Mythical Military

As you may know, the heroic image is baloney.

I went through Army Basic Training twice. On top of that, I spent several years working in a whole division of drill sergeants. It was an Army Reserve unit. The entire division was devoted to the mission of setting up and running a Basic Training base should the nation mobilize for war honestly. I am very well acquainted with everything that goes into the very fundamental design of Army training specifically, and am acquainted with the training of the other branches.

Everyone knows it arises from our adoption of the Prussian military structure and culture.

So why is it the very best of the best are trained to differently? You can find plenty of published information, and it will be confirmed by people who have been through it. Even when they tell you stuff they shouldn’t, the basic story doesn’t change: Elite military training is totally different from the general run of military experience. If you attend an elite school for Special Forces, you are pretty much on your own, in the sense they don’t yell and scream. If you don’t want it, you go home. If your head isn’t on straight, you can’t take it.

That should be a magnificent hint as to what the military leadership thinks of the rest of the folks in uniform.

From the moment you first walk onto the assembly area of your basic training unit, it’s non-stop head games. The drill sergeants are carefully schooled in sadism and humiliation. They somehow imagine this will force some measure of conformity on the whiny brats what show up from God-knows-what social situation. Anyone with an ounce of intelligence recognizes this is not optimal. Yes, most people from the general run of the US population are totally useless for even the honest mission of the military, never mind the foul hateful stuff we actually have our troops doing in the world.

People who leave basic training already know that atmosphere does not reflect what they’ll face in any subsequent military assignment. So they pass through something they know instinctively is pointlessly brutal and dehumanizing and carry that spiteful cynicism with them. The only ones who don’t were decent to begin with, and didn’t need that sort of breaking down of dignity to become useful. Plenty of drill sergeants know it’s all wrong, but if they balk at being cruel and hateful, they get into trouble. A significant number of them didn’t want that assignment in the first place, but were pretty much drafted for it.

No, it’s not fun and not funny unless you are the scum of the earth.

Is it any surprise we have such a big problem with things like rape? I’m surprise how little there is of it, given the vast effort to turn people into abusive sons-of-bitches in the first place. Gleeful abuse is a fundamental necessity to what we have, in the sense that if you take it away, the whole thing would come apart. We’d have to start over from scratch. It’s made worse because genuine heroism in leadership is a ticket out the door, as the entire system prefers the most useless, gutless bean counters and soulless management types it can find. If you wear brass above the rank of captain in the US Army, it is highly probable I will despise you once I get to know you.

A significant number don’t stay for subsequent contracts with the military. That’s the good news. The bad news is our current evil adventures have demanded the command staff implement policies of not letting people go when the contract expires. So the worst are kept in and all sorts of insane measures are put into place to keep them under some semblance of control. It’s not working, as anyone can see.

For all that, I assure you I never felt I accomplished more than I did when wearing that fool’s uniform. That is, the people who did stick around, for whatever misguided reasons and under high manipulation, were responsive to the faith I have borne for many years. It called to them and they wanted all I could give them. It wasn’t the ego-stroking fact the took me seriously; I never took myself seriously. I wasn’t proud of my official accolades, especially when some of the foulest creatures got exactly the same rewards with exactly the same high-sounding words. Pretty bits of color I wore on my dress jacket meant precious little to me. What mattered was the trail of changed hearts I see behind me. Civilians haven’t been half as interested, but when I walked among the folks in uniform, they loved my faith and wanted their own share of it.

That is the part I miss, and I’d love to be among them again, because I already know they would be hungry for what I have.

The New Network Tribe

In times past leaderless organization was a theory, but in the Network Age, it is becoming dominant.

The fundamental element of Ancient Hebrew society was the extended family household. Without them, you were dead, often literally. No one else would take care of you because no one else had any duty to God to care much. Indeed, they had reason to be quite suspicious and keep you at arm’s length. Certain minimal life support issues were a duty, to give you a sporting chance, but general care and maintenance was a different matter. The only exemption was a covenant, which was more binding than simple shared DNA. This is how we are wired to live.

In the New Testament, the fundamental element was the church body, which was always organized like the ancient Hebrew tribal society. That is, your church was your covenant family. Again, this was more binding than blood ties, but the fundamental operation was as an extended family household in a tribal society. The whole point was the necessary support system for folks staying together in a single community. Chances were, if you followed Christ, your blood kin would likely kick you out as a threat to what they thought were God’s blessings. When churches were formed in Gentile communities, this might be less of an issue, but there were plenty of other problems which attacked the church and called for a tight, clannish community. This is how we are wired to live.

Hebraic families typically organized themselves by reflex. It included a measure of chaos from our Western point of view, but it was enough for them. It requires a book to discuss all the details, so we leave it there for now and point out: In the Network Age, physical proximity is often fleeting, if at all. It’s generally a non-factor in consideration of doing things together. Personalities may be an issue, but the fundamental nature of things does not require leadership at all. A common vision, yes, but not specific leadership. Rather, it requires only selected people taking up various functional roles, with the whole thing changing to meet the purpose, whatever that might be. In first century churches, a fundamental element was simply being together through thick and thin. Most important would be a shared vision of why we are still here on this earth. It had nothing to do with property or greatness as humans measure it; it didn’t matter what they accomplished. It was about the fundamental shift in what kind of people they were.

People in the Network Age are learning to get important things done with the most minimal structure. They seldom want things that require solid organizational structure. Too much of what matters most to them does not demand it. They have oriented on this life in ways older generations can’t comprehend.

Did the Occupy Movement produce results? Mostly they provoked even worse repression from the Establishment. The system geared up to destroy their influence. Does it occur to anyone that’s a good thing, if it becomes too publicly obvious so that no one can ignore it any more? Does it occur to anyone the failure itself brought a vast horde of people together over something that might be hard to define in terms of what is better, but not hard to define in terms of what is bad? The collected ideas pasted together in the early days of the Wall Street protests were often contradictory. The people who held these competing agendas didn’t agree and still don’t. But somehow they managed to get one job done: Making sure everyone knows the system is inherently broken and can’t be trusted. We now know it in ways we might have ignored before the protest.

Meanwhile, this vast horde of people got more practice at coming together, combining resources to build something we can’t easily detect with the normal awareness. If you are primed to think outside the collapsing structure of Western Civilization, you might see the Occupy protests as highly successful. They have organized with a unique identity and acted together for extended periods against a global foe, somehow managing to be cohesive in action despite the apparent disparity in terms of standard political agendas.

Yes, it did include a handful of organizers who tried to steer things, but those didn’t actually see what happened around them. The movement has built a tribal unity without the physical proximity. They have created a budding civilization that bypasses all the existing categories and structures. They are sucking the lifeblood out of the future for the current world order, while the current world order hardly notices.

Did anyone notice if you tried to deny them the standard infrastructure access, they simply routed around that denial? They manged to network through commodity devices and keep communications alive on a level sufficient to keep going. It was fundamental to their identity as a group. We can see the original movement is about dead, having moved into the stage of formalizing too much. It was perhaps inevitable because they were using new ways to do old politics. Already we are seeing political action without so much of the physical gatherings. Individuals with some shared vision are now acting individually in different places toward a common hope. The Network Age is slowly being born from the Net itself, directly, as whole segments of diverse populations from within many countries are embracing a whole new morality which is very different from the West.

They have become a virtual covenant tribe. They are a taste of the distant past and the future.

Fires Not So Wild

The recent spate of wildfires appear to include more arson than was first believed.

Today the news outlets in our area are saying the state fire marshal, after inspecting the burned areas across the state, believes some of them were arson. The big fire south of here near Slaughterville was actually three fires all started at once. The fire near Cushing seems arson, but they stomped that down before it did much damage. We already knew the one in Luther was considered arson, and that one took out roughly 60 structures.

The one nearest us here in the trailer park last year was probably arson, as was the one before it which took out so many homes just within a few miles. Perhaps the firebugs didn’t intend to burn as much as went up in flames, but they did intend mischief and harm.

What makes it difficult is how very many of them over the years here in Oklahoma are unsolved. When they start all over the place on the same day, it’s more than merely suspicious. Copycats? Maybe. I have to wonder, simply because it’s not the first time a coordinated effort was made to burn down a lot of stuff over a wide area for malicious reasons. Among other things, it’s a quick and cheap way to bankrupt a whole state at once. Our economy is very strong compared to the rest of the country, and I’m sure lots of people know that and aren’t happy about it.

At the same time, the sort of folks who would engage in such schemes aren’t so interested in actual damage as fear. You’ll hear plenty of folks talking about bucking up and rebuilding, or how they are just happy everyone got out alive, but that can’t hide the broad fearfulness promoted by the mainstream media. Not only does this sell air time and papers, but it serves to keep people dependent. I’m pretty sure this is what matters most of all, regardless whether any of it was arson.

Bits: Chicago Still There

Am I the only guy who noticed there doesn’t appear to have been any false flag incidents in Chicago?

Go to your favorite search engine (I like Duck Duck Go) and put in the search terms “chicago nato false flag” and see how many alternative press articles there are on the alleged high probability of some sort of false flag event.

I suppose that stuff was going around since NATO announced plans to meet there, so I don’t really know who started that rumor. At any rate, the only false flag was the now infamous arrest of some protesters set up by an FBI infiltrator. Without those spies there would never be anything for the FBI to do.

So, what would you bet me the rumor was started by somebody who’s selling something, same as the mainstream press?

Delphi: Caught Off Guard

I ran across a truly talented Delphi technician the other day. You would never have expected it; I know I didn’t. He was member of a bulletin board for house churches.

So great was his mastery it took me a while to catch onto it. When he turned that garbage on me, I didn’t realize what was up. I was surprised to find I was irritated by some things he had posted. At first I thought he was missing what I said, but when I offered to correct his misapprehension, it simply continued. Oh, so subtly, he stuck the barbs into my soul, until I realized I was angry, and only half understood why.

I did catch him on what he was doing, but didn’t see the larger pattern. I had to think about it awhile. After reviewing the exchange again, I was able to pick out the pattern.

You’ll recall I listed the steps, but didn’t spend much time detailing how they worked. Step 2 is isolating and marginalizing strong opponents. One of the best tricks is to subtly anger someone, leaving yourself room for plausible denial when called on it. In several debate threads, he managed to claim he wasn’t clear, or the other person didn’t understand. Someone else observed he took a lot of heat from others over the years, and now I understand why: He provokes them intentionally.

This guy is a natural; I’m willing to bet it’s half instinct. That’s because I can’t really see any apparent purpose behind it, other than to never lose an argument. Otherwise, the only reason he could have is to keep the thing so stirred up no one will stick around. I do note a lot of names which simply stopped posting after a discussion with him. He’s not even a moderator, yet manages to run the whole thing. The only folks he hasn’t driven off are, shall we say, too far off in left or right field? I mean loopy compared to me. Nobody will take them seriously in the first place.

I’ve said it before: Secular politics can’t hold a candle to the nastiness I’ve seen in religious politics.

Rape and Mythology (Updated)

Perhaps the most disturbing part of modern mythology is about rape.

First, let’s review the basics. We have a certain amount of our human nature which is hard-wired from Creation. Further, the curse of the Fall adds some other features. The Laws of God (Moses, Noah, etc.) reflect our current wiring as humans. We are not bound by the Laws, but use them as a source to understand, and are encouraged to abstract principles of justice using Jesus and His Apostles as examples of how to do it. Where we stand today is atop several layers of mythology between us the bedrock of reality. We seek to strip away the intervening layers of mythology to get back to reality.

(Update: Think about what I’m saying here, folks. All of Western Civilization is crap; it’s one of Satan’s greatest achievements. I’ve been attacking Western intellectual assumptions for years and if you have just stumbled across this post as your first visit to my blog, get a clue before you bother commenting and defending Western Feminist lies. I am faithfully reporting what God has taught from ancient times, and He’s not impressed with your opinions to the contrary. Neither am I.)

Modern social and legal definitions of rape are pure crap. Rape is forced sex. The Laws indicate the basic requirement is that the victim resists as much as they dare, including a cry for assistance. Yes, we have some thinking to do about how modern criminal techniques may reduce the likelihood of resistance or raising alarms, but by no means can mere regret justify a claim of rape. Women are highly variable about such things, and all too likely to lie about it. That’s a fact. On the other hand, we also cannot imagine the necessity of a death penalty for raping a woman married or engaged. The whole thing is of necessity pretty messy and our entire cultural gloss makes things worse.

Nobody denies women can be traumatized by life, but even that depends too much on our flaky Western culture. Still, it can be shocking to the point of serious injury to the psyche. So can a lot of other things, so we cannot let this one thing stand out as deserving of some special handling, as if physical penetration of any orifice is somehow more taboo than all the other horrifying things people do to each other.

Rape is a violent act. However, that does not mean it can’t be a sexual act at the same time. Unwanted sexual intercourse is not the definition of rape. The reason we have so much brouhaha over this is because we have one of the most licentious societies in human history, and that confuses just about everything in terms of the ancient roots of human justice. So this discussion here assumes we already recognize God’s revelation says sex is just and right only when between a husband and wife, period. You can extrapolate as you like if your morals are different, but that’s where we start.

Unwilling sex does have a place a place in society. What is the old English phrase for that? “Humbling a woman.” Place this in the context of the advice given by some women in recent history, suggesting sometimes a contentious woman simply needs a hard riding and she’ll behave better. Perhaps you know a woman who is smart enough to be appropriately submissive to her man. Our cultural connotations for that are all wrong; the point is she knows whose team she is on, and doesn’t fight her own husband when he takes the lead. It doesn’t mean she’s cowed and afraid of the world. A strong woman is a gift if she turns her combativeness onto the outside world and defends her man.

Women do respond to strength in man. Perhaps his strength of charisma is enough, but when it’s not, there are other ways to get her attention. She has no right to resist her own husband. If she were too much a problem, I’d send her packing in the first place. Not all men are like that, nor do all men live in a context where that’s an option. How much force does it take to remind her? Force is not inherently evil.

We have enough problems with human wretchedness; we don’t need to create imaginary crimes.

Justice over Rights

You have no rights.

The fantasy of rights comes chiefly from Germanic cultural mythology. Originally, it was more a matter of the rights of nobles and royalty, issues for which there would be no accountability to anyone else. This was chiefly expressed in the land-based feudal system of the European Middle Ages. It reached its high point in the doctrine of “Divine Right of Kings.” It was deeply flawed, and those who gave us the Enlightenment felt they had reasoned out a good answer by vesting humanity itself with certain rights. We see this mythology reach its peak in the likes of the US founding documents — which many of the authors never actually took seriously in the first place — and perhaps the “Rights of Man” and similar documents.

It’s not as if there were no people who actually believed these ideas, but the people promoting them often refused to live by them when ignoring them suited some contextual purpose. What matters is how these ideas became the mythology permeating Western democratic cultures. Today we have the comedy of various partisan agendas cherry-picking which kinds of rights they will emphasize to the exclusion of others. This whole talk of rights is bogus in the first place, because it’s nothing more than a rhetorical device to make your philosophical opponents look bad.

I don’t subscribe to this mythology. Once I understood what sorts of liars were behind the mythology, I realized it was pure junk. The longer I dug at the foundations of human history, the more utterly certain I was any talk of rights is an excuse to avoid discussing the real issues. A much more ancient and enduring concept is justice. The problem is in the definition of justice.

My regular readers know I reject the notion justice is defined by human reasoning. If it’s left up to us, it won’t take long for meanings to be stood on their heads. It has to be something external to the combined efforts of human intellect, or it won’t ever work. I assert justice has been revealed from the Source of all things, but even among those who accept such a presupposition, most have gotten lost by multiple filters layered on over many centuries. We’re back to where we started with human reasoning as the reference point.

Nor can I assume my reasoning is somehow immune to failure. All I can do is assert what I know and let truth cut it’s own path, but I’ve been digging into the question of what was communicated to us in primeval times. The idea of rights is directly contrary to what has been revealed as justice.

Here’s what most people choke on: You must not hold your life as precious, but you must treat all others so. That has nothing to do with self-defense, but as the broad view of what brings justice on this broken human race. On the one hand, we recognize life sucks, and it’s really not something we should take seriously for ourselves. On the other hand, we are wrong to make things any worse than they have to be. If we place our own perception of our needs above others, then there are no boundaries, no consideration for taking your share of the misery. That’s unjust. Your comfort is not some absolute played off against all contexts. There is a certain amount of background sorrow which varies and you are required to absorb your share.

That share itself varies with circumstances, and you are obliged to measure that, as well. You are your brother’s keeper in some senses. Everything is an on-going estimate of what will bring the best results for everyone in your orbit in life. There are measures of your existence which are shared property with the surrounding humans. Western Civilization has gotten this part wrong from the beginning, by raising the individual too high, and for all the wrong reasons. Individual greatness should rest entirely upon their demonstrated competence in caring for others. Not feelings, but effectiveness.

For example, the loss of JFK as an injustice is not a matter of partisan politics or his fine rhetorical speeches. After learning his lesson from the Cuban Missile Crisis, he was about to remake the whole government into a more just and sane system. He would have dissolved the CIA as his and the nation’s greatest enemy; it was and still is, and it is they who killed him. He planned to break up the banking controls over all the economies of the world, and was going to seek genuine peace with the likes of Cuba and the USSR. He was willing to transform the US military from it’s massive and insensate bureaucracy to a much smaller and more effective force, doing what actually made a difference at the lowest possible cost in life and dollars.

These and many more ideas threatened the entire corrupt system which brought him to power as a figure head. He wasn’t willing to be a figurehead. No, not every thing he planned would have worked, but the net effect was a serious threat to entrenched criminal interests. We are hardly surprised when so very many different interests cooperated to murder him. As for moral problems, I suggest his private behavior was comparable to what we know of King David. Yes, I’ve done far better with my personal morality but I’m not distracted by the call to govern. I’d make a complete mess of things through sheer incompetence were I actually chosen to run such a big show. Whatever his flaws, the world would have been a far more just place had he lived.

I could say the same for many who never got the chance, but ran for President. No one candidate ever embodied justice, nor even the best of our hopes and dreams, but some came close enough to be a serious threat to those who actually do rule. A certain amount of inefficiency is expected, and personal moral failures are quite the human norm. Justice is unhampered in the main by most human foibles. It’s when we narrow down our individual focus on ourselves that we become ripe for exploitation by those whose plans for their own comfort require injustice on a grand scale. You’ll notice the right to vote has accomplished no good thing, nor most of the other “rights” enunciated by the liars who intend to make them all both dramatic and meaningless.

Somebody has to be in charge of we’ll all kill each other in the long run. We’ll do that only after we have terrorized each other with all manner of petty spite. This business of rights tries to make every man a nobleman against all others, and it’s guaranteed to be unjust on the whole. The very thread of thought is a threat in itself. There have to be people with authority, but it must arise from a genuine demonstrated ability to carry it justly. We simply have no concept for that in the West. We bluntly reject the very foundation of justice by hatefully refusing people the utter necessity of living in tribal social structures, the one society capable of best protecting humans against injustice. This whole business of rights pitting family against family shows a cynical intent to isolate people from their one best hope of protection.

In the name of rights we have destroyed justice, but it hasn’t gone away. It will devour us all too painfully, all too soon.

We Get Stories

What can you believe?

Steve Quayle and a handful of echoes are telling some wild story about Chinese troops, or at least Chinese forward battle equipment storage, just south of Laredo, Texas. Supposedly a truck driver delivered a load of groceries down that way, and was directed by an armed guide in the passenger seat and escort vehicles. Then another fellow went down and checked where he thought it had to be. If you follow the main highway south by southwest from Laredo, the estimated sixty miles brings you just about to Arroyo Blanco. Between there and Monterey (another sixty plus miles) and scanning quite a bit side to side, there is nothing matching the description. There’s even a video someone made showing a search using Google Earth and the map coordinates supposedly given, but it’s a huge cheap housing addition.

While serving with the US Army in Europe, I visited quite a few combat equipment storage sites. These things are huge, with truly substantial fences, armed guards and attack dogs. There are a couple of small buildings, and acres of huge steel storage buildings. Exposure to weather is a serious threat to idle combat vehicles, most of which are poorly designed and built by the lowest bidder. The soldiers stationed at these places are almost all mechanics and other equipment specialists who do nothing except a constant rotation of various maintenance tasks on everything there. I can’t imagine the Chinese military would be less fastidious, so either you’ll see tons of vehicles in orderly formation or a huge collection of really large buildings. You would see fences strong enough to show up on aerial photography.

In other words, you won’t see them on any mapping site, nor on Google Earth. At the very least, you would expect to see masking, something which obscures what’s really there. For example, I invite you to check Google Maps, and search for Brunssum, The Netherlands. Switch to the satellite view. Right near the center of town where Google puts the marker is a junction between Rimburgsweg (running generally east and west) and Prins Hendricklaan. Just south of this junction is an obscured map feature, labeled “AFNORTH” (Allied Forces Northern Europe). When I was there, it was AFCENT HQ (Allied Forces Central Europe). All the references I can find show it still is, so I’m sure it’s just goofy Google labeling, but I don’t really care. It’s obscured because it’s a NATO installation.

It was originally built as a coal mine camp, as the whole thing is perched on high ground. The waste from the mine (called “slag”) was piled just east of there. Rimburgsweg curves a bit, then runs almost straight east from town. Virtually everything north of that line is high ground, the old “slag heap” — the nickname now used by everyone in that area. The ground under all the greenery slopes steeply upward to a flat table, and is mostly black rubble. Near town, branching north from Rimburgsweg runs Ganzepool, and the first major right turn is Kranenpool. That street runs between a bunch of obscured images, which should obviously represent some sort of “secret” government map feature. You’ll also see a sports field, and it’s no secret this is used by the NATO personnel.

If you were there driving or walking around, you’d see everything without much trouble. Among the sights would be those huge steel buildings behind tightly guarded fences I mentioned earlier. You notice, though, all this obscuring indicates pretty large land space used for this activity. Google can hide the appearance, but not the amount of land space used. By the way, those are NATO installations in Brunssum, but just down the road a ways is a smaller base owned solely by the US in Schinnen, not obscured by Google. It’s another old converted mining installation just west of town, tightly jammed between the A76 Autobahn and a line of trees (shading a creek). Lots of buildings and parked cars. Zoom in close enough and you can see the fenceline. You can see the gated entrance at the west end of Borgerweg, and a small gate shack standing between the curved entrance and exit lanes (the first building next to the gate on the north side is the Military Police building). Even though the aerial shot is old, it’s still much newer than my memories ending in early 1993.

While the aerial view of Mexico isn’t quite as new as the ones for the Netherlands, you should still see something visible from higher altitudes (zoomed out) that would give it away in terms of land use. It’s not there. Steve Quayle is infamous for this crap, and it marks him as a liar. It’s possible he doesn’t actually know any better, but that doesn’t change the effect of his spreading such crazy rumors.

On the other hand, we have the story of Russian troops massing on the border of Georgia near the passes into South Ossetia. Take a quick look at maps and you’ll see how short a run it would be from there to the Iranian border. While the MSM isn’t making much of this, it does come via more or less reputable sources. I doubt China intends to invade the US over the Mexican border, but I’m quite sure Russia would roll quickly down to help Iran due to treaties and trade deals.

Oh, and Russian military planners say they figure an attack on Iran will be sometime this summer.

Battling Your Boys

Review the fundamentals: We have a huge layer of mixed cultural mythology, running against a hidden undercurrent of predation taking advantage of the buried facts. Then, off in another realm entirely is the actual truth of hard-wired human nature. The major challenge with raising children, if you start young enough, is helping them understand society is run mostly on lies.

But for parents who come too late to this truth, and their boys are somewhere near 12 or older, we have to come up with methods of holding the tension between false social expectations and what their wiring tells them. The good part regarding boys is you can more easily tell them straight out their social environment is manure. They probably know it, at least on some level, already. Hearing it from you, their parents, will come as quite a relief, and they are likely to listen.

Basic fact: American cultural mythology hates real men. It lies about what a real man is, and does it’s best to shape boys into something they cannot be, should not try to be. Even if he rebels, he’s still a sucker for yet another lie. You can probably talk straight to them about struggling against a world of lies, helping them understand the only real victory is not being sucked under.

At school, everything they face is run by the false feminist mythology. It’s meant to drive them insane, and generally works. Teach your boys Game (Game Theory of Human Socio-sexual Response). It’s all over the Net. If you’ve not encountered it before, use the built-in search engine on this blog for a long list of posts related to the term “game”. Some two-thirds of what’s listed will actually discuss the topic of Game Theory. At a minimum, you need to understand the basics of Post-Victorian Feminism.

From the first day of school, the system will try to make him a sissy, a metrosexual. The system will tell him all his natural instincts are evil or criminal. They’ll try to drug him if he acts like a normal boy. The earlier you work with him to handle this wholesale rejection of manhood, the stronger he’ll be in negotiating his own way through the system. You cannot do that for him, only equip him.

Understand the social mythology peculiar to your son and his peers. Know what they think is cool. Chances are he will not understand his single greatest need is apprenticeship to a worthy man. It might be his father, but that’s hardly necessary, and these days rather unlikely. At around age 12-14 his wiring demands daily close contact with someone he needs to emulate. It needs to capture his imagination. But if you simply let him choose according to the whims of his peers and such, there’s a high risk it will be someone unworthy. Every man should want to apprentice one or more young fellows, but most cannot. The number one issue with his behavior is the general impossibility of meeting his real need. He’ll up with a mix of distant models who can’t demonstrate for him the details of living with a badly messed up world.

So Dad or a good stand-in needs to work closely with him on some level. Pay attention to him and stay involved. If you can’t share your hobbies with him, share his. If you can’t get him under some man’s wing, he’s probably doomed.

If he starts to manifest any real manhood, the girls will be all over him. If he handles it well enough, let it go. A few guys are just naturals. Most are not. They’ll be sucked under every way imaginable, to include varying efforts and degrees of seduction. Unless you are willing to pay the price for sexually segregated education, this becomes the second hardest thing you’ll face. He’ll be distracted from what really matters. Girls his age are likely to outfox and dominate him, and sensibly younger girls are simply too young. You probably can’t force the issue. Social structures militate against the right answer.

I don’t recommend military academies. Western military social structure is simply all wrong, and if you like my writing at all you won’t like the results of sending your son to any of them. Almost anything else you can do to keep him away from girls, in the sense of keeping him too busy, etc., is worth a try if he goes along with it.

He needs a job. Since that may be pretty difficult, construct something which requires the same commitment from him as a job. Not in terms of modern workaday scheduling (another social lie) but something deeper. It needs to be consistent with his interests and aptitude, and it needs to keep him engaged. It needs to call up from his inner being all the things that makes a man manly. Some really good hobbies are out there, and some can be mixed to good results. Most school sports are actually dangerous in terms of psychology, but it’s hard to avoid it with some boys. In the long run, he really needs to steer his own course. Raise him with the expectation he should decide for himself as much as he thinks he can handle. You don’t have to like his choices; he does.

If he’s already hooked up with a gang, you need a miracle, not advice.

The one best antidote for all social lies is making him self-sufficient. Teach him not to rely on what society provides, because it will surely fail him, and perhaps sooner than anyone expects. He needs to resolve to do what real men do, facing hardship with equanimity, and making the most of bad situations. If he doesn’t understand the world is essentially hostile on many levels, he’ll be a victim looking for a predator. Naturally, you’ll color this with the emphases of your prevailing locale.

Manhood is hard enough without leaving it to chance.

The Trauma of Teenage Daughters

Humans are more instinctive, hard-wired, than most folks are prepared to admit.

America in particular suffers from social schizophrenia about human nature. On the surface, we have a broad cultural mythology. Since it comes in several flavors, most people see it as a mixture of competing stripes, but if you really want to, you can easily see they are more alike than different.

At the same time there is a nasty undercurrent going in another direction altogether. Most people couldn’t see it if you pointed it out to them. They mistake those flavors which aren’t their favorite for being the nasty undercurrent. The real thing is truly evil, the realm of predatory psychopaths. I’ve discussed that undercurrent enough in other posts, so I’m just reminding readers it’s there.

That predation is based largely on actual facts of human nature, but aren’t quite what we are wired for, either. So the actual truth of what we could be if we tried is buried, totally ignored by the mainstream and actively hidden by the predators.

I’ve encountered some folks with teenage daughters. Many of these folks are tormented between expectations and reality. They are discovering cracks in the false image of the cultural mythology, glimpsing the predation underneath. Because they have no idea what really is possible, they are in panic. The girls are any number of stripes of rebellious, ranging between smoldering passive-aggressive to outright wildcat pandemonium. If you feel you have a handle on things, you can stop reading now, because this is addressed to folks who feel beleaguered, and are sincerely seeking some help.

It won’t help if we attempt to strip away the cultural mythology or undercurrent in order to explain hard-wired nature. These people need something where they are. The best I can do is offer them some peace knowing what they might be able to do at this point. I’ll save my religious counsel for other posts; I’m running in clinical mode here.

Frankly, by age 12 most families have already lost their chance for setting things right. They’ll have to assess where things are now and try to negotiate what’s left. Over this and the next three years, she will demand renegotiation of just about everything. That’s because the hard-wired instinct tells her she ought to be in the final preparation for marriage by 14 and up. Folks, that’s what is in our human wiring, so try to ignore all the cultural crap.

You are not the truth police, and you are dealing with a human being who is not a mere extension of your own thoughts and feelings. The real chore at this point is changing you, not her. She’ll change if she wants to, not simply because you demand it. Do what you can to make her want it.

She can be steered only where she is open. You can maximize the openings by taking seriously the duty to back off and treat her more as adult. However childish she may be, she’s now not much worse than a great many adults. The question is not what she merits, but what will actually work. She has already demanded the right to decide a lot of things, and only by physical force can you stop that. (How the law and various government agencies view things is pretty grim for you right now, and varies with locale and too many other details I can’t account for here.) In general, restrain her only from tearing up your household stability directly, things generally regarded as juvenile delinquency. It’s not “anything goes” but “don’t make us pay too much for your idiocy.” She’s not your equal, but negotiate with her more or less on adult terms, anyway. To be honest, she’s going to act like a boarder, not a family member.

She will have swallowed a certain amount of prevailing cultural mythology of the flavor shared by her peers. Learn it; take it seriously. Understand it as mythology which she finds binding. Take her viewpoint seriously in how you treat her, even if you know it’s pure manure. You can’t help her change her ideas until you take seriously the ones she has. Adopt the status of aplomb with her crazy nonsense. Don’t react with shock and rage to her announcements she intends to do this or that. Act altogether unsurprised. Yes, there are times when this feels like crass manipulation. Get used to it.

If you have the opening, be totally objective in offering her your assessment of consequences. Do not attempt to sneak in evaluative coloring. Not according to some obscene cultural fears, but inform her the best you know from reality. Keep it simple when possible. If you’ve had trouble facing the reality of consequences from your own youthful insanity, and the years following, you’ll never be able to do this. But then, nothing I write would help you in the first place. She will pretend she doesn’t care what the world thinks because she believes she is in a position to make demands of the world. It’s the sort of crap we saw with those peculiar protests recently involving women dressing provocatively and waving signs about “slut shaming” — as if protesting with signs and risque clothing could force people to change how they think of slutty dress.

So she’s going to put on enough makeup to paint a barn and the most outrageous colors. Ignore it. This sort of thing means nothing. Showing too much skin? You’ll have to pretty savvy to win that battle, because it’s a little too late to build her sense of modesty. But you don’t have to pay for it, either. Make her pay her own way, or learn to tailor her own clothing.

In broad terms, help her explore all the same silly nonsense every teenager has passed through since before the previous century. If you hinder the exploration itself, you’ll only make things worse. Better it is to help her get through it as gracefully as possible. There is no simple list of rules here, because it really depends on how you understand what I’m suggesting here. These suggestions wouldn’t be obvious to most people, but turn out to make sense when people think about it. If she thinks you take her seriously, she’ll be less combative.

For the most part, ignore what she says. Do try to respond reasonably when she talks, but pay more attention to what she actually does. What she says she intends to do this minute may not be what she ends up actually doing. Chances are she’s lying to herself an awful lot. Get used to that and don’t be smug, if you can help it. It’s not a question of taking her highly variable feelings seriously; it’s a matter of not provoking her needlessly. It’s all too easy, as you probably know.

It takes two fools to argue, so don’t be a fool. Choke down your own feelings. Keep in mind, it doesn’t matter what our social expectations are, her hard-wired instincts know she’s supposed to be getting married soon to some very strong and manly fellow, someone who will take her in hand and make her a woman. Since our society generally forbids marrying someone a decade or more older at this age, she’s stuck with dating boys who are generally less mature in their own male tracks than she is in hers. That puts too much power in her hands when she least needs to handle it, too many choices when she needs them made for her. But they are supposed to be made by her new spouse she isn’t going to have. Unless you are exceptionally resourceful, you can’t fix this mismatch between what should be and what is likely. Accept your fate and make the most of your bad situation.

That’s all I can offer. Unless you were active in fighting the mythology when she was born, you had only the first five years to get started. Now that she’s 12 or older, it’s too late for anything less than a genuine miracle. Without being there with you and seeing all the details of your daily existence, and hers, along with your family history with her, I can’t offer much more.

You can’t change her, only yourselves, so look for your own peace.