A Society Without Guardrails
Ever heard of Aleister Crowley? He was a famous English occultist well known for using drugs and supposedly practicing magic. At one point, he broke through into the public consciousness and was called things like, “The Beast” and “The Wickedest Man in the World.” Ozzy Osbourne even wrote a song about him called, “Mr. Crowley.” Although Crowley supposedly wasn’t a Satanist, he certainly hated Christianity and created his own evil religion called Thelema which had a central tenet that went like so:
At first glance, many people might find this a little confusing. The philosophy of “The Wickedest Man in the World” is “Do what thou wilt?” How can telling people to basically “do what you want” be evil in and of itself? What if you just “do what you want” and don’t hurt other people? Well, not much anyway. No murders, rapes, or armed robberies? Would that still be evil? Would that still be, in Christian speak, “sinning?”
Well, let’s turn the corner from Crowley to “The Seven Deadly Sins.” We’ve all heard of them, right? Their roots stretch all the way back to Rome and Greece, but in 590 AD, Pope Gregory is generally credited with giving them something akin to their current form:
Today, our entire society is overrun with non-stop gluttony, lust, and envy. Sloth, greed, pride, and wrath are all extremely common as well. But many people are probably thinking, “Wait, are those really sins?” Well, let’s face it… if “Do what thou wilt” was your philosophy, this would be a large portion of what people would naturally do because we humans are deeply imperfect creatures. People are not naturally good. To be good, we have to be SHAPED by traditions, customs, and good parenting. We have to be CONDITIONED to do the right thing.
Put another way, we need GUARDRAILS to protect us from becoming weird, amoral, selfish little monsters.
In fact, one of the primary reasons our culture is such a mess is that we’ve ripped so many guardrails away and if we’ve bothered to replace them at all, the guardrails we’ve put in place are mostly dysfunctional. Without those guardrails, our society is falling to pieces.
Although most people think of Christianity as a religion, it’s also a very old, very functional system of recommendations, limitations, and guardrails for behavior that have been proven successful over the long haul in the real world. That doesn’t mean Christianity is perfectly practiced or that all Christians perfectly adhere to the guidelines handed down by our religion (actually none of us do), but if you have a society of people at least TRYING to stick to how they learned to behave in the Bible, it’s going to be a comparably moral society.
Of course, Christianity is not the end-all and be-all of guardrails in our society.
Let’s take another one that could probably best be described as a “custom” about how men and women should behave around each other. Fairly or unfairly, there was a time when women were expected not to show off too much of their body, be alone with a man when they were drunk, or spend the night with a man they didn’t know. It would be assumed that if a man and woman say, made out in public and then went back to the man’s room, it was because the woman intended to have sex with the man.
Now, many people VERY FAIRLY point out that just because a woman dresses in a risqué way or say, chooses to get drunk, make out with a man, and spend time alone with him, doesn’t mean, “she was asking for it.” THIS IS CORRECT AND TRUE.
That being said, which system worked better? The one with clear guardrails or the one we have today, where college students get blackout drunk, have sex, and make accusations about whether they were raped depending on how they feel the next day? You know, the system with “affirmative consent” (may I unbutton your shirt) that about 5 human beings use, kangaroo court college trials, and feminists claiming pretty much everything is “rape culture?”
We ripped down almost every guardrail in this case and it didn’t liberate us, it created chaos.
What about the guardrails around gender? Are the people who believe you can be any gender you want today and a different one tomorrow happier and more mentally sound than the people who believe there are two sexes, and they are determined by your chromosomes and equipment at birth? Pretty clearly, “No.”
After a CENTURY of struggle around race, our society adopted a guardrail concerning it. “Let’s be colorblind and just treat everyone like an individual.” Are we better or worse off now that the guardrail has been abandoned by large parts of society openly advocating for judging people by race? Clearly, we’re not.
Look at the guardrails our society used to have for the ethical behavior of journalists. Once those were all abandoned, did journalism become more or less prestigious? More or less trustworthy? When schools moved from respectable professionals teaching reading, writing, and arithmetic to any old wacko pushing their views on politics and gender while they tried to psychoanalyze kids, did things get better or worse? Same question about standards for the universities. For the military. For politicians. For scientists. It’s not a coincidence that as the rigid ethical standards for scientists have eroded, so has their credibility.
You know, there was a time in America when it was considered SCANDALOUS to get divorced or have a kid out of wedlock. Those were strong cultural guardrails that were abandoned. Is marriage stronger or weaker because of it? Are kids doing better today because they’re not growing up with a mom and dad around? Of course, not.
Many of us grew up with different types of guardrails, great and small, all around us. Saying the Pledge of Allegiance in school. Going to church. The concept of chivalry. Saying “sir” and “ma’am.” The idea that it’s dishonorable to live off of your neighbors in any way from welfare to school lunches. An iron-clad, widely accepted standard of masculinity. Standard masculine and feminine roles in marriage.
In the modern era, these sorts of standards feel RESTRICTIVE to many people. Of course, they are. They’re guardrails. They’re MEANT TO BE restrictive and limit your possibilities because, for the most part, the choice is between staying on the road or going off the side of a cliff. A lot of people don’t get that because they’re stubborn, they’re willful and they’re full of themselves for no good reason other than maybe inordinate amounts of unearned praise from teachers and single parents when they were young.
However, the reality is that 9,999 out of 10,000 are not going to benefit from completely ignoring the guardrails of the past and trying to define themselves from scratch. In fact, the reason those societal guardrails came into being was because so many people tried to do just that and failed that our ancestors came up with ways to protect us from ourselves. At the end of the day, “Do what thou wilt” may seem like a way to customize your life and maximize your happiness, but the human experience has proven that it’s anything but for the vast majority of people. You, me, all of us – we need guardrails to help keep us on track.