Steader quote:
I have many thoughts about education given my experience with homeschooling, helping to found a high school, and thinking about [my children who are nearing adulthood]. For the offspring of [steaders], the main takeaway is that enculturation is more important than efficient education. Your kids will do great and will be smart no matter what. So focus on the things that will bring your children into a rich identity. In our case, things like poetry, music, Latin, art are very important. The more technical subjects are easy. But the former subjects need to really have a chance to germinate and bear fruit.
In the Beginning was the Word
Today’s post is about using explicitly perma-family literature and art to build a perma-family identity. In essence, today’s transmission covers why propaganda is good and how you can make it work for you. It ends with a pitch to write, buy, use, and share full on propagandistic natalist narratives for kids.
Begin with the End in Mind
A perma-family is a family that can reiterate through multiple cycles of marriage, childbirth, and childrearing. One-generation natalism is not natalism at all. It’s just putting off the extirpatory part until tomorrow. Extinctive . . . but not yet! Dwindle . . . more slowly! are not and should not be inspiring slogans.
The end is to have children who wish to marry, have children, and raise their children to wish to marry, have children, and raise their children . . . In other words, your goal is to form a rich family identity that your children want to pass on, with one component of that family identity to be explicitly natalist.
An Aside on Education and Technical Education
From a purely functional standpoint education has three aims: learning skills, learning meta-skills (in other words, learning how to learn skills), and identify formation.
Technical education is a highly desirable form of learning skills and meta-skills, especially when it has a practical component. Engagement with reality is a must for all forms of education. The code must compile. The metal must be bent.
However, if you or your children are learning math, science, engineering, coding, and so on, don’t forget the identity formation component. There is an ethos in technical learning. Knowledge acquisition, curiosity, doing things, delight in beauty, independence, rigor, are all present in some degree. Find your ethos for technical education and make it explicit to you and your children.
Because, if not, there is an identity that technical education will probably assimilate them to. Go to college, do STEM, become a wage-earning professional with 1.2 children. This is an identity with a lot of cultural pull. The advantages of technical education far outweigh the disadvantages but you and your children must resist the undercurrent’s pull.
What is Propaganda?
Propaganda is certainly a dirty word. It’s a Russell conjugate.
I create stark and impassioned appeals.
You make message fiction.
He churns out propaganda.
A neutral definition of propaganda that fits with how its used is
Propaganda: attempts to persuade through images and word, usually on contested topics, usually not based on strict reasoning.
Propaganda does not have to be bad. A lot of pretty great art has messages, and some of the messages can be clearly political. Richard III: Hurrah for the Tudors! Thucydides: lol democracy.
Propaganda also does not have to be great art to be effective.
So you’re the little lady who made this great war.
Or, unfortunately, accurate.
Propaganda Works for You
Propaganda isn’t infallible. You can’t meme people into believing whatever you want, especially if they are smart and healthy and well-adjusted (like your children). At the same time, it is very powerful.
People think and evaluate. Concepts are both the food for thought and, if provided from outside, are pre-made thoughts. People are inborn empiricists—everyone’s internal view is shaped by what comes from outside. The human mind is ready and willing to take in, especially the young mind, especially from its father and mother.
But you must give them something to take in. At minimum you must from time to time tell your children that family is important, that you want them to be happily married with children of their own some day, and you want them to have the happiness of seeing their own children married . . . etc.
The most repeated piece of steader advice for family identity formation is to hang a lantern on what you are doing.
People are social—they care what other people think—and people are pattern finders, so patterns of input are usually given more weight.
You can’t talk to your kids just once.
Multi-channel Messages
The most effective messages are the ones that come through multiple channels. Not just repeated multiple times, but repeated in multiple ways.
Think of a rope with tightly twined strands.
Some of those strands are called authority, experiences, explicit parental teaching, social approval …
And a very heavy strand is called Narrative.
Tell the Story, Narrate the Narrative
Stories—narratives—are one of the main organizing principles of human thought. Partly because we are social creatures but also because we are overwhelmed with information. It is quite likely that any general intelligence that must take future-oriented action will inherently develop pattern matching and narrative as fundamental parts of its mental architecture. In any case, it is certain that humans have.
Think about the books you read that still stick with you. The movies. The plays. The stories you heard.
Think about how often you find yourself repeating quotes or mannerisms or even accents and phrases from a narrative that really hit home. Narrative leads to emulation.
So, yes, tell stories.
Stories become more powerful when they are shared. Stories define group boundaries. What we call “inside jokes” are usually just shorthand references to stories that happened. Shared experiences are a form of story generation.
Stories become more powerful when they are told to children. Childhood stories are pieces of mental architecture that will last for a lifetime.
Get together with family. Tell stories.
Stories become more powerful when they sometimes make a point. Talk about how glad you are you had children. Were there obstacles? Opposition? Sacrifice? Adventures? Rewards? These are what stories are made of.
Buy the Book, Write the Book
Finally, judiciously incorporate books and film and other forms of art into your family narrative production.
It is extremely powerful form of cultural reinforcement when someone with a narrative that has effectively been a personal or a small-group narrative runs across someone else that shares it. It creates a bond.
You want your children to have those bonds. Natalism in one family is impossible. So the question is, who do you want them to have bonds with? The types of books and movies you use in your family narratives shape who they will eventually bond with.
Unfortunately, there is a dearth of explicitly pro-natalist literature. We are going to fix that. In the coming days, we are going to unveil some explicitly pro-natalist books for kids. We hope you opt in.
Everyone who does is helping to form the kernel of something that is going to grow and grow.
What did you do to keep our family going through the birth collapse, Grandpa?
I got a kid’s book on why having kids was great and read it to your Mom.
… Legend.