I have a mountain of laundry in my living room, waiting patiently to be folded. I spent a week camping with my side of the family, out of the news cycle, out of cell phone reception, and not missing much. Every once in a while, I wonder if I’m a screen addict. Then I go away from all of them, and I find that I’m totally not. My hands never twitch to check my phone that I turned off and put away. I don’t miss the youtube videos, or anything else, so long as I have books to read or people to talk to.
I borrowed my father’s book to skim through. He was reading The Benedict Option, and so was my fundie religious brother. When I don’t have much time to read a book, sometimes I’ll start with the last chapter and work my way backwards from there. I find it to be a more engaging process of reading a book, because the author expects you to have already mastered concepts provided earlier in the book.
As the campfire conversations turned to politics, after my oldest brother had left to go back to work, I found myself in agreement with my brother for once. It is strange. We don’t agree on much. He’s anti-abortion, anti-gay marriage, and everything else you’d expect of a Christian religious extremist who would never consider himself extreme. Yet, his views match up rather well with Dmitry Orlov’s Communities That Abide.
He just wants the religious freedom to raise his children as he sees fit without Government Interference. This usually means private schools or homeschooling, and there was much complaining about statist/liberal indoctrination techniques. If you’ve been following Jordan Peterson much, you’ll have heard about some of these things. Basic POSIWID says that public schools are not currently designed to teach people how to read and write and do math, otherwise there would be a lot more functionally literate graduates out there who could read bus schedules and could spell things correctly. Even John Taylor Ghatto knows that public schools are designed to indoctrinate into obedience to authority, uniformity, and conformity to liberal notions of tolerance. Public schools, of course, MUST teach tolerance, in order to divide and conquer the children for when they grow up, so they don’t form tribes and clans and effectively resist government taxation and control.
The recommendation my brother was talking about is not to take over the liberal college faculty, and not necessarily to build better Christian colleges, although that’s certainly one thing that can happen. Not everybody should go to college. Not everybody should take on that debt, true enough, but more importantly, not everybody learns that way. Adam Savage is a maker, and doesn’t belong in college. Mike Rowe talks about dirty jobs, and how there’s much more employment and satisfaction to be found in the trades. He has also discussed how trade schools don’t have safe spaces and diversity training and speech/thought control. Instead, they have people insulting each other with grins on their faces, because blue collar people can take a joke and dish it right back. There’s something about working with your hands that makes you get out of your head enough to not get offended when somebody insults you, you fragile snowflake.
I’d like my children to grow thick lizard skin instead of being thin-skinned blubbering messes. You don’t do that through identitarian means, nor through love-bombing. Confidence, as always, comes from within, from trying and failing, and getting back up again and trying again. That hard-won self-confidence can not be taken away from you like self-esteem can, because it comes from within, not from outside of yourself. When you have it, you can dump toxic people from your life, knowing you deserve better, because you can identify who is toxic and who isn’t. Lizard skin is a boundary.