CHAPTER I.
Down the Rabbit-Hole
Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank, and of having nothing to do: once or twice she had peeped into the book her sister was reading, but it had no pictures or conversations in it, “and what is the use of a book,” thought Alice “without pictures or conversations?”
So she was considering in her own mind (as well as she could, for the hot day made her feel very sleepy and stupid), whether the pleasure of making a daisy-chain would be worth the trouble of getting up and picking the daisies, when suddenly a White Rabbit with pink eyes ran close by her.
There was nothing so very remarkable in that; nor did Alice think it so very much out of the way to hear the Rabbit say to itself, “Oh dear! Oh dear! I shall be late!” (when she thought it over afterwards, it occurred to her that she ought to have wondered at this, but at the time it all seemed quite natural); but when the Rabbit actually took a watch out of its waistcoat-pocket, and looked at it, and then hurried on, Alice started to her feet, for it flashed across her mind that she had never before seen a rabbit with either a waistcoat-pocket, or a watch to take out of it, and burning with curiosity, she ran across the field after it, and fortunately was just in time to see it pop down a large rabbit-hole under the hedge.
In another moment down went Alice after it, never once considering how in the world she was to get out again.
The rabbit-hole went straight on like a tunnel for some way, and then dipped suddenly down, so suddenly that Alice had not a moment to think about stopping herself before she found herself falling down a very deep well.
Either the well was very deep, or she fell very slowly, for she had plenty of time as she went down to look about her and to wonder what was going to happen next. First, she tried to look down and make out what she was coming to, but it was too dark to see anything; then she looked at the sides of the well, and noticed that they were filled with cupboards and book-shelves; here and there she saw maps and pictures hung upon pegs. She took down a jar from one of the shelves as she passed; it was labelled “ORANGE MARMALADE”, but to her great disappointment it was empty: she did not like to drop the jar for fear of killing somebody underneath, so managed to put it into one of the cupboards as she fell past it.
“Well!” thought Alice to herself, “after such a fall as this, I shall think nothing of tumbling down stairs! How brave they’ll all think me at home! Why, I wouldn’t say anything about it, even if I fell off the top of the house!” (Which was very likely true.)
Down, down, down. Would the fall never come to an end? “I wonder how many miles I’ve fallen by this time?” she said aloud. “I must be getting somewhere near the centre of the earth. Let me see: that would be four thousand miles down, I think—” (for, you see, Alice had learnt several things of this sort in her lessons in the schoolroom, and though this was not a very good opportunity for showing off her knowledge, as there was no one to listen to her, still it was good practice to say it over) “—yes, that’s about the right distance—but then I wonder what Latitude or Longitude I’ve got to?” (Alice had no idea what Latitude was, or Longitude either, but thought they were nice grand words to say.)
Presently she began again. “I wonder if I shall fall right through the earth! How funny it’ll seem to come out among the people that walk with their heads downward! The Antipathies, I think—” (she was rather glad there was no one listening, this time, as it didn’t sound at all the right word) “—but I shall have to ask them what the name of the country is, you know. Please, Ma’am, is this New Zealand or Australia?” (and she tried to curtsey as she spoke—fancy curtseying as you’re falling through the air! Do you think you could manage it?) “And what an ignorant little girl she’ll think me for asking! No, it’ll never do to ask: perhaps I shall see it written up somewhere.”
Down, down, down. There was nothing else to do, so Alice soon began talking again. “Dinah’ll miss me very much to-night, I should think!” (Dinah was the cat.) “I hope they’ll remember her saucer of milk at tea-time. Dinah my dear! I wish you were down here with me! There are no mice in the air, I’m afraid, but you might catch a bat, and that’s very like a mouse, you know. But do cats eat bats, I wonder?” And here Alice began to get rather sleepy, and went on saying to herself, in a dreamy sort of way, “Do cats eat bats? Do cats eat bats?” and sometimes, “Do bats eat cats?” for, you see, as she couldn’t answer either question, it didn’t much matter which way she put it. She felt that she was dozing off, and had just begun to dream that she was walking hand in hand with Dinah, and saying to her very earnestly, “Now, Dinah, tell me the truth: did you ever eat a bat?” when suddenly, thump! thump! down she came upon a heap of sticks and dry leaves, and the fall was over.
Alice was not a bit hurt, and she jumped up on to her feet in a moment: she looked up, but it was all dark overhead; before her was another long passage, and the White Rabbit was still in sight, hurrying down it. There was not a moment to be lost: away went Alice like the wind, and was just in time to hear it say, as it turned a corner, “Oh my ears and whiskers, how late it’s getting!” She was close behind it when she turned the corner, but the Rabbit was no longer to be seen: she found herself in a long, low hall, which was lit up by a row of lamps hanging from the roof.
There were doors all round the hall, but they were all locked; and when Alice had been all the way down one side and up the other, trying every door, she walked sadly down the middle, wondering how she was ever to get out again.
Suddenly she came upon a little three-legged table, all made of solid glass; there was nothing on it except a tiny golden key, and Alice’s first thought was that it might belong to one of the doors of the hall; but, alas! either the locks were too large, or the key was too small, but at any rate it would not open any of them. However, on the second time round, she came upon a low curtain she had not noticed before, and behind it was a little door about fifteen inches high: she tried the little golden key in the lock, and to her great delight it fitted!
Alice opened the door and found that it led into a small passage, not much larger than a rat-hole: she knelt down and looked along the passage into the loveliest garden you ever saw. How she longed to get out of that dark hall, and wander about among those beds of bright flowers and those cool fountains, but she could not even get her head through the doorway; “and even if my head would go through,” thought poor Alice, “it would be of very little use without my shoulders. Oh, how I wish I could shut up like a telescope! I think I could, if I only knew how to begin.” For, you see, so many out-of-the-way things had happened lately, that Alice had begun to think that very few things indeed were really impossible.
There seemed to be no use in waiting by the little door, so she went back to the table, half hoping she might find another key on it, or at any rate a book of rules for shutting people up like telescopes: this time she found a little bottle on it, (“which certainly was not here before,” said Alice,) and round the neck of the bottle was a paper label, with the words “DRINK ME,” beautifully printed on it in large letters.
It was all very well to say “Drink me,” but the wise little Alice was not going to do that in a hurry. “No, I’ll look first,” she said, “and see whether it’s marked ‘poison’ or not”; for she had read several nice little histories about children who had got burnt, and eaten up by wild beasts and other unpleasant things, all because they would not remember the simple rules their friends had taught them: such as, that a red-hot poker will burn you if you hold it too long; and that if you cut your finger very deeply with a knife, it usually bleeds; and she had never forgotten that, if you drink much from a bottle marked “poison,” it is almost certain to disagree with you, sooner or later.
However, this bottle was not marked “poison,” so Alice ventured to taste it, and finding it very nice, (it had, in fact, a sort of mixed flavour of cherry-tart, custard, pine-apple, roast turkey, toffee, and hot buttered toast,) she very soon finished it off.
“What a curious feeling!” said Alice; “I must be shutting up like a telescope.”
And so it was indeed: she was now only ten inches high, and her face brightened up at the thought that she was now the right size for going through the little door into that lovely garden. First, however, she waited for a few minutes to see if she was going to shrink any further: she felt a little nervous about this; “for it might end, you know,” said Alice to herself, “in my going out altogether, like a candle. I wonder what I should be like then?” And she tried to fancy what the flame of a candle is like after the candle is blown out, for she could not remember ever having seen such a thing.
After a while, finding that nothing more happened, she decided on going into the garden at once; but, alas for poor Alice! when she got to the door, she found she had forgotten the little golden key, and when she went back to the table for it, she found she could not possibly reach it: she could see it quite plainly through the glass, and she tried her best to climb up one of the legs of the table, but it was too slippery; and when she had tired herself out with trying, the poor little thing sat down and cried.
“Come, there’s no use in crying like that!” said Alice to herself, rather sharply; “I advise you to leave off this minute!” She generally gave herself very good advice, (though she very seldom followed it), and sometimes she scolded herself so severely as to bring tears into her eyes; and once she remembered trying to box her own ears for having cheated herself in a game of croquet she was playing against herself, for this curious child was very fond of pretending to be two people. “But it’s no use now,” thought poor Alice, “to pretend to be two people! Why, there’s hardly enough of me left to make one respectable person!”
Soon her eye fell on a little glass box that was lying under the table: she opened it, and found in it a very small cake, on which the words “EAT ME” were beautifully marked in currants. “Well, I’ll eat it,” said Alice, “and if it makes me grow larger, I can reach the key; and if it makes me grow smaller, I can creep under the door; so either way I’ll get into the garden, and I don’t care which happens!”
She ate a little bit, and said anxiously to herself, “Which way? Which way?”, holding her hand on the top of her head to feel which way it was growing, and she was quite surprised to find that she remained the same size: to be sure, this generally happens when one eats cake, but Alice had got so much into the way of expecting nothing but out-of-the-way things to happen, that it seemed quite dull and stupid for life to go on in the common way.
So she set to work, and very soon finished off the cake.
Chapter 1, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.
Indeed, we've fallen down a very deep well.
Let's recap how we got here.
Our genetic makeup, and all that goes with it, is something that has a 250,000,000-year-old, at least, history. We aren't "assigned gender", like we're given class assignments. Our gender is part of our DNA and in every single cell in our body.
And there's no confusion on that part inside of us, in our natural state or a more natural state. We're so ordered towards our natural gender orientations that recent studies have shown that not only boy meet girl where cultural boundaries exist, they even will where speciation boundaries exist, as long as they're not massive.
I.e., Cro Magnon boy meets Neanderthal girl? No problem.
And yet, now in contemporary, rich (historically speaking) white, European society, which we are part of, there's a segment of society which is claiming that their DNA, in essence, got it wrong.
That's not possible. Your DNA is your DNA, and your gender is not a "birth defect". Indeed, ironically, in an era in which genetic traits that previously were regarded as defective are now to be treated as normal, here's one that is in fact normal, your gender, being treated as defective.
Western psychology and sociology, which is Western, has taken up treating individual inclinations and biological mandates, or perhaps our psyches as divorced in some ways from our bodies, such that any whim and desire, save for a very few, is to be celebrated. In the area of sex, as disturbing as it may be, and it is highly disturbing, the only inclination which is not to be questioned, and not to be celebrated, is the one barring adults (mostly men) preying on children.1
Everything else is okay and not to be questioned, including behaviors that were only recently regarded as species of mental illnesses, among which is people believing that they should be a member of the gender which they are not.
There's no scientific basis for this. Indeed, in real terms, its current suddenly accepted status is a rebellion against science by narcissistic forces. It is, in essence, they argue, "all about me!". We are the centers of our own narcisstic universe, around which everything revolves, and everyone must acknowledge it.
Only a really rich society can engage in such delusions. And because the delusions are destructive, they will only do so temporarily.
Somebody suffering from such a delusion, a man, decided he was a woman, and entered a sorority at the University of Wyoming.
This was reported by the Cowboy State Daily back in October, in an article in which they stated:
Artemis Langford2, of Lander, became the first open-transgender student to be accepted into the Kappa Kappa Gamma sorority in September, according to the Branding Iron, UW’s student newspaper.
Born male, Langford identifies as a woman and attended high school in Lander.
So The Branding Iron reported on the story. That likely wasn't hard, as Langford reports for The Branding Iron. He didn't write the article, however.
That article appears here:
Nowhere is it clear how far down the transformation process, if at all, Mr. Langford has actually gone. Photos of him show him dressed as a woman and affecting a female appearance, and indeed perhaps to a degree more successfully than is typically the case in this arena. But is he, as they say about horses in another context, "intact". The articles don't say.
At least one article elsewhere suggest that he is in fact intact, and that some members of the sorority, while it voted to admit him, were uncomfortable with it. One supportive news story just flat out said he was a male that had been admitted to a sorority. The National Review reported that members were uncomfortable about it, with an article about that stating:
A sorority at the University of Wyoming has opened the door to allow a transgender student into the group that has been historically known to only allow females.
Kappa Kappa Gamma (KKG) voted on whether or not the transgender student who is a biological male should be allowed to join the sorority. In a majority vote, Artemis Langford has been accepted to join the group. In an interview with the UW's student newspaper the Branding Iron, Langford says, "I feel so glad to be in a place that I think not only shares my values, but to be in a sisterhood of awesome women that want to make history."
But, not everyone in the sorority joins Langford's excitement. Before Langford was officially accepted, KKG gathered together to discuss the future of the sisterhood. One sorority member told National Review the president and membership chair dismissed the concerns of members who felt "deeply uncomfortable with a male being accepted into their sisterhood."
NR reports the leadership pressured the women into accepting their ideology. The anonymous member references comments made by senior leadership about the girls being "homophobic" if they voted no. Another leader allegedly said, "If you have something to say about this that isn't kind or respectful, keep it to yourself."
Moreover, while appearances on such things aren't everything, it's pretty easy to tell which "sister" Langford is in a group:
Assuming he is intact, and to put it honestly which therefore will come across as indelicate and crass, he's got a dick and balls and male DNA, and he's with a group of young women. His currently claimed psychological situation may be telling him he's a woman, but his testosterone and biology tells him he's a man, which he is. And if we know anything about the biology of our species, the mammal with the highest sexual dimorphism and sex drive of any mammal that ever lived, it can override a lot. Indeed, claimed homosexual men fathering children is not exactly unusual.
So, there's a man, perhaps intact, living in a sorority, simply because he claims to be a woman and has been dressing as one.
I'm not saying that he's going to do something improper. Chances are he won't. But I'm saying that, at a bare minimum, it's a bad precedent, as at some point, somebody will.
And of couse we're saying more than that, as this article is focused on, at least in regard to this, biology.
KKG allowed this to occur because it either must affect to be woke, in the zeitgeist of our times, or it doesn't want to appear to be offensive. It should be noted the sorority was recently in the news with bad press elsewhere as its members on one campus were reported to be hostile to their only black member. Based on its material linked in the article above, it's sincerely sipping the Kool-Aid.
UW when it learned of it, which it learned through the Branding Iron, chose to turn a blind eye, taking the position that it's often the best just to do nothing rather than risking offending somebody.
Baptist minister Todd Schmidt, however, did choose to do something, that being to note that Mr. Langford is in fact a man.
Rev. Schmidt was maintaining a booth in the Union which espouses his worldview, which is basically that the entire globe is around 5,000 years old (it's much older) and that evolution is a fib (it isn't, it's the scientific truth). Taking offense at Mr. Langford's decision that he was a "Miss" for sincerely held religious reasons, he was, quite frankly, probably the worst person imaginable to introduce scientific reality into the discussion, but he did. Given the situation, and his Weltanschauung, that was likely inevitable, if unfortunate.
Now UW had trouble. It should have known the trouble was coming.
It reacted to the trouble by booting him off campus for naming Langford by name. But Langford had already outed himself. The widely spread news story, the version we initially discussed here, was that Rev. Schmidt had outed Langford and was being tossed out for that reason. But in reality, that wasn't what had occurred.
Enter constitutional experts like Eugene Volokh, who have said that Rev. Schmidt's free speech rights are being suppressed. Given the full story, Volokh and his fellow travelers are frankly correct. UW had acted to suppress free speech.
Next enter the Freedom Caucus.
What and who the Freedom Caucus is in Wyoming is something that's flown beneath the wire, but as the recent ship jumping of Krysten Sinema had taught, when you are a member of a political party in a legislative body, you "caucus" with them. Basically, the caucus is a political organization within a legislature, nearly a proto political party or even more than that. In this case, the Freedom Caucus has come to be a de facto political party within the GOP, and the extreme right wing/populist one at that.
In that role, it takes Trumpite views, or the ones that work toward him, as part of their Führerprinzip. They also espouse Illiberal Democratic views, taking the outlook of Patrick Deneen to a full conclusion. In that sense, they are open in the sense that not only do they view social trends in the US as disturbing, which they are, and delusional in some areas, which they also are, and espouse the view that ground needs to be taken back essentially by force.
This issue was tailor-made for them as it presents a rare instance in which their Weltanschauung is supported by a concrete issue, and therefore, lead by Illinoisan Jeanette Ward, they've emailed the University, stating:
Well, they're right.
And therefore, what we predicted post Obergefell, has come to pass.
Justice's Kennedy's departing gift.
At the time of the Obergefell decision, which was obviously not supported by the law, we predicted that it would be used to advance an anti nature and anti-traditional liberal world view, even though the delusional octogenarian author didn't see that coming, and those advancing the view of Obergefell, which was to force the issue via a judicial coup, claimed that they'd stop there. The didn't, and haven't. And now a certain section of the American left are busy tearing down all standards.
In no small way, Obergefell lead to Donald Trump, and Donald Trump lead to the radical right antidemocratic Illiberal Democrats.
And stuff like this advances them enormously.
None of which gets to some other issue at work in this trend.
Let's pretend.
Something is massively amiss in a society in which a small but celebrated section of it is so distressed by their natural roles as men and women that they choose to radically opt out of it. Most of those so choosing do not really seek to take up the full roles of the other gender, but seemingly to escape that of the one that they are in.
What has brought that about?
The other day, I rode down the elevator with a woman dressed as a tiger.
She was not, of course, a tiger.
I don't mean that she was in a tiger costume, like for Halloween or a really advance New Year's costume ball. I mean that she was dressed as a tiger, with tiger stripped clothing, and a tiger cape (it was cold), and wearing cat ears.
She also absolutely stank.
I didn't ride all the way down, but halfway down. Boarding the elevator on the top floor of the building, she got on halfway down. You could tell she was surprised that the elevator was nearly full, but she got on, which means that she was in close approximation to all of us.
The weather outside was Arctic. There was a car waiting for her, which was good, as if not, she would have frozen within a block.
But she was dressed as a tiger.
A few years ago, I used to pass, fairly frequently, a girl on here way to high school who was dressed as a cat, completely with a tail.
At that time, I mentioned it to a friend who also had high school aged kids, and he informed me they were "furries", and there were a small community of them in the high school, not surprisingly all female, although not all furries are female. Over time, I'd see a couple more of them as I drove to work who walked the same route.
Furries are still around, and they've come to take themselves fairly seriously. They're people who heavily identify with an animal fantasy. Not just adorning costumes in some instance, but in some really taking it seriously, which has to be a debilitating lifestyle.
Why do I mention this?
Well, again, what brought this about?
People who want to be part of the other gender? Humans who want to be animals?
Hmmmm. . .
Much ado about emasculation.
I don’t think that being a brute or having insensitivity or disrespect for women is anything to do with masculinity, or ever did. But I don’t think that to be fair to women, we should become them.
I think that men have, in my view, become quite feminized. I have these very strong women in my life who do not take masculinity as a sign of oppression toward them. There are a lot of, I think, cowardly genes that lead to people surrendering their jeans and putting on a skirt.
The New York Times recently ran an article claiming there is a male crisis in the country.They have a point.
Commerce [and] entrepreneurial capitalism take more people out of poverty than aid. We need Africa to become an economic powerhouse.
And;
Entrepreneurial capitalism takes more people out of poverty than aid.
He's right.
Truth be known, capitalism is so efficient at generation of wealth that its buried Socialism. Even college reds who like to pretend they're socialist are capitalist. Left wing economist like Robert Reich who like to run around presenting to be really far thinking on this, spend their actual time arguing about slight adjustments to things like taxes and public funding of this or that. Current economic debates, in the real world, have all the content and meaning of two basketball fans arguing over which teams in NBA are good vs. really really good.
Missed in all of that, the system became so efficient that it went from being a tool, to the only purpose in living. Modern employees are like the galley slaves in Ben Hur, they live to serve the ship, and are told, in all seriousness, the same things the POWS are told in The Bridge On The River Kwai, "be happy in your work".
But people aren't.
And that's part of this.
This is a liberal, American, white, phenomenon for that reason.
The children of white liberal Americans are pretty much told that individually, they're really, really special, and that each of their individual needs, no matter what they are, have very special, if not cosmic, importance. They're also at this point basically unchurched, so they're not given any sense of how cosmic the cosmos is. They're special role in the universe is to consume. In order to best consume, they need to get good paying jobs, which their status in the upper middle class nearly guaranties, and then serve their individual wants, as consumers.
In short, they know nothing more important than themselves.
With so little grasp of themselves and with no guardrails, the world is a really scary place. The basic human drives towards community, reproduction and all still exist, but everything is disordered. People's activities are not natural. People don't burn off calories in pursuit of the things they were evolved to do, but at the gym. People secure their food from sources that are so remote and distant that their basic nature is a mystery. Pop fads scare people into eating unnatural diets, to the extent that an urban food production industry isn't doing that anyway. A pronogrified culture demands that they have sex, and has gone from that to demanding that they observe, accept, appreciate, and engage in sexual acts that are deeply unnatural.
It's not too surprising that a lot of people want to drop out.
And they're dropping out in every way imaginable. Out of the workforce. Out of being productive employees. And out of their natural roles.
"I, Consumer".
The other thing that capitalism helped very much do, by putting a focus on nothing other than the bottom line, is to commence a war on nature. It's so engrained in our society that most people don't even know it.
Perhaps no one but a hunter can understand how intense an affection a boy can feel for a piece of marsh…. I came home one Christmas to find that land promoters, with the help of the Corps of Engineers had dyked and drained my boyhood hunting grounds on the Mississippi river bottoms…. My hometown thought the community enriched by this change. I thought it impoverished.”
Draft foreword, A Sand County Almanac, in Companion to a Sand County Almanac.
At heart, we remain what we always were. Hunters and gatherers on a wild landscape, that are part of it, subject to it, and a lesser in a greater whole. Capitalism has told us that we're to be mindless consumers who are the centers of our own personal universe.
Indeed, it's good for business. The more individual and alone you are, the more consumptive you will be. Looping back to transgenderism, for those who take the route down to radical intervention, they made themselves the subject of a branch of medicine that isn't about care at all, but merely about appearances. It isn't cheap, however. And those who consume that will become prisoners of pharmaceuticals for life.
Again, we're so used to this that we just don't see it. Even radical leftist, or those who think they are, serve the machine. Left-wingers rail against the Dobbs decision, as a societal elimination or reduction of abortion would mean that fewer women would exist to serve industry. The same individuals campaign for Federally funded daycares as that would "free" women to work, which really means it would compel them to do so. Everything must serve that ultimate goal.
You live to serve this ship. . . Consumer.
The male role in this goes back to the Industrial Revolution. The female role was impacted by the removal of men from the households to go to the mines, but putting women in the mines themselves is newer (we experimented with putting children in them, of course, but gave that up as too cruel). People who were not willing to cooperate voluntarily were compelled to do so in some fashion or another.
Following the Second World War, fueled by developments that occurred during it and during the Great Depression, the really radical shit to a consumer economy began. It was aided by new "industrial" developments and cultural trends that assisted it. The Sexual Revolution of the 60s and 70s, combined with pharmaceutical birth control followed in the wake of the Playboy assault on marriage, all of which basically served to remove men from real women and thereby liberate their wallets and time for more consumption. First Wave Feminism followed along and made the same push for women.
In this new world, what do young people have to look forward to? Careers, mostly. Lives in sterile boxes, broken up by occasional vacation and wide variety television, and the Internet.
It's no wonder we're at the Mad Hatter's tea party.
So how can this be addressed?
Opposed to the industrial society is the agrarian, which does not stand in particular need of definition. An agrarian society is hardly one that has no use at all for industries, for professional vocations, for scholars and artists, and for the life of cities. Technically, perhaps, an agrarian society is one in which agriculture is the leading vocation, whether for wealth, for pleasure, or for prestige-a form of labor that is pursued with intelligence and leisure, and that becomes the model to which the other forms approach as well as they may. But an agrarian regime will be secured readily enough where the superfluous industries are not allowed to rise against it. The theory of agrarianism is that the culture of the soil is the best and most sensitive of vocations, and that therefore it should have the economic preference and enlist the maximum number of workers.
Going home
We once observed here;
Yeoman's First Law of Behavior. You are going home again.
Thomas Wolfe is famously quoted as having written "You can't go home again.". I believe that the more accurate quote is "You can't go home again, and stay there." I'll be frank that I've never read Wolfe's work that this quote comes from, or much of Wolfe at all, so I can't really say how the quote should be taken in context. The bad thing about pithy quotes is that it's very easy to do that, and loose the meaning that the author intended for it.Be that as it may, the quote that people like to cite to here, in the context that the quoter makes of it, is completely in error. Not only can you go home again, you are going to. At least you're going home again in terms of your basic personality.From long observation, I'm pretty convinced that everyone's basic personality is set by the time they're about five years old. Likes, dislikes, intense interests, the whole smash, in some way, is there. Kids who are outdoorsy at five will be outdoorsy as old men. If a kid is fascinated with fishing at that age, he'll be fishing when he's 80. A dedicated reader at five will be at fifty. Nerdy at 5, nerdy at 95. And so on.This is a fact, I think, that's hardly appreciated, but it's there. I've watched kids who loved one thing or another grow up and continue to love it. I've also seen those same people suppress something that they loved early on, and suffer for it.This doesn't mean that people can't learn or develop new interests. They certainly can. But something of that spark of interests is in there very early as a rule, even if it's only really intensely brought out later.What's also important about this, however, is that a person's real personality can be suppressed, but very often with bad results. Some people suppress it, to their misery, their entire lives. Everyone has seen people who are unhappy in a career or occupation, and wondered why. Well, perhaps that accountant saw himself as a kid as a commercial fisherman, and still does. Perhaps that cubicle dweller wanted to be a forester, and it hasn't left him. Perhaps that math teacher really loves baseball, and that's all that he thinks about each day. These things can't be fully repressed.They can come roaring back, however, and I've seen that from time to time. Every adult knows one or more instances in which somebody in a seemingly solid career up and bolted for something surprising. I've known, for example of several instances in which successful lawyers suddenly quit and entered the seminary, or in one instance, Rabbinical school. I doubt that was a simply newly discovered interest, it'd likely been there all along in some fashion. I've known other instances in which which lawyers became teachers, teachers became lawyers, or successful business people took jobs as poor farm hands. I've seen a lot of instances in which a person left a rural area for career in business where they accumulated a fair amount of wealth pretty much with the exclusive desire to go back to their original hometown and live the lifestyle of their youth, often when they're too infirm to do so, which they could have done had they never left. And, most strikingly at all, I've seen people who lived face paced modern lives, focused on careers and wealth where they had abandoned a simpler rural lifestyle and the religion of their youth, struggle with it in middle age, and return to what they had originally been. That really was who they always were.That doesn't mean that things don't wax and wane, in terms of interest. That's another oddity all to itself. Some people have genuine intense loves that they slowly loose. But they can come back. Absent some other sort of degeneration, people who were intensely interested in one thing, to seemingly loose their touch, can suddenly regain it and do.This also doesn't mean that if a person was a snotty brat at 5 their doomed to a life of snotty bratness, although that can also happen. Indeed, for some, a personality trait can become a cross to bear that's lifelong, but still one that can be handled.. Being a brat is more of a personality defect, at least normally. Just as a person with abominable speech can learn to speak like a gentleman, a snot can learn correct behavior. No, what we're speaking of here is core personality traits. Those are pretty fixed by about age five.
What's true of individuals is true of cultures as well. This will not last indefinitely.
Nor should it. And people don't want it to. It's that last thing that makes this all so amazing. Fear of speaking their views, and of living a more authentic life, are everywhere.5
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At one time, it had become a cultural practice of the Apache to actually sacrifice a virgin, as so often fabled about various people. One year, however, a young man simply rode and grabbed the girl so chosen and rode off with her.
It never happened again.
Sometimes, that's what it takes. An individual action. Perhaps many of them, but in contravention to what is expected.
Dinogad's tunic is very speckled
From the skins of martens it was made
Whistle! Whistle! Whistling
We call, they call, the eight captives
When your father went to hunt
Spear on his shoulder, club in his hand
He called his lively dogs
'Giff, gaff! Catch, catch! Fetch, fetch!'
He killed fish in his coracle
Like the lion killing small animals
When your father went to the mountain
He would bring back a head of buck, of boar, of stag
A head of speckled grouse from the mountain
A head of fish from the falls of Derwent
At whatever your father drove his spear
Whether wild boar, or wild cat or fox
None would escape if they had not strong wing
Pais Dinogad. Welsh, 7th Century
Mehr Mensch sein.
Footnotes:
1. There is, however, a movement that seeks to change even this, although this is so extreme that it would seem unlikely to ever succeed. Having said that, much of what we're talking about was once regarded as nearly equally extreme.
2. A real oddity of this is that Langford has retained his name, although "Artemis" can apparently be a male or female name. To Americans, the name sounds male. The name descends from the Greek word for "butcher".
Also, while various press reports have omitted his name, it's become clear its very widely circulated, including by Langford himself, who apparently had no hesitation about doing so.
While I generally like NPR, an example of this is provided by a recent NPR Politics podcast discussing what is going on at the state legislative level. All the panelist were simply amazed by the state level legislation regarding medical intervention in gender and freely used the term "gender affirming care".
Gender affirming care would affirm your gender, not surgically and pharmaceutically impose a new one on your nature. But the fact that they all acted like this was so obviously not the case demonstrates that the Press really is largely left-wing as a rule, and serves to shut people up who might otherwise be likely to join the debate on a non-extreme level.
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