The Bare Minimum, continued

What's the point of the Bare Minimum list? Should it include a church? Should it include continuing to parent after age 18?

Today’s transmission follows up on your responses to last weeks Bare Minimum Conditions List and points you to a few articles that the steady-minded won’t want to miss.

THE BARE MINIMUM FOR CONTINUED FAMILY SUCCESS

What is the Bare Minimum Needed for a Family Founder to Succeed?

You responded to last week’s exploration of the minimum conditions for a family to survive the ongoing Human Lineage Collapse Disorder.

As always, the responses helped.  You have so much talent and intelligence out there.

What is the Minimum Conditions List for?

The list is not a list of things you ought to start doing.  Most of them you already do and a couple of them, like making sure your children survive to adulthood with their fertility intact are probably taken care at the minimum level by living in a first world country.

The list is a check.  If you are missing something on the list, fix it, or realize you are going to have to take extraordinary measures to route around it.

The list is also a mindset reset.  We live in a society that takes the existence of families for granted.  The list is part of a necessary reorientation towards thinking of your family’s continued success as a problem that you can and will solve.

Is the supportive, like-minded community an essential?

Several of you suggested that  a supportive, like-minded community was an essential, whether it be a church or an informal group of some kind.

Especially because otherwise who do your kids marry?

It does remind me of the research saying that one of the three predictors for whether kids will follow their parents politics and religion is whether some other adult authority figure supports it.

How can you be a successful multi-generational family if you don’t talk the talk and walk the walk?

Several of you pointed out that if you want to establish a multi-generational family you have to act like it.  You need to not write off your kids once they turn 18 and you need to inculcate the expectation that they will care for you when you get older.

OPTING IN SUBSTACK

I just discovered the Opting in Substack

I love it so far.

In this provocatively titled article, he explores superior ways of raising your kids to succeed financially.  Is the get-a-degree grindpath really the best we can do?

.

How Your Kids Could Skip College

He takes a page from the book of the ancient Roman patricians who educated their sons by taking them with them as they conducted their business.  He makes practical suggestions that are well thought out.

A SCHOOL OF STRENTH AND CHARACTER

This is a feature essay in Palladium magazine.  What it is is the history of American local self-organization in the 19^th Century.  We knew some of it, but the reality was even greater than we knew.

Any path forward that doesn’t aim to restore the American character of organized self-help may be a path to greatness but it is not a path to American greatness.

The country that can combine state capacity and folk capacity will claim the stars.  Until then, if you had to choose either state capacity or folk capacity, choose folk capacity.

The institution builders of the Civil War embodied a type of excellence that foreign observers of their era described as characteristically American. The jurist Francis Lieber, who emigrated to the United States in 1827, credited this excellence to the fact that America had not “create[d] or tolerate[d] a vast hierarchy of officers, forming a class of mandarins for themselves.” A nation governed by a centralized mandarinate “can summon great strength upon certain occasions, as all [centralized systems] can; but it is no school of strength or character.” 

But less than a century after the Civil War, American life did become dominated by centralized and professionally managed bureaucracies.