A culture that lays too much emphasis on males wooing females, rather than on males gaining the favor of the girl's father, disempowers men in general and sets them in undue competition against each other sexually and economically, and pits them against women economically and politically, while it settles them into a false pride of competition against other males, and decieves them into thinking that they can achieve honor directly from the woman they woo. They cannot in the long run. It is a matriarchal society, humiliating to men and disempowering to many, both men and women, in the long run. Men today are too proud to see what is happening to them and to their culture.
Older men should invest in honorable young men, and help them get established. Thus the girl's family should contribute to the marriage with a dowery, essentially and investment in small economic structure, the 'small business', if you will, of the new family. Young men thus made accountable to older men are motivated to achieve honor as men, and women are protected from bad men. The young man's family should also contribute, though their primary contribution might be already made in their son's prior training and business or trade start-up. Such investing from the older generation should legally obligate the younger to repay the loan in the parents old age, eventually displacing our current over-dependence on the alrge structure of social security.
The supra-structure of 'Father Washington' cannot continue to do so much of this for us, but the semi-large structures of business should continue to support their laond dependable workers with good retirment benefits, and be obligated by the supra-structure of the government to do so.
Young people in general, both boys and girls, should be taught the value of working hard, of saving money, and of avoiding interest debt. They should be taught basic bookeeping and record-keeping. They should also be taught how local accountability in matters of sexuallity as well as commerce protects and empowers it's citizens. People properly oriented around local economic interest will more profitabily and more readily loan money at no interest to their own neighbors or even invest in their own poor with wise local oversight. Newcommers to a community whould be welcome and should be included in the local investment if they prove to be accountable, reliable, and loyal to the local economy and culture. Undue cultural insularity is oppressive and unjust, and racism, though sometimes culturally natural to some extent, should be legally checked by the supra-structure from it's tendency to systematically disenfranchise a whole people within a larger community or business semi-large structure. Nevertheless, even a group of people are subject to some cultural evaluation by others, and frank communications about these things should not be forbidden or shamed if they seek to shed light in a helpful way, giving the benefit of the doubt and the possibility of improvment. Neither gender, race, wealth nor local status should have any bearing on the punishment of crimes, nor should it result in an uneven reward for labor and opportunity within the larger community, though the small community has cultural rights to develop and empower its own people especially. All of us must try to balance a sense of identity and loyalty to large, medium and small structures of culture.
Males who are not yet financially ready or proven as responsible have no business fathering children and burdening society with unwed mothers and the expensive bureacratic nightmare of keeping them obligated to pay child support. Generally this means that boys should have a period of initiation into society more rigorous and lengthy than that of girls, and be kept away from the adolescent girls until they are ready. For economic and sexual harmony, males should marry females younger than them in age, in general.
Too much investment is made in big business today. Not enough investment is made in small business. Greed and bigness draws power away from men in general, and from a local culture of honor among men in a community. It creates a need for more laws and larger bureucratic structures that protect women with a kind of chivalry that is sometimes self-serving to the job security and status of large structures of government, big business and education. How proud these employees are of their chivalry!
The community should have it's own commerce, primarily, and not just be an outpost for franchised businesses that suck power out of the community and put it into the hands of a few CEO's in a central office outside the community. Communities should take pride in themselves, help their own people advance and contribute to the community, and protect them from inordinate slavery to large structures outside the community.
Many large structures are neccessary in modern society, especially in manufacture, but the goods manufactured should compete fairly for sale among true local merchants, not corporately owned retail stores.
Even local manufacture is being taken away from our communities today by huge international conglomerates that buy and then close factories. They buy up competitors and then close the factories in order to exploit low-wage workers elsewhere in the world.
The girl should marry young in the prime of her beauty, have children, and then return to the work force, or get further training or education before returning, and perhaps develop a professional career from her husband's investment previously empowered by her father's investment in her marriage and in her husband's work. The woman is then empowered and invested in within the small and medium structures of her family and community.
The community's fathers should seek to be powerful enough to protect their virgins from fly-by-night big structure males, and to interest their debutantes in locally known, accountable and investable young men, rather than allow their daughters to be exploited by outside sexual and economic distractions that disrupt the flow of responsible planning and local economic culture. In economically overextended capitalism, not enough commerce is local, and romanticism tends toward this over time. If the community is too extended outside its own resorces, it cannot make it's women happy in the long run, and its debutantes and young men will have to be employed peons of the big structure. Girls with their "crushes" are often too impatient and rebellious to understand the economics of marriage and culture, and thus fathers should control the dating activities of their daughters up to a certain age of maturity and be legally encouraged to do so. It should be stated on a marriage license of a woman up to a certain age of autonomy whether she was married according to her father's wishes or not. A young woman that gets married or pregnant against her father's wishes should recieve less help from public funds for economic difficulties that arise from her decision than one who is married with her father's permission.
Economic growth involves a certain rhythm of population growth within a given area, and a certain density-point of saturation. Young couples should be occasionally be encouraged to raise families in less populated areas and given economic incentives to do so by those interested in developing less populated areas. There is always a ceiling to growth. When people are too bottled up in highly populated areas, no matter how diverse the economy may be, many will find themselves constrained and oppressed, while the less populated areas will also suffer the imbalance. The Midwest, which has over-emphasised agribusiness, and thus is unduly depopulated, should seek to develop new communities where smaller farms and more locally-based economies can prosper. The coastal and urban areas, which have drawn people in during the last century, having over-emphasised big business and long-distance commerce, should now train some of its young people in more rural skills and businesses, and thus help them escape the oppression of high density by moving elsewhere and developing economies where young people are needed. A sense of the propriety of investing in the cultural advantages of a greater emphasis on local economic transactions must displace our inordinate focus on big business investments and transactions.
Some of the tensions and temptations of urban areas and of young people in general has to do with a loss of economic hope. There is the sense among many that there is little opportunity for them to obtain sufficient psycological or material reward for hard work under the employ of large businesses. A cultural investment in small local structure commerce by cooperating small farmers, businessmen, and wealthy visionaries will allieviate this sense of hopelessness.
Those with wealth who want to help the poor should consider ways of getting commerce, production, and new small business growth into areas where there is currently economic stagnation.
Those with money should consider what real wealth is. Real wealth is not money, which is only a symbol; it is influence over people. Such influence should be invested wisely, through money as well as through time, planning, and research. Investing in others brings a satisfying return if done with wisdom.
Those with money to invest in the poor should consider not just the inner city, but also the dying towns in the Midwest. There should be a move toward repopulating the Midwest. Population relocation can become a new cultural vision, a kind of "Manifest Destiny" revisited. Less populated areas elsewhere in the world can be considered as well.
Links
Response to Cal Thomas
Let's build a community!
A Simple Kind of Life
unrelated stuff of no interest
