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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 24, 2023

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So why is it bad for them to become the upstanding ideal of a different culture?

Because they mostly don't.

Children need real, living role models that they interact with every day to absorb enough of a functional culture to smoothly take it up themselves. Right now, society is absolutely full of fake role models, cardboard cutouts of fictional cultures that attempt to lure children into their clutches to be used in some way, whether somewhat banally as brand dedicated consumers or more maliciously.

Children are impressionable. They lack good judgment and, especially, have no real concept of the long term until they are already quite mature, ie., until they have already been raised within one culture. There is a reason we don't just leave cigarettes or alcohol or sexual activity to the good judgment and curious nature of children: They will make bad, often harmful mistakes much more often than they will learn valuable life lessons and become the wiser for it.

The worst part? The children themselves are the only ones with the right incentives to raise themselves right. Because their judgment is impaired, we are left with the second best choice, those whose incentives are aligned with the child's the second most: The parents. Society has no skin in the game for any particular child and anonymous or large scale social institutions most of all. No parent is perfect and always has all their child's best interests in mind at all times, everywhere, but they're going to be significantly better than a teacher who only has that child for one class for one year, where they are but one of dozens of others. They're certainly better than any bureaucrat for whom the child is one of a faceless multitude.

In the past, face-to-face local society provided an additional set of adults whose caring and long term exposure to the child offered a non-exclusive alternative to the child's parents, but that culture is dead and the modern replacements are not up to the job.