Special to L. Neil Smith’s The Libertarian Enterprise

When my kids were little, I often had the strangest of experiences, at least for someone who was raised as I was, in a place small enough that every adult felt entitled to laying down the law (sometimes resulting in their getting a correction from my mother, because what I was doing was approved of in the family, if not in the village) so that if you stepped a foot out of the true path, you were likely to find yourself at the vortex of a converging tornado of grandmothers.

Sometimes, mostly when the kids were very young, and I was waiting on the playground for them to go in (I walked, so I always left enough time, and often this resulted in waiting for the teacher to let them in) I’d see a kid doing something dangerous to himself or others: Dancing on top of the six foot retaining wall; swinging a branch within two inches of another kid’s eyes. For the other stuff, like manners…. well, it was none of my business, and I wasn’t about to start a feud. But “danger to himself/herself and others” would get me to put my book away and hurry to the kid to say “No. Don’t do that.” in as firm a voice as I could.

The weird thing was the look I got back. Gape-mouthed, eyes wide, it would have been a look that was warranted if I’d told the kid “I’m an alien from Alpha Centauri.” A few of them gave me the key to their shock by saying “You can’t tell me no” or “You can’t tell me that” or “I do what I want.” Not one of them EVER told me “You’re not my mom” (Which is hilarious since my kids, when very young tried that at least once a year, like I’m that stupid.) Which meant it wasn’t a matter of correction by a stranger, it was a matter of “no one ever told me no.” (BTW without touching them, just with withering correction and contemptuous voice I dispelled the notions of those kids. Yeah, I was the person to go to for Kleenex and to get your shoes tied, but I also became the person that if you wanted to misbehave, you had to hide from. Which means most of the time it really was “NO ONE EVER TRIED TO CONTROL THEM.”

Yesterday, here, someone was speculating on the cluster fark of idiocy that our current “holy marxist rulers” have unleashed and said “Well, they didn’t expect to have to perform.”

But it’s not that. They never really intended to perform. You see, they do what they want. They should just “be” and be applauded for it.

Part of the issue is that no matter how you’ve been trained, humans need other humans to set boundaries. Piaget was wrong about that, to an extent. Sure, it is a developmental thing in childhood to realize that others are beings with self-will. But it can be forgotten has an adult, or restricted to a small set of people who are “real” where everyone else isn’t.

People who are isolated from other people go a little bit loopy. (An effect our idiot would be betters are shocked to find followed their idiotic lockdowns.) Sometimes “eccentric recluse harmless loopy” and sometimes “The dog is telling me to chop up the neighbors and put them in trash bags loopy.”

We are social apes, and we need the corrective reactions of others to realize when we’ve gone too far/too weird.

This is particularly true for people who consider themselves “good people” because their intentions are pure, and who never confront the demons inside themselves. (We all have them.)

The problem is that the rise of “mass industrial society” coincided with the left/Marxists seizing control of all communication, including the arts.

Look, Marxism and mass production is a marriage made in hell, one feeding into the flaws of the other. Perhaps it was inevitable, since Marxism is as much a product of the industrial revolution (and one man’s retardation) as it exacerbates illusions of central control.

But having established themselves in control of journalism and the arts by the middle of the last century–to an extent no one not in the field couldn’t even know. I mean, perfectly sane people think that non-Marxists are just not creative. (Casts an eye towards Hollywood. Yeah.)–leftism made itself a positional good. Every feedback from the mass education/information industrial complex told you that to be leftist was to be forgiven everything, to get away with everything and to be automatically, by fiat “good.”

And the problem with that is that no corruption, no evil, not unbridled wish for power would be punished, or even mentioned. To be leftist meant that your private peccadilloes would never be held before your eyes. And often those grew into crimes–looks at Clintons, Obamas, Bidens–and those too would go unpunished.

The problem is these are the children who were never told no. Except they’re not children.

Their unbridled century long indulging of their darkest wishes and urges has left them curiously unsatisfied, so they keep reaching for more and more.

At the same time, society has changed, and we can talk to each other outside their control.

Things like the election they had to steal in plain sight have to give them the cold grue. Not that they can process it, because no one has ever told them anything but that they’re perfect.

So they waver between imagining everyone else must be worse, and thinking that there is something wrong they don’t know.

But at the back of their minds, they know something is wrong. They know they are wrong. Which is driving them ever crazier.

The bad results are not unintentional. They’re spoiled children breaking the whole toy box because they weren’t allowed to beat the quiet little girl with the toy hammer. They might not confess this even to themselves, but they destroy because they’re throwing a massive tantrum.

The problem is this: Children and adults need feedback. For their own protection. Because there’s only so much society at large will tolerate, as Heinlein exemplified with the story of how to train a dog (child) in Starship Troopers.

You can’t let a puppy grow up making messes and excuse it because he’s just a puppy, and then at one take him outside and shoot him. Same with “juvenile delinquents” of course.

BUT–

The same goes for a political faction. You can’t let it go unpunished and praised for the most horrendous power grabs and evil, and tell them they’re good, without eventually having to deal with it.

I think at the back of their minds, dimly, they see it coming. But they don’t know what to do about it. After all, nobody ever told them no, and they are the good people who do what they want.

Keep your clothes and weapons where you can find them in the dark. And be not afraid.

In the end we win, they lose. But it’s going to be a mighty rough patch in between.

 

Reprinted from According to Hoyt for September 24, 2021