Status Updates From Life Under Compulsion: Ten ...

“We should want the father in the family so that the mother can be with the infant. We want the real freedom that the family brings. But the Life Under Compulsion will have none of it. The first thing to do, then, in making orphans of us all is to remove as many fathers as possible. Bind the strong man, then take the house.

“if man cannot submit himself and all his works to God, then he will lose himself instead in the immanent. “The absolute or positive atheist,” says Maritain, “hands himself over, body and soul, to the ever-changing and all-engulfing Whole—be it the social or the cosmic totality.””

“It is essentially a pornographic world, where everyone lies naked on a bed of nettles, and every new thing is dead before it is born. Do we doubt this? Consider an advertisement on television …Take from it everything that smacks of enticement to lust, wrath, avarice, envy, vanity, and pride. Take all the noise out of the noise. Take the sting from the nettles. There is nothing left.”

“Everything is a stinging nettle. We drive down the street and the signs nettle us: buy this, do that…. the sting, the lash of prestige, of seeking admittance to the “best” school, the “best” team, the “best” club; the noise of a clanking death-in-life. Then to escape one noise, the children turn to another, the prick of the video game, the tweet, the drug, the sexual hook.”

“These days we have no true childhood, only a diseased precocity, introducing children to things that any decent man of Whittier’s day, or of Armstrong’s, would have considered unutterably vile. Therefore we have no true adulthood either, only a prolonged infantility, a curdled adolescence followed by old age and death.”…

“Their sin, both ways, is sloth—the inability to delight in what should properly bring us joy. Or, to put it in terms of Life Under Compulsion, they can be lazy, but they can never be at ease. They must be up and doing, or down and consuming.”

“This “work of culture” springs from the haven of the home, and no number of titanic sculptures in a public square can make up for it. Paul blames the men for the loss, because they allow women who are indispensable as culture makers in the home to become dispensable and interchangeable in the workplace, and indeed subordinate, while many a man instead might drudge his days away as a clerk and not be missed.

“The archons, like my monstrous imaginary parents above, forget that a child is a human being, not a data processor, ……A child is a human being: and human beings are made in the image and likeness of God. That implies that the child is made for goodness and truth and beauty, and that he will respond to it, despite Dewey’s absurd contempt for it and his reduction of their response to a case of the wiggles.”

“To be free is not to live in no place and at no time but to live in one place as in the shadow of all places, and to live in one time as in the morning twilight of eternity.”

“ The brave Stoic Epictetus boasted that no one could put fetters upon him. What enslaves us is not the will of another but our own will when we turn to vice.”

“The river flows naturally to the sea; its nature impels it to do so. Man’s nature impels him to love what is beautiful and to seek the truth. That drive for love and truth is itself his liberty. This drive is natural and good. The river should not be blocked up with mud.”

This chapter on the Family is completely undoing me. This has been my life's efforts, devotion, and love. This.