Caligula’s Horse

Being Emperor, Caligula, declared his horse a senator, because he could.  But when Rome made anger an assassin’s purse, equine Senator ‘Incitatus’ would, have also likely so been cursed, put to the knives, a  victim of his master’s crimes.

Remember Incitatus.

Innocents may blameless be, but like the horse, shall have no help, if symbols they become of evil times.

Remember Incitatus.

Brace against the day when calculation fails and certainty is sucked beneath a seething force, as fear and raging seamlessly combine.

Remember Incitatus,

Nature presumes not to punish or endorse.  Its injured wrath shall blindly lash, not just at folly, but fondest hopes and grand designs.
 
Remember Incitatus.

Showered with gifts and marble stabled, slaves to serve his every whim enabled, gold amongst his oats, bejeweled, clothed in royal purple, prancing with his master, ‘til they both met with disaster.

Remember Incitatus.


Of all the liberal progressive causes espoused in the last fifty to sixty years, one of the most (one of the few) unambiguously successful, at least in the first world, has been the gay lobby.  It is at least as formidably organized as any of the large interest, industrial or ethnic lobbies.  Its reach into the system of governance, social policy organs, media, opinion leadership, academic research and capacity to get bodies onto the streets to get its point of view across, is a match for the biggest and the best, whether it be the National Rifle Association or the tobacco and hydrocarbon interests, or the Jewish lobby.

The results of its work have been impressive.  Gays have gone from being legally harassed by the courts, police and any thug who felt like beating one up, to having some recognition that they are a legitimate part of society, should be respected and left alone to lead their lives in peace, without being unjustly discriminated against.  While it would be an exaggeration to say that they are as safe as any other citizens on our major urban and particularly rural regional town streets, the days of furtive concealment and constant harassment are hopefully drawing to a close.

What is presently gratifying is that gay people now feel they can come out and publicly celebrate themselves with an uninhibited and well organized panache that leaves the rest behind.  Who can now resist the Australian Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras in the streets of Sydney every year, with its theatrical sexuality, fantasy, dressing up and indulgent good times fun?

The fight for equal rights is still ongoing in relation to the right to marriage status for gay couples and their right to adopt children.  This essay is designed to be a reality check not just on these matters of gender, sexuality, children and the institution that once regulated them, but the biggest reality check of all; whether very much of anything that is being done or going on now is sustainable or even sane, and what that means, not just for gays, but all of us
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How the rest of us think about and deal with Gay society is a reflection upon us.  This is not so much a matter of either credit or censure, but the relative strength and weakness of the inter-gendered mainstream and the gay demands being made upon it.  How this politically unpacks itself tells us a great deal about the condition of modern society.  And the underlying picture that emerges is not a happy one.


Gays do not have a monopoly on having a gay time.  Ordinary men and women go for it with the same enthusiasm, but reproduction and the heavy responsibilities of it eventually get in the way.  It is a tough business and exacting in what it requires.
 
What is even tougher for reproductive couples is that women carry the vast bulk of the reproductive suite and this is very intrusive on them at every level of their being.  Men are almost untouched by it.  What little they have hangs off the edge of them, but it makes up for that by being constantly demanding and wandering in its attentions.  This thoroughly inequitable and divergent biological distribution of burden and sensibility creates specialized consciousness that complements the inter-gender partnership, but also compounds the potential for misunderstanding, irritation, conflict and betrayal.

Mass entry of females into the industrial workforce has also put even more pressure on them because there has been little or no move to relieve them on the domestic front by their male partners.  This does not improve their sense of humor or their energy levels for fun and games.

Nobody has thought through the changes and the level of social investment that would be necessary to properly manage shifts in the status of woman.  All the easy sexy bits were done to death but the hard yards on ‘political’ gender change have hardly been touched.  This has meant on the one hand, a sexual free-for-all which has turned out to be nowhere near as ‘liberating’ as it was cracked up to be, and on other, a mass of unresolved issues that hit relationships hard when they have to get down to work.

In the longer haul, the love between men and women has a tense and tough bitter sweet quality now made more problematic by the skewed, lazy and superficial laissez-faireism so typical of liberal ‘progressive’ projects and consumerist driven social tampering bent on hijacking sexuality as a tool of propaganda and social control
 
Keeping a reproductive unit together for long enough to complete the reproduction cycle has always been a major challenge, which is why, until recently, it was a lifetime arrangement that was extremely difficult to get out of.  As this institution came under pressure from fundamental cultural shifts, instead of dealing with the problems directly and head on, to preserve marriage as a system of reproductive security, a strategy of managed collapse was adopted that gave the resultant mess to lawyers, social welfare agencies and the manufacturers of anti-depressants to sort out and balm.

And the wrinkly truth about inter-generational ‘collateral damage’ was seamlessly smoothed out. There were just far too many interests involved in the dismantling of social regulation and its replacement by selling and marketing, to allow the interests of children to get in the way of ‘progress’ and the ‘human rights’ of supposed adults, to get out of inconvenient or unsatisfactory commitments as easily as possible (and buying brand new domestic re-setup suites every time they do it).

Even the possibility of rethinking, reconstructing and resecuritizing marital arrangements to preserve a system of reliable long term familial governance never appeared as a credible agenda, even though it may well have been a great deal cheaper in all respects than letting it altogether collapse on demand.

There has never been any admission that romantic engagement is not just a hopeless predictor of long term amity, but does almost nothing to address the very demanding labor sharing and governance issues that have to be worked through and resolved by married couples having children.  They are running a sometimes dauntingly demanding reproductive construction site that take a lot out of them over a long period.  If this environment is mismanaged, it will wreck any relationship, no matter how warmly it started.  The Romance and sex was just a starter pack and absolutely no guidance for the future at all.

And if the mismanagement becomes inter-generational, then the successor product becomes more likely to be damaged too, and even less able to manage its successor product.

Where are the compulsory partnership assessment and pre-marital training modules?  Where are the regulatory framework and the management authorities to run it that will monitor marriages, provide support and hold its partners accountable for regulatory infringements and/or unconscionable conduct?  Where are the annual family domestic relationship ‘budgets’, the random audits, domestic five year plans and the ongoing management training facilities?  Where is the system of embedded mentorship and counsel?  We do much of this for business, yet a business only makes money.  A family is our fundamental and most basic ‘business’ unit whose output is our most precious value added product, by far.

These questions do not exist because there is no management interest in this form of enterprise because it, the value of its balance sheets, its labor, educational and regulatory requirements, and its ongoing operating improvements or backward steps, are off the books.  It defaults to laissez-faire-these-things-look-after-themselves.  And of course they do, sort of, but with a heavy casualty rate and a substantial long term damage profile for survivors; damage not just to individuals, but the system of social reproduction itself.

The notion of the realms of ‘private’ and ‘public’ life that has been assumed as given since the emergence of social utilitarianism in the eighteenth century needs to be relooked at.  If the system of social reproduction ceases to work properly, then this becomes a public matter.  The level of failure of so called ‘private’ relationships is not just a failure of the contracting parties, but a failure of the cultural environment that they have to work in.  To fix that requires social intervention.  And if that involves breaching the imagined right to privacy, that has to be set against the ‘right’ of the marital relationship, the right of the children to have a secure and stable environment that can be reliably replicated down the generations and the right of the system of social reproduction to some kind of integrity.  Society has ‘rights’ too and as the ultimate ‘customer’ of the social reproductive output, it doesn’t have to tolerate second and third rate product from this source more than from any other ‘industry’.

Why should an individual have all the rights, but few responsibilities and society have the bulk of the responsibilities and no rights at all?  Why should we tolerate the misuse of our social commons by giving individuals the option to abuse or degrade them with impunity, because they cannot be held accountable or punished?  And why do we not reward high functioning social performance with social privilege and deference instead of indifference or tokenism?
 
It has been all too easy to characterize this attitude as ‘repressive authoritarianism’.  And liberal progressives have got away with this propaganda trick to divert attention from their abject social failures; no longer.  They are not going to go on getting away with fudging freedom and license.  I assert that freedom is only authentic and empowering when it exists within a disciplined framework and secure institutions.  Otherwise it is just a cruel and self deluding joke that we are playing on ourselves.

Marriage has ‘fallen in’ with an increasingly consumerist lifestyle attitude that makes relationships (and just about everything else) much more disposable and ‘customer’ satisfaction driven.  And from that perspective, I suppose it doesn’t really matter anymore what one ‘marries’ or for how long.  But for gays to use the weak and derelict state of this institution to wedge their way into it is a bit like the behavior of the court eunuchs in the film ‘The Last Emperor’, after he had been overthrown, but not yet forced to abdicate.  They started to loot the Imperial treasury stores in the Forbidden City.

In effect, ‘marriage’ as a concept has been reduced to a temporary civil union in most respects, which makes it an easy and tempting takeover target.

What used to give ‘marriage’ its male and female character was its capacity to permanently bury itself into and help stabilize the inherent tension within the circle of life, so that it could reliably reproduce, nurture and deliver acceptable ‘reproduct’, generation after generation.  That is necessarily a very man woman thing, reflecting their particular struggle, ends and needs.  And even though its power to hold them together is now only honored in the breach, that doesn’t mean we should allow it to be vultured by opportunists
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So here is the rub:  The mainstream ‘straight’ society that does the procreative heavy lifting, accepts that this is not for everybody and that those who want to live their sexual lives differently should not attract any sort of discriminatory penalty for making that choice.

However, that is not a license for them to rip off other people’s cultural property.  An appeal to equal rights and social justice as grounds to be admitted into the estate of marriage only morally works up to a point  Then such appeals degenerate into moral blackmail that is nothing more than goodwill and tolerance freeloading; i.e. throwing a foot stamping ideological tantrum because Daddy won’t give it a sweetie to which it has a sacred ‘right’.
 
There is of course, at least in the Australian context, a plain old civil union to cover all the reasonable legal necessaries for a long term intimate relationship (including rights of inheritance), but it doesn’t come with all the wedding trimmings and recognition; in short ‘the big fat tradition’.  It isn’t as big a sweetie as the wedding one.

It wouldn’t occur to the thwarted equal rights claimant, that the reason marriages have that status and are made such a fuss of is that they aren’t just an intimate partnership agreement.  They are a celebration of the prospect of children that comes from an alliance of families and their reproductive representatives, whose union will potentially join those families forever as blood relatives.  More, it is an acknowledgment of the enormous emotional long term commitment that the unique and particularly difficult challenges of such a union require, and the deepest hope that its children grow up in a lasting, secure, loving and disciplined environment, so that they can pass on these inestimable values when their time comes to reproduce.

Marriage is a send off on the greatest and most profound journey that human beings make; that all life makes.  It is the celebration of its renewal.  Nothing that we do as a species comes even close to being more important than that.  For those who enter inherently reproductively sterile relationships, to pretend that they are equals in this journey just beggars belief.  It is pure crib and bluff in the hope that the rest of us will be spineless enough to give in to them.  They count on no one having the courage to stare down the propaganda lie that they are in league with reactionary dark forces and/or ideologically ‘unsophisticated’ Hicksvilles, that habitually oppose all ‘just’ (by definition) demands made against them.
 
Any joining of a couple in a marital ceremony that does not reference the authentic possibility of a natural reproductive outcome between them is a parody of the real thing.  It is not a marriage.  It is a pretentious caricature.  This is the point where gay pride goes beyond self esteem and equal rights into the realms of inflated egoism, unwarranted presumption and poor judgment.  At best, that kind of pride ends in buffoonery and at worst, in tears.

The sad thing is that the existing conventional marriage ceremony industry has almost descended into parody anyway.  What is being purportedly celebrated has been gutted out so badly that it is hardly more than an excuse to spend ridiculous sums of money to show the rest of the family, friends and acquaintances that one has the wherewithal to throw it away on a family structure that has almost a fifty percent chance of only surviving for five to ten years.
 
They would be wiser if they invested most of that money into a ‘life boat’ trust fund for the prospective grandchildren and/or wait for long enough so that they might be reasonably sure they had something long term to celebrate.

One attends these ‘ceremonies’ that profess never ending love and loyalty ‘til death do us part’ with wryly amused and completely suspended judgment and pray that they are in the ‘lucky’ 50%.  But of course, just as in a military campaign, the dead are not the only casualties.  Presumably the ‘lucky’ ones carry that load, but that never gets disclosed, because there are no follow ups or records kept other than by gossipy anecdote and the extremely rare honest family history that will appear a generation later. It is not a subject too many people like to air.
 
If military campaigns are anything to go by, the usual proportion these days of wounded to dead is around 2-3 to 1, although with poor evacuation and medical facilities that drops to 1 to 1.  That would mean the ‘lucky’ 50% are all carrying relationship wounds of some description, which should have been sent to ‘marriage hospital’ for some repair and healing therapy.  In the absence of such a facility, that would mean that they were front line patched up instead, and left with some ugly and dysfunctional healing, and ongoing pain to limp around with and stoically endure for the rest of their lives.

And by far the most severely affected group in this wounded category are women.  They suffer depression at double the rate of men.  For all the talk of their ‘liberation’, they still carry the bulk of the domestic load and the problems that arise from it.


Children and adoption is another related and really sensitive area.  Gay aunties and uncles are often a great asset to a family as very welcome top of the range child minders, treatsters and entertainers.  But it is quite another matter if they try to compete with failed reproductive couples for scarce adoption opportunities.
 
If one can’t contribute to the life pool because the relationship one is in is by definition sterile, one has no right to go to the reproductively active part of society and demand access to its stock of ‘spare’ children, possibly in front of people who have entered into authentic reproductive relationships in good faith, but find themselves unexpectedly sterile.  That would be grossly unfair.

Trying to have your sterile relationship cake and eat other peoples’ reproductive fruit as well, is not only pure ideological self-indulgence, but a really cool cheek.


Society needs to capitalize, maintain and protect equitable reproductive inter-gender role modeling as its central theme and parenting is central to that.  Both boys and girls carry with them into the next generation the parental role models and mentoring they grew up with and the gender identity of each parent; particularly, but not exclusively, fathers and sons, mothers and daughters.  And millions of years of primate evolutionary development have gone into the continuity link between the act of life creation and the ongoing nurturance of its product by its creation partners, over a protracted family rearing cycle.

As a rule of thumb, children should grow up in a gender balanced parental household.  And while that isn’t always possible, particularly at the moment, it is a legitimate ideal that should be respected.

It is one thing to be accepting of gays in general, it is another to be accepting of them as gender role models for children in particular.

Basically, our sexual feelings and satisfactions are biological bait to get us into doing something that most of us probably wouldn’t do if we knew half of what was involved, i.e.; to reproduce.  These feelings can alight on almost anything, but if it isn’t straight male/female reproductive sex, it is either a fetish ‘mistake’ that complicates and potentially destabilizes already fragile cross gender relationships, or a same sex ‘mistake’ that leads to reproductively sterile relationships.

Whether they are culturally induced mistakes caused by inappropriate sexual imprinting at a critically impressionable age, or a psychological gender mis-assignment mistake, or a biological mistake like hermaphroditism, doesn’t matter.  They are mistakes and we should be honest about that and stop pretending that they aren’t; and stop pretending that society should entertain same sex gender mistakes as an official alternative model to the reproductive one, which is what the demand for gay ‘marriage’ and ‘parenting’ is all about.

I went to a British boarding school where pain became sexualized for me.  I am also a mild Asperger syndrome ‘sufferer’ (a form of autism).  They are both mistakes in my makeup.
 
I would no more go around advocating sexuality based dominant/submissive inter-gender modeling as an appropriate part of family life with children involved than I would if I were a gay contemplating ordinary male to male sexuality modeling.

In the highly unlikely event I were to ever consider going into a sado-masochistic relationship, it would be on the plain understanding that no children would ever be involved.  Even if we decided to abjure that sexual relationship at a later time to accommodate children, there would still be the risk that the political imbalances built into the history of that relationship would still corrupt/distort the process of transferring gender equity principles to the next generation.  Children are political sponges.  They pick up everything, even if it is completely unconsciously.

In the case of an even less likely gay relationship, adoptive children would be ruled out because no matter how marvelous my partner and I were as carers, I would not want to be modeling to them an intimate non reproductive gender relationship as part of normal family life.  It isn’t.  It is a sexuality mistake every bit as much as sado-masochism.  Not only would it be emotionally lying to them, but I would not want to risk even the possibility of confusing or misleading them into repeating that mistake.
 
Children, at least for a time, are so completely at our mercy.  If one in my care became gay while I was in an openly gay relationship in the house with them, I would always suffer doubt as to whether that had been my fault and that I had corrupted them, because that is what replicating a mistake means.

The choices are not between bad straights and excellent gays as carers.  Gays and straights in all likelihood have exactly the same distribution of caring attributes, for good and ill.  It is about protecting the reproductive gender archetypes that define our and any other species.  Focusing on whether gays are good parents or not is a good propaganda ploy because it diverts attention away from the much larger crisis of gender and social regulation, of which the Gay push into reproductive relationships is a symptom.

Nor do I suggest that Asperger’s Syndrome is some grand mystical alternative to ordinary sensibility.  It isn’t.  It makes me (when I forget myself) a socially gauche and awkward pain in the butt that others have to make allowances for.
 
I am neither into self-deception nor propaganda leveraging.


The fact is that most of us in the reproductive mainstream accept the reality that some of our children are going to be gay, for whatever reason.  When they fully mature, they have the right to determine that as independent characters and should be supported and socially protected in their decision, if that really is where their long term happiness lies.

However, few of us would say that was a desirable outcome, or ought to be encouraged, or that it shouldn’t be actively prevented when a child is at critical point in its sexual maturation.  The fact is we lose part or all of the next generation of our family if they ‘turn’.

Gay activists seem to be putting themselves at risk of being seen to be not only wanting to get into parenting and modeling gay relationships to children, but also ‘influencing’ their behavior and attitudes when they reach critical development and decision points in relation to their sexuality.  I am not suggesting undue influence here, just letting the kid make up its own mind what kind of sexuality it wants to adopt.  What could be fairer than that?

It’s like a creationist giving a child all ‘the facts’ and let it decide for itself if Charles Darwin really got it right.  What could be more objective than that?

I know I am being unfair here, not to be snide, but to indicate the extent of the hazard of even the possibility of ‘tampering’ with arguably the most sensitive part of human sensibility.  This step is going way beyond coming in from the cold, to leveraging the gay agenda much more deeply into mainstream society.  This is not necessarily about the interests of children, but the political needs of gay sexuality.  The ice gets very thin here.
 
I am not for a moment suggesting that gays should be excluded from managing and/or teaching and/or mentoring children in all sorts of other capacities.  They just aren’t appropriate parenting role models because they do not, by definition, meet the most critical and basic part of the social job description; gender balanced familial child rearing.

The fact that the structure of gender balanced child rearing is presently disintegrating make this area even more dangerous for gays.  It potentially re-enforces the perception that they are ‘taking advantage’ of this tragic state of affairs and further contributing to its ongoing downfall.  What seduces them is that the mainstream system is so disrupted that virtually anything can pose as a plausible alternative, especially if one chooses for propaganda purposes, high functioning people to model the ‘alternative’.

I do not underestimate the capacity of Gay lobbies to successfully shift the goal posts and fudge the issues sufficiently to wedge their way in.  I can live with that, but I think it will come back to bite them.  This is pushing luck past self belief into hubris.  To imagine that such a strategy could deepen the roots of ‘tolerance’ and ‘understanding’ is pure fantasy.
 
While we know that a certain percentage of all children will likely be gay or bisexual, if this happens in a gender balanced parenting family that will be seen as an inevitable part of the facts of life.  If it happens in a gay parented household, no matter how unfair that might be, while sympathizers like myself might only harbor private doubts, it will inevitably be cause for suspicion of ‘interference’ with children amongst people with an ambiguous or hostile attitude to gays.

No matter how well constructed the propaganda and politically effective it might be in realizing gay agendas, fundamentally, a large section of the rest of us are never going to accept that gays have any business in the familial business of reproduction and rearing children.  And this gay strategy will quite rightly be seen as ‘interference’ in the generality even if there are individual gay families where parenting of the highest order is occurring.  It is not a legitimate project and no amount of equal rights rhetoric, or selective use of exemplars, will do more than temporarily suppress that perception.  In the end, it just won’t wash.

We can talk glibly about ‘prejudices’ in these matters, but everyone is carrying them; not just one side.  When it comes to sexuality, all the prejudices are fat and juicy.  And the fact is that we aren’t talking just about prejudices, but power and the ability to accumulate it.  Where there is a power vacuum, there is always someone there who wants to fill it.  In the age of gender chaos, gay lobbies are serious contenders and are making the moves.  I don’t blame them a bit.  The warning is, not just to gays, but any minority temporarily in a position of relative strength.  It won’t last.  It isn’t sustainable.

The world of sexuality is a lush and beautiful landscape full of gorgeous things, alongside some of the most toxic unpleasantries imaginable.  Everyone, gays and straights alike, have to be extremely careful about how they negotiate the territory.  Gay lobbies obviously do not understand this and have been seduced by the politics of opportunity and a mainstream society that is vulnerable, unstable and potentially an explosive cocktail if anything ever goes wrong, as it surely will.


This vulnerability within the social mainstream invites not only opportunistic invasion, but the chance to deliberately further damage the already distressed gender infrastructure.  It isn’t just marriage that is being subverted, but the inclusion of men in the business of reproduction right through its development cycle.  It is the long term joining of men and women that is fundamental to the integrity of gender and its reproduction as a cultural artifact from generation to generation.
 
I understand that Lesbians couples can reproduce using third party sperm.  Some man delivers fifty percent of the genome for a new life, but gets excluded from responsibility for being a father because it has been transferred to someone who can never be one, by definition.
 
Children, families and society at large need an entire generational cohort of engaged live in fathers, just like they need mothers, preferably their natural ones.  To deliberately deny them a proper father is self-indulgent behavior that can be gotten away with because right now it can; because no one is held morally accountable for their behavior, for the moment.  What this practice ‘says’ is that maleness is unimportant and dispensable in the familial upbringing of children.  Lesbian gays may feel that, but they do not speak for the male side of the children they care for, for like any other parents, they are only stewards.  Nor do they speak for the rest of society.

By way of contrast, as a first cohort baby boomer, I remember meeting a couple of English war widows, some ten years after the World War finished, still grieving, not only their own loss, but the loss of the father in relation to his children.  These women put a very high value on the paternal contribution to family life.  They could see the things their dead husbands would have given to their children had they lived, particularly to the boys, and recognized the effects of that loss in comparison with other families that had their father.  Even as a seven to eight year old boy, that attitude came through very clearly.
 
The dead men’s pictures were prominently positioned in the house as an icon and would be referred to regularly, not as a passive memory but an active constituent of the life of the family; what he would have wanted; what he would have done.  Using this mechanism, the mother tried to compensate for the paternal loss.

The oldest sons would also be co-opted into taking some of the responsibility of being the ‘man of the house’.  They were hitting their teens at the time and they took this very seriously.  It weighed heavily on them and gave them a gravity beyond their years.

I do not make light of the special circumstances afoot in these situations, or the great changes in gender definition and social practice since then, but it suffices to point to how much men can give to a family if they are functioning in a cultural milieu that supports their contribution and they are seen in the generality to be behaving reliably and appropriately.

Children can make do without a father for whatever reason, but make do is the operative word.  It is a sub-optimal outcome, just as it would be if they had to make do without a mother.  And I think that without a legitimate or unavoidable reason for such an absence, a society in full possession of its powers and faculties should and would demand both as a standard norm. Any society that wasn’t in the process of deconstructing itself would see narrowly sectional demands to exclude one side or the other in the reproductive effort, as a presumptuous try on.
 
Gender isn’t just about an individual.  It is socially dimensioned.  It is intellectually definable as a principle as well as a psychological set of dispositions.  Male and female each have their business and contribution to make, and need to be equally valued both as a matter of equity and what it is that they uniquely bring to the table by way of consciousness, behaviors and ‘feel’.

We are speaking of species identity here.  Gender is as fundamental to the nature of our species as it gets.  We cannot afford to allow those who have alienated themselves from that to dictate how we should regulate its purposes.
   
And that incidentally applies doubly to deliberately partnerless heterosexual single women doing the same thing.  This is particularly a problem in the welfare sector which has been made much worse by a baby bounty that was introduced by the last Australian Federal Government.  They are creating a plague of fatherless and often inter-generationally welfare dependent children.  At least in the lesbian household there is the possibility of a second carer, which is a mercy for which we ought to be ‘grateful’, if doubly crummy heterosexual behavior is the standard we set for ourselves.

If a daughter of mine gets herself into a really hopeless marriage and for her own and the children’s sake she feels she must go it alone, then I will be more than sympathetic and do my utmost to be of assistance, without rancor or judgment. I cannot claim greater wisdom when I was their age.  My first two children were the product of an abysmally poor choice of partner and my own incompetence as a character.

But if she deliberately decides to go it alone as a single mother in the first instant, that is going to be different. If she continues to work she will have to either pressure me into grandparental parenting and/or overuse the child care system, or stay at home and go into the welfare system.  Whatever way, it is an unfair imposition on grandparents who have already done their parenting, or it is unfair on the kids because too much farming out of children into child care short changes them on parental intimacy and care, or an unfair imposition on an already heavily overcommitted tax system that is there for emergencies, not for ordinary discretionary decisions.

Turning emergency, respite and ‘top up’ support services into parenting substitution, and state income support into a semi-permanent ‘lifestyle’, is just asking for trouble and long term problems.

Some of these concerns with single parenting exist right across the spectrum of parenting in the late consumerist period.  Exploiting grandparents as cheap child care labor or overusing childcare as parenting substitution is widely practiced in families that rely to the hilt on double incomes to preserve their lifestyle expectations.
 
The inhibition on questioning those expectations is so pervasive, the belief that convenience and ease is a non negotiable bottom line is so entrenched, the thoroughgoing fudging of needs and wants is so complete, and planning, budgeting and saving habits are so egregiously poor, it is just assumed that the nurturing needs of particularly young children have to come second, because it ‘cannot be helped’.  The necessity for double incomes is an assumed given to which all other consideration must bow and anyone who questions that ‘doesn’t understand’ or is heartlessly lacking in ‘empathy’ or ‘sensitivity’.  The lifestyle assumptions are sacrosanct.

As a basis for real debate all this is transparent nonsense.  As an outcome of sixty years of relentless propaganda and habit reshaping, it is an overwhelming triumph.  The systematic dismantling of a nurturance culture that builds in the long term habit of intensive parent to child interactive software building, doesn’t register on the radar anymore.  It reminds me of just how totalitarian markets have become in reshaping consciousness that we have forgotten just how much relentless and protracted hard work, deliberate inclusion and organizing that used to involve
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Something important has been lost somewhere if people think that the child is less important than the lifestyle.  It is the other way round because nothing is more important than the child.  It is our hope for the future and if it is given the best possible parenting inputs into capitalizing its fundamental character formation, that hope should be well justified.  Turning it into a dual incomes ‘orphan’, allowing it to be swallowed by the media sponsors and compensating by showering toys and treats on it, is a recipe for disaster and the production of social trash.

The scale of the disaster has hardly registered in the public consciousness.  The loss of focus on the fundamentals of biological and social reproduction has meant not only a loss of security, but a dismantling of familial governance and a default to ‘as seen on the media’ whereby parents cease to be central figures in their own homes.  Their ongoing lack of socializing input and its substitution by electronic media means they are no longer regarded as authoritative or mentoring figures by their children.  Their status as adults becomes negligible.  They cease to be able to justify precedence or respect and often this degenerates into contempt and mockery.

Worse, this is now converting into new generations of parents who have no idea about adult governance and even where they attempt to make a stand for parental authority, they find that they neither have the skills, nor the political leverage nor even the capacity to use force to have their way with children who know their rights, feel empowered by popular culture and can run rings around them.

Parents have become the new stock character buffoons who have to be rescued by super nanny to get some semblance of order with their children.  Even their pets require animal whisperers.

In this extremely dysfunctional cultural environment, the only families that will have any hope of coping are ones that have a disciplined focus on their children from the beginning and provide a very full family based program of activity and adult-to-child intimacy that will withstand the later anarchic pressures when the children start to grow up.  And the adults have to be very careful to leave themselves the time and energy to do that, even if it means sacrificing career and lifestyle choices.
 
In this setting, the kind of school a child went to, or the suburb it lived in, or the lifestyle accoutrements and infrastructure surrounding it, are vastly less important than the character of the parents it had, the social values they carried and the effort they made to realize them in day to day life.  If after getting the basics right, in place and working all the time, then, if the budgets allow, the next order of priority is education for the children and only after that do domestic lifestyle considerations become appropriate.

It is all about setting priorities on the basis of a values hierarchy that puts the reason for having a family in the first place at the front and centre; its children.  In an environment of increasingly ominous future signals, it has never been more important to produce secure children with real depth of character who turn into mature, resilient and loving people with the courage of their convictions to hold them in good stead, if all goes ill.
 


These domestic considerations used to be regarded as secret women’s business.  Now women need not just more support, but committed partners that lift at least half the burden off them.  They can’t work in the paid workforce and deliver the old standard of nurturance on their own, despite heroic efforts to do so.  Men seem to have continued with their old attitudes to themselves and to women, even if concessions have been made at the margins.  Yet they have lost power and are finding that they cannot easily sustain their old prerogatives.  Domestic resentment and conflict stalk them.  Yet the discomfort of that does not prompt change so much as failure to engage, evasion and denial.

Much worse for them is that the particular business of constructing men as characters has fallen to pieces.  Boys need much more disciplining than girls as they grow up.  Girls find themselves saddled with a very onerous reproductive suite that is often as uncomfortable and painful as it is a nuisance.  But it grounds them because everything about it is so consequential and fraught with risk. For boys, when the testosterone hits, aggressive instincts deepen and egos soar in ways only limited by their fantasies.  They need firm boundaries that are vigorously enforced as soon as they are breached.  If they don’t get that, they can easily lose control of themselves, and their sense of reality.
 
They lose their sense of place in the herd hierarchy and get into reckless aggressive behavior, because nothing is containing them.  Or they get into undisciplined habits that turn them into feckless weaklings, because no one kicks them and tells them that it isn’t good enough when they lag and make excuses.  No one absolutely insists that decency, honesty, good manners, consideration of others and a willingness to sacrifice for the common good are non negotiable training outcomes.
 
If one is never going to gestate, bear and suckle children, and live by necessity at the beck and call of others for possibly several protracted periods, it is much easier to lose sight of the common good and to believe that the world completely revolves around oneself.
 
Their sense of identity isn’t sufficiently contained, tested and tempered to a high enough standard to turn them into secure, disciplined, responsible and proud men who have something to be proud about; men who are not threatened by assertive females and do not become prey to insecure game playing, fantasy escapism, self-pretense and misogyny; men who efficiently pull their weight without counting the cost and expecting rewards just because they have done the right thing; men who as individuals would make some woman happy to be his wife for the long haul, despite the fact that they will inevitably clash and drive each other nuts from time to time, because that is what men and women do if they are honest with one another.

Right now nobody dares to confront the current crop of young bucks because they have ‘rights’.  They can call any adult’s bluff because they are just paper tigers.  And why shouldn’t they treat adults with contempt if they never stand up to them and knock them down to size.

Nobody is allowed to do that anymore and this perversely guts the very empowerment strategies that might help them to become real men (gay or otherwise).  And then when they marry or whatever, their spouse finds that they living with a man-child instead of an adult, who just has to be added to their list of liabilities, especially when real children start to arrive.

And how many responsible gay men end up with partners who are intemperate sluts who simply cannot control themselves the moment they spot a pert little backside?

We cannot afford to just stand around and watch while a fifty percent chunk of reproducing the next generation is allowed to be marginalized out of the reproductive process.  Men need to be an important and integral part of nurturing and bringing their offspring to mature fruition, not just because their labor is needed, but because they have something unique and important to offer their children.
   
Failure in this is already having all sorts of unforeseen and unpleasant long term consequences.  Amongst other things, emotional disengagement and unconstrained egoism is a pre-condition for the making of sexual predators as well as a range of other unpleasant inconsequential behaviors, like a propensity for violence and bullying.  And once the damage is done, it will take generations to fix and require an authoritarian rights-be-damned toughness to ensure that men meet the standard required to be proper reproductive partners again; no buts, no excuses and no escape!

Why should any of our daughters have to put up with male partners who are little better than children?  Why do we tolerate this?  There is just no excuse why every marriageable male can’t be up to speed as a man, who can properly meet his partnering and fatherly duties, and be sufficiently mature to emotionally engage and take on the reproductive politics that men and women have had to manage since time immemorial, as well as the new politics of equal domestic responsibility.

Failure to do this can also produce not just depression, but ugly behavior and an unpleasant disposition in women, as frustration, bitterness and anger get the better of them.  And being far more emotionally sophisticated than men, they really know how to stick in the knives and cut up their spouses.  This kind of abuse only makes whatever is wrong with the relationship worse and dooms it either to eventual violence and/or separation, in circumstances that will likely do enormous damage to everybody, including the wretched children of such a union.

I do not blame them for this.  What is left of the system of social reproduction is putting them in this invidious position.  It isn’t their fault.  And while I do not underestimate their capacity to be perverse, on balance, we are very lucky to have them.
 

Our system of social reproduction is almost irreparably damaged, which means any fix will be a foundations up rebuild accompanied by heavy handed and large scale intervention into worlds that were once entirely private.  If that sounds like the voice of a fundamentalist, it is.
 
When too many of the supporting chocks for effective reproductional effort have been cut away, the only way to prevent the whole edifice from collapsing is to get back to fundamentals.  This is not about a ‘return’ to an old fashioned way of doing things, for in truth, even if one wanted to do that, there is too little of it left to get much leverage from.  It is about making what we are doing work, by reprioritizing the reproductive effort to number one; by removing ideological blocks to change by calling their bluff and making them as disreputable as they deserve to be, doing the hard work, not tolerating failure and having a preparedness to get tough with people who don’t do what is expected of them.
 
Above all, we stop handing out important social status indicators like rights as if they were handbag accessories!  Like anything else, they have to be earned and maintained if they are to be worth anything.  And we stop tolerating the spineless pusillanimity that currently passes itself off as moral humanism and call it the decadent ideological fudge it really is; an ideology that cannot tell the difference between merciful compassion and an uncritical soft touch, freedom and license, ‘justice’ and sectional interest, respect for rights and indulgence, critical discernment and 'discrimination’, judgment and ‘judgmentality', reasonable belief and 'prejudice', ethnic character delineation and 'stereotyping', reproductive gender consciousness and 'homophobia', equality and rewarding the incompetent or penalizing the industrious, compromise and being compromised, concern for the value of human life and cowardice, dissent and treason, reasonable just cause and excuse making, discipline and repression, or toughness and abuse. This ideology is a corrupt sham that eventually augurs the collapse of social governance and moral discourse. 

I am almost certain that if Voltaire, Bentham and Mill could see how their ideas have been mediated within the consumer society, they would turn away in disgust and disappointment, wishing they had never put pen to paper.
 
If our social institutions become so badly damaged they cannot be relied on anymore, doubt, evasion and casualization become rational behaviors.  Why would anyone get into a marital deal that has a fifty percent chance of being a ruinous and extremely distressing failure within five to ten years, which will be further accompanied by miserable consequences that will very likely follow the adult and child victims around for the rest of their lives?  This is what we have brought ourselves to and it has to be fixed!

Recently, I somehow managed to sit my way through a new film called ‘Precious’.  It is set in Harlem, about an abused and enormously overweight teenage girl, who is constantly harassed and bullied by her mother, made pregnant for a second time (first child affected by Downs Syndrome) by her father who also infects her with HIV.  While social welfare people and educators accomplish a rescue of sorts, it was a relentlessly depressing and emotionally jarring litany of tragedy and the completely grotesque.  Authorities uncovered similar stuff during the recent Federal Government intervention into Australian Northern Territory indigenous communities.  Undoubtedly there are a lot of similar evils going on in non indigenous welfare communities and the larger society.

Indigenous society is a bellwether for the rest of society twenty years down track and the prospect is just too terrible to think about.

My wife and I see it in the residential caravan park we own.  We have learned the hard way to keep out social welfare people in crisis.  They bring drugs, alcohol abuse, domestic violence and social disturbance with them.  As characters, they are completely trashed and it is our fault, for we have allowed this to happen
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What really grieves me is their children, whose fate is sealed even at a very tender age.  We sometimes look after them and we can see that they are still beautiful albeit abused little people who will be relentlessly destroyed by their parents and their circle of acquaintances, as they grow up.  There are so many little ‘Preciouses’.  They break our hearts.  We have allowed this to happen and made miserable mealy mouthed euphemistic excuses for it, like ‘disadvantage’.

One of the very few things I admire about conservative Islam is it just doesn’t tolerate that kind of sociopathic moral escapism.
 
We see here the consequences of giving up the ‘repressions’ of yesterday and replacing them with life without boundaries, where anything goes and no abuse, cruelty or distortion of human behavior is off the table.  Defenses against this have been thrown away and now the former borders of human decency and respect are being invaded by barbarians.

We are faced with the terrible task of having to start building systems of social fortification to defend ourselves against attack both from within and without.  And the very first piece of agenda in such a defense will be to decommission and decontaminate ourselves from the liberal progressive ideas that have done so much to make such loss of control a reality.

When enough time has passed to get a bit of perspective on this period, there will be a perplexed sense of horrified mystification as to what middle twentieth to early twenty-first century populations thought they were doing, not dissimilar to the post-war puzzlement at the behavior of Germans in the 1930s and 40s.

 
Nothing that has anything to do with life is traveling well right now because almost nothing we are doing is sustainable.  Unsustainability is perhaps an insufficient word if one thinks that the  consumerist economic project and the social practices that have grown up around it since shortly after World War 2, are poised to wipe out a very large slab of our biological future, in a frenzy of ecocidal destruction that will take a great many of us with it.
 
When one recognizes something like that, one realizes that one is trapped in a huge asylum for the insane.  One is forced to start the business of getting back to basics and the fundamentals of what life is about.  In an insane place, this is as close as it gets to rational.  Without such touchstones, one drowns in the false thinking that is the mark of an asylum.

Regime insanity and crime is not the same as the personal variety, because it seems so ordinary and unexceptional.  As investigators found during the processes of prosecuting war crimes and administering denazification after the last World War, they were dealing with very ordinary people.  While having done terrible things or been knowingly aware and remaining silent about them, they saw themselves at the time as part of necessary and socially sanctioned organizations, with legitimate goals, approved operational procedures and a rigorous chain of command that expected unhesitating obedience.  Questioning anything about them at the time was not accepted as part of ‘respectable’ conversation and could result in a terrifyingly summons to the local offices of the Gestapo.
 
When things changed, as disciplined conformists, they switched to the new paradigm and adopted the new democratic and liberal respectability with the same enthusiasm as they had embraced the despotic old order.  And while fear of a terrifying summons from the local Allied Occupation Security and Intelligence offices would have driven this behavior in the first instance, it was plain old fashioned conformism that drove it after that.

It was almost unheard of for regime criminals to re-offend once the criminal regime had gone.  They were too busy setting up their own regime of amnesia and adopting their new persona as thoroughly as possible.  Left to their own devices, most of them were not ‘naturally’ violent in a civil society that didn’t condone it.  They were model citizens in the ‘New’ Germany.

Public spirited people who would have turned in a family to the Gestapo for harboring Jews in the Old Germany, would just as willingly report inappropriate neighbor recycling behavior to the health authorities in the new one.

The really dark conclusion to that is that they were thoroughly normal people, just like you and me.  I understand myself well enough to know that if I had grown up in Germany in the interwar years, I would have almost certainly ended up fighting with the Waffen SS, doing some not very nice stuff and probably killed in its service.  Like so many stupid young men, I would have been seduced by the glamor and elitism, the camaraderie, the sense of higher purpose and ideological ideals, and a uniform to die for, literally and metaphorically.

This is how it is for us right now and we take that for granted and question it as little as the Germans did, except that now totalitarianism has been privatized and does not require the crude policing of the past. Today’s regime prisoners are summoned and held by visions of paradise proudly brought to them by the sponsors.  There is no intimidating security apparatus, only the politics of ‘cool’ and what other people might think if we bought brand X.

The Nazis were ‘only’ into mass murder of selected populations.  Our regime is into wiping out much of the biosphere if it has to, to keep its legitimate business goals of continuous exponential growth intact.  If there is a choice to be made between downsizing the consumer based industrial project and keeping it going, and allowing nature to ‘take its course’, the latter is what is going to happen.
 
Our system of production has taken on a life of its own and become a reproductive organism in its own right.  Its administrative slaves will do absolutely anything to preserve it and its growth ambitions, no matter how terrible the consequences.  It is behaving just like a cancer, and until the host dies, it is a really super efficient and productive system with a track record second to none.  And can it eat resources!?  This bulging lumpy puppy’s accountants see cancerous over-replication and a propensity for morbid obesity as legitimate ‘growth’ to be added to the GNP.
 
Alice doesn’t have to wander through a domestic magic looking glass anymore to check out the characters that are off with the Red Queen, who are all now living on the top of looking glass towers in any city where one happens to reside.  The mad hatter is still having elaborate tea parties in the mid-floors marketing department, but now whimsy has given way to science.  Alice eventually stayed on and is now doing Enormously Important Work for the white rabbit down the labyrinthine corridors at Wonderland Inc, designing reality algorithms for the spades in suits.

In the state of Victoria in south-East  Australia where I live, Alcoa, our giant aluminum smelter company, just signed off on a giant 35 year brown coal electricity contract that currently takes nearly a quarter of our total state electricity  supply.  They have locked in one of the dirtiest energy sources to be found anywhere, and done it against the global background of looming CO2 climate disaster.  They just don’t take any notice because they cannot afford to stop expanding their operations.  That is the only bottom line.  And this behavior is being relentlessly repeated all over the globe.

This is no conspiracy.  There is no need for one.  It is a market based least line of resistance collective response.  No one has a scale back plan B because it isn’t possible within the existing ideological paradigm.  All the efficiency and energy savings lead to lower prices that increase the traffic that drown the savings that float the propaganda message that savings and spending are same, same.  It is still imagined that one can only stay in a business enterprise within the existing suite that is presently recognized as ‘industrializable’.  Monetizability rules imagination more absolutely than a security apparatus.
 
No one has the wit to try and redefine economics and ‘wealth’, for there is no concept that it is a good or profitable idea to switch out of consumer industries into social reconstruction and ecological defense ones, even if it means saving our collective necks and what is in effect the main repository of our real wealth; the social software between our ears.  Nor is there any interest in ceasing to hide real environmental or social costs, assets and products as ‘externalities’.  Monetized capital has become too hooked on looting ‘externalized’ wealth and then calling the resultant catastrophe ‘progress’, when in reality it is the march of the lemmings.
 
As things stand, unless one knew what to look for, one would never know that our economic system had been hemorrhaging red ink for the last hundred years and that our social software is looking like a picture of a third world slum.  The underlying unaccounted for costs and asset stripping were not recognized as debts, but they didn’t go away.  They were simply stored out of sight.  Sometime soon, the shocking reality of how much we now ‘owe’ the biosphere and how culturally degraded we have become will crash the biggest party in economic history, with resultant impacts we have hardly begun to think about.

In the meantime, the default setting is to ride the tiger for as long as possible, no matter what the ‘collateral’ damage is or how many riders get eaten.  Just worry about number one still being on there at the end of the day.  Nothing else matters. Go Alcoa!


The Nazis were such brutal amateurs.  Their depredations were so transparently black-uniformed-skull-and-cross-boned-in-your-face.  For us, the market will take care of everything and all we will have to do come the crunch, is send heartfelt Band-Aids and body bags for the unfortunate victims of ecological ruin, who do not have the wherewithal to save themselves or the military resources to take them from somewhere else.

One has to have an imagination to realize that talking about say ‘green cars’ (there are no such things) is the same as saying ‘Work Makes You Free’ (Auschwitz front gate).  They are both propaganda slogans deeply implicated in the notion of holocaust; the latter to the tune of tens of millions of people; the former to the tune of hundreds of millions and billions, as well as allied living species in countless numbers.

War production ordinance dumped on battlefields by war machines to invade/defend territory has been turned into production warfare run by marketing machines to dump ordinance onto customers to gain or lose market share.  In terms of the damage profile each leaves, it makes almost no difference whether the product is poison gas or air freshener.  But in terms of damage scale, no one has ever seen a cumulative build up of marketed ordinance at the velocity and density now being witnessed.  And it can’t go on indefinitely without terrible consequences that will have warfare kinds of impact.  One just has to hope that one will be rich enough to be on the winning side that eats.

The last of the planet’s already more than halved rainforest area will disappear within 40 years, taking out almost half of the remaining global inventory of plants, animals and micro organisms.  This matters no more to today’s populations than Auschwitz, Treblinka, Buchenwald, Dachau or Mauthhausen did to the populations of their day.  Now however, the holocaust is global and includes all living things.  It is The ‘Great’ Maelstrom; the greatest since the extinction of the dinosaurs, seventy million years ago.

Nuts.  Completely nuts!  Criminal nuts!


It is only a matter of time before we ‘meet our Stalingrad’, so it would make sense for anyone with any sense left, to start preparing for some serious reversals of fortune.  More, they need to prepare against mass constituencies that have been long in denial about this possibility.  Once they have got over the shock, they will be looking for someone to blame for their misfortunes; and it won’t be their favorite toys and trinket makers, whose ecological rapacity and totalitarian habits have made such a disaster inevitable.

For gays, such preparation would mean taking their considerable winnings off the table and consolidating them by digging in the roots of tolerant acceptance considerably deeper than they are now.  Gays are somebody’s sister or son, who belong and are valued for themselves and all the things that they contribute to the common weal.  They are the nice, considerate, decent and public spirited people next door who have pruned the gay agenda and adopted a more conservative profile, so as to become a smaller potential target and less obviously children of liberal progressivism.
 
Getting involved in tendentious try-on gender boundary disputes will leave the gay rights movement dangerously exposed when the retreating starts.  Do not expect it to be either orderly or accompanied by the civil decencies.  Everything that gay activists have worked so hard for could all be undone, because the real enemy will be able to say with some truth, that the gay break-in into the reproductive milieu was nothing more than a bastard child of weak governance and the reformationary zeal that overran it.  “Look what happens if they are given an inch…….”

In the coming period, anti-gay hostiles will be able to get much more traction than they do now.  People who are now neutral towards them will come under pressure from this quarter and may waver.  The liberal and progressive sponsors will be coming under attack as the frustration and anger that has been quietly building against them over the last few decades gets its chance.


The deconstruction of social regulation and its substitution by marketing and selling has been an economically very successful strategy, but socially disastrous.  The giveaway is the libertarian destruction of personal obligation, accountability and discipline, which is what used to be the underpin of all social rights.  Unconditional human rights have been conflated with consumerist indulgence, where the customer is always right.
 
The systematic removal of internal and external psychological controls has progressively turned people into consumers who don’t know how to say ‘no’ to anything.  Over three generations, this has produced a new wave of young people whose behavior is completely spontaneous and whose receptivity only responds to messages from the commercial sponsors.  Everything else has been demolished.
 
Today’s young Consumerbabelets are every bit as much a totalitarian social product as the Hitler Youth, the Soviet Young Pioneers, or the Chinese Red guards.  The latter were used briefly to smash recalcitrant adult attitudes not approved by Mao’s regime.  This tragic reversal of the role of adult and child only lasted a decade in China.  For us the revolution goes on like an intergenerational catastrophe, relentlessly infantilizing adult society with each successive wave.

The culture of the Consumerbabelet is characterized by the totalitarian language of Doublethink (reversal of meaning)/Hollowthink (meaning annihilation), revolutionary enthusiasm and relentlessly cheerful and intrusive persuasion, institutionalized veneration of icons, adult infantilism, personality cults, privatized, massively budgeted and science driven private propaganda ministries, ever intensifying productivity and compliance requirements, systematic white anteing of pre-Revolutionary values and institutions and an agenda of nothing less than the complete reconstruction of the individual and society for the maximizing of production and consumption outcomes.  Consciousness control does not get any tighter than this.  Traditional totalitarianisms have been rendered into clumsy obsolescence.

The Pied Pipers of Cool have taken our children singing and dancing to the music of myriad Ipods, into the magic mountain and there wasn’t a thing we could do.  Only fools would dare complain, for ridicule already stalks them.  We pretend that this is as inevitable as it is as necessary as it is right.  We are the ones who must adjust, for we cannot afford to alienate the little princes and princesses.

This is the kind of despotism that George Orwell could not possibly have imagined.  The authoritarians of his time were so crudely ‘political’.  Who would have thought that the liberal ideology of the enlightenment could have been so easily co-opted into fronting a system of privatized totalitarianism that everyone missed because it was right under their noses?
 
Libertarian ideas have been used by the marketing and sales department of Freedom Inc to batter down any social inhibitions to maximized consumption goals.  The removal of disciplined and responsible behavior and its replacement by social license to indulge oneself in whatever fantasies that are being sold at the time, is the ultimate disempowerment.  That this should have been auspiced by liberal progressivism is an unforgivable breach of its social license and its legitimacy as an ideology.
 
Conservatives like me will go after it when we get the chance, to get its acolytes out of positions of social influence and power, and to hold them to account.  They cannot be allowed to get away with this.  And when the time comes, they, along with selected corporate postremocides (future destroyers who were ‘only obeying orders’) will be put through the moral ringer with the same uncompromising rigor that the Nazi hacks had to endure after the World War.

Gays will need new sponsors to protect them.  They will need conservative supporters who will be prepared to put a lot on the line to block the religious right and prevent a return to the homophobic repression of the past.  But if the organized lobby arms of gay society have not configured themselves to be a consciously conservative minority voice that accepts the dominant gender paradigms of reproductive mainstream society, there will be very little sympathetic conservatives will be able to do for them
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Furthermore, people like me are not going to die in a ditch trying to save gays if they have put themselves in the ground between us and the liberal progressives we are going after.


Getting to first base in managing life inside an asylum is being honest with ourselves, because everything around us conspires to prevent this.  Using ideological clichés like ‘patronizing’, ‘judgmental’ or ‘prejudiced’ when assessing honest feedback is the language of propaganda, moral evasion, intellectual laziness and probable self-guilt on all three cliché counts.  It doesn’t wash anymore.
   
As an Asperger, I am the child of a Lesser God.  I am a partial social incompetent who lives in his head a lot of the time and ‘talks to himself’.  But I have meditated more deeply than most of my contemporaries, which would have been much more difficult if I had been more like them.  I am deeply faulted, but without regret.  I have made life around these errors, repented those that I could have done better with, or dealt with badly and make no apology for the rest.  It hasn’t been all downside.
 
By the same token, I have been deprived of many of the ordinary pleasures and growth experiences that come with the company of friends and listening to what they have to say.  I have suffered for it and lost many things that life offers, which has made me even more insensitive than I might otherwise have been.
 
But sometimes insensitivity is trumps.  It enables one to say the otherwise unsayable, when it needs to be said, at a time when it isn’t ‘acceptable’, because the conventional wisdom of business-as-usual has yet to catch up with the bad news.  And it thrives in the narrow window of crisis, when sensitive, consultative and empathetic style is not a virtue, but a preparedness to stamp on toes is.
 
For me, pride and humility are conjoined.  In the struggle for credibility and status in a very competitive one-upmanship environment, humility has become a very under-rated virtue.  It is close to honesty, for we all have faults, one way or another.

My sexuality is an imprinting mistake.  It brings unnecessary extra baggage into reproductive relationships which are inappropriate.  They have a tendency to put those already fraught relationships at further hazard by importing political extremism into them.  And while I am not in a position to say that some people cannot manage these hazards successfully, they need to be reckoned with as dangerous, which is why I no longer indulge those propensities in myself and have not done so for over 26 years.

Gays need to be equally brutally honest with themselves.  This is not a self-esteem and gratification exercise, but one dedicated to a realism which is the basis of personal empowerment, autonomous thinking and quality decision making.  This requires the capacity to do some serious myth busting.

Being gay is not some kind of sacred, mystical, sexo-existential ‘identity’.  Such ideological inflation only begins to sound even vaguely plausible because we have so lost touch with real existential/spiritual values that we are susceptible to even the most spurious and self serving rubbish.  Sexuality and the desire profile it represents is one of many facets of our characters and to define it as more than that isn’t just a serious loss of perspective, but a propaganda exercise.
 
Just because a lot of gays wear their sexuality on their sleeves doesn’t mean that is what and ‘who’ they are.  It is just the face page they choose to show to the world.  My sexuality is all over me like a rash and it never ever leaves me alone for long.  I choose not to socially indulge it or reveal it unnecessarily, let alone ham it up into public theatricality.  It isn’t any less of ‘who I am’ for that.  Nor is it made more of than it really is.

Just because individuals have gay tendencies doesn’t mean they are ‘in denial’ of themselves if they chose not to indulge them or that they ‘falsify’ themselves if they make a choice to be reproductive instead, if having children is important to them.  They are simply making ordinary adult life choices that involve some sacrifices in one place in exchange for benefits elsewhere.
 
Sure, the sex isn’t going to be that exciting, but that is not the be all and end all of what life is about.  And if it is, I would suggest that there are some rather underdeveloped values informing such a view and a sensibility that has done little to explore anything except the most superficial things that life and partnerships have to offer.
 
My wife has never catered to my sexual fantasies.  I never expected her to, because I never married her for that reason.  We have never been particularly sexually compatible, but she is a fabulous woman towards whom I am absolutely devoted, without qualification.  Marrying her was the best and most rewarding decision I have ever made.  And this has been in no small measure amplified by producing a gorgeous, talented and ambitious young woman as a daughter.

The dominant consumerist ideology relentlessly tries to persuade us that we are quite properly helpless before our desires, and that if it feels good, we should do it.  This isn’t necessarily the case, unless of course one’s lifestyle and values have already been colonized by that paradigm.  One of the reasons that gay lobbying has so been so successful is that many gay ‘lifestyles’ are very consumer driven.  Childlessness leaves relatively high disposable incomes for indulgence and fun.  The template fit between much of the gay community and the consumer society is exact.

Consumer industries love gays because not only are they spenders out of all proportion to their incomes, but they are spending behavior models for the rest of society.  The gay and lesbian Mardi Gras is an all singing and dancing advertisement promo for that must-have-social-essentials industry, the lingerie and sexware manufacturers and retailers.  And that is just the tip of the spending iceberg; melting with hot deals and sizzling accoutrements.  It doesn’t get any better when sexuality and spending mix.

The consumer society works sexuality until it almost raw, because the desire and fantasy is so much more powerful than the reality.  It has inflated and puffed its value and importance to the point of caricature, like Barbara Streisand’s nose.  The humble rut and struggle of reproduction has been raised to iconic ‘spiritual’ dimensions.  The hormone flush of sexual interest has been made synonymous with ‘love’ to an extent that borders on the ludicrous.  Every pretentious and tawdry woman’s magazine sports a sex priestess to advise the ever hapless and hopeless romantic of the pornological possibility of eternal bliss.  And the stupid sucks keep coming back for more because hope springs eternal, no matter how much the evidence for it doesn’t.  Sexuality is the ultimate bullet proof con and gays are amongst its most prominent victims.  They so ‘do’ the trappings of sexuality. It’s their ‘thing’.


Sexual behavior is just another part of the behavior continuum.  Just like anything else, it can be abused and/or represent a failure of character.  But this is not an issue of sexuality per se, but the values and commitment that informs it.  Emotionally arrested and narcissistic child/adults cannot engage others deeply.  They prefer promiscuous and superficial engagements because that is all they are capable of.  They disrupt the broader gender dialogue by muddying the politics of reproductive commitment.  They actively undermine it if they do not choose to keep to themselves and each other.  They can be a heart wrenching nuisance and waste of time for those who are not as immature as they are.

I think it is fair to say this is mostly (but not entirely) a male thing, gay or straight.  Women can do promiscuity and flighty game playing, but their reproductivity and their sexual emotionality grounds them too much to want to stay there for long.  Their window of reproductive opportunity is limited and so is their patience.  In the end they get bored and irritated with men (and other women), who have nothing to offer other than casual coupling.

Women who are confronted by an unwillingness to emotionally engage by most of the men they meet can hardly be blamed for turning to other women for emotional support and a female partner who is likely to deliver appropriate and understanding domestic arrangements.

The mirror image of that is that many gay men find their attraction to other men has the benefit of dealing with a whole mass of other guys who have as little interest in demanding emotional engagement as each other; none of that give an emotional inch and take a mile stuff; no nesting noises and babies; no hormones and moods; no periods, no menopause; most of all, fewer bonding hassles and ‘neurotic’ possessive jealousy, just because there has been more than a one night stand.  Being gay is the answer to the ‘My fair Lady’ question as to why a woman can’t be more like a man, because all he likely wants is a quick ‘friendly’ and a cup of coffee afterward.  “Give me the simple life……”

All this is a mistake, or a series of them, gay or straight.  It indicates a profound loss of confidence in or memory of appropriate reproductive behavior.  The social values that inform it are a mess.  Everyone is floundering and looking for easy options.  The commodification of ‘happiness’, the ‘good life’ and the reduction of gender to just sexuality is a leering parody of what is real. The Midas touch which is so often represented as a success story is actually a trap in which the unwary unwittingly destroy (turn to gold) everything around themselves, including their food and water supplies, and their children.  The people who died with the most toys were dumb losers who just never ‘got it’.  And worst of all, these mistakes entrench immature and adolescent expectations and behavior in people who should have grown up and embraced adulthood, but never did.

Adults understand that the more they invest loving behaviors into others, the richer they become; not necessarily in the obvious ways, but in the maturity and richness in the software between the ears, and the love and regard that is returned back and (more importantly) passed on inter-generationally.  The most powerful and universal reason for making that investment is reproduction.  It isn’t the only one, but creating and nurturing life is the most powerful and universally accessible one, by far.  It is what all primates do.  To lose that instinct is a fundamental loss of species identity and indicates a society that has completely lost touch with what matters.


I know that our children will be really thrown into the deep end.  A lot of them won’t make it and will suffer much shorter, more pain filled and hazardous lives.  There is no doubt that sometime in the next twenty to thirty years there will be a massive demographic collapse of human and other populations.  It will be a brutal lesson in finding out what matters and what doesn’t; what works and what doesn’t; what is acceptable behavior and what isn’t.  And the survivors will be either gangsters and thugs, or the most courageous, adaptable, tough and committed to getting the best out of themselves and those around them, in extremely difficult circumstances.

Children are our hope for the future and no matter how grim it is, good people are going to be needed then more than ever.  Good parents need to put them there to help future human communities get through the bad times until one day things get a bit better.  If intelligent and well meaning people opt out of the future for our species, they will be leaving it to those with the least vision for what we can become, and they will inherit the earth, or what is left of it.


So, to keep it simple:  Being gay mainly boils down to a sexual preference that is some sort of a mistake and/or a result of the dreadful state of gender relationships and much of our cultural infrastructure.  That is not to suggest that it is something to be ashamed of or that it is a blameworthy defect of character; just a defect.  We all have defects.  It goes without saying that gay people should be judged exactly the same way as anyone else; on their merits in relation to the specifications required for what they are doing.
 
Bob Brown, who is the national leader of the Australian Greens is gay and in a gay partnership.  No one outside the traditional Christian right would dream of holding that against him because it is completely irrelevant to what he is doing and politically representing.  Even though I am far too conservative to be a member of The Greens, he fathered the environment movement’s push into politics and I hold him in enormous esteem for that.

If some hydrocarbon or logging crazy tried to shoot Bob and I were in a position to put myself in front of him to save him, I wouldn’t hesitate to do that, because he is that important, even though I cringe every time he opens his mouth on social policy.

But I am also saying people who have entered into reproductively sterile relationship cannot honestly or legitimately claim the benefits of and the right to use the marital arrangements and adoptions rights of people who have genuinely entered into reproductive relations.  That is theirs because they earn it.  There is no equality here and to pretend that there is, is dishonest, even if he is Bob Brown and the most worthy character on the planet.

Concurrently, I am also arguing that gender definition cannot be fudged by pretending that homosexuality is a gender ‘alternative’ to the ‘dominant’ heterosexual one.  Rather it is a sexuality mistake that is benignly tolerable but not to be encouraged in children if it can be possibly helped. Their reproductive potential is of some interest to their families and the as yet unborn (sustainable thinking).

And finally, the crisis of gender that is resulting in the breaking up of our reproduction infrastructure is also a values and behavioral crisis that is largely a male problem in failing to pull its weight and/or emotionally fully engage in the reproductive enterprise.  It risks compounding participation failure in this great enterprise by retreat into emotional infantilism.

I see marriage as an estate that has onerous and permanent responsibilities and should be able to command considerable social resources in its support to make it viable for what it is designed to do; which is to create, secure and effectively bring up the next generation.  Part of that is additional recognition and privilege in comparison to any other form of domestic relationship, that neither contributes to, nor has a right to contribute to, this great social task.  This is not discrimination against anything or anyone.  It is recognition of and just payment for the genuine added value that balanced gender modeling by a man and woman in a marital relationship delivers, or ought to deliver and be held to account for it if they don’t.


Anyone still in the thrall of liberal-progressive prejudices is going to really hate all this and see it as some sort of reactionary return to the past despite the fact that everything outlined here is dedicated to salvaging as much from the wreckage of liberal progressive society as possible.  There is no suggestion here that gender definition should be returned to the past.  On the contrary, what is being advocated here is making the already existing preliminary changes in the status of women work, so that the whole suite of gender behaviors around the way domestic life is run is properly completed; so that it empowers, as it secures as it delivers on all the major bottom lines.  And anyone who thinks that that is going to happen by some kind of historical osmosis is dreaming.

The same goes for gays.  I want them to secure the many gains they have made and not risk all on a political gambit on reproductive involvement.  Any new regime that comes along with an agenda to rebuild gender balance and security in our reproductive politics is not going to like anyone with an ‘alternative’ sexuality agenda, who is seen as trying to ‘tamper’ with mainstream gender values and children, by ‘exploiting’ its current weakness.  That isn’t just foolish politics.  It is potentially suicidal because it really will give genuine homophobes the kind of leverage they need to attack without mercy. There are so many other ways to make gays into valued and secure community members with powerful allies who will provide sustainable long term defense against the real enemy.

And finally, the social critique of consumer capitalism portrayed here is neither right nor left wing.  It is nonetheless a devastating judgment on what has become of us and that we must somehow either escape or resist the current economic/environmental trajectory.  The terms that this is couched in are far more profound and morally arresting than the judgments at Nuremburg, when Nazism was brought to account.  We are all deeply implicated in a behavioral spiral that will destroy much of everything we have ever valued and force us into a Long March out of the shambles that was once Modern Times.  And there isn’t much time left to get our affairs sufficiently in order to survive what will undoubtedly be an extremely rough ride into the future.
 

Having resolved my personal issues to the best of my ability, I am now busy trying to develop a secular form of ideological fundamentalism.  Hopefully that will reconnect me and perhaps others back into a sane world view with a real grasp of the basics that have been pushed aside in the rush for the consumerist pig troughs
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It is just unfortunate that most of the blithe little pigs still have absolutely no idea that their world is about to be turned into an abattoir.  While I feel obliged to do my utmost to save as many people as possible, I will not blame myself if that number is few.  I live in a society whose crimes are only dwarfed by its capacity to keep populations docile and on message.  Joseph Goebbels, arguably the greatest propagandist ever, up to his time, would be hard pressed to get a job in a public relations or advertising firm these days
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We have a politically unimpeded ‘free’ media, but its decentralized operations have features that would be familiar to students of totalitarian despotisms.  Goebbels would have no trouble spotting them, especially in the mass market lower end.  Global warming news management would leave Joseph glowing with admiration.  And he would be so impressed by the colossal density and sophistication of commercial information management and the iron grip it has on effete, feckless and bureaucratically paralyzed democratic governments.  Once he had got his marketing and public relations degree, Joseph G would be back in his element, with a vengeance.
 
Fascism doesn’t need the state anymore when everything can be turned not necessarily into its opposite so much as hollowed out from the inside.  ‘Hollowthink’ does not become despotic and tyrannical ‘Doublethink’, which turns meaning into its opposite (freedom is slavery).  Much worse, it becomes nothing at all.  Life without boundaries is the very definition of helplessness, impotence and dysfunctional behavior.  It is the tyranny of existential annihilation.
 
It is not open to us anymore, as Martin Luther did, to challenge the writ of our day by sticking a couple of pages of intellectual pugnacity on the local cathedral door.  We are reduced to ridiculous shadow boxing with enemies who have so much of our measure we can hardly see them at all, let along land a blow.  The asymmetries between individuals and the forces that determine their fate have never been greater.
 
The totalitarianism of our times is so formidable, it disappears into our psychological fabric almost without a trace that anything has been altered.  Everything seems so normal and historically continuous.  It is only when, like the space traveler in ‘2011: A Space Odyssey’, he pulls out a drawer in his ‘room’ and finds nothing there, that he realizes he isn’t where he thought he was.

But if ever the little piggy snouts are for any reason pulled out of the malnourishing but all powerfully tasty swill and allowed to see over the edge of their troughs, the shocking truth will out, the panic will set in and the real action will start.
 

Once a regime has become unstable and vulnerable, the circumstances of its end are unimportant incidentals.  They could be anything, for a system in decline produces multiple risk vectors for itself.  They are a symptom of as well as the reason for that decline.
 
Long before the last days, some people and organizations get a sense, sometimes conscious, sometimes not, that they must prepare for uncontrolled change that cannot be avoided.  They look to their defenses and sniff for the opportunities that may arise.
 
Redefining ‘wealth’ and ‘industry’ in an environmentally constrained world will be keys to maintaining prosperity and well being when traditional forms are in decline and/or being deliberately closed down. Conservatives will be the carriers for this dynamic new core of social values, imaginative leveraging and the means to concretely produce them within the economic order.  The social software vehicles for this transformation of economic value will look similar in some respects to a cross over between a service industry and traditional religion, aimed at producing high performance and high productivity social behavior. Biological and social reproduction will be an ‘industry’ and will be treated in exactly the same way as any other, only more so because its product is more valuable.

All other industries will move from growth in consumption to defensive survivalism in the face of hostile and powerful natural and human forces.  Its main pre-occupation will be fortifying the basics of life.  Cost will be much less of a consideration than the capacity to facilitate deliverance from threats or minimize damage if that isn’t possible.  The viability of modern mega cities will come into question as we come to terms with realistic accounting and what they really cost to run.

Conservatives will inherit the coming period of disorder because they are a match for it.  They want stability and order.  They want viability in the long term.  They will patch up some of the broken pieces of old capital and try to make them work.  They want to get the basics running right so that security is re-established.  They will get rid of the trashy and the meretricious, because they divert resources from the essentials and the delivery of high quality and long lasting product, human or material.
 
Threat responsive social organization will take on some military features, become more rank and hierarchy defined and will be quick to discipline behavior that does not conform to what are considered at the time to be reasonable expectations.

Democratic rights will be much more conditional and the franchise will be restricted to those who have proven through onerous and demanding, but ordinarily surmountable tests, that they are worthy of that enormous trust and deserving of the very real social clout that comes with it.  And the more senior and better regarded one is, the more votes one will be able to earn.  Wiser heads will not be rated the same as fools.  Votes will be a status symbol.  In a conservative society, nobody gets anything for nothing, because conservatives  know that unearned assets and benefits all eventually become taken for granted and of low worth.  Conservatives do not indulge people.  And they will be running a world where indulgence really will be unaffordable at any level.


This is a strange landscape to the uninitiated.  This is a post-modern world where life has been broken like Humpty Dumpty.  Only bits of it can be put back together and populations are forced to rebuild, more or less out of ruins, another kind of world that will be scarcely recognizable to the one we now know.

And I am saying to gays in particular and everyone in general, get on with it.  Get ready.  Start moving agendas and priorities around.  Nothing can really prepare for the future, but it is particularly unkind to those who have made no preparations at all.
 
Preparation is accumulating forms of wealth that cannot be confiscated or lost when all goes ill.  It is training for fitness, endurance, resilience, courage, a loving disposition and far sighted habits of mind.  Preparation is getting the settings for life down to the bedrock essentials that cannot be undermined or gainsaid.  It is an unshakable faith that nothing is too terrible to deal with.  Preparation is refusing to tolerate excuses and the second and third rate.  It is saying a resolute no to regime crime and insanity.  Preparation is the habit of ruthlessly honest and transparent dialogue and a willingness to absorb punishment in return, for our intellectual landscape is awash with powerful delusions not up for debate.  These things will stand people in good stead when all else is lost, whether they are gay or anything else.

The age of indulgence is almost over. People who have got used to ideological pampering and weak governance are in for a shock as their pretensions and cosy arrangements are cut down to size or out altogether, as Caligula's stables are cleared, swept out, stripped of their ornamentation and given to other uses. And if the Gay Lobby gets caught in there when the tide turns, they risk losing everything, including the best and most worthy of their achievements.

Remember Incitatus.




Christopher Nagle
March 2010