STATISM STARTS AT HOME: Worldwide the Authoritarian "Right" to Own and Control Children is What Legitimizes the Authoritarian "Right" for Governments to Treat its Populations as Children/Slaves/Pets
Well-said overall. As a lifelong youth rights activist myself, I agree. And this is what we in the youth rights movement call "adulto-patriarchy", the intersection of adultism and patriarchy.
What I am hoping to do with this new word "Parentarchy" is to show the invisibility of humanity's acceptance of power of parents over children as acceptable and unchallenged. Just as slavery was once acceptable and then finally became considered immoral, so I hope government and parentarchy will become likewise unacceptably immoral.
And now the problem of parentarchy seems to be coming back with a vengeance (albeit in more subtle, postmodern drag) in recent years, after it appeared to be on the wane.
Hi, Jack. I have some questions for your forum. Who should have authority over the person who takes primary responsibility for a child? My rule of thumb is that authority and responsibility should always go together. But this seems to imply that there's a body of authority that should be over parents, that would take no direct responsibility for the children, but would set the rules for how parents needed to parent. And what would be the punishment to parents who don't obey this authority? Would their children be taken from them? Given to strangers who are paid by you as a taxpayer? Would you send them to parent reform school before they could get them back?
As a related aside, my reader Guy tells me that the term 'rule of thumb' derived from the law that said a man couldn't beat his wife with any lash more narrow than his thumb. That answers the question, I think, of who has been given authority over the person taking primary responsibility for a child. And if the child is an oldest son, he has authority over the mother in primogeniture. Women were allowed to wear veils to show they were 'owned' by a father, brother or husband. Women without a veil could be raped at will, and wearing a veil without a male 'owner' made a woman subject to being stoned to death.
I grew up in the era of spanking and corporal punishment, which was inflicted by fathers in the home and nuns in the school. The trope was "Wait until your father gets home." So 'parentarchy' is really an oxymoron. -archy comes from archons or rulers, who could only be male. The pater familia had complete power over wives, children, servants and slaves.
In looking up which gender commits more child abuse, I first found the counterintuitive stat that it was women. And then I found this site that looks at that statistic: http://www.thelizlibrary.org/liz/statistics.html. It states: "90% of all children who are in the care of one caregiver are in the actual physical care of a woman (parent, grandparent, teacher, babysitter, day care provider, nurse, etc.), and that 10% are in the care of a man. (This is a conservative estimate.)" It then adjusts the statistics based on that and eliminating instances in the care of a couple, in which the woman would be charged with 'failure to protect.' The result is that a child in the care of a man is astronomically more likely to be the victim of abuse that in the care of a woman, when looking at active violence rather than minor instances of neglect.
If your objective is to reduce the amount of physical pain inflicted on children, the best thing you can do is enable mothers to securely care for their children without the need to depend on a man or, even more importantly, be forced to share custody without being present. Children belong to and with their mothers. Forcibly taking them away, through adoption, custody or mandatory employment inflicts the lifelong trauma of abandonment on an infant. If the child's well-being is your concern, protect the bond with the mother.
Hi Tereza, I appreciate your response. I will go into your words and reply to them directly there with my words under yours.
TEREZA CORAGGIO
Hi, Jack. I have some questions for your forum. Who should have authority over the person who takes primary responsibility for a child? My rule of thumb is that authority and responsibility should always go together.
JACK
Speaking as a Voluntaryist, no one or any collective such as government should
have any authority (defined as power over another person) over a parent (whether biological or adopted). So yes, I agree that always responsibility and authority should be synonymous—each individual should be “self-authorized”: only answer to one’s self and have no higher authority than one’s self.
TEREZA
But this seems to imply that there's a body of authority that should be over parents, that would take no direct responsibility for the children, but would set the rules for how parents needed to parent. And what would be the punishment to parents who don't obey this authority? Would their children be taken from them? Given to strangers who are paid by you as a taxpayer? Would you send them to parent reform school before they could get them back?
JACK
My answer above answers this. There never should be ANY authority higher than each individual, human self. No individual or collective has the moral right to use physical force over another person unless it is to save a human life.
TEREZA
As a related aside, my reader Guy tells me that the term 'rule of thumb' derived from the law that said a man couldn't beat his wife with any lash more narrow than his thumb. That answers the question, I think, of who has been given authority over the person taking primary responsibility for a child. And if the child is an oldest son, he has authority over the mother in primogeniture. Women were allowed to wear veils to show they were 'owned' by a father, brother or husband. Women without a veil could be raped at will, and wearing a veil without a male 'owner' made a woman subject to being stoned to death.
JACK
This “rule of thumb” did not start from domestic violence but has an interesting rather haphazard history https://allthatsinteresting.com/rule-of-thumb-origin . Again, my answers above apply here in that all of these patriarchal violent absurdities should be immoral and would never be permitted in my Voluntaryist society based on the Non-Aggression Principle (NAP).
TEREZA
I grew up in the era of spanking and corporal punishment, which was inflicted by fathers in the home and nuns in the school. The trope was "Wait until your father gets home." So 'parentarchy' is really an oxymoron. -archy comes from archons or rulers, who could only be male. The pater familia had complete power over wives, children, servants and slaves.
and while it appears most social groupings present and past were patriarchal ruled by males, as you know we have the word “matriarchy”--rule by females--and there have been, and continue to be, some groupings that were matriarchal.
The term “Patriarchy” came into existence 1560s
https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=patriarchy and the word was used politically from the 19th century increasingly into “feminism” circa 1970s to make “visible” what you are describing as the systemic, oppressive rule of men over women.
I am surprised/perplexed that you did not understand my neologism PARENTARCHY and how it reigns as the ELEPHANT IN THE WOMB (did you read all my Substack post?) which seems to show me even women/mothers/feminists like you do not SEE PARENTARCHY?!
So, no, I do not think my neologism “Parentarchy” is an oxymoron but a very much needed new word to make VISIBLE the destruction, systemic, taken-for-granted, power of parents over their offspring so that society at large will condemn such abuse of power as immoral and the main cause of human violence in the world—which is what my post is really about, see especially Lloyd deMause’s work.
My Voluntaryist neologism “Parentarchy’ like Feminist “Patriarchy” is meant to make morally visible to society what is, unfortunately, still far too ubiquitously invisible: the largely unconscious self-justification of parents granting themselves the moral right to treat their children as slaves and pets—e.g., to be morally justified to use first physical force upon their children as punishment—which is under the Voluntaryist NAP, immoral and criminal.
TEREZA
In looking up which gender commits more child abuse, I first found the counterintuitive stat that it was women. And then I found this site that looks at that statistic: thelizlibrary.org/liz/s…. It states: "90% of all children who are in the care of one caregiver are in the actual physical care of a woman (parent, grandparent, teacher, babysitter, day care provider, nurse, etc.), and that 10% are in the care of a man. (This is a conservative estimate.)" It then adjusts the statistics based on that and eliminating instances in the care of a couple, in which the woman would be charged with 'failure to protect.' The result is that a child in the care of a man is astronomically more likely to be the victim of abuse that in the care of a woman, when looking at active violence rather than minor instances of neglect.
If your objective is to reduce the amount of physical pain inflicted on children, the best thing you can do is enable mothers to securely care for their children without the need to depend on a man or, even more importantly, be forced to share custody without being present. Children belong to and with their mothers. Forcibly taking them away, through adoption, custody or mandatory employment inflicts the lifelong trauma of abandonment on an infant. If the child's well-being is your concern, protect the bond with the mother.
JACK
Yes, agree. And this is the ongoing focus of many of my Substack posts with Lloyd deMause references especially this one
“The rate of innovation in cultural evolution is determined by the conditions for parental love and therefore increase in individual self-assertion in each society, all cultural evolutions being preceded by a childrearing evolution. The locus of psychogenic evolution has historically been affected far more by maternal than paternal influence--indeed, entirely maternal in the crucial first nine months of life…. It has mainly been the mothers who have produced epigenetic novelty; so to discover the laws of cultural evolution one must “follow the mothers” through history. This is why only the psychogenic theory posits that for most of history women and children are the ultimate source of historical change.”
----
And I end with dear Ralph no less than Waldo Emerson:
“Men are what their mothers made them.”
I agree.
I was very fortunate to have Erna as my mother who gave me that trust in the world (before she died when I was 2 ½--her picture I face now as usual when I type this along with my Other Half, Katharine) and myself (see Erik Erikson in this post) that as Goethe knew:
“As you come to trust yourself, you will know how to live.”
And John Holt knew concerning children:
“To trust children we must first learn to trust ourselves…and most of us were taught as children that we could not be trusted.”
Looking forward to having you join us this weekend, your Saturday noonish, our NZ Sunday 9AM.
Jack, I'm so sorry you endured that tragic loss at 2 and a half. That breaks my heart.
You know, right, that we agree that every child is born with bodily sovereignty and the right to not have violations of the body is the most fundamental human right?
I don't think this is controversial in terms of corporal punishment in the US. Any parent who smacks their kid in public will be put on social media and villified. Public opinion is overwhelmingly against spanking in the US. It's not, however, criminalized as you are saying it should be, putting the State between the parent and the child.
I believe the only legitimate role of the State is to protect the sovereignty of communities. The only legitimate role of community governance is to protect the sovereignty of families. And the legitimate role of the father is to protect the mother so she can protect the children. That's my definition of tonic masculinity.
If the State is 'entrusted' with protecting the child from the mother, you've given up all sovereignty in favor of an 'authority' who you say cares more about the child than the mother.
And archy isn't just rule, it comes from the all-male body of rulers with a precise inheritance order. 'Matriarchy' is a reactionary word to patriarchy, which has been the law in Western civilization up until my generation. Mine is the first in which women are not fully dependent on a man in order to raise children. Instead, they've been forced to serve investor profits, just like men, and raise their children in their spare time. I don't see that as progress, and don't consider myself a feminist.
I'm not sure if I'll be free at noon but if I am, I'll join you. Thanks for the invite.
As a Voluntaryist I do not recognize the State except as a dangerous, immoral agency. Hitting children is criminal/immoral not because the State labels it so but because the NAP does.
For me, the State has NO legitimate role to play.
And as for the role of fathers it is not only to protect the mother--men should not be considered bodyguards only.
Archy as I pointed out before is simply rule by, power over and that can be, and is, done by both sexes.
Matriarchy is only a "reactionary" word if you are a "reactionary" ideologue which you seem to be here.
You seem to be against the Free Market as left collectivists are and while I agree mothers should choose to stay home with their child for the first 3 years I do not agree the State should step in as Welfare daddy and steal from others (tax) to support mothers to stay home.
Sorry, Jack, but I've decided I can't buy into this one ... there are less idiosyncratic and more useful ways of promoting the wellbeing of children which we both want. "Parentarchy," your neologism, has too many structural similarities for my comfort to the radical feminist "patriarchy" (as you noted yourself) and to academic disasters like critical race theory, in its claiming to see "hidden" discriminatory and by implication immoral structures of domination.
What is wrong with the radical feminist claim is its assumption that men and women are pretty much interchangeable and are fundamentally the same cognitively (except when it is convenient for them not to be). They aren't, which is why we'll never see "parity" between men and women in fields like engineering, computer science, or in the military. "Systemic racism" has parallel problems.... The reason blacks will complain about being watched in stores (for example) while whites aren't is simple: statistically blacks commit more crimes than whites: more shoplifting, more assaults, etc. It's not "racism" to be systemically alert to this sort of thing, it's common sense.
There just aren't any good reasons to credit those academic constructions, and the same is true of "parentarchy," I would argue.
It assumes that children are fundamentally rational agents equal to adults and capable of understanding abstractions like the NAP, when (with possibly very rare and precocious exceptions) they aren't.
So what can we do instead if we want to promote children's wellbeing?
I've gotten into a little of this in our talks, and I think, in previous posts. We all come into the world the same way: naked, crying, helpless. We're either nurtured or we die (research you drew to my attention substantiates this). So that's where peaceful parenting would have to begin. I tried to elicit a few principles out of the discussion and got the usual "no initiation of physical force" (verbal or structural force?) or "no domination" but absent specifics.
As I observed, you're not going to be able to reason with a 2-year-old; the most you can do is stimulate her senses by whatever means you can make available; and as her command of language grows, you can begin to communicate right from wrong, that certain behaviors are desirable because they are safe; while others are not, either because they are unsafe or they do not respect the rights of others. I don't see how to do this by presenting inductive and deductive arguments the child will not be able to grasp. Parents should serve as examples. If they give their children love, their children will learn what love is. If children see violence, they will learn to be violent. Which seems to me the primary argument against corporeal punishment.
I'm not a parent, though, never have been, probably never will be. So maybe I'm missing something. I have been able to observe Gisela's niece's 2-and-a-half year old on a few occasions, including the meltdowns when the girl would be lying on the floor screaming (why some folks refer to the "terrible twos"!).
Here's what's bothering me: the relative decline of stable families in the West, caused by factors that have nothing to do with whether or not parents are illicitly dominating children. Families, to the extent they've survived, are being severely stressed right now.
How I see things (a Bigger Picture, I had this outlined the day of our meeting but was unable to refer to it): there are at least seven requirements of a healthy, sustainable civilization:
(1) Affordable energy.
(2) Affordable housing.
(3) Abundant healthy food.
(4) Affordable healthcare.
(5) A strong and stable family unit. (I'd italicize that but I don't know how to do it in a Substack comment.)
(6) A means by which to educate the next generation, so what has been learned can be passed on.
(7) A stable and therefore reliable currency.
Perhaps the fact that *none* of these presently exist in America is something we ought to have a conversation about (?). Is "the state" to blame? I'm increasingly skeptical of that point of view because we had more of each, in the U.S. anyway, when we had a mixed economy (e.g., in the 1950s, 1960s). When American (especially American corporations) embraced the neoliberal economics of, say, Milton Friedman, these all started to disappear. Read Part 2 of my "Three Existential Threats" essay.
Although I know you won't agree with me and will try to psychoanalyze it away, I wish you would reconsider the Biblical family, as discussed in Ephesians 6:1-4, Colossians 3:20-21, Psalm 127:3-5; I Timothy 3:4-5, 5:8; and elsewhere. The Biblical family situates the father as the head of the household, but his position is laden with responsibility; it is *not* a license to treat his wife and his children in any way he sees fit. If anything, the Biblical view directly implies that the Christian worldview condemns every form of child abuse and child neglect.
It's an aside, but whether our conversations are going in any direction likely to bear fruit seems to me a valid question at this point. I have some major decisions to make in the year ahead ... Gisela's and my living arrangements, whether we move to the U.S., what we do when we arrive there, and so on. None of these "free friends" conversations are contributing anything helpful.
The fact that I keep running into stories like this one leaves me disconcerted about the wisdom of such a move:
I suspect that whatever the official statement on her death certificate, she really died from isolation and a broken heart! This was someone who had contributed to the system she trusted, and when she ceased to be able to serve the system economically (i.e., help an employer get richer), she was thrown to the wolves.
Neoliberal (materialist) civilization is fundamentally atomizing and dehumanizing, laden with structures fundamentally destructive of families, much less helpful to children. Parents are more likely to lash out at their children if they are suffering from the stress of working at two jobs each to keep food on the table and a roof over their heads, in addition to whatever debts they may have accrued (student loans?).
In other words, there's a larger context here, Jack. Your concept of "parentarchy" drops this context and treats the idea that children have "rights" in the abstract (being rational homunculi in miniature), which is unhelpful.
I may have to bow out of further weekend conversations, for a different reason though, if that fellow Leonard is now a member of the group. He was arrogant to the point of obnoxious! Both of you were rude to Teresa (is that her who posted elsewhere in here??). I think that's why she said she found the discussion useless and left. She was making what I thought were sensible points, and they surely seemed to be based on her personal experience of successfully raising three daughters (if I'm remembering right) who are now successfully raising their own children. Although I'd have to allow her to develop more of her ideas uninterrupted to be sure, they seemed at least compatible with the Biblical model.
The point being, though, if you lay abstractions against concrete results, the results are going to win out, every time.
Both of you were trying to do that. For me, that was when the conversation went sideways.
As I noted, people respond to incentives (and disincentives) ... unless they figure out that they're being incentivized, decide it's not in their best interest, and work to thwart or avoid the incentivizing systems. This includes children, who may not be little wind-up toys, but neither are they Cartesian-Kantian homunculi of pure intellect (one doesn't have to be, or have been, a parent, to grasp that; it's common sense). You have to acknowledge that it's not all or nothing, and that how to proceed is going to be different for different children because they're wired differently. This was the point I was trying to make (not very well, I was too flustered by that time) before Leonard called me a relativist, said a couple of other things I took as insulting, and I decided to bow out at the next opportunity.
I appreciate your perceptions, Stephen, particularly "if you lay abstractions against concrete results, the results are going to win out, every time." If that conversation had only stayed between the four of us, it would still feel worthwhile that one other person got what I was trying to say. And that's remarkable because, as you point out, I was never allowed to develop my ideas beyond the one line. And while my daughters have said they would use the same system to raise their kids, they haven't yet had a chance to try that out. But I look forward to that in the not-too-distant future.
I have, however, put that exchange into a post of my own here: https://thirdparadigm.substack.com/p/is-parenting-an-abuse-of-power. It helped that Jack sent me the transcript of 'the polite challenge Leonard posed for you,' which you and my readers recognized as arrogant, obnoxious and rude. I agree with you completely about the systemic challenges to parents, which is my primary topic in economics. There are many warm and intriguing comments in the thread.
Again, thank you. It was an unexpected delight to follow one of my readers back to here and find I had been heard. I may have inadvertently shouted 'Miracle!' at the computer and startled the neighbors ;-)
Well-said overall. As a lifelong youth rights activist myself, I agree. And this is what we in the youth rights movement call "adulto-patriarchy", the intersection of adultism and patriarchy.
What I am hoping to do with this new word "Parentarchy" is to show the invisibility of humanity's acceptance of power of parents over children as acceptable and unchallenged. Just as slavery was once acceptable and then finally became considered immoral, so I hope government and parentarchy will become likewise unacceptably immoral.
And now the problem of parentarchy seems to be coming back with a vengeance (albeit in more subtle, postmodern drag) in recent years, after it appeared to be on the wane.
Well-said
Hi, Jack. I have some questions for your forum. Who should have authority over the person who takes primary responsibility for a child? My rule of thumb is that authority and responsibility should always go together. But this seems to imply that there's a body of authority that should be over parents, that would take no direct responsibility for the children, but would set the rules for how parents needed to parent. And what would be the punishment to parents who don't obey this authority? Would their children be taken from them? Given to strangers who are paid by you as a taxpayer? Would you send them to parent reform school before they could get them back?
As a related aside, my reader Guy tells me that the term 'rule of thumb' derived from the law that said a man couldn't beat his wife with any lash more narrow than his thumb. That answers the question, I think, of who has been given authority over the person taking primary responsibility for a child. And if the child is an oldest son, he has authority over the mother in primogeniture. Women were allowed to wear veils to show they were 'owned' by a father, brother or husband. Women without a veil could be raped at will, and wearing a veil without a male 'owner' made a woman subject to being stoned to death.
I grew up in the era of spanking and corporal punishment, which was inflicted by fathers in the home and nuns in the school. The trope was "Wait until your father gets home." So 'parentarchy' is really an oxymoron. -archy comes from archons or rulers, who could only be male. The pater familia had complete power over wives, children, servants and slaves.
In looking up which gender commits more child abuse, I first found the counterintuitive stat that it was women. And then I found this site that looks at that statistic: http://www.thelizlibrary.org/liz/statistics.html. It states: "90% of all children who are in the care of one caregiver are in the actual physical care of a woman (parent, grandparent, teacher, babysitter, day care provider, nurse, etc.), and that 10% are in the care of a man. (This is a conservative estimate.)" It then adjusts the statistics based on that and eliminating instances in the care of a couple, in which the woman would be charged with 'failure to protect.' The result is that a child in the care of a man is astronomically more likely to be the victim of abuse that in the care of a woman, when looking at active violence rather than minor instances of neglect.
If your objective is to reduce the amount of physical pain inflicted on children, the best thing you can do is enable mothers to securely care for their children without the need to depend on a man or, even more importantly, be forced to share custody without being present. Children belong to and with their mothers. Forcibly taking them away, through adoption, custody or mandatory employment inflicts the lifelong trauma of abandonment on an infant. If the child's well-being is your concern, protect the bond with the mother.
Hi Tereza, I appreciate your response. I will go into your words and reply to them directly there with my words under yours.
TEREZA CORAGGIO
Hi, Jack. I have some questions for your forum. Who should have authority over the person who takes primary responsibility for a child? My rule of thumb is that authority and responsibility should always go together.
JACK
Speaking as a Voluntaryist, no one or any collective such as government should
have any authority (defined as power over another person) over a parent (whether biological or adopted). So yes, I agree that always responsibility and authority should be synonymous—each individual should be “self-authorized”: only answer to one’s self and have no higher authority than one’s self.
TEREZA
But this seems to imply that there's a body of authority that should be over parents, that would take no direct responsibility for the children, but would set the rules for how parents needed to parent. And what would be the punishment to parents who don't obey this authority? Would their children be taken from them? Given to strangers who are paid by you as a taxpayer? Would you send them to parent reform school before they could get them back?
JACK
My answer above answers this. There never should be ANY authority higher than each individual, human self. No individual or collective has the moral right to use physical force over another person unless it is to save a human life.
TEREZA
As a related aside, my reader Guy tells me that the term 'rule of thumb' derived from the law that said a man couldn't beat his wife with any lash more narrow than his thumb. That answers the question, I think, of who has been given authority over the person taking primary responsibility for a child. And if the child is an oldest son, he has authority over the mother in primogeniture. Women were allowed to wear veils to show they were 'owned' by a father, brother or husband. Women without a veil could be raped at will, and wearing a veil without a male 'owner' made a woman subject to being stoned to death.
JACK
This “rule of thumb” did not start from domestic violence but has an interesting rather haphazard history https://allthatsinteresting.com/rule-of-thumb-origin . Again, my answers above apply here in that all of these patriarchal violent absurdities should be immoral and would never be permitted in my Voluntaryist society based on the Non-Aggression Principle (NAP).
TEREZA
I grew up in the era of spanking and corporal punishment, which was inflicted by fathers in the home and nuns in the school. The trope was "Wait until your father gets home." So 'parentarchy' is really an oxymoron. -archy comes from archons or rulers, who could only be male. The pater familia had complete power over wives, children, servants and slaves.
JACK
Yes, I study etymology and “archon” means, neutrally, “to rule” https://www.etymonline.com/word/archon
and while it appears most social groupings present and past were patriarchal ruled by males, as you know we have the word “matriarchy”--rule by females--and there have been, and continue to be, some groupings that were matriarchal.
The term “Patriarchy” came into existence 1560s
https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=patriarchy and the word was used politically from the 19th century increasingly into “feminism” circa 1970s to make “visible” what you are describing as the systemic, oppressive rule of men over women.
I am surprised/perplexed that you did not understand my neologism PARENTARCHY and how it reigns as the ELEPHANT IN THE WOMB (did you read all my Substack post?) which seems to show me even women/mothers/feminists like you do not SEE PARENTARCHY?!
So, no, I do not think my neologism “Parentarchy” is an oxymoron but a very much needed new word to make VISIBLE the destruction, systemic, taken-for-granted, power of parents over their offspring so that society at large will condemn such abuse of power as immoral and the main cause of human violence in the world—which is what my post is really about, see especially Lloyd deMause’s work.
My Voluntaryist neologism “Parentarchy’ like Feminist “Patriarchy” is meant to make morally visible to society what is, unfortunately, still far too ubiquitously invisible: the largely unconscious self-justification of parents granting themselves the moral right to treat their children as slaves and pets—e.g., to be morally justified to use first physical force upon their children as punishment—which is under the Voluntaryist NAP, immoral and criminal.
TEREZA
In looking up which gender commits more child abuse, I first found the counterintuitive stat that it was women. And then I found this site that looks at that statistic: thelizlibrary.org/liz/s…. It states: "90% of all children who are in the care of one caregiver are in the actual physical care of a woman (parent, grandparent, teacher, babysitter, day care provider, nurse, etc.), and that 10% are in the care of a man. (This is a conservative estimate.)" It then adjusts the statistics based on that and eliminating instances in the care of a couple, in which the woman would be charged with 'failure to protect.' The result is that a child in the care of a man is astronomically more likely to be the victim of abuse that in the care of a woman, when looking at active violence rather than minor instances of neglect.
JACK
Great new research resource, LizNotes, thank you! Yes, knew about the misuse of the rough statistics that show more women than men commits child abuse/neglect. I mainly agree with Ashley Montague (The Natural Superiority of Women https://www.amazon.com.au/dp/076198982X?ref_=mr_referred_us_au_nz ) and Melvin Konner (Women After All: Sex, Evolution, and the End of Male Supremacy https://www.amazon.com.au/Women-After-All-Evolution-Supremacy-ebook/dp/B00L3KQ3PC ) that society at large would be better guided to Voluntaryism through the female portal and Peaceful Parenting.
TEREZA
If your objective is to reduce the amount of physical pain inflicted on children, the best thing you can do is enable mothers to securely care for their children without the need to depend on a man or, even more importantly, be forced to share custody without being present. Children belong to and with their mothers. Forcibly taking them away, through adoption, custody or mandatory employment inflicts the lifelong trauma of abandonment on an infant. If the child's well-being is your concern, protect the bond with the mother.
JACK
Yes, agree. And this is the ongoing focus of many of my Substack posts with Lloyd deMause references especially this one
https://responsiblyfree.substack.com/p/from-men-and-women-going-their-own where I quote Lloyd
“The rate of innovation in cultural evolution is determined by the conditions for parental love and therefore increase in individual self-assertion in each society, all cultural evolutions being preceded by a childrearing evolution. The locus of psychogenic evolution has historically been affected far more by maternal than paternal influence--indeed, entirely maternal in the crucial first nine months of life…. It has mainly been the mothers who have produced epigenetic novelty; so to discover the laws of cultural evolution one must “follow the mothers” through history. This is why only the psychogenic theory posits that for most of history women and children are the ultimate source of historical change.”
----
And I end with dear Ralph no less than Waldo Emerson:
“Men are what their mothers made them.”
I agree.
I was very fortunate to have Erna as my mother who gave me that trust in the world (before she died when I was 2 ½--her picture I face now as usual when I type this along with my Other Half, Katharine) and myself (see Erik Erikson in this post) that as Goethe knew:
“As you come to trust yourself, you will know how to live.”
And John Holt knew concerning children:
“To trust children we must first learn to trust ourselves…and most of us were taught as children that we could not be trusted.”
Looking forward to having you join us this weekend, your Saturday noonish, our NZ Sunday 9AM.
Get free, stay free.
Jack, I'm so sorry you endured that tragic loss at 2 and a half. That breaks my heart.
You know, right, that we agree that every child is born with bodily sovereignty and the right to not have violations of the body is the most fundamental human right?
I don't think this is controversial in terms of corporal punishment in the US. Any parent who smacks their kid in public will be put on social media and villified. Public opinion is overwhelmingly against spanking in the US. It's not, however, criminalized as you are saying it should be, putting the State between the parent and the child.
I believe the only legitimate role of the State is to protect the sovereignty of communities. The only legitimate role of community governance is to protect the sovereignty of families. And the legitimate role of the father is to protect the mother so she can protect the children. That's my definition of tonic masculinity.
If the State is 'entrusted' with protecting the child from the mother, you've given up all sovereignty in favor of an 'authority' who you say cares more about the child than the mother.
And archy isn't just rule, it comes from the all-male body of rulers with a precise inheritance order. 'Matriarchy' is a reactionary word to patriarchy, which has been the law in Western civilization up until my generation. Mine is the first in which women are not fully dependent on a man in order to raise children. Instead, they've been forced to serve investor profits, just like men, and raise their children in their spare time. I don't see that as progress, and don't consider myself a feminist.
I'm not sure if I'll be free at noon but if I am, I'll join you. Thanks for the invite.
Thanks for your care.
As a Voluntaryist I do not recognize the State except as a dangerous, immoral agency. Hitting children is criminal/immoral not because the State labels it so but because the NAP does.
For me, the State has NO legitimate role to play.
And as for the role of fathers it is not only to protect the mother--men should not be considered bodyguards only.
Archy as I pointed out before is simply rule by, power over and that can be, and is, done by both sexes.
Matriarchy is only a "reactionary" word if you are a "reactionary" ideologue which you seem to be here.
You seem to be against the Free Market as left collectivists are and while I agree mothers should choose to stay home with their child for the first 3 years I do not agree the State should step in as Welfare daddy and steal from others (tax) to support mothers to stay home.
I emailed you on our Zoom meeting.
Get free, stay free.
Sorry, Jack, but I've decided I can't buy into this one ... there are less idiosyncratic and more useful ways of promoting the wellbeing of children which we both want. "Parentarchy," your neologism, has too many structural similarities for my comfort to the radical feminist "patriarchy" (as you noted yourself) and to academic disasters like critical race theory, in its claiming to see "hidden" discriminatory and by implication immoral structures of domination.
What is wrong with the radical feminist claim is its assumption that men and women are pretty much interchangeable and are fundamentally the same cognitively (except when it is convenient for them not to be). They aren't, which is why we'll never see "parity" between men and women in fields like engineering, computer science, or in the military. "Systemic racism" has parallel problems.... The reason blacks will complain about being watched in stores (for example) while whites aren't is simple: statistically blacks commit more crimes than whites: more shoplifting, more assaults, etc. It's not "racism" to be systemically alert to this sort of thing, it's common sense.
There just aren't any good reasons to credit those academic constructions, and the same is true of "parentarchy," I would argue.
It assumes that children are fundamentally rational agents equal to adults and capable of understanding abstractions like the NAP, when (with possibly very rare and precocious exceptions) they aren't.
So what can we do instead if we want to promote children's wellbeing?
I've gotten into a little of this in our talks, and I think, in previous posts. We all come into the world the same way: naked, crying, helpless. We're either nurtured or we die (research you drew to my attention substantiates this). So that's where peaceful parenting would have to begin. I tried to elicit a few principles out of the discussion and got the usual "no initiation of physical force" (verbal or structural force?) or "no domination" but absent specifics.
As I observed, you're not going to be able to reason with a 2-year-old; the most you can do is stimulate her senses by whatever means you can make available; and as her command of language grows, you can begin to communicate right from wrong, that certain behaviors are desirable because they are safe; while others are not, either because they are unsafe or they do not respect the rights of others. I don't see how to do this by presenting inductive and deductive arguments the child will not be able to grasp. Parents should serve as examples. If they give their children love, their children will learn what love is. If children see violence, they will learn to be violent. Which seems to me the primary argument against corporeal punishment.
I'm not a parent, though, never have been, probably never will be. So maybe I'm missing something. I have been able to observe Gisela's niece's 2-and-a-half year old on a few occasions, including the meltdowns when the girl would be lying on the floor screaming (why some folks refer to the "terrible twos"!).
Here's what's bothering me: the relative decline of stable families in the West, caused by factors that have nothing to do with whether or not parents are illicitly dominating children. Families, to the extent they've survived, are being severely stressed right now.
How I see things (a Bigger Picture, I had this outlined the day of our meeting but was unable to refer to it): there are at least seven requirements of a healthy, sustainable civilization:
(1) Affordable energy.
(2) Affordable housing.
(3) Abundant healthy food.
(4) Affordable healthcare.
(5) A strong and stable family unit. (I'd italicize that but I don't know how to do it in a Substack comment.)
(6) A means by which to educate the next generation, so what has been learned can be passed on.
(7) A stable and therefore reliable currency.
Perhaps the fact that *none* of these presently exist in America is something we ought to have a conversation about (?). Is "the state" to blame? I'm increasingly skeptical of that point of view because we had more of each, in the U.S. anyway, when we had a mixed economy (e.g., in the 1950s, 1960s). When American (especially American corporations) embraced the neoliberal economics of, say, Milton Friedman, these all started to disappear. Read Part 2 of my "Three Existential Threats" essay.
Although I know you won't agree with me and will try to psychoanalyze it away, I wish you would reconsider the Biblical family, as discussed in Ephesians 6:1-4, Colossians 3:20-21, Psalm 127:3-5; I Timothy 3:4-5, 5:8; and elsewhere. The Biblical family situates the father as the head of the household, but his position is laden with responsibility; it is *not* a license to treat his wife and his children in any way he sees fit. If anything, the Biblical view directly implies that the Christian worldview condemns every form of child abuse and child neglect.
It's an aside, but whether our conversations are going in any direction likely to bear fruit seems to me a valid question at this point. I have some major decisions to make in the year ahead ... Gisela's and my living arrangements, whether we move to the U.S., what we do when we arrive there, and so on. None of these "free friends" conversations are contributing anything helpful.
The fact that I keep running into stories like this one leaves me disconcerted about the wisdom of such a move:
https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2024/12/27/living-solely-on-social-security-she-ended-up-homeless/77104827007/
I suspect that whatever the official statement on her death certificate, she really died from isolation and a broken heart! This was someone who had contributed to the system she trusted, and when she ceased to be able to serve the system economically (i.e., help an employer get richer), she was thrown to the wolves.
Neoliberal (materialist) civilization is fundamentally atomizing and dehumanizing, laden with structures fundamentally destructive of families, much less helpful to children. Parents are more likely to lash out at their children if they are suffering from the stress of working at two jobs each to keep food on the table and a roof over their heads, in addition to whatever debts they may have accrued (student loans?).
In other words, there's a larger context here, Jack. Your concept of "parentarchy" drops this context and treats the idea that children have "rights" in the abstract (being rational homunculi in miniature), which is unhelpful.
I may have to bow out of further weekend conversations, for a different reason though, if that fellow Leonard is now a member of the group. He was arrogant to the point of obnoxious! Both of you were rude to Teresa (is that her who posted elsewhere in here??). I think that's why she said she found the discussion useless and left. She was making what I thought were sensible points, and they surely seemed to be based on her personal experience of successfully raising three daughters (if I'm remembering right) who are now successfully raising their own children. Although I'd have to allow her to develop more of her ideas uninterrupted to be sure, they seemed at least compatible with the Biblical model.
The point being, though, if you lay abstractions against concrete results, the results are going to win out, every time.
Both of you were trying to do that. For me, that was when the conversation went sideways.
As I noted, people respond to incentives (and disincentives) ... unless they figure out that they're being incentivized, decide it's not in their best interest, and work to thwart or avoid the incentivizing systems. This includes children, who may not be little wind-up toys, but neither are they Cartesian-Kantian homunculi of pure intellect (one doesn't have to be, or have been, a parent, to grasp that; it's common sense). You have to acknowledge that it's not all or nothing, and that how to proceed is going to be different for different children because they're wired differently. This was the point I was trying to make (not very well, I was too flustered by that time) before Leonard called me a relativist, said a couple of other things I took as insulting, and I decided to bow out at the next opportunity.
I appreciate your perceptions, Stephen, particularly "if you lay abstractions against concrete results, the results are going to win out, every time." If that conversation had only stayed between the four of us, it would still feel worthwhile that one other person got what I was trying to say. And that's remarkable because, as you point out, I was never allowed to develop my ideas beyond the one line. And while my daughters have said they would use the same system to raise their kids, they haven't yet had a chance to try that out. But I look forward to that in the not-too-distant future.
I have, however, put that exchange into a post of my own here: https://thirdparadigm.substack.com/p/is-parenting-an-abuse-of-power. It helped that Jack sent me the transcript of 'the polite challenge Leonard posed for you,' which you and my readers recognized as arrogant, obnoxious and rude. I agree with you completely about the systemic challenges to parents, which is my primary topic in economics. There are many warm and intriguing comments in the thread.
Again, thank you. It was an unexpected delight to follow one of my readers back to here and find I had been heard. I may have inadvertently shouted 'Miracle!' at the computer and startled the neighbors ;-)
Food for thought:
https://rasavonwerder-william.blogspot.com/2025/01/smash-adulto-patriarchy-or-great-cosmic.html