Uncle Yarv #13: parenting edition

Miguel from Nerzhinsk writes:

Hey Uncle Yarv, I figured I’d take this opportunity to ask you about something that, while not immediately applicable to me, I think about a lot—parenting.

Genetic determinism is compelling but I’m not sure how it should practically impact my future parenting outside of procreating with a genetically impressive individual. It seems less important to read your kids a bedtime story than it is to pass on the genes that make you want to read a bedtime story. However, I don’t plan on treating my offspring like the control group in an adoption study.

What can parents do to increase their children’s chances of growing up to be good people that navigate life happily and remain uninfected by the Cathedral’s scourges? What levers do you pull that make the most difference?

I’ll add another wrinkle to the story—I am a traditionalist Christian and would like my children to be as well.

Let me explain our cultural parenting strategy once again. It was simple and required no work: we simply let the kids believe we had no interest in politics. Eventually this will break down, but not until your children have formed their own perspectives.

The bet with this strategy is that the Cathedral will try to indoctrinate them, and fail. If this bet pays off, the child is immunized for life. And since the ideas they are being indoctrinated with (a) make no sense, (b) were extremely fresh and delicious 50 years ago, the chance that the official narrative will fail to implant is quite great—especially with a bright, inquisitive, rebellious child, such as any Gray Mirror sub should bear.

Of course, if you are a traditionalist and would like to raise your children as such, this is not a viable strategy. Then the question becomes: should you isolate the kids from our modern filth and degeneracy? Should you teach them to hate it? Or should you teach them to understand it, respect it, and pity it?

These approaches are stated in my preferred order. If you try to isolate your kids from the modern world, you have a sterile culture that any bacterium will grow in easily. Your isolation has to be perfect and that’s just not possible.

If you teach them to hate the modern world, you run the risk of a teenage reversal—in which your child sides with the modern world against you. Many such cases. This is an absolute nightmare scenario which I believe I have somehow escaped, praise Allah.

But teach them to respect and understand the modern world—frankly patronize it—and they will sympathize with its suffering—with the suffering that these ideas and these delusions create. This sympathy will prevent it from seducing them, since no one you pity can seduce you—pity breaks the glamor that comes with the status of power.

Or so, at least, is the best theory I can offer. Try it and let me know how it goes!