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Friday, April 25, 2014

Societal Suicide

Suicides can be pretty versatile. You can shoot yourself or cut yourself. You can poison yourself or starve yourself. You can jump off a building or off a bridge or in front of a moving vehicle. You can do a whole host of things. The idea is to deprive your body of the essential elements required to continue living. One of the picturesque ways to do it is to swim out to sea. You see, pointing a gun at your head and pulling the trigger is, well, a bit unnerving even to the ardent suicide intendee. So a variety of methods are devised that make it ... easier. Distract yourself while you end your life. That kind of thing. So one way it has been done is to just start swimming. Now you can tell yourself, "I'm just going for a swim. I'm not killing myself." Eventually you will reach the limits of your endurance and be unable to change your course of action and you will drown. Success! (As long as "success" is defined as reaching one's goal of ending his or her life.)

So how would a society commit suicide? The same way, of course. Deprive the society of the essential elements required to continue, and a society will die. If the society does it to itself, it is suicide. And I would offer the opinion that we appear to be doing just that.

Take, for instance, the assault on morality. A moral code is absolutely essential to the continuation of a society. It has been said that "America is great because she is good, and if America ever ceases to be good, she will cease to be great."1 History tells us that corrupt societies fail miserably.

Key to any society at all is the bedrock component of the family. No society can exist without this element. Dismember the family and society ceases to exist. There is no more vital2 piece of society than family. Look what we're doing to thoroughly dismantle that part of society.

Begin, first, with pornography. In my youth we knew of one or two fellows who discovered their fathers' carefully hidden "stash" of Playboys. It was hidden. It was private. It was even shameful. Today, of course, it is open, public, embraced, even encouraged. It's even considered a "marital aid". What has our society embraced? Pornography teaches that men should function a particular way and women should function a particular way in the sexual encounter. The fact that nearly no one functions that way is irrelevant. The fact that functioning that way does serious damage to interpersonal relationships is beside the point. Our thorough defense and endorsement of porn is preparing young men and women to be complete failures in their sexual relationships ... from an early age.

Then there is the problem of dating. "Dating?" you ask. "How can that be a problem?" We've decided that this is the most logical and effective method of finding our "one true love" (something else we've assumed as true). So we teach each other to hunt for "what I want", use whatever or whoever you want in that process, toss those who don't measure up to "what I want", and move on until you get what you want ... maybe repeatedly. This is not conducive to "family".

So far we haven't even arrived at "family". Marriage hasn't occurred. And there is still more. Consider the notion of contraception. Before modern contraception -- the Pill -- sex outside of marriage was risky business. Public opinion, economics, and practicality suggested that sex should only occur in marriage so that any pregnancies would occur in marriage -- in a family situation. Enter contraception, and sex eventually became a recreational drug. Do it for fun; don't worry about consequences. Marriage? Why? Without even considering the ramifications of abortifacients that kill babies in the womb, we've removed the caution and stigma of children out of wedlock.

A large part of this assault on the family found its most powerful weapon in the 60's with the "free love" movement. Going along with the assault on morality, this movement argued, bolstered by contraceptives and dating, that sex should not be limited to marriage relationships. The radical shift that occurred from that point on has been nothing less than astounding. In a decade, "living together" went from shocking to accepted and in less than half of a century it became more the norm than the exception. A few years ago I remember getting an email sent to myself as well as other coworkers inviting us to a fellow worker's wedding. One coworker commented, "He said he has been saving himself for marriage; he hasn't had sex with her yet. Who does that? Does anyone do that? Is that even safe?" A long haul in a very short time from the biblical "sex should only occur in marriage" to the current alternative.

But, okay, we've trained people to expect all the wrong things in relationships via the glut and acceptance of porn, taught them to test and move on in dating, stripped off the whole problem of "sexual immorality" and its consequences, and still people get married. So, see? We haven't done any harm, right? No, the problem gets worse. We've introduced "no fault divorce", a quick and easy method to shred any existing marriage simply because "We don't want to be married anymore." "She's not living up to my expectations" -- you know, the faulty ones he garnered from the porn. "He's not meeting my needs" -- you know, the self-centered notions built by dating. And the phenomenal, "The kids will be better off if we part" ... instead of "The kids will be better off if we learn to get along." So we've managed to strip marriage of any genuine purpose and any real backbone and render the concept of a lifelong commitment as generally pointless.

Enter the final nail in the coffin. With family shredded and teetering on the edge, we've now managed to completely redefine ... normal. Well, "normal" as it relates to family. "Marriage" once meant -- always meant in every historical venue and every biblical location -- the union of a man and a woman for the purpose of mutual support and to procreate. No longer. We've factored in a new concept -- "gay marriage". This one has no "man and woman" requirement and no aim toward offspring. Coupled with the prior dismemberment of the concept with pornography, relationship-hopping, sex for recreation without consequences, and the transitory nature of any "marriage", it becomes likely a temporary relationship without any genuine sense of "monogamy" (now termed "mongamish"), and the whole thing becomes meaningless. Factor in the intrinsically related concept of "gender equality" -- that there is no difference in the genders -- and its consequent "sexual equality" -- there is no difference between sex with one gender or another -- and "family" is on the verge of vanishing in a puff of emotional logic. Today it includes unmarried couples, loosely related people, close friends, even the dog. It means nearly everything and, thus, almost nothing.

Bottom line: we've traded "family" for self-centeredness. "What I want" determines right and wrong, good and bad, the definitions of terms, and "what I will do". We're not killing ourselves; we're just going for a swim. And we slowly but surely remove ourselves from solid ground, food, shelter, safety ... life. It is societal suicide. It might not be intentional (I say "might"), but it appears inevitable.
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1 Attributed to Alexis de Tocqueville

2 Vital: 1) of or pertaining to life. 2) the source of life (e.g., "vital organs"). 3) necessary to life. Thus, "vital".

2 comments:

Marshal Art said...

Oh, it's not intentional, but it's happening nonetheless. The "intent" is to see a different consequence come to fruition, while insisting suicidal actions will achieve the goal intended. I think that's called "cognitive dissonance", but it looks like suicide in any case.

Stan said...

I don't know for sure, Marshall. I know that most aren't intending to dismantle society, but there are actually a few who are and others who, if they saw it, wouldn't mind. Mostly, though, the "I don't know that it's intentional" caveat was aimed at the god of this world. It is his intent ... one he has passed on to his followers.