back and forth from the ocean–when they need comfort–and deep inland, when they are exploring, learning, risking.
Some people find the water has dried up. They are in an arid land, with no shelter in sight. This sparks an obsession with sex, and a persistent tendency to use other people to satisfy their own needs, rather than asking first what they have to offer.
I had mentioned two posts ago some ideas on why so many people seem so eager to reject freedom. I had come up with this concept of Maternalism, by which I mean the following: it seems to me many women in our society are jaded by the time they are twenty; they have had sex with multiple partners, fallen in love and had their hearts broken, and been exposed to endless repeats of movies and music portraying women as more or less inanimate sex objects; this must affect their capacity to love deeply, which creates a dearth of genuine maternal love in our society.
Superficial mothers will breed superficial children. They will drink their milk from a cup, but they will never feel truly and deeply loved. In fact, many mothers, lacking nurturing from their husband–whose training was similar to her own–will find in their children the reason to live and the source of love that has been heretofore denied them. This is, in my view, one of the reasons so many kids in the inner cities get pregnant so early: they need love. They just don’t realize that babies take a lot more than they give for many years. This in turn leads to anger and resentment, and more kids who are destined for failure.
Emotional dissatisfaction: this is the climate within which calls for a more “nurturing” State will resonate. These lonely people, who don’t know where to turn, will listen to calls for, oh, I don’t know, say “Hope and Change”?
You first crush peoples spirits. Then you claim you have the solution to alienation. This is a path to freedom for the intellectuals, and slavery for everyone else.
To the point here, the parents of children capable of running a free nation will necessarily be constantly providing a background of emotional support, but also pushing the child to develop an identity of its own. Sometimes the water has to disappear. Sometimes to love is to be cold and cruel. As long as they remember where they came from, they will always know that there is a way back, when they really, really need it.
My two cents.