BY FRANK WRIGHT

The Enlightenment values which have given us the idea of individual liberty as freedom from constraint have partnered with technological advancement to result in a mass society of atoms.

The digital age is not merely a lonely one, but one in which people are increasingly patterned on visual media. The life examples they internalise are not the lectures of online grifters, but simply a blur. The internet is pattern less from the point of view of sense. Minds are filled up like an overflowing dustbin with the scraps of a media grazing habit. The permanently entertained wear a blank expression, because their saturation in ephemeral images is cancelling them inside.

Family is also a habit. It is one which we are in danger of losing. It is the means of the transmission of healthy, sensible and fructifying norms. It is the basis for lifelong human flourishing. People wither outside it, and the struggle they endure to defray the cost of its loss is an effort that the fortunate product of the stable family never has to make.

The benefit of strong social bonds is not fungible – it cannot be replaced with likes, with a new kitchen, a lifestyle change or some pampering. The strongest social bonds are those of blood, and to break these is to shatter society. The avowed enemies of the family see it as something worthy of being smashed. The result is to break people for life and to leave them with nothing. The family is the main line of defence against the wholesale collapse of society. The family has many enemies, each of whom seeks to substitute itself for the one institution which does best to secure people and their progeny from the viral madness of mass society.

Mass society is one term for the borderless supermarket we all inhabit. It is a process which renders everything a product, and by which all things tend to sameness. There is one architecture, one ideology, one set of correct opinions on every subject. The same films, television, memes and media tropes appear on the screens we all carry around. The results of massification are not beneficial.

Normlessness or anomie is one result, making of the family just another option. The removal of social, cultural and moral norms is necessary to mass society to mitigate the increasing tensions of replacing a familiar population with a churning mass of strangers. The family is an anchor point in the turbulent marketplace of everything, where even identity is a product.

Moral inversion is another result, making virtues of the vices. It is the process by which the empty become full of nihilistic fervour for one passing fancy after the next. Ice age, acid rain, ozone layer, warming, climate change, crisis. The name can change because it is simply a hook to hang the desperate need to believe in something when everything of genuine value has been ransacked and ruined. These crazes allow for a sense of belonging -a kind of filial loyalty inspires the ranks; just as criminal gangs afford a substitute paternal family structure. Ours is a culture of fakes.

Our children are keen to leave home and move to the city, which is a bustling hive. Cities ‘buzz’, they have ‘vibes’. Cities are where the metropolitan elite live, who decide what we are to think and do with our lives. It is the city which most closely resembles the internet on which our young people are increasingly socialised. The city is a place of limitless momentary experience, of mutual strangeness. It is a refuge for young people ill at ease with themselves, whose replacement of family support with like-seeking online status has left them with a permanent sense of anxiety.

The massification of life is a pathologizing process. It is dehumanising in replacing family scale relations and healthy socialisation with an atomised population of pleasure-seeking strangers. Every damaging social trend from crime to weird sexual fetishes, pornography and addictive behaviour is a result of the starvation of the human spirit and the glutting of the vices which are valorised in its place. The dominant ideology is one which is best served by detaching people from the meaningful anchors of God, family and kinship in country because to do so is to make them crave something to replace them. The highest human good is the pursuit of desire delimited by the aggressive dismantling of any concept or structure of genuine value which stands in the way. It leads to an appetite which will tire of its own excess and seek ever more depraved stimulation for its jaded palate. This is one reason for the accelerating degradation of public life, where explicit obscenity is becoming routine, and the term ‘minor attracted person’ is being normalised.

The crazes which seize populations through the media are like scraps of meaning tossed to the ravenous. They create and cement division, such as the worldwide hatred of the unvaccinated, on the basis of opinion manufactured on a massive scale for thoughtless consumption. Lacking any wider moral framework, and with no sensible family structure to correct or challenge these views, a venomous extremism of opinion dominates the individual mind. Beliefs are tailored to the singular, not the plural, and on examination most mainstream opinions appear to be crafted to confer some sense of unearned superiority on the believer. This is a poison which spreads through vanity.

The war on the family is a war on sanity. There is no better foundation for the formation of healthy, mentally stable human beings. Its replacement and removal delivers us into the many evils of obsession, self-absorption and mania which flatter us in the backlit isolation of our beloved screens.

From Frank Wright’s ‘War on the Family’.  Frank has emigrated to England from London. You can read more of his one star reviews of reality on SubStack.