What does make someone a “useful” member of society? That is not an easy question for a variety of reasons that go well beyond not just agreeing about the answer. In fact, in a nation as hyper-individualistic as the United States, a lot of people don’t feel like that’s an appropriate question to ask in the first place. Their answer would be some version of, “It’s not anyone’s job to be useful to the country. People don’t owe anybody anything except themselves.” In other words, it’s sort of the opposite of John F. Kennedy’s famous quote:
Perhaps most importantly, it’s worth noting that this is sort of a “first principles” question about what makes a successful nation. Most Americans have stopped thinking about questions like that, much less the answers. Of course, that is a horrible mistake and it’s a big part of the reason that the country is in such a huge mess today. America has become like a Krispy Kreme which doesn’t know what products the public comes there to get or (ahem) a school where they think their primary job is to talk to kids about gender and push gay pride, not teach the kids to read, write and do arithmetic.
However, getting back to first principles, it is obvious that a lot of things we are rewarding and encouraging in our society today ARE NOT producing useful, productive human beings that other people are going to benefit from sharing a society with.
Just to personalize one of many, many examples:
Let’s see. Deliberately weird looking? Check. Does she have some non-trivial mental problems? Almost certainly. Is this person prickly, difficult, and narcissistic? Yes, indeed. So much so that it comes across strongly in a fairly short TikTok video. Is this someone you want to live around? Hire? Share… I don’t know, ANYTHING with? Of course, not. No sane, competent person in their right mind who was CREATING a new country, a new culture, a new business, or a new society, would want to recruit someone like this because at best, she’s going to be deadweight that everyone else has to carry on their shoulders and at worst, she’ll spend her time actively trying to convince more people to be as messed up as she obviously seems to be.
It's fine to be focused on having a good life. Everyone should do that, BUT – and this is a big but – it’s very hard to do that if the society you live in turns to garbage around you. Businesses need quality workers. The military needs a basic pool of qualified applicants to recruit from. Good neighborhoods are made up of good neighbors. If you feel like you can trust the people around you, you feel more comfortable, more relaxed and you are more willing to invest in your community. What kind of people make that possible?
Honest people. Hard-working people. Patriotic people. Mentally stable people. Self-reliant people. Competent people. Law-abiding people. Religious people who may still be imperfect, but at least try to abide by a code of right and wrong. People looking for work, not a hand-out. People who pay more in taxes over the course of their lives than they get back from the government. The sort of people who wouldn’t steal from you, who you could trust to watch your kid or dog for an hour, who aren’t weird, creepy, or suspicious.
Meanwhile, we’re increasingly creating a society full of people who can’t navigate which bathroom to use, which sex has a period, or what their personal pronouns are today. Instead of celebrating excellence, we’re celebrating some of the least functional, most useless people on planet earth. We could use more doctors, more small business owners, and more people who are excellent at ANYTHING of use from plumbing to programming, to janitorial work, but instead, like our neighbors in Canada, we’re gearing up our whole society to produce more of this:
Whole generations of Americans grew up without ever questioning whether they were the wrong gender. They never considered whether to declare themselves to be part of some weird, off-brand sexuality that was invented on the Internet last week. It never occurred to them that they might need personalized pronouns, but today, we have our school systems, our government, corporations, and countless political activists working hand-in-hand to push these ideas on as many vulnerable kids as possible.
For what, exactly?
To create legions of broken, weak, generally incompetent Americans? Whatever they may claim their intentions are, that has certainly been the RESULT of what they’re doing.
Why are we incentivizing that? For that matter, why are we incentivizing:
* …Uneducated illegal aliens to come to America and do manual labor, apparently with the hopes of them becoming citizens later. How would bringing in millions of people who’d spend their entire working lives as net tax liabilities for the country and then end up going on disability at 50 when they fall off a roof or blow out a knee benefit everyone else?
* Why do we want legions of snowflakes who need safe spaces away from ideas they disagree with and who consider different opinions violence? Why teach people to be frail, intellectually incapable mediocrities? What’s the upside for the country?
* There’s a whole cottage industry on the Left that revolves around convincing black people to hate white people for the color of their skin and to teaching white people to hate themselves. Why do we have everyone from colleges to corporate trainers, to the New York Times and the current President of the United States pushing this kind of racial hatred? How does it benefit a multi-racial country to ENCOURAGE the different racial groups that are here to despise each other?
* Why are there cities incentivizing criminals to commit crimes by refusing to prosecute them and in some cases allowing them to break the law at will? How does our society benefit from having more people engaged in shoplifting, open drug use, and defecating in the street? What kind of people are doing those things and how can it possibly benefit our society to have more of them?
* Without question, the vast majority of trans people are victims of social contagion. Why are so many people in our society working overtime to CREATE huge numbers of trans people who would have been likely to have lived much happier, more productive lives before they were brainwashed?
* MOST PEOPLE exposed to drugs are not going to become hopeless addicts. Yet, a small but significant percentage of them most certainly will. So, why are we legalizing marijuana in so many states (21 and growing) when it will undoubtedly lead to millions of lives being wasted?
* Why are we encouraging so many people not to work for a living by, in some cases (13 states), paying them more in welfare benefits than they could make if they had a job?
So many Americans mock Christianity, which has been the moral backbone of our country, vilify the most successful people in our society, treat love of country like an anachronism, talk about rights without ever mentioning responsibilities, and treat being judgmental as worse than any sin that could be judged. Then we’re surprised that huge numbers of garbage people are doing garbage things every day of the week. We’re surprised to see young children being given gay porn in schools. We’re surprised to see school shootings. We’re surprised to see confused, broken people demanding the whole world be changed to cater to their bizarre, self-destructive impulses.
C.S. Lewis would not have been surprised:
To continue to be successful, society must pass along the virtues that made it a success in the first place. When that process is abandoned and an ever-growing wave of parasites, basket cases, and societal deadweight is allowed to metastasize by the day, an ever-growing price will have to be paid for it by the remaining productive citizens. Eventually, when that price gets to be too high, a society will break. Unless we start changing course, our society will break too. Deadweight can only be carried so far.
It feels...planned. This stuff didn't happen overnight. The bricks of societal foundation were removed one at a time, with assurances and rhetoric of tolerance as they were carted off.
Hoo boy, I really liked this! You gathered the salient points and aimed them at the target, hitting the bulls-eye with each and every one.
That person in the video, dripping with bitter and angry vitriol, badly needs someone to love her enough to save her from the barren and empty life she has ahead of her, but who short of a saint would even try?