The Ice Spartan and I had an exchange of emails on
Dr. Taraban
, and sometimes, the best way to get a point across is by listening to two guys discuss a topic philosophically. In fact, philosophy itself etymologically means lover of wisdom, but historically it has always been friends discussing the meaning of things and in so doing discovering truths about our reality and our place in it.
Now, Dr. Taraban generally dispenses decent advice for the most part, mostly on his YouTube channel. He clearly is doing well for himself and appears on various YT podcasts regularly too. Mostly because he is providing generally useful, rational advice on dating and relationships, albeit… within a totally secular framework.
I have sent some of his shorts to friends or young men that wrote for advice, however, I do believe his approach does have some gaps. And these are the ones that relate to long-term, permanent relationships, that is… marriage. Of course I should say proper Catholic marriage, since that is the only one left that expects people to actually stay together until they die.
The Ice Spartan and I had various philosophical conversations when we worked on the farm, and when he discovered that my wife and I are married as proper Catholics (that is, the only Catholics left, 1958 Sedevcantists) in a real Catholic Church, and that neither of us cares at all for the government contract version of a “marriage” it was as if a lightbulb moment went off in his head.
They way he interpeted it was something like:
“Oh, that’s awesome, so you bypassed all the government contract stuff and the marriage is just between you and her!”
“Us and God.” I added.
The modern landscape of relationships is considered by most, especially young men, to be a veritable hellish post-apocalyptic landscape, and in some ways they are right, of course, so Taraban’s utilitarian approach, which generally will produce better results than average, is rightfully seen as a net positive. And it is… up to a point.
You see, the things Dr. Taraban discusses I lived through and learnt from on my own, and as such, now that I am married as a Catholic, I can tell you that despite being well aware of all the practical elements of a relationship, how to get into one and so on, there was always something missing. I wrote
Caveman Theory
assuming most readers would be secular, and so I addressed them in that fashion, however, I also tried to cover the element that Dr. Taraban is missing.
The following exchange below between the ice spartan and myself may better lighten you too on what true love is, what marriage is, and perhaps, how to find both, if, like the Ice Spartan, you are in the market for an actual marriage for life instead of a general hook-up.
The bits with a green line to the side and in bold are the Ice Spartan commenting. Normal writing with a green line to the side is a quote from Dr. Taraban’s book,
The Value of Others
. The replies without green line to the side are mine
So, now you can pretend you’re just sitting around the campfire listening to the Kurgan and the Ice Spartan talk about Dr. Taraban. Enjoy.
************************************************************************************************************
I don’t like his face or voice.
He’s not an attractive man. I’m neutral on the voice. However, precisely BECAUSE he’s not attractive, one must give him credit where it’s due. He has, despite serious disadvantage in looks, managed to figure out enough about male and female dynamics to be at least somewhat effective and useful for many men. It’s not a small achievement. Is it all good? Certainly not and far from it, but compared to the average advice a young man might get today he’s head and shoulders above that.
He comes across as libertarian, or as I prefer to call it, lucitarian / liberferian.
Hahhahaha cool name.
I would say he is simply secular and the inevitable getting batted back by women when he was not yet famous, MAY have left a residual bitterness that is mostly unconscious and exhibits as his simple “rational observation of the facts”. So it’s hard to accuse him of being intentionally nihilistic or black pilled. He certainly does not act that way or feel that way, and the only reason I say there MAY be residual bitterness at the unconscious level is because of his persistence in reducing most of what he says to the secular (material) perspective, which, ultimately, is a limited and incomplete model of reality. Ignoring the spiritual to the extent he does (which is far from complete ignoring, he is aware of it and has talked about transcendence at least) is ultimately an error. A flaw of character in some respect. Not unusual for it to be the result of rejection at some level.
He is well-read and does have some good advice for men and women. This is about some of the things I disagree with him about. I don’t make a comment on everything. If you think he is spot on about something or everything, please feel free to let me know where we differ.
No one is spot on about everything.
Your tendency to notice the flaws and weaknesses is because you’re a scout (in my simpler and also more accurate SSH, what Vox calls a Sigma).
He says “partner” all the time. This word has stuck in society even faster than “Judeo-Christian.” “Partner” used to just be a term used by fags and lawyers (also fags).
Indeed. Secularism is of the devil.
Secular advice on relationships and marriage has to fall short in one way or another.
Many! All really.
All quotes are from his book. “…….” means that I cut out a paragraph.
Anything in bold is my wording.
The Value of Others: Understanding the economic model of relationships to get (and keep) more of what you want in the sexual marketplace
Orion Taraban
“CHAPTER 9
LOVE HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH RELATIONSHIPS
The goal of this book is to offer a universal theory of relationships: a framework capable of explaining the widest spectrum of phenomena across as many types of relationships as possible. Its fundamental premise is that relationships are the media in which value is transacted. People come together because they want things from others, and they attempt to satisfy these wants by trading unequal things of comparable value. Where this does not occur – for whatever reason – no relationship exists. This is true of all consensual relationships on this planet.
In this chapter, I’d like to address the most common criticism of my economic model of relationships, namely: not everything is transactable. These critics balk that reducing all relationships to a quid pro quo exchange cheapens relationships. They argue that the most valuable and precious gifts that can be shared between people are non-transactional and that explicitly emphasizing the transactional dimensions of relationships is precisely what is wrong with the world today. They also maintain that purely transactional relationships cannot explain certain human behaviors – like altruism and compassion – and must, therefore, be (at most) only part of the story.
So how do I respond to this criticism? Leaving aside the judgmental associations that almost always attend these arguments, I agree with the crux of the scruple: not everything is transactable. And these goods constitute some of the highest states to which people can obtain. They are often ennobling, encouraging, and enlivening. I call goods like friendship and loyalty and love non-transactable goods (or NTGs) because they cannot be bartered for something in return. However, this technically means that these goods are not valuable. Even if the price tag is exorbitant, a valuable good can be bought. On the other hand, NTGs cannot be bought at any price – which makes them invaluable (or, what might be the same thing, valueless). Like virtue, they must be their own rewards; otherwise, we would call them by other names.”
Love has everything to do with everything that is good in this world.
Of course. But he has just told us that his whole book has nothing to do with love. It’s an economic model of reality, and since everything and anything useful, interesting or effective about economics can be written on a postcard, we now know this book is of no utility whatsoever to anyone with an IQ that matches at least mine at age 4 when I realised the concept of fiat money was absurd. Of course people then tell you it’s all very complicated and you as a child just don’t understand so you grow up pretending to not understand until one day you decide “ok, am old enough now! I’m gonna look at this thing!” And you do, and realise 4 year old you had it right. It’s all fucking nonsense.
“The problem with the criticism that not all goods are transactable is not that it doesn’t have a point but that its point is irrelevant. It should only take a little effort to understand why. If relationships are the media in which value is transacted, and certain goods are invaluable and non-transactable, then it would follow that relationships would not be necessary to transmit these goods.”
Logical flaw in that reasoning. Along the lines of: a table has 4 legs, a dog has 4 legs, so a table is a dog.
Every one of the invaluable things he mentions: love, loyalty, friendship are only even detectable IN relationships. So he’s obviously wrong.
This is exactly what we see when we observe human behavior: non-transactable goods fall outside the purview of relationships. So arguing that the economic model is flawed because it fails to account for goods that it has no business accounting for doesn’t make much sense.
Trying to justify his bad logic from above.
Let me explain.
If non-transactable goods required relationships, then we should not be able to find evidence of these goods outside of relationships
More bad logic. Example: sex requires relationships so you will not find sex outside of relationships. So what do you call the activity of the guy who fucks car exhausts? Or sheep for that matter. Bit of a stretch to call either one a “relationship” but not quite right to pretend the activity is not sexual at its core. Just because X can be found in A, does NOT mean X cannot also be found in NOT A. It’s very basic logic he gets wrong. Kinda disappointing. But then secular houses of cards really ARE this fragile once you look at them with any level of care and detail.
– and this is hardly the case. Take loyalty, for instance. At this very moment, millions of people are enacting their loyalty to athletes or entertainers or politicians who have absolutely no idea these particular fans even exist. And this loyalty isn’t just the fair-weathered allegiance of bandwagoners. Many have devoted their lives – have killed and been killed – in the service of this loyalty. What’s more, these devotees receive nothing in return for their loyalty from their idols,
Wrong. They get something. The appearance and countenance of that person, which they interpret (wrongly) as meaningful. But just because someone shits on the pavement and you go and scoop it up and convince yourself it’s chocolate and eat it, doesn’t mean it’s valueless
to you.
And that’s the thing about transactional things, the BUYER determines the value, not the seller.
who (again) often do not know these people are even alive.”
The “buyer” does NOT require a direct relationship to exist in order to give a VALUE to some perceived thing that his idol does or says. Because he is the buyer, so he can set whatever value he wants on anything, including the vapid actions or words of a celebrity.
“When vetting for a long-term relationship, it’s generally a good idea to take a page from human resources: hire slow and fire fast.
When has human resources EVER improved anything in ANY firm? Never in any I ever worked in. I hire fast and fire fast too. I can go through 100 candidates in the time they go through 5 and I will have therefore sorted
practically
, not theoretically, for the best candidate.
This is true for several reasons. As previously discussed, the first of the three principal crises through which most couples must pass is the Crisis of Disillusionment, in which each party’s projected fantasies are shattered by the impinging reality of the actual other. Since the honeymoon period in which these fantasies are predominant can typically last up to a year, it is wise to hold off making a life-changing commitment to someone until you’re in a position to accurately perceive the person to whom you are committing.
Eh. Without exception, every one of the actually meaningful relationships I have had (P/A/L/E/G/R/L) [<— hahaha funny I put the initial of each woman that mattered, to make sure I didn’t miss one and it spells out Pale Girl! Hahahah]
that were ultimately good and made up of good people (P/A/L/L) was the result of an instant perception that happened in seconds when I first met them. The exception to this was the three of which one could be said to be extremely solipsistic (E) and the attraction there was instant too but almost entirely physical (pretty much a 10 by anyone’s standards) and the red flags obvious, but the dick was driving. So much so the brain was like… just bang her enough and move on. But weakly, if you bang a REALLY pretty one enough, and she is also very good in bed, you tend to try to fool yourself into becoming Captain-Save-A-Broken-Bitch. Never ends well. The other two the attraction was enough physically that I decided to do the Orion thing and “take my time”. During which the narcissist (G) played her part at Oscar level ability and me being now “reasonable” went along with it and by the time her true nature had demonstrated itself in full force she had kidnapped my daughter to Brazil. So that’s what being “careful, and reasonable” got me. After that the other very attractive and also broken woman was a conscious choice of not quite Captain SABB but at least Captain let me stick around this Broken Bitch and see if she fixes herself. Which was perhaps not altogether useless and possibly a life can be built on that IF you have enough stuff to keep you BOTH entertained for several decades. Short of increasingly freaky sex fetishes or at least ones that become mutually obsessive and co-dependant, I can’t think of anything that would actually ever manage to do that for say 50 years; so, such a relationship is ultimately, by default, temporary. Whether it’s one day or two decades.
The relationship that was ultimately my marriage (for life because now as believing and baptised Catholics) is the one where the day I met her I had a weird flash-forward of our whole life together and four kids and old age together. I would have married her there and then. The fact we only properly had a try at it a decade and a bit later is only by the Grace of God, because our personalities still had so many boxes we would have destroyed each other. Many of our boxes needed to be removed (by others, life, etc) before our souls would have a chance at recognising and operating on each other past the boxes (see
Theory of Boxes at my OG blog
)
That said, it can still take time after the Crisis has passed in order to determine whether or not sufficient compatibility is present to justify a lifetime appointment. This is why, in most cases, a reasonable minimum due diligence period for a spouse or co-parent is at least several years. Those who would collapse this timeline are likely putting their own ambitious designs ahead of the good of the organization. This is hire slow.”
Ridiculous rationalisation of material reality due to general cowardice, due to the vast amount of pain that facing reality in ALL its facets usually entails for the average person, given that doing so means facing both your own flaws as well as your fears.
I have heard of people courting for three months and having a marriage that lasts until death. I have seen plenty of people date for years only to later divorce. Time is not that important of a variable as he makes it. If two people have the wrong ingredients going into a marriage, it doesn’t matter how many years they ‘vet’ before marriage.
You are correct.
“CHAPTER 12
PEOPLE DON’T REALLY WANT RELATIONSHIPS
After reading through an entire book dedicated to discussing why people enter into relationships and under what conditions, this chapter title may come as a shock. However, to the extent that you’re surprised by this claim, you haven’t been paying attention. I said as much in the first pages when I defined relationships as the media in which value is transacted. People rarely form even temporary relationships out of the simple joy of connecting with others – and when they do, they are still transacting the value of connection (which, by definition, requires a relationship). Where there is no transacted value, a relationship neither exists nor can it exist.
And yet… the transacted value can be one of those invaluable things, which he denies is even possible. Eg. What do I get from God or Jesus other than the fruits of their perfect love? And what do they get from me other than my weak, ever-flawed, pathetic attempts at loving them?
We’re not transacting Hail Marys for gold bars after all. Only Love for love (and badly at that as I hardly do any part of my part). So again, demonstrating his broken logic.
The only rational conclusion from all this is that what people really want is value – not relationships, per se. For many people, entering into relationships constitutes their best possible chance of securing that value. As previously discussed, it is a common strategy for dealing with the problem of other people. However, it is only one such strategy. If people can secure the same good more cheaply, more easily, and more safely in other ways, then they will predictably (and understandably) do so.”
Sorry to say, but this guy, being American, has interpreted and confused the word “relationship” with “business transaction”. More logic errors.
Some people do want relationships. As Rainer Maria Rilke said, “that something is difficult must be one more reason for us to do it.”
Indeed.
“As disturbing as the recent relationship trends might be, we will likely need to contend with them for the foreseeable future.
No Orion. YOU do. I don’t. Because I have a far more clear model of reality, and as such I am not a blind man jumping on a recent volcanic crust hoping not to land in lava. I can see the pits and as long as I pay attention, I’ll not fall prey to the dangers that blind people on that landscape have to face. I’m Catholic. I see where Orion doesn’t even know there is a light switch. And as do others that while not possessing the BEST torch (The Catholic Truth 11,000 [TM]), even a weak Zen-Agnostic quasi-Shintoist (open-source homemade) torch sees further than the cheap American knock-off known as: The Orion Transcendental Meditation and Secularism Luminary 100,000, which barely lights up your shoes, never mind the ground ahead.
This is because disrupting the decline in relationships would practically require the prohibition of birth control – which, in turn, would undermine all of women’s social advances of the previous 60 years. Not only would supporting such a solution be tantamount to social suicide in today’s political environment, but the idea would also be functionally impossible to implement in reality. The genie cannot go back into the bottle. At this point, a return to a male-dominated, patriarchal society capable of implementing such a solution would likely require such a horrendous catastrophe – something on the scale of global nuclear conflict or protracted civil war, in which most of the population is forced back into the game of survival, necessitating a return to traditional gender roles – that no sane person could prefer the cure to the disease. For better or worse, going back is not an option: we can only move forward and adapt to circumstances as they evolve.”
Weak man.
Yes. But do you know precisely HOW he is weak? Try to answer and perhaps consider the following:
Is he really wrong about the idea that banning birth control is unlikely and impractical?
And if he is right about that, how is he weak?should we try to ban birth control by force?
And if not, again, how is he weak?
before reading further below try to answer with specificity about HOW and perhaps WHY he is a weak man.
***
Orion is probably mentally stronger than most men, and he is not exactly wrong about not being able to put the the genie in the bottle.
His weakness is lack of faith.
If you have faith (in the one true loving God) you will look for, find, or help direct a woman to the very same idea of no contraception being how things are meant to be. What is the ONLY religion on Earth that makes it a dogmatic point that birth control/contraception is wrong? You know it… say it with me: Catholicism. How do you know if some couples really are? They have the first baby in year one of their marriage and more until menopause every couple of years (assuming no health issues). Or you know… are still making children at age 55 and 43 respectively.
“Women today have half as many children as they did just 75 years ago, and half of the population of the world currently lives in countries that exist below self-replacement rates. Much of the “civilized” world is skirting on the fringes of population collapse, as social structures that have been preserved for centuries are disintegrating in real time. How did this happen?
Satan and his imps the Jews.
The confluence of variables that has given rise to this situation is extremely complex.”
It is not extremely complex.
Indeed. See above.
“For instance, it’s not wrong to assert that – without their own economic power – women could never truly become a social and political force that men would need to take seriously. However, any truth in this statement was rendered functionally irrelevant when women were pregnant for the better part of their adulthoods and saddled with childcare responsibilities that only they could discharge. The advent of birth control is what allowed a critical mass of women to step out of the domestic sphere, to develop social identities independent of their reproductive capabilities, and to secure an unprecedented amount of freedom and autonomy for themselves. It was approved by the Food and Drug Administration in 1960, immediately preceding the rapid changes in relationships just described.
The pill was invented by a Jew and the boomers flocked to it immediately after the Catholic Church had been infiltrated to the point that by 1958 a Freemason had been placed on the Throne of Peter, pretending to be Pope. It was all a co-ordinated effort on multiple fronts.
Personally, I don’t have a problem with any of this.
Because you are either a silly secularist mired in the false narrative of the obscene and mass-murderous Satanic ideology of feminism (seriously it has Satanic origins), OR you’re too chickenshit to disagree with said narrative publicly.
To be honest, it would be morally precarious to argue in favor of less freedom and self- determination for any particular demographic of human beings.
Really? No Orion, it is the moral DUTY to for example argue for far less freedom and even the right to life for say pedophiles. As it is the moral duty of any decent man to simply ignore, not have anything to do with, and especially not procreate with a feminist woman. But it IS politically and socially dangerous to be such a man of principle. We get who you are now.
These goods are not the issue. The issue is precisely the slowly dawning realization that these goods are inseparable from certain consequences for the sexual marketplace – consequences that reverberate all the way to the core of civilization. They are two sides of the same coin: try as you like, you cannot have one without the other………..
All this changed with the widespread use of birth control, which functionally separated sex from reproduction. By reducing the likelihood of pregnancy to a negligible possibility, the rational necessity for commitment prior to sex was eliminated.
Not morally. Only physically.
What’s more, given the fact that women can (and do) earn their own money, that fathers are legally obligated to provide financial support to their children’s mothers (even if they never explicitly consented to such an arrangement), and that heavily funded social welfare programs exist to subsidize single mothers, the stakes associated with pregnancy outside the context of a committed relationship are now significantly lower for women.”
Weak man.
Yes, but again, I ask you to be specific about the how and why. The answer is the same as above but the way it plays out is a bit different. See if you can define it.
“Fortunately, these are not the only two options. The capacity to see beyond this dichotomy – the choice between the way things have always been or nothing at all – is the opportunity inherent in the current relationship crisis. The idea would be to supplement marriage (and the conventional relationship pathway that leads to marriage) with additional relationship structures (and pathways) that optimize goodness of fit by solving certain problems of living.
Hahahahhaha sure! The Utopia of communism! It’s never been done right before, Orion! Let’s see how many millions have to die to do it right this time! Hahahha
Ideally, people could then choose the arrangement that works best for them rather than attempt to force themselves into a single monolithic structure (or forgo structure entirely). Most of Western civilization has already created a precedent for this solution in the legalization of same-sex marriage, which fundamentally expanded what a large portion of these societies was willing to recognize as a “legitimate” union. We will see the potential of this moment fulfilled when this same tolerance and acceptance is extended to heterosexual relationships that deviate from the conventional ideal. Just as there is more than one way to be queer, there is more than one way to be straight…..
Ah yes… the degeneration of society into what Walter Jon Williams labelled Condecologies in one of his fiction books. Gigantic city-sized condominium blocks with their own rules about everything from what sex you can have to what TV programs you get.
What Orion misses, as a secularist, is that society functions like a multi-cellular organism, in which the cell is the nuclear family. Biology dictates it. You disorder that and the “animal” eventually dies.
And “more than one way to be straight” has always existed. In the closet, just like faggotry always was. While as humans we may never manage to avoid our flaws, errors of degeneracy and lust, we absolutely should and must punish, disallow, and condemn such behaviours at a public and social level. And protect, with all necessary force if required, the creation, tending to and thriving of the nuclear family composed of one man and one woman joined in marriage until death, and their children.
And whatever perversion you can’t do without, you better do it behind locked doors, in a closet, in the dark. Upon pain of severe punishment.
Among other factors, the marital ideal consists of a wedding, a legal contract, a solemn oath before God, emotional commitment, resource provision, sexual exclusivity, cohabitation, and child-rearing. This means that every spouse must be a celebrant, a business partner, a soulmate, a best friend, a sponsor, a monopolized lover, a roommate, and a parent. What’s more, this ideal somehow expects each partner to unite the security and stability of companionate love with the passion and excitement of romantic love. And with the decline of civic communities and extended kin networks, each person is required to perform countless ancillary roles previously discharged by an entire village: nurse, therapist, playmate, cheerleader, activity buddy, chef, mistress, personal assistant. Finally, both parties typically expect a host of non-transactable goods – things like love and loyalty and friendship – from a relationship that might be predicated on attraction and lifestyle opportunities.
Some children also want to be astronauts. When they are born in Italy or Africa and have zero access to any space programme. Such children quickly learn also that Leprachauns and unicorns don’t exist. So, adult men and women should be able to figure all this out too.
Unfortunately, no person can be all people, and no actor can perform all roles. A caring mother might be a disinterested wife. A family man might not be monogamous. A loving relationship might be sexless. The institution of marriage has been overburdened with a weight that it was never designed to support.
Well, bitch… better buckle the fuck up and make it support! Or perhaps you would prefer to live in the year 1200 and tell me how much “easier” relationships with 12 kids and tilling the earth by hand without electricity or indoor plumbing was.
Much like a chain is only as strong as its weakest link, modern marriages are only as resilient as their most fragile component.
True. And weak men and women should immediately be sidelined and avoided. You only pair up with the ones that can cross the apocalyptic wasteland with you.
The durability of the others too often becomes irrelevant if and when this component fails. Under such conditions, the outcome is generally a foregone conclusion: either divorce with all its attendant emotional and financial hardships, or a quiet resignation that has surrendered hope and responsibility……
The function of marriage is to provide a stable context for people to raise children. That’s it.
Indeed. So stick to that as the goal, and add on the bonus stuff only as possible.
Everything on top of that is additional weight that the institution of marriage was not designed to support. A marriage was never meant to be a partnership with your best friend, an exciting adventure with a lover, or a union with your soulmate
Well, it is all that, IF you both agree that its PRIMARY purpose is to have children and raise them. Cause I sure as shit don’t enter into that kind of situation with someone I can’t laugh and cry together with!
– or any of the other ideals you’re prone to hear at modern weddings. Rather, marriage was created to provide a stable context for people to raise children. It is fundamentally an instrument of social organization that became necessary once people started living in communities that exceeded Dunbar’s number. From this perspective, we can understand that it isn’t necessarily a problem when, say, a co-parent doesn’t reciprocate sexual interest: the problem resides in expecting reciprocated sexual interest from a co-parent.
Kak. Marriage is defined as the literal gifting of your body to the other person. Your body does NOT belong to you, but to your spouse. And if they want to have you as a free use sex partner, guess what: You’re it! It’s their property, if they want to fuck you six times a day daily, barring health issues, you get to say only yes.
This is why marriage fails: we want it to be more than it is, and so we expect our partners to be more than they are.”
The problem is not that people are expecting too much from a marriage. Humans are capable of more than one thing. I can work a job and also cook pasta. Sometimes I do put the pasta in before the water is boiling, but it is still edible. A problem is that people are not educated much on or given good examples when growing up about what all goes into a marriage, so maybe it seems like a lot at first. It is like like someone trying to become a farmer when their parents weren’t farmers. There will be some pain.
Indeed. Tell me about it. Me and L had a shitshow for examples of family units. It’s only because of instinctive barbarian male levels of “toxic masculinity”, that we function, and L’s primal femininity; as well as my confirming all my ideas with a little look into historical facts that have escaped the notice of how people think about the past.
“Americans now work an average of 12 jobs in their lifetimes, and no one expects a pension anymore. Globalism and digital technologies disrupted entire industries. Established businesses that refused to adapt were left behind, and innovative new companies sprung up to take their place. Greed and entitlement – neither of which were invented in the 1980s – persist today. People continue to work about as hard as they need to……
The pundits of my youth could only view current events through the lens of what they had known, which is why all they saw was ruin. The old ways were falling apart. However, every crisis is simultaneously an opportunity. Globalism may have signaled the end of America’s consumer production industries, but it also marked the beginning of its digital economy. Every benefit is also a liability.
No. Again, wrong. Overall the change has been a consistent loss of humanity at the “benefit” of materialism. Only a secular materialist could possibly believe humanity is “progressing” or even just remaining about the same. It is not. It is progressing materially at the expense of a loss of humanity and what makes life worth living (those invaluables).
Workers today might not enjoy the job security they once had, but they are also not practically constrained to devote the better part of their lives to a mismanaged organization. Success is possible under most any circumstances, provided the players are willing and able to adapt as conditions evolve. While those who could not (or would not) accommodate to change encountered difficulties, many others found ways to thrive in the new marketplace.
For various definitions of “thrive” that might better be described as “survive”.
The point of this extended digression is that something comparable to the transformation just described is occurring in the sexual marketplace today. The old ways are falling apart. However, the pundits of the present day are as misguided as those of my youth. Contemporary social conditions have not created the intersexual dynamics discussed throughout this book: they have revealed them.
Sure. And the reveal is precisely what the Catholic Church has always said about humanity: we are a bunch of fallen, drunken, petty, cowardly, greedy, weak, lazy, envious, angry, rats. Also: water is wet.
Like it or not, men and women today are as opportunistic and self-interested with respect to whom they mate and date as they have ever been (or been allowed to be). Loyalty and integrity haven’t changed as much as the network of incentives that differentially reward (or punish) their expression.
Wrong. It has demonstrably degraded.
People continue to commit about as much as they need to….
Again, what he is noticing is simply the fact that given the temptation, most humans succumb to it, and in the process slide all of us closer to a general degradation of humanity (the ultimate Satanic objective).
Given human nature and individual limitations, it has never been – nor will it ever be – possible to get everything you want from a single person. Traditional marriage understood this, and its most enlightened response to this difficulty was to treat these frustrations and disappointments as an opportunity to self-transcend.
Nothing has changed it in that regard. The opportunity remains.
Your wife no longer has sex with you? Excellent! Use your involuntary celibacy as a chance to examine your own carnal attachment. Your kids leave you no time for yourself? Wonderful! Use your maternal responsibility as the means to overcome your residual selfishness. You’re no longer satisfied with your relationship? Phenomenal! Use your dissatisfaction as an opportunity to realize that you are entitled to absolutely nothing in this life. And this perspective isn’t necessarily wrong. Marriage did demand that people self-transcend –
Correct and good.
at least as long as they couldn’t get out of it.
And here is the devil’s temptation; rendered all the easier and more frequent thanks to the scourge of Protestantism, and general increase in Satanic zeitgeist brought about by it. After all, it is above all Protestantism that brought contraception to the world.
And while it may not have been exactly what people wanted, the argument could be made that it just might have been what people needed in order to mature into fully functional adults.
By this point I’d say the argument has been demonstrated to be as firm a law as gravity. While the argument against it still has to come up with anything even remotely coherent or descriptive of reality.
The issue is that willingly entering into difficulty because it can be used as an opportunity for growth is about as appealing to most people as running a marathon on their day off…..
True. And most people are…? Say it with me…. Weak, cowardly, selfish… etc etc
So, fewer people are getting (and staying) married than ever before.
Good. We don’t want the idiots to reproduce any more. It’s enough of a tragedy they reproduce at all! In the meantime, those of us who can better see through the glass darkly will continue to increase our numbers.
Even casual sexual relationships are at historically unprecedented lows. The main reason for this is that people are continuing to rely on a previously successful mating and dating strategy that is becoming increasingly obsolete with each passing day, namely: the optimization of value in a single individual.
You carry on pansexual boy. We’ll see 100 years from now how your idea of normalising whatever form of sexual congress stacks up against a bunch of us Catholic zealots who repress our human perversions in at least the social context. We will then be able to determine is giving free reign to human flaws produces anything better (or at all) than tamping down on those same flaws.
However, it might be possible to get more of what you want from many people. The mating and dating strategy that will become increasingly effective in the foreseeable future is the optimization of value across individuals. Rather than attempting to find one person capable of effectively discharging all the hyperconflated roles of a modern marriage (which is a tall order, at best), people will progressively find many partners, each capable of discharging one (or some) of the hyperconflated roles of the same (which is a significantly more realizable goal).
Sure, sure, just like the utopia of Communism is a “more realizable goal” than a religious theocracy right Orion? Except we have had religious theocracies throughout our human history and NONE of them have EVER stacked up a body count throughout their centuries old existence that even remotely comes close to what about 100 years of communism have done.
You’re dreaming utopian dreams of harems and you will awake in a living nightmare of zombies tearing at your flesh my boy.
This prediction is value-neutral. For better or worse, those who are willing and able to flexibly adopt this strategy will thrive, and those who cannot (or will not) will encounter difficulties.
We’ll see won’t we.
I have 5 children of my own that will carry forth my way if life. How many you got?
This strategy can be implemented consecutively, simultaneously, or both. For instance, rather than making a commitment for life – a commitment that, apparently, is too weighty for many to carry (especially now that they are living much longer) – people might intentionally make a commitment for, say, 20 years to complete the task of raising children in a stable and sustainable context. The co-parents might choose to cohabitate during this time, or they might not.
Oh what wonderful and stable people THAT will create… it’s not like we have stacks and stacks of data on what these type of situations create in terms of people, right? Oh… wait… actually we do, and It’s a fucking horror show!
They might choose to be monogamous sexual partners, or they might not. They might choose to enter into a contract pertaining to their wealth and property, or they might not. They might cultivate a deep, abiding love for each other, or they might not. They might participate in shared interests and activities, or they might not. They might commemorate their commitment with a religious ritual, or they might not.
Pray tell, what “religious ritual” has ever been made on these absurd utopian ideas? None. So you are referring to new and invented wholly pagan/satanic false religions not even yet invented.
They might assist each other in ways not directly pertaining to their duties as co-parents, or they might not. And when their mission is complete,
As I said. Welcome to Business America! Reducing ALL human interactions to a sale! Would you like an extended warranty with that, for only 10% more of your soul?
Who knows? We may even end up celebrating the end of such an arrangement at least as much as we currently celebrate the beginning, given that doing so would recognize a relationship that actually completed what it set out to do.
No wonder he has a tendency to “appreciate” Buddhism, he’s a nihilist ultimately. Even if he would deny it even to himself, as do most buddhists.
This is the opportunity inherent in the crisis: people might be able to get more of what they want. The catch is that they won’t be able to get more of what they want from a single person. With the dissolution of marriage as a monolithic social institution, individuals might finally have sane and compelling alternatives to the “everything or nothing” Hobson’s choice that still dominates the sexual marketplace.”
He is like an economist who is explaining his super amazing model by using an island as an example. IT’S NOT BASED ON REALITY. Humanity is not at this level. Marriage should be one way within a given society. Down the line, there is no society with the view he talks about. It’s all about the Individual Consumer ™.
Precisely correct!
He ends with a story from the Bible.
“There is a story in the life of Jesus, and it goes like this:
One day, a group of people approached Jesus and asked, “Is it right that we should have to pay taxes to the emperor?” They were trying to trap him with his words.
In response, Jesus requested that they show him some of their money. He asked the group, “Whose image is on this coin?”
The people answered, “Caesar’s.”
So Jesus continued: “Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s, and unto God what is God’s.”
When they heard this, the people were amazed, and they let him be.”
Funnily enough, this very parable destroys his entire model. Hahahhaha
Addendum:
The reason is that things related to “value” in and of “the world” should remain in and of “the world”. And things relating to God and His Will for us, should remain outside of “the world”, and given that marriage is a sacrament, it foundation (like all else by the way) remains rooted in God. The point is not “enforcement” of rules to keep people married. The point is that indeed we all have to grow up. So it is no longer about having rules enforced against you, but rather, it is about you actually making a choice, and sticking to it. The sticking to it part? That can only happen in one of two ways:
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Due to brutal, tragic, pig-headedness without mercy, (the secular way, which usually fails by the way, like 90+ percent of the time, eventually), or,
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By having faith in a religion, philosophy and way of life that is larger than your own personal squabbles, and provides the context in which you find the way to resolve the issues even as you grow closer together for doing so.
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PS:
On a personal level, I think I would actually get along with Orion Taraban, and he also has some of the same interests I do apparently (physics, astronomy). He’s an intelligent and reasonable guy, and while my criticism of his model of relationships here is pretty brutal, it is ultimately a disagreement on the foundational underpinnings of our life philosophies. I would have disagreed with him even before I became a Catholic, in much the same way the ice Spartan (who is not a Catholic) does above. Nevertheless I think he is a very interesting guy, and one that is I believe honest and really does mean well for his fellow man. So do not take my criticisms of his flawed philosophy as an indictment of the man. It is not.
This post was originally published on my Substack. Link
here
