1. True Liberalism requires adults, which requires individuation/separation from the womb. Fascism in some form–and understood broadly I would incorporate monarchism under this banner/ceremonial ax–can be the only creed for a society whose members consistently fail to individuate. I would note that most of human history has seen tradition imposed by violence at every level from the home to the State. To this very day, if an Untouchable walks in an upper class Indian neighborhood, he is liable to be killed, and no police report ever filed, much less the crime punished. This is a society which does not value individualism, or rising above your operant conditioning. Most societies are like that.
I wonder from time to time what exactly Bill Ayers taught. He wrote a number of texts (in addition to Obama’s two books) which I have long intended to look up, but there is only so much time in the day. Child Development was his field, if memory serves. One could scarcely do better, in building his version of 1984, than to generalize the parenting practices on display here.
2. As a general rule, parents who raise children who fail to individuate have not done so themselves. The parents of these perma-children are co-dependent. They need to keep their children sucking at the proverbial teat so that they themselves can avoid the pain and confusion which would attend the recognition of their long term failure. For children to individuate, they must be pushed away by the parents to some extent. They must be told to take risks, and to risk failure regularly.
3. No good parent should wish only good things for their children. All of us need challenges to grow, and unplanned challenges do the most in forcing us to become more resilient, adaptable, and ALIVE. You build emotional muscle in the using of it. Hoping for an easy slide through life is the equivalent of encouraging them to avoid any physical exercise at all, because it requires effort. It is a hope for their failure. It is the opposite of love.
4. Only people who have individuated can even begin to think about spirituality. The path one needs to walk shifts constantly, and no one can tell you where to go and what to do, reliably. No one can guide you on a path you are inventing as you go along. You have to learn to trust yourself, your own instincts, and to go where no one you know has gone before. Certainly, there are good tools, and some good teachers, but in the end we all are responsible for ourselves.
5. I think we could perhaps speak of Male Fascisms and Female Fascisms. Male Fascism is arresting and jailing or killing anyone who dissents. It is Communism. It is Nazism.
Female Fascism, like women themselves, would be more subtle. Think about what would happen if these women got complete power. Would they be crucifying people in the streets, shooting dissidents in the head? No. I don’t think so. What they would do would be to ostracize people who failed to goose-step with them. They would limit where you could live, and where you could shop. They would limit where you could work, and who you could marry. You would have no access to the internet, or physical access to a public place where you might say something inconvenient. You would be, for all intents and purposes, removed from society, but not directly.
And even though this process would be based on the very same hatred, the very same cruelty as Male Fascism, they would be able, in their discussion groups where they debated how best to “care” for society, to consider these merely unpleasant but absolutely necessary precautions to prevent unpleasantness that might ruin someone (else’s) day.
It would, in other words, be based upon the same grandiosity and self delusion which guide all left wing lunatics.