Dear Friends,
It seems to me, people should get married at a young age. There is no better way to eliminate the slut life and restore the nuclear family. Women and children would benefit immensely as would men. I would argue that by every measure our society would improve as would our standard of living. The argument people should wait until later so that they are more mature is spurious. I reason it’s spurious because history shows that when people married younger, they stayed married longer. Plus there are certain communities that marry young and stay married their whole lives as a rule. Some will argue the difference is cultural not the age of marriage. To which I agree, culture feeds back into the average age of marriage. Functional cultures build families, dysfunctional cultures build up body counts.
A civilization lives and dies around the family. If families aren’t formed and children aren’t born, that civilization ceases to exist. This happens regardless of how enlightened, scientific, or wise it’s purported to be. Without children civilizations cease to exist. Aldus Huxley claimed, tongue in cheek, that parents could be replaced by the factory, and industrial orphanages could replace the family. We all understand at some level, however, that such ideas are absurdities. Not only are parents necessary for the production of children, families are necessary for the nurturing, growth, and maturation of children into adults. The basics of trust, honor, and truth are first taught in the family… or not, depending on the family. Orphanages are famous for failing their charges in these matters.
Pragmatically, we need to look at the quality of life of people. The metric should be health, safety, and fulfillment. When we examine the health of people we find that married people are more healthy and live longer. But health isn’t the be all and end all of life. What is health if one is in constant fear of crime, death, or worse? When we look at crime statistics we find that married people are less likely to commit crimes. Even then, those crimes are usually in furtherance of family goals, like survival. From this it’s apparent that the more married people in a society the less crime there will be. Healthy and safe are important, but what about fulfillment? One could argue that Eleanor Rigby and Father Mackenzie are fulfilled, but I might argue otherwise.
Folks might argue that if people are older they are able to make more mature decisions about who their spouse will be. This should lead to more lasting and fulfilled relationships. In theory this makes sense but in practice it fails. When a theory comes into contact with reality and is falsified by reality, the Popperians abandon it. The idealists, however, find fault with reality. In this case, as the age of marriage has risen, so has the divorce rate. The two seem to rise in lockstep. I wonder if this is because as people age we become more fixed in our ways. If this is true then when we are young we are more open to connecting with a spouse, even someone who years later might seem unsuitable. Then, as they become more fixed, the two are more likely to form a common trajectory instead of intersecting ones.
This is becoming ever more important as the West and indeed the whole world appears to be entering Universe 25. The mouse experiment in plenty that resulted in extermination. We are becoming more like those mice every day. We grow more self-absorbed, narcissistic, and egotistic. It’s got to the point that women have several abortions in their lifetime, but no children. When they become old and no longer sexually attractive they disappear, alone and lonely. They have no children or grandchildren to comfort them, talk to, or get angry at. Society fragments into individuals who are not healthy, safe, or fulfilled. The answer is to marry kids at a young age, maybe right after high school. Go back to traditional systems that worked. We tried the slut life, it gave us VD, so let’s go back to what worked.
Sincerely,
John Pepin
