Thoughts

I think “Women’s Liberation” played an important role in all this, and so does early exposure to electronics. I think the massive disruptions in marriage roles created a great deal of instability in the homes of children born after, say, 1975.  What I would specifically hypothesize is that Attachment patterns were disrupted both by the increases in divorce, and by women going to work.  Both would create increased levels of stress in the woman, and make her less emotionally available to her children, as well, obviously, in the case of working mothers less physically available.  To this we could perhaps add the resentment she was taught at that time to feel about her situation, which could not but have been perceived by the children.

Economic factors would play into that as well.  Perhaps the large banks that run the world created the inflation in the 1970’s to support their war on families, as well as to secure the cessation of any remaining limits on their ability to create and gift money (which they got around 1980).  Make earning a living harder, create a need to compete with men in women, and you get little children who do not get enough love.  Those children grow up feeling disspirited, lonely, and unable to connect with very deep feelings of hurt and anger.

Secondly, consider the proper role of Mirror Neurons.  When they are working properly, they enable attachment and socialization.  We feel what other people feel.  We look in their eyes and see sadness, or laughter, or anger.  This is the basis of empathy.

Consider how a child is socialized when their main interactions are with an electronic device which can be controlled by them, but which cannot mirror them.  This child would look normal on the outside, but not understand basic human emotions.  Pile this on top of a distracted busy mother–and I do think it needs to be the mother, political correctness be damned, because you were in HER womb, and we are hard wired to respond differently to mothers–and you get these little shits I see on the internet.

They KNOW something is wrong with them, but they have no idea what.  I know something is wrong with them, and that is my best guess.

I am rewatching Andrei Tarkovky’s masterpiece “Nostalghia”, and it starts with a meditation on motherhood, its difficulty, its joys.  An obviously “liberated” woman comes into a very old church during a ceremony intended to help a woman conceive a child, and asks the sacristan why so many more women are there than men.  He says something like “a woman’s job is to raise children, and that requires patience and sacrifice”.  And she sounds disgusted and says “and that’s ALL they are for?”  He shrugs and says “you asked me”.

But is there not something sacred in motherhood?  And do we not dilute or eradicate that sacrality by treating babies like unwanted gallstones?  It would seem to me that in diminishing motherhood, we diminish childhood.  Rather than a sacred responsibility, it becomes something to get through or–as is the case in much of Europe–to avoid entirely.

Wisdom involves moving slowly, often.  Seeing what is there without assuming it can be reduced to an abstraction and then plugged into a formula.  That does not involve the body and senses.  And most of life cannot be reduced to words.  If you are living at the word level, you are not living.  If you can speak all you know, you know little, at least consciously.  The knowledge is always there, but it vanishes when it is ignored and suppressed.