I regularly speak with concerned parents. Here’s what they’re saying:
1. Teachers are telling boys to earn special status by becoming girls, and they’re telling girls to become boys, then they’re confusing them further by saying gender is a fluid and therefore it’s a social construct. The parents don’t know how to combat this because parents haven’t offered their children more compelling ways to earn dignity or specialness, so the kids are learning to distrust their parents.
2. The kids are not only believing the propaganda but are convinced their parents are evil bigots. This means a wedge is being driven into the home. Parents are dealing with terrorist spawn who demand being referred to as a “they” or “them,” threating to kill themselves if their parents don’t comply. The reactive parents comply because they lack a convincing level of leadership and persuasion, they don’t know how to undo the damage.
3. Parents feel they’re in the dark, drifting without a compass, mostly because they feel they’re missing a unified marital or family mission. Though parents and kids live under the same roof, they’re often anything but a team. They lack a compelling organizing principle––there’s no fire around which the family gathers and holds together. This means the kids will fall out of orbit, they will be pulled into the woke solar system of victim mentality, and because the parents never established a proactive hero narrative, the kids won’t allow themselves to take charge of their own lives. They become sheep. Reactive parents create a victim-mentality; they create a breeding ground for wokeness.
If you’re experiencing the above, or if you’re just interested in the topic, read on. And…if we can get to the bottom of it right here, right now, I hope you’ll join me in taking action.
Before we start, how many of you thought like I did, that our Constitution would safeguard us against a cultural and political collapse? I thought our Constitution would prevent us from becoming the Soviet Union, China, Venezuela, Cuba, Cambodia, N. Korea, etc.. I thought dystopias like 1984 and Brave New World were for other nations, not the United States of America. That was foolish.
We’re going to look at 8 questions, each one is a domino to the next. Let’s read the 8 questions quickly, then we’ll go through the answers in detail. Don’t be concerned if you don’t fully digest the first reading of the 8 questions.
1. What does our Constitution aim to protect?
Ans: Liberty.
2. What does liberty aim to protect?
Ans: Our humanness.
3. What does our humanness aim to protect?
Ans: Meaning itself.
4. What does meaning aim to protect?
Ans: The bonds that hold us together.
5. What do the bonds that hold us together aim to protect?
Ans: The cultural initiation (a story or experience that transmits a culturally pervasive sense of context and meaning).
6. What does the initiation story/experience protect?
Ans: The ah-ha moment–– an awakening that inspires the child to say YES to life.
7. What does saying YES to life protect?
Ans: The child’s desire to offer effort, sacrifice, reciprocity, trust-building, and collaboration.
8. What do effort, sacrifice, reciprocity, trust-building, and collaboration protect?
Ans: The lineage’s future.
If individuals are deprived of the experience that affirms life-itself, meaning, if we’re deprived of the experience that makes us say YES to life, then our lineage begins to dissolve. If our lineage dissolves, we ourselves atrophy in body, mind, and spirit. While our body may survive, we become aimless robots–– anchorless slaves.
Let’s get into the details.
1. What does our Constitution aim to protect?
Ans: Liberty.
o Our Constitution places as its highest goal, protections of our natural right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. We’ll summarize these as “liberty.”
2. What does liberty aim to protect?
Ans: Our humanness.
o Liberty… is not an end in itself. Liberty is used for the cultivation of our humanness, and our humanness is nothing more than our love for the world we’re responsible to uphold. Our humanness cannot blossom in a vacuum, it only grows where our participation is both needed and recognized. If humanness is not cultivated, love won’t take root, responsibility will lay dormant, and what follows is a slave-like, robot-like existence.
3. What does our humanness aim to protect?
Ans: Meaning itself.
o Human history is about small groups who survive as families or tribes who band together as nations. An individual human could not exist but for how he or she helps hold the tribe together. Personal identity was always built on the individual’s usefulness or contribution to the small and intimate group. That person’s desire to contribute, or to hold the fabric of their shared reality together, is the meaning of meaning itself. Our own humanness lives throughout the meaning we give our role in holding the small group together. Further, our humanness is expressed in the thanks we give to the landscape that feeds our group. Meaning lives through our acts of gratitude. Meaning lives in the invisible bonds that hold reality together. We live within that meaning when we partake in upholding those bonds. The slave and the robot have no such meaning, no such bonds, no such cultivated humanness.
4. What does meaning aim to protect?
Ans: The bonds that hold us together.
o If meaning dies, the bonds between us die. (By “us” I mean small, culturally integrated, mostly self-sufficient groups or tribes.) If those bonds die, we either: 1) drift off by ourselves, unprotected, to die alone in the desert. Or…2) we become slaves to a central, faceless authority.
5. What do the bonds that hold us together aim to protect?
Ans: The cultural initiation (a story or experience that transmits a culturally pervasive sense of context and meaning).
o A proper cultural initiation offers context as to insert understanding into the child’s young mind. The initiation experience (and or story) is meant to reveal nature’s original instructions, meaning, it reveals the innate inner motivations and or will that drives every cell and organism in our natural surroundings. Included in those organisms is the human body itself and the tribe it partakes in. We live in a story that we did not create. We are participants in a world that we did not design. From the initiation comes a feeling of awe for the magnificent workings of the world. When the young initiate beholds the invisible glue that holds everything together, their awe becomes gratitude, gratitude becomes a desire to participate, and the now, wise child, immediately outgrows his solipsistic vacuum of self-centeredness; he has fallen in love with the whole of reality and he loves his own important role in upholding and protecting it.
6. What does the initiation story/experience protect?
Ans: The ah-ha moment–– an awakening that inspires the child to say YES to life.
o When the child recognizes the beauty and elegance in the creation itself, when the child sees that the laws of creation work better than anything the child could conjure himself, then he says YES to the invitation his people have given him, he says YES to being a participant, and he says YES to being a steward of the place that nourishes his people.
7. What does saying YES to life protect?
Ans: The child’s desire to offer effort, sacrifice, reciprocity, trust-building, and collaboration.
o When the child says YES to life, his own comfort and safety are no longer his primary concerns, and instead, he will eagerly do what’s necessary in upholding the system he lives in. By doing so, he earns dignity. This is his new identity. He is a protector. He will rise to make any effort of sacrifice, reciprocity, trust-building, and collaboration needed. These efforts are made of his own volition, and his new display of motivation allows his group to survive together as a trusted unit.
8. What do effort, sacrifice, reciprocity, trust-building, and collaboration protect?
Ans: The lineage’s future.
o A people who survive together must find it in their hearts to focus more upon the future than the present, more upon their small group than upon themselves, and more upon paying their debts to both God and the landscape than taking freely and giving nothing in return. We only trust those who place service and the lineage’s future above all else. If the culture has lost its story or lost the story’s meaning, trust dies and the future fizzles, which means the lineage loses the phalanx-like strength it will most certainly need to face life’s inevitable challenges; that lineage will eventually perish or become enslaved to a culture who says YES to life and lineage.
When meaning dies, when the initiation is deemed unnecessary, when the story is forgotten, when its experience in no longer prized, when the sacrifice is no longer recognized, when pleasure-seeking is deemed higher than building a strong future, when liberty is exchanged for comfort, and when reciprocity becomes obligatory and transactional, then the lineage will collapse, and its people will be taken as slaves. In that decayed or decadent environment, love has disappeared, people are alone in a crowded room, and trust is gone. This outcome produces an existence where tasks will be performed at gunpoint, as happens with every Godless, collectivist or leftist revolution.
Our cultural crisis can only be fixed by parents. The above 8 questions point to the fundamentals in sustaining a free people. this means that YOUR home is the place for these initiations, your home is the place to facilitate the experience that makes your child say YES to life and lineage. If you can’t create it at home, then don’t look for it anywhere else, don’t look for a politician to save our kids or our nation. If liberty’s initiations are not in the home, slavery is the consequence, and our Constitution won’t prevent it.
If liberty is wasted on personal pleasure and amusement, if liberty is not carefully utilized on the sacrifices that hold the lineage/group together, then liberty will be lost. Unless there is an experience that makes us fall in love with the group’s story, such that we willingly put self-indulgence aside that we may carry our people’s story into the future, liberty will be lost and our people will be enslaved.
Check out AmericanFirekeeper.com to learn more about how you can wokeproof your kids. Take the course; I’ll facilitate the experience listed above so you may facilitate it for your children. Watch the free 40 minute webinar to learn more about the e-course: Liberty-Based Parenting, Leadership, and Storytelling.
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