My Response to the Common Question: What Can I Do to Help?

We but mirror the world. All the tendencies present in the outer world are to be found in the world of our body. If we could change ourselves, the tendencies in the world would also change. As a man changes his own nature, so does the attitude of the world change towards him. This is the divine mystery supreme. A wonderful thing it is and the source of our happiness. We need not wait to see what others do.

– Mahatma Gandhi

Over the years, many people have asked me, “what can I do to help?” and I never really had a good answer. After five years of consistent writing and thinking, I finally have something concrete to say, but it might not be what you expect. The answer is to work on yourself. Be a better person. It’s something I need to do, and it’s something all of us can strive for every day of our lives since every one of us is flawed.

It doesn’t matter what you do for a living, or what your individual circumstances are, we’re all presented with a variety of choices on a consistent basis. We are all constantly faced with the opportunity to be kind, apathetic or downright mean to someone else, and it doesn’t matter how small the gesture is, every single act is meaningful. I have become convinced that the choices we make in seemingly minor situations resonate and impact the world. It seems clear to me that if everyone acted even a little bit kinder to their fellow humans the world would improve dramatically.

If we all become better people, we would simply not put up with the rampant violent and unethical behavior coming from politicians/oligarchs and things would eventually change. I believe the rot at the top of society influences the bottom, and vice versa. The best way to break the cycle is for each of us to take responsibility for ourselves and our own minds. At that point, consciousness can truly take a leap forward. Being kind, is in fact, a revolutionary act.

Trying to be a decent, rational and informed adult in a world increasingly filled with madness, childish dialogue and violence is hard enough. Being a parent compounds these challenges significantly. You suddenly become endowed with the truly awesome responsibility of guiding children into adulthood and helping them find their way in the world. In this day and age, accepting this challenge has become increasingly difficult.

Yesterday, I sent out a tweet that really seemed to resonate with people.

Writing stuff like the above is very bittersweet for me. On the one hand, my wife and I are extraordinarily blessed that we’re able to be home with our young children so much, but I also feel terrible for all the couples that don’t have such a luxury. As we’ve gotten to know other couples in the area, there’s one common theme that keeps repeating. There’s palpable frustration that both parents have to work simply in order to survive financially. In most cases, one of the parents would prefer to be at home with their children rather than working, at least while the kids are still young. This isn’t to say that there aren’t great parents out there who both work because they both want to work. I think that’s perfectly fine, and I’m not here to judge people’s choices. The problem I have is that many couples simply do not have a choice. And this is considered progress by some.

Those who would like to raise their children and view parenting rightly as a very serious and important job, increasingly don’t have this luxury due to financial circumstances. This is very dangerous and we’re already starting to see the repercussions in society at large. Finding this acceptable is further evidence of a very depraved, selfish society that has lost its way. We live in a culture that so discounts the heroically important task of parenting that parents aren’t able to raise their kids even if they want to. This is disturbing and we need to get our priorities in order quick or future generations will turn out to be a total mess.

On a related note, if you think I’m exaggerating about the importance of thoughtful parenting, let me highlight a few excerpts from a fascinating article I read yesterday titled, Is American Childhood Creating an Authoritarian Society?

American childhood has taken an authoritarian turn. An array of trends in American society are conspiring to produce unprecedented levels of supervision and control over children’s lives. Tracing the effects of childrearing on broad social outcomes is an exercise in speculation. But if social scientists are correct to posit a connection between childrearing and long-term political outcomes, today’s restrictive childhood norms may portend a broader regression in our country’s democratic consensus. 

Since the early 1980s, American childhood has been marked by a turn toward stringent adult control. Support for “free range” childhood has given way to a “flight to safety” characterized by unprecedented dictates over children’s routines.

More so than any other generation, parents and educators have instilled in millennials the idea that, as Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt put it, “life is dangerous, but adults will do everything in their power to protect you from harm.” Indeed, strong social pressures have so hardened against parents who believe in the value of a free, unsupervised childhood that psychologist Peter Gray likens them to past Chinese norms on foot binding.

Hard numbers illustrate these trends:

  • The amount of free time school-aged children enjoyed plummeted from 40 percent in the early 1980s to 25 percent by the mid 1990s.
  • The time young children spend in school jumped from 5-6 hours in the early 1980s to almost 7 hours beginning in the early 2000s.
  • By 2006, some 40 percent of schools had either eliminated recess or were considering doing so.

So too, do more qualitative indicators. Recent studies supported by the Alliance for Childhood found that kindergartens have “changed radically in the last two decades.” Exploration, exercise, and imagination are being deemphasized and play has “dwindled to the vanishing point.” Instead, kindergartens are introducing “lengthy lessons” and “highly prescriptive curricula geared to new state standards and linked to standardized tests”—curricula often taught by teachers who “must follow scripts from which they may not deviate.”

Experts meanwhile are linking increasing rates of anger, aggression, and severe behavior problems to a lack of free play. These outcomes are consistent with evolutionary psychology theories that consider play to be a critical part of child development, teaching children to cope with, and ultimately master, fears and phobias.

The impact on children is concerning in itself, but the stakes for society are particularly high at a moment when American democracy appears vulnerable. In a recent paper in the UCLA Law Review, University of Chicago law professors Aziz Huq and Tom Ginsburg ask whether the United States is at risk of democratic backsliding. Huq and Ginsburg found that the risk of incremental but ultimately substantial decay in democratic norms has “spiked” and now presents a “clear and present” danger. The authors argue that a “larger shift toward an illiberal democracy” is well within the cards.

Whether or not an authoritarian scenario unfolds in the United States could depend on childrearing trends. Indeed, social scientists have long argued that the origins of authoritarian societies can be discerned in childhood pathologies. 

Among the most far-reaching adherents of this view was the late psychologist Alice Miller, a student of authoritarian regimes. Through her study of Nazism and Soviet communism, Miller concluded that dictatorships emerge when an entire generation of children is raised under authoritarian conditions replete with excessive forms of control and discipline. In the case of Nazi Germany, Miller is convinced that Hitler would not have come to power but for turn-of-the-century German childrearing practices that emphasized “unthinking obedience” and discouraged creativity. The millions of Germans who ultimately supported Nazism, in Miller’s views, were coping with the legacy of a “hidden concentration camp of childhood”—one enforced by the “clean, orderly citizens, God-fearing, respectable churchgoers” who comprised the ranks of Germany’s authority figures.

I am not advancing here a simplistic, causal claim that schools are cutting recess and therefore dictatorship is coming to America. But there does seem to be at least anecdotal evidence of an authoritarian paradigm shift in the childhood realm—one that forebodes a broader challenge to the country’s liberal, democratic norms.

Current indicators call, at a minimum, for hard thinking on why American adults are finding such resonance in authoritarian childrearing practices, and whether we, as a society, are preparing young people to thrive in a free country.

Something we should all be thinking about a lot more.

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In Liberty,
Michael Krieger

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15 thoughts on “My Response to the Common Question: What Can I Do to Help?”

  1. And Dr. Spock re-naturalized childrearing for mothers in the 50’s, and was blamed for the free spirits in the 60’s and 70’s. Another thing…I don’t know if ‘civis’ is still a mandatory semester in junior year of highschool, but I did an informal survey of teenagers in the 90’s, ‘what were you taught about voting?’… and was very surprised to hear the same word from kids going to different schools … ‘it’s a privilege’. Hmmmmm…. I always thought it was more of a duty.

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  2. The beginning of this article contains probably the best advice we can give one another. Want a better world be a kinder and more empathetic person.

    As too parenting while I agree children should be allowed to be kids I’ll hold comment on as to how childhood is spent having serious repercussions on society’s future nature not having delved into that subject or knowing if the theory holds water. I will say that on occasion when I thought a parent was being over bearing on children playing I’d venture the comment ‘Heah you kids, quit acting like kids’ to bring things back into perspective. I am of the boomer generation and we were all free range until the twilight call of mothers called us all in from playing kick the can or whatever we were up to but a quick glance at our generation shows that while a good percentage were/are politically/ideologically active so to are a great many very accepting of an authoritarian narrative. Some people are on the optimist extrovert scale while others are naturally on the pessimist introvert scale and the percentage of these types within a population may also have a large effect on societal outcomes, but the advice given early in this article usurps all the harshness of how children are brought along towards adulthood and to accepting responsibility in this world.

    This article also brought back memories of all the kids, boys and girls, playing scrub baseball in the street while parents moved their vehicles to prevent broken windows and then settled on front porches to yak among themselves or just watch the game. I can remember parents getting together to play cards, usually cribbage, in the backyard as from a bygone era. It seemed all yards were open to kids passing through playing ‘army’ or ‘cowboys and Indians’ except of course for the meany on the corner….

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  3. I think hitler was the result of the economic depression also;
    being a good bürger/citizen was about the expectations & the social norms;
    sure german and say french or russian parenting differed;
    the english beat and disciplined their kids too; so far i couldn’t find the british version of hitler; their hitler was the imperial politics maybe;

    i think germans are quite creative despite their parents efforts
    but a bit robotically disciplined because of their parents efforts

    children have different needs and personalities also;
    authoritarian childrearing practices do damage some kids more than other

    i grow up in the former Eastern Bloc not being damaged by the communist indoctrination because the discussions we had at home; i was grade 3 when i realized that some of what i was taught at school was propaganda and at least questioned it privately; critical thinking in the Eastern Bloc was encouraged much more in the schools ( except questioning the communist party undisputable program – inspiration for very funny jokes shared privately- which we avoided in public )
    and i had some teachers using Aesopian ways to teach not fearing trading their paycheck for honesty and integrity

    to my surprise i found that people here in canada are inclined to being a bit more politically correct indoctrinated good bürgers/citizens than what i would expect from a ‘democracy’ that doesn’t brainwash its citizens;

    parenting with love would never harm your kids, neither free range play a bit further from the bullies on the playground or the indoctrination of current propaganda in school

    authoritarian childrearing practices
    leave scars though and create bullies from some kids or bullied kids for some

    and on the adult level
    the breed of corporate / institutionalized authoritarianism
    (the beating of the passenger on the airplane in Chicago, the corporate/imperial wars for oil – the government aliby being bringing democracy there, the Orwellian spying on your own people to control them, profit only motivation – etc) is damaging to much more people, whereas the authoritarian parenting damages just your own kids

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    • Very thoughtful comments and I enjoyed hearing of your youth.

      Canadians are polite to a point. Pass that point and they get very pissed very quickly and will band together to get things done. They made their right wing governments put into effect medicare and other social infrastructure by building a left wing political party threatening to take power if these social needs were not met. They had the only publicly owned national central bank until the right wing government of Pierre Trudeau castrated it and handed monetary policy for Canada over to the Bank of International Settlements et al. Whether CDNs as a whole still retain this feistiness will be known when the chips get down again.

  4. This reminds me of my own free-range childhood and my mother’s question, “What have you been up to now?”, asked in worry and surprised disbelief. But how could we ever explain for her; that a burning hay-stack was an inevitable result of war, or that getting soaked in the icy river was part of the sea farer’s adventures? How powerful a child’s play is.

    Being good, or trying to. Not as an external rule or duty, but as the command of your own heart. It takes bravery to live by the heart. Because it was closed when growing up. And we learned to support ourself on external institutions. Letting those go can be a fearsome process. But miraculously the heart bears within us all moral knowledge we ever need. It only takes the courage to trust oneself. The outer reflects the inner – or the butterfly effect – different perspectives of the same mechanism. We are all powerful. It was written: “Do not hide your light under a basket”. And I believe that in some way we shall also share the burdens, so doing good is certainly a good idea.

    And I thank this blog for my acquaintance with Ralph W. Emerson. I found great joy in this audio: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ftVxOTGkLpc

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  5. “Go outside and play. Just make sure you’re back home when the street lights come on”. – Mom

    That was my mothers prime directive through my entire childhood.Likewise for all of my friends.

    Sure, there were the occasional broken arms, broken legs, fractured skulls, etc., as part of the law of natural selection. If you made the mistake of mouthing off to a bigger older kid you got your ass whipped.

    If you had a brother who was older and bigger than the kid who whipped your ass, he’d go hunt him down, whip his ass, and tell him afterward (or during the asswhippin’), “This is what’ll happen if you ever mess with my little brother again”. Then your older brother would remind you that you needed to learn when to keep your mouth shut because he didn’t have time to go hunt down someone every time your mouth got you into trouble.

    Basically, it was the law of the jungle.But you learned a lot of very valuable life lessons very quickly. The overarching primary lesson was cause and effect. So unless you enjoyed pain, you adjusted your behavior accordingly.

    However the primary directive was always play and have fun. Which for the most part was exactly what we did. If you came home with a skinned up knee your Mom washed it off, sprayed Bactine on it, and sent you back out the door. The joy of freedom.

    I truly feel sorry for kids now. Because very very few of them get to experience that pure joy now. And it’s been that way for decades.

    So you have adults now who were never given the chance to have those experiences during their childhood. So a lot of them end up like Jason Zinoman who wrote the hit piece on Lee Camp in the NY Times. With no real understanding of cause and effect because he’s never has his ass handed to him as a result of his actions.

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  6. You have struck the heart of it, Michael. Things will NEVER change as long as YOU have to change before I do. I know this is something that has been on your mind for awhile because you wrote a while back there wasn’t any problem with religion, government, media, corporations, etc…the problem was the HUMAN MIND. Bingo!

    I came to the same conclusion: too much time reading about others’ outrages and not enough time making my small corner of the world better.

    Anecdotal evidence it works: I walk down my street in medium-sized city to a particular cafe each morning before things get busy. Three days ago I decided out of the blue that I would stop along the way and pick up litter I saw rather than waiting for a shop owner or the city to do it. Today, for the first time ever, when I turned the corner to the cafe, I come across a lady I’ve never seen before picking up litter in front of the cafe. We had a nice, brief chat and agreed that if we want a cleaner city, we should lead by example.

    A coincidence? I choose not to think so. I believe it was confirmation that change may begin with me but I shouldn’t be surprised it doesn’t end there.

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    • Quark, there is no such thing as coincidence. No matter how much us humans want to believe in things like luck and coincidence, nothing is random.

      One of my favorite poems is titled “The Mistress of Vision” by Francis Thompson.

      This excerpt:

      “Where is the land of Luthany,
      And where the region Elenore?
      I do faint therefor.

      ‘When to the new eyes of thee
      All things by immortal power,
      Near or far,
      Hiddenly
      To each other linkèd are,
      That thou canst not stir a flower
      Without troubling of a star;”

      says it perfectly.

      Thompson was an opium addict and was considered mentally “unbalanced”. But “thou canst not stir a flower, Without troubling of a star” is not only beautiful poetically, it is the truth.

      There were also people who claimed that Tesla was mentally “unbalanced”.

      “Though free to think and act, we are held together, like the stars in the firmament, with ties inseparable. These ties cannot be seen, but we can feel them”. – Nikola Tesla

      As I’ve gotten older I’ve begun to realize that many people who are considered to be balanced and “sane” are the ones who are off kilter. Just look at our current “leaders” who consider themselves to be exceptional, successful, “well adjusted” people. Well adjusted to what?! If that’s well adjusted, I’m not interested, thank-you very little.

      So Michael’s statement that “it doesn’t matter how small the gesture is, every single act is meaningful” and “the choices we make in seemingly minor situations resonate and impact the world”, is the key that all of us can use every day to individually and collectively make this world a better place.

  7. Unfortunately the two income trap was enabled by the rise of consumerist based debt worshipping feminism. The upside of early 20th century prewar feminism,was squashed as modern feminism has become nothing more than worshipping two oncome wage slavery disguised as womens right to work and the fully fraudulent “equal pay” movement. Hillary clinton divides and conquers people who support feminism by making dupes out of most of them using the appeal to emotion and indentoty politics.

    The state cannot secure full tyranny without destroying the family. This begins with separating families one another by crushing clans. That was accomplished long ago in most cases but the mormomons hassidic jews amish and other numerous clans that practice freedom of religion at the political level still survive in the u.s. the throngs of atmoized families are targetted as parents are separated from children. Husbands from their wives. Fatjers from children and ultimatepy, even mothers from children. Once the family is divided and conquered the children can be separated from siblings and be made to trust thr authorities. In america, the masses of atmozied broken families are fodder for the meat grinder autjoritarian regim finding in them ahuge pool of willing acquiescers as well as some willing agents of the state. Desperate people make good agents of depravity, having known,nothing independent and self sufficient social unit woryh fighting for. The ‘state’ becomes their social unit. That is what ‘statism’ is about. Right or left, statism is a form if comprehensive sanctioned gangsterism. Is is THE programmed gangsterism. All other spcial units being made reprehensible.

    Modetn feminism has been cultivated by the cia, leading authors like steinham were patronized by cia publishing fronts. It is about culture making. statism is a long term project, and modern,feminism cannot easily be made to turn away from statism, strengthening women as people, rather it will continue to,use feminist ideology to strethen those who abide by statism and weaken those who champion indepence and self sufficiency of the family independent from the state.

    This is why most feminist women are so hopeless stuck in a statist mentality that is put upon an academic and mass media pedestal.

    One challwnge is that pointing this out , as a man, puts you at immidiate risk of being labelled as a mysoginist. Only females can usually stand a chance of getting these ideas through to female Modern feminists.

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    • A lot of your comment rings true. The original idea by those who lead society around by the nose was to get the almost one half of the population that wasn’t being taxed into the work force so that they could be taxed. Ergo the rise in inflation as theft of the value of the former single earner’s paychecks, the greater extension of credit to households in lieu of paychecks keeping pace with inflation with increased debt slavery and the need for stay at home spouses to enter the workforce. David Rockefeller once stated that this was the goal put into play during the 1970s. This was also a time of the parabolic run up of national debt throughout the nations that comprise the west. Feminism as a gathering force, catalyzed by women’s reproductive control with the birth control pill and sexual enfranchisement, and not seeing the larger financial business plan, was just along for the ride and as you point out played nicely into the direction that society was being taken.

    • As an addendum I will state that I am all for the right of women to have equality with their male counterparts as we are all in this together and anything less is an injustice that in actuality affects all of us.

  8. I am an Objectivist – a lifelong student of the ideas of Ayn Rand. Reading this article and the responses, I am reminded of a note I sent to Craig Biddle, editor or “The Objective Standard.” It represents my own perspective that I practice with respect to “what can one do” – especially since my integration of Rand’s ideas expressed by the arrival on the “Objectivist scene” of David Kelly.

    “I’ll close with two recommendations Craig, specifically directed at Objectivists.

    1. Lead with your life and not your mouth. As is the case with a picture being worth 1000 words, an example is worth 10,000.

    When you instead, choose to lead with the latter, skip to number 2.

    2. KNOW your audience! We live in a society that is, in significant measure, dominated by Judeo-Christian philosophy. Therefore, there is a tendency for many of us to become pessimistic and caustic. While I do at times lapse into pessimism, I try, though not always successfully, to keep the following in mind..

    I remain cognizant of my “pessimism.” The value of “pessimism” however when confronting the above reality, is that your “surprises” tend to be favorable. Therefore, never become caustic. Always remain benevolently open to such surprises. Depending on YOUR virtue(s), favorable surprises come more often than you might imagine – as long as, through the exercise of rational virtue(s), you EARN THEM!”

    Dave Walden

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