The Secular Fundamentalist

The Entrenchment of Adolescence - The Modern Romeo & Juliet

Chapter 18: The Entrenchment of Adolescence - The Modern Romeo and Juliet

Recently, the eldest daughter of a younger cousin of mine had her thirteenth birthday.  This was much cause for huge celebrations of her teenyboperization on said younger cousin's Facebook page. Friends of the family came in with all the usual congratulations that one might expect on such an occasion.  "So happy to...Congratulations on...Best of luck for"...etc, etc.

Not yours truly.  When I wrote this, my youngest daughter was 18 and my oldest one 35, so in all conscience I could not possibly pretend to tell people what they want to hear on the extremely vexed subject of adolescence.  I am a battle scarred veteran with enough experience to know better.

So I sent them something of a fly in their swimmingly pleasantly birthday greetings ointment... I know: inappropriate.

"You could be under threat from ‘SLAPS’. ‘SLAPS’ you ask? Spoilt-Little-Adolescent-Princess-Syndrome.

They think they own the joint you live in and you are the stupid garcon who has to supply whatever is wanted and chop chop.  Massive sulks and cold shoulderings are part of their armamentarium, if they do not get what they want snappily enough, or you have the temerity to expect something of them.

The nice little girl you once thought you knew seems but a distant memory.

The Only Known Antidote is an unflappable lack of cooperation by way of systematic and ruthlessly enforced counter-demands, and a reputation for being a totally relentless and heartless bitch/bastard.

Mark this. To compromise with SLAPS is to be compromised.  'Flexibility' is more than likely weakness, or a nicely fudged version of it.

Success in meeting and beating SLAPS produces one of the most rewarding and heartwarming outcomes; respect.  The love will come later.  And it is a struggle you need to win, or you become that now well established and recognized phenomenon; the parental loser. And your darling one will never let you forget it.  If that happens, your value as a mentor and defender of your children’s interests flatlines.

Know what it is to be frankly regarded as a ridiculous pain.  Check out the not terribly well concealed eye rolling every time you open your mouth and dare to venture an opinion that isn't exactly synchronous with the dominant current-adolescent-consciousness. And they will still roll anyway, even if you get the answer right, because adults have no business getting it right!
 
Part of The Only Known Antidote is the prospect of highly ‘unreasonable’ and possibly traumatically unpleasant behavior. Ordinary reasonableness is no defense, because fundamentally, what is being negotiated is not reason, but power, authority and mentorship.
 
Rather than seeing themselves as humble absolute beginners who know next-to-nothing about anything to do with  life experience, they assume the absolute authority of their favorite opinion makers; you know, the slightly older kid down the street or as seen or heard  from whatever media source is drifting past at the time.

I am sure this advice is of no conceivable use or relevance.  This could never happen to you. And I am sure it won't because the love, good will and a willingness to meet your dearest one half way will conquer all.  Good luck."

Being Facebook, I had already trespassed on too much comment space and put far too much party pooping weight upon it, so I left it at that. But there was more that needed to be said. The measure of any social authority is its capacity to enforce its edicts.  Without clout, it is but an empty gesture that is only honored in the breach, if that.  So when one is put in that position, one has to be creative, or one surrenders meekly to the currently prevailing social forces.

The capacity to turn on incandescent rage is an art form that every SLAPS parent needs to acquire. I did not exercise this in my own life until my oldest daughter was around thirty, but it is never too late.  Her mother's accusations against me have been firmly implanted in her mind to the point that no rational discussion of the evidence for or the assumptions behind those accusations was possible.  I have worn these second hand recriminations since the girl was old enough to speak, and I finally completely and totally lost my temper.  It was a very salutary and attitude changing moment and it has improved our relationship beyond my wildest expectations.

There is nothing like standing up for yourself, but this particular tactic can only be used once and possibly twice in the lifetime of a relationship, so you have to really make each one count.  The third time it starts to lose its impact and can indicate weakness rather than strength. She will start to suspect you are a blustering paper tiger, which is exactly what you are, because the bodies of SLAP Syndromers are now sacrosanct, like the royal children of old.  As a parent, you are reduced to bluff and ranges of sanctions that will cost you more heartache and stress than anyone else; which brings us back to bluff.

You cannot lay hands on a SLAP, but you can use the modern equivalent of the whipping boy, who would take the punishment for the wrongdoings of his royal companion.

You demolish, rip, tear and throw their possessions and everything else around them in a monumental raging adult tantrum, because everything they own and use is paid for by you, and belongs to them at your discretion.  Damage to paintwork is good because it leaves a permanent reminder of what might happen if you are really provoked.  The smashing of reading light bulbs is particularly dramatic.  Scooping everything off a desk onto the floor looks spectacular. Pulling rubbish out of cupboards and spraying it round the room gives the scene a certain three dimensionality.
 
This massive piece of theatre can profit from some rehearsal because not only must the SLAP get a quite convincing impression of their world disintegrating around them, but it must be accompanied by a few well chosen words that express just how pissed off you are, what you expect generally and right now in terms of cleaning up, a timeline to do it and a promise of nothing short of the Wrath-of-God if it isn't done on time to your satisfaction. And then, as you exit, you slam the door of her room so hard, the foundations shake.

After months of being needled by this once delightful kid (but now arrogant little fop) the cathartic release that rage facilitates is truly satisfying in the deepest sense known to man or woman.  It also has the ineffably appropriate effect of creating an element of fear in your relationship; that you cannot be taken for granted; that while for most of the time you are an infinitely caring, loving and supportive parent, you can also get really ‘nasty’, if provoked far enough.

We temporarily live in era where parents and people entitled to some social authority don't get much regard.  Yes, one can be an empathic counselor or a hotshot salesperson and gain the confidence of a child that way, but once there needs to be a confrontation of any sort, and you need some clout, it doesn’t work for long and quickly unravels.  And if you avoid confrontation at all costs, the risk is becoming a servant surrounded by unresolved issues, rather than a parent who is on top of their child’s development towards becoming an adult.
 
A bit of courage, firmness and a capacity to go out onto a dramatic limb, can mean the difference between being an object of contempt whose word carries no weight, and being a person of substance in the life of your child, who can actually help them when they really need it, because they will listen to you, even if they don't agree, or like what you are saying.

That does not mean that positive role modeling and mentoring isn’t important, but without clout as well, it only works when the going is good, or kept good by a process of well constructed political retreat/avoidance that makes a virtue of the necessity.

Social governance is under threat from consumerist ideology and human rights lobbies bent on making parental power and social authority obsolete and allowing the power vacuum to be filled by messages from the sponsors, the cults of media personality and the commercially controlled peer group.  However, while getting parental order and discipline into a domestic household has been made unnecessarily difficult, it is not impossible, once you recognize why and how the game has been stacked against you.

You cease to be a mystified and floundering Dorkasaur who cannot see what is being done to you and especially your children, who are completely defenseless against scientifically researched and administered propaganda and a product and service placement system more powerful and savvy than anything the communist or fascist dictatorships of the past could have ever thrown at them.

Today, were he alive, Joseph Goebbels, Hitler's formidable propaganda Reichminister, would have to go back to propaganda school to even get a sniff at a job in the modern advertising and public relations industries.

Be warned, when one’s children reach their adolescence, they are ready to be taken from one by the Pied Pipers of Cool, in collaboration with a small but influential group of libertarian and laissez-faire social de-regulators.  They have been allowed to colonize our social welfare, legal and educational systems in return for delivering a radically stripped down all rights and no responsibilities version of the ideas of The Enlightenment.  The result is very high compliance to the Cult of Cool and a very nasty and dysfunctional social mess within our inherited system of reproductive and social governance.

As parents, we are not helpless and can call the bluff of this state of affairs, but one needs to be very clear and savvy on how one will do that because otherwise we end up being ‘the problem’ and made to look like unreasonable and misguided clowns.  Our system of social management doesn’t ‘call in’ nonconformists and regime opponents for ‘a chat’ with the local security police. It just marginalizes them indirectly, using the children, peer social networks, media and advertising pressure, and directly through the disabling power of social welfare authorities.  The carpet gets pulled out from under them, and down they go. And then they really do find out just how powerless they really are.

Systematically and relentlessly the children are colonized, even more effectively than they were under the the Nazis (Hitler Youth) and Communists (Young Pioneers and Red Guards).  The lack of state intervention makes the whole process look ‘spontaneous’ and ‘natural’, and the social disorder it creates, normal.  And if we are insufficiently armed and lack confidence and/or courage, then ‘flexibility’ is the only option.  This has strengthened the marketing controllers, ideological arbiters and social welfare authorities and weakened mass populations, so that they can be effectively controlled while appearing to be ‘free’ agents.

They are anything but, which brings me back to SLAPS.  Spoilt Little Adolescent Princess Syndrome is not really just a product of poor parenting so much as a deliberate and protracted inter-generational policy thrust by markets to disable anything that can get in the way of unlimited consumption of goods and services.  And adolescence is their most important, vulnerable and profitable training ground for that project.  Parents potentially get in the road of that, which is why they get to be systematically nobbled in their attempts to govern their children and why their children seem to somehow and quite undeservedly, have so much credibility and quasi-adult standing.

The brutal fact is that parents need to be converted into instruments of the consumer paradigm, by becoming supine providers for the aspirations and fantasies of their little ‘Consumerbabelets’.

Moral precepts by themselves cannot be used as weapons in this struggle, unless the user wants to end up the same way as the traditionalists who first had to confront the libertarian marketing system, with the damned things hung round their necks like albatrosses.  Morality magically became the ‘thin-lipped-balding-with-glasses-repressive-authoritarian-moralizing-and-judgmentality’ of the old and foolhardy.  We could no longer define our moral space.  There were no clear, let alone defensible boundaries left, so we were lost before we could even begin. There was effective moral silence.  Feel good was good and excuse making became the dominant form of what was left of moral discourse.  And that was that.

I hate excuses because the people under the most pressure, with the best reasons to use and the fewest resources both material and personal to resist, are the ones at most risk, most quickly and most damningly!

The poor, the marginalized, the willfully rebellious and the ethnically and gender oppressed are all the more victimized by the claims of victim status and the cloying self-help defeating sympathy that comes with it. Their condition already brings out enough of the worst in them without that as well.  Instead of honestly focusing on overcoming obstacles and being trained and disciplined into genuinely empowering behavior, they are taught to become expert at every kind of deceitful rationalization.

Their failure, poor behavior and dysfunctional values are denied, smoothed away and not their fault. If it were their fault, they didn’t mean it.  If they did, they couldn't help it.  If they could, it seemed like a good idea at the time, because everyone else was doing it.  Even if it weren't, it was just ill luck that it turned out badly.  And they have to be cut a bit of slack, because hell, they are 'disadvantaged' and/or 'misunderstood' poor things who need uncritical empathy rather than be held to account.

No one is responsible because shit happens.  ‘Accidents’ and lack of foresight are an inevitable part of life that has to be endured rather than dealt with.  Effective management is always just out of reach because no one is prepared for really tough confrontations that hold people to account, with no wriggle room.
 
I hate excuses, particularly from the young, who should look to us for truthful guidance.  They are completely at our mercy for what we give them to conduct their lives.  They are cruelly betrayed at their very beginnings by a culture of excuse making.

The people who indulge excuses become complicit accessories to the lies and evasions that that every excuse carries. Worse, the indulger’s complicity in the pretence of others meshes very neatly into their own pattern of lying and evasion, whereby they can pass it off as ‘fairness’ and ‘justice’ which then becomes the standard for all to use. Thus fairness and justice, which should be priceless treasures in any culture, become leering parodies to mock us in ours.

Those who have the temerity not to indulge excuse making therefore have to deal with people who have come to expect that their excuses are legitimate.  Ergo, anyone who denies this is by definition 'unfair'.
 
Ethical articulation and firmness is seen to be ‘moralizing’, 'inflexible' and 'judgmental'. ‘Moralizing is not considered to be about virtue and goodness.  'Flexibility' is not seen as weakness.  'Judgmentality' is not considered to be the simple exercise of judgment.

No one is allowed to question the culture of indulgence.  Moral authority is denied.  Even if it isn't, no one has the stature to presume to know what it is, or how it applies.  Paralysis rules.

Calling the bluff of people who have long been allowed to get away with poor behavior and shoddy values involves a lot of protest and indignation, especially if they have become culturally institutionalized.  Corruption of this kind has a way of ganging up on anyone who challenges it.

Coming to grips with corruption always has to end in a fight, because no one willingly gives up illicit gains.  And corrupt practice always has powerful friends.  Anyone who confronts it is putting a lot on the line and can so easily lose.

In the real world, making moral stands can make one look marginalized and foolish,  One may have to learn to hold one's tongue, and very careful when using it.

But the principles that moral precept encapsulate do provide critical defensive armor and the basis for a strategy to take back the initiative.  If we construct them not as abstract ‘beliefs’, but concrete bottom line outcomes against which the status quo can be measured and found wanting. And if we can set against the status quo a vision of a society determined to recover the reasonable regulatory and accounting mechanisms and disciplines we would expect from any healthy and profitable human industry, then we have weapons we can fight with.
 
The libertarians are the status quo.  They are the ones with a sixty to seventy year record to defend.  And what they did to their predecessors, we can do to them.  They are the ones who are now ripe for attack.

Nowhere in the economic realm (except at the ideological corporatist ‘fringe’) is naked laissez-faire libertarianism tolerated for reasons so obvious they no longer need to be explained or defended.  So why do we tolerate it in our social organization and the most important industry we have and the reason why society exists; our system of social reproduction and the children who pass through its halls, to carry our enterprises and hopes into the future?

Once we understand how the game is being played against us, then assemble our moral precepts and attack strategy, and take the courage to confront the beast, we become at last real free agents. Then at least we have some chance of saving our children from the totalitarian tyrants of our day. And they are all the more tyrants because they can so dominate the collective consciousness through privately owned mechanisms, mass populations no longer require supervision through state control.
 
Behind our system of formal democratic governance is an informal one that is practically invisible and much more powerful.  You won't find it except in the shadows of the corridors of democratic power, because it affects an anonymous, multi institutional, privately or corporately owned, ‘apolitical’ in character, organizations that hardly anyone has ever heard of, or would take any notice of if they had; ‘think tanks’, ‘foundations’, ‘institutes’ PR firms, advertising agencies, lobbyists and marketers.  Trade, industry and professional peak organizations are just the attachment points for a web that weaves complex yet almost seamless reality algorithms for the masses, who have been handed over, lock, stock and barrel, to the tender mercies of the ‘proud sponsors’.

Then there are the plethora of relentless, noisy and politically savvy pressure groups, which are very good at leveraging opinion media with the passionate sound bite, slogans and easily digestible opinion pieces. Drip, drip, drip...

It is only right now beginning to dawn on more than the usual critics that most western media organizations are not just ‘news’ and ‘entertainment’ disseminators, so much as propaganda organs that run very large and well organized agendas using personality cults and pervasive message repetition, in exactly the same way as would have been found in Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union and Red China.  Only the state intervention is missing.  State intervention is so obsolete.
 
Newscorp is a good example of the genre.  Guys like the ‘controversial’ Andrew Bolt, who byline for Newscorp’s Melbourne Herald-Sun, works in exactly the same way as the party line hacks who used to scribble for state sponsored rags like ‘Der Sturmer’, ‘Pravda’ and ‘The Peoples’ Daily’.

Nor would it normally occur to anyone that the best way to disable individuals and destroy their viability as characters is to shower them with rights without first teaching them the underlying disciplines that give life to those rights and make sense of them as empowering agencies.  In the world of Orwellian doublespeak, freedom becomes slavery through the agency of permissive license to indulge whims and desires that enthrall and disempower the victim, only this time not to a political Big Brother dictatorship, but one that never discloses itself as such.
 
Human rights seem so right, legitimate, compassionate, humane, fair, 'progressive' and whathaveyou, that only those in league with dark forces could possibly oppose them.  Calling the bluff of this freedomspeak requires some courage and a deep conviction that these claims are ideological bluff, crib and fudge.
 
In the real world, no one gets anything for nothing.  Freebies always cost, somewhere. And with human rights, particularly for children, the price is delivering them to the marketplace without internal controls that can filter and block the messages from the sponsors.  The consumer economy no longer needs disciplined and responsible citizens.  It wants unfettered consumers. That is the price, and it is a very, very high one.  The spoilt child undermines the adult and gives the larger society a nasty dose of I.I.D. (intergenerational infantile disorder).

But of course, it isn't really that simple or easy, because we no longer have readymade parental governance templates to guide us in our joint collaboration as parents.  When the old fashioned patriarchal templates were thrown out, they were not replaced, at least inside the family.  This means that even the most thorough and sincere preparation against the identified threat can come to nothing. I speak of my own experience as a father and husband.

My dear and beloved wife suffered an oppressive tyrant for a father.  Her upbringing was extremely restrictive and she not only deeply resented it, it left scars.  This has made her untrusting of not just individual men, but the male zeitgeist.  This has also made not only male authority, but any authority, something of an anathema, as well as anything one needs to do to conserve and enhance it, whether that authority be wielded by male or female.  So she has no concept of protecting it, or maintaining any sort of parental common front.  If she were critical of me for some reason, she had no thought to edit this away from our daughter, who might interpret this criticism as a diminution of my standing as a parent in her eyes.

Children really do not understand the complex underlying dynamics of adult relationships and shouldn’t be exposed to them until they are mature enough to appreciate all the variables and nuances from all sides in the equation.  What they really need until then is predictable and secure stock characters who deliver loving nurturance and discipline within easily and well understood management parameters.

My beloved wife is very deft in gaining trust, cooperation, collaborative outcomes and deflecting conflict with everyone (except me), even if it means not confronting more difficult and intractable issues that perhaps should be confronted.  There is a fine line between the wisdom of waiting and avoidance.  For all those excellent reasons, she has always got on with my dear daughter very well, unaddressed issues notwithstanding.  And because I do trust her judgment, I have always given her the benefit of the doubt, even when beset with it.

I on the other hand, am not so adept, am less flexible and more up front demanding in what I expect of others, including my daughter (but not my wife).  So I became unpopular and judged hard for being ‘unreasonable’, even in very small things.  If I tried to dig my heels in on some issue, I got no support, and was made to look...foolish and petty.  This has made me very diminished in the eyes of my daughter, which has caused me some pain and damaged our relationship.

Much of my potential value as a father was demolished.  All that was left was a buffoon and a caricature that others had to ‘put up with’.  And while that may in some ways have been an appropriate reflection on certain parts of my character, under any regime with even a shred of good governance to it, it would never have allowed that caricature to be so brutally and persistently drawn, because it would be clear to everyone how deleterious to the family governance system and the children this would be.

It is quite appropriate for an adult ‘child’ to regard his or her father as a fool, if the evidence that would be persuasive to him or her and any other reasonable and disinterested adult, would suggest he is.  But the child and adolescent hardly have even the beginnings of that kind of capacity for mature reflection and critical evaluation.  To give them precocious knowledge almost invariably gives them a false view of the world and the problem of having to unlearn it later, or worse carry inappropriate modeling of adult behavior into the next generation.

I do not blame my wife for that, for she is an honest and decent person who has always acted sincerely from her beliefs and emotional instincts, but it has had consequences.  On finishing her schooling, our daughter took a gap year to live away from home, work and explore her options. She wanted to return home when she returned to her studies, but neither of her parents really wanted her back.  Besides her conflicts with me, she hadn't developed the habit of pulling her weight in our household, which made her something of a burden.  It is quite nice not having to put up with her, or the political complications that her presence would bring into the relationship with my wife.  And the very sad thing was that that was not her fault.  There was no culture in our household of establishing, common fronting and enforcing bottom lines.

I am not suggesting that said daughter isn't a very decent individual, and certainly, she has learned many of her mother’s fine attributes, that I am sure will always stand her in very good stead, but, as a father, I see absolutely nothing of myself in her, because I don’t think there is anything.

I really am not into blaming because these things come out of a complex interaction of characters, their political dynamic and the larger politic that informs them, and much of that just can’t be helped.  And it doesn't make me love them any less.  But what it does draw attention to is the lack of an overarching parenting template that could provide a solid foundation to the almost always problematic relationships of men and women and their children.  Had we had something like that to slot into, with some solid rules of engagement underpinning it, we might have had a more secured, easier, more gender balanced and productive relationships, with better quality family outcomes at the end.

That wouldn’t mean that exactly the same internal tensions in our relationships wouldn’t have been there.  But a good management system would have tended to optimize the productive and lessened the deleterious.

Part of what has been going on in my own family is representative of a process of transferring the locus of social authority that ultimately depends on the use of power to enforce its edicts, towards a market ‘selling model.  Traditional authority has been rendered semi-obsolescent by gradual internal loss of confidence and collapse, and heavy negative external pressure.  The real locus of control and domination is now exercised through very cutting edge ‘political’ technology; the ever expanding inventory of goods and services and its distributional services sector.
 
The new social and cultural goads are the fear of marginalization in the competitive race for ever more of whatever one has been sold on.  The relentless enthusiasm of selling becomes the dominant paradigm.  Nobody has to do anything except buy what armies of persuaders dictate. Whereas once upon a time, social control and social discipline were unified components of social order, today they are not, as the latter is marginalized in favor of the former.

While selling is a very powerful motivating technology, it is also a very sophisticated and demanding beast that has to be operated at a well planned and researched, trained and resourced, diversely applied, imaginative, focused and energized level of functionality, to work as a primary mechanism of control.  If it reaches a certain threshold of density, it can become a totalitarian tool.  Below it, it loses traction quite quickly, especially in the highly competitive market environment.
 
We all sell from time to time.  Some individuals are very good at it and are able to successfully apply its principles widely in their lives, but even in sales organizations, they are the exception rather than the rule.  This is why twenty percent of salespeople generate eighty percent of the business and income.  This is why most selling is highly organized and system based, so that even average footsloggers can be modestly effective.  High functioning selling is hard.  The best operators make it look easy, but it isn’t.

For all its psychological sophistication and demonstrable effectiveness in the right hands, selling is a manipulative tool.  It isn’t rational persuasion. It is about rationalization.  It is about finding what a person’s or groups of persons’ motivating buttons are, where they are located and pressing them with just the right dexterity to get the required response.  It is a bit like herding sheep into a pen.  And it doesn’t matter what is being sold, or how benign it is, or how objectively in the interests it is of those being sold to buy, the relationship is one of sheepdog, sheep and corral gate.  And necessarily the relationship is opaque, exploits the politics of trust, and in varying degrees, expropriates a margin of that politic, and the resources it contains, small enough not to alert its object as to what has been extracted.

Once a culture switches to selling as its dominant control tool, it blows away traditional ways of doing business.  Even the cheapest marketing and selling presentations still have to have adequate budgets, research backing, glossy production values and the right distribution channels, and it brutally shows if it isn’t’.  Most teachers in a classroom and parents in the home do not have the resources to bring their presentation level up to the internalized media standards of their classroom/progeny audience, except for short bursts or if they are exceptional charismatic and/or empathetic individuals.
 
If one is no longer relying on external ‘do as you are told’ discipline, or internal ‘pleasures and satisfactions’ delaying self discipline to get through an educational program, or a family activity, one’s audience engagement standard has to be excellent at all times to be any good at all.  And if it doesn’t make the implied standard consistently enough, disengagement is almost immediate, just as it is if a TV program doesn’t quite hit the spot.  Boring is unforgivable and attention spans unforgiving.

That is why family life is disintegrating into separate electronic suites, with the environment users bumping into each other occasionally for a snack or drink in the kitchen; why family holidays now devolve into highly packaged Something-Or-Other-World entertainment and spectacle.  That is why classrooms are beginning to disintegrate into various levels of sub-chaos.
 
The strength of selling as a tool is its penetrating power; if its communication round is shaped correctly for its target; if its propellant charge is sufficient to reach it at adequate velocity; if target analysis has correctly determined its most susceptible entry point; and if the aim is true. However, by its nature, selling is narrowly focused to get a ‘buy’ response.  The problem is that there is a huge amount of human agenda that does not easily slot into the sell/buy equation.

From the perspective of a selling culture, the only way round that is to deconstruct the existential and cultural software that doesn’t fit.  The results of this are lamentably two dimensional, but only to three dimensional minds.  Once the latter have been marginalized sufficiently, everybody can be made malleably well adjusted for what they need to do for the rewards, pleasures and satisfactions that they can afford, i.e., the social software zeroes down to  production drivers and market responders.
 
Unfortunately, if the traditional disciplining and guiding functions of parents and state are sufficiently subverted and circumvented by marketing systems, then many or perhaps most adolescents may not emerge properly into a broadly configured responsible adulthood until much later in life, if at all, and only after some tough, enormously expensive and bitter learning experiences.  Thus this market susceptible state of adolescence is perpetuated into partnering and parenting phases of life such that all members of the family, post-adolescent and adolescent, are nearly as dysfunctional as each other.

Over the last fifty to sixty years, we have gone through a systematic process of laissez faire libertarian deregulation of our social environment that has severely weakened it.  And this was not some serendipitous coincidence, but a deliberate process of stripping everything away from us except market forces and the raw desire to satisfy every whim through the production of goods and services.  All other forms of productivity and regulation have been destroyed, which has meant replacement models for old cultural infrastructure, other than said market forces, just haven't been constructed.
 
So we find ourselves serendipitously re-inventing the wheel with every family start up, often floundering, feeling, bumping and guessing our way around until we land somewhere which might well be completely inappropriate, wrongly sited and oriented, inefficient in design and an unnecessary headache to operate.  The only constant is the constant messaging to produce and consume like there was no tomorrow.

The result is that the system of reproduction stops producing emotional adults and instead builds under-constructed and vulnerable social product that we wouldn’t dream of tolerating in any other ‘industry’.  When you think of it, our social reproduction ‘industry’ produces the most important service infrastructure and product we make, by far.  But right now, far too much of it is looking like a cultural rust belt, surrounded by shanty slums in which a lot of very poor practice is going down.

Half the battle in dealing with this is recognizing that it has even happened.  We know, with a divorce rate of over 40% that things aren’t good, but most people can’t join the dots that make the picture.  When we get the picture, we stop blaming ourselves and each other quite so much and start to address the structural and regulatory issues that rebuilding social institutions involves.  And we also start to critically evaluate more broadly the sustainability and appropriateness of the wider economic order and its larger environmental impacts.

This is not going to be a very easy journey, but we may already have started it.  And if we commit to at least beginning the securing of our own little piece of the action, by forgiving one another our trespasses, we have at least made a start.  Helen, after 30 years of marriage, has forgiven the slightly autistic man who married her and loves him still.  And I have forgiven the irritable, impatient and often clinically depressed woman, who I love devotedly still.  At least we can look ahead with some kind of vision of a joyful old age and not be weighed down with the recriminations and bitternesses of not only our failures, but the failure of our cultural infrastructure.  And this will bear us through what I think are going to be a very tough period.