When you have a toddler, children’s books, like toys and candies, just naturally appear on the premises. Friends and family members drop them off, they appear in the mail or mysteriously wash up on the mat or in the nook without anyone quite knowing how they got there.
Three generations ago, it might have been possible to just relish the bounty. These days some books are sweet and delicious like apples, others like candy and still others have to be checked for razor blades. Children’s books tell us little about children, but a great deal about adults.
Take ‘Tikkun Olam Ted’.
Ted, a colorful apple-cheeked little boy, occupies a world of equally cartoonish pets. On Sunday, he recycles, on Monday, he reuses the recycling, on Wednesday he volunteers at the animal shelter and so on, until ‘Shabbat’ arrives and then he “rests and dreams of Tikkun Olam.”
Tikkun Olam, a traditional Jewish concept that means the world recognizing G-d as its Supreme Ruler, was rejiggered by secular denominations to mean an evolving set of leftist causes. And that brings us to Tikkun Olam Ted, a little boy whom we are told earned his name “because he wants to help fix the world and make it a kinder better place”. Unlike religious Jewish children’s books, G-d never appears in Tikkun Olam Ted. The little boy has been tragically left to be his own god, to labor for six days to save a faltering world before collapsing on the Sabbath.
‘Parentification’ or expecting children to assume parental roles is a well-worn concept, but not nearly enough attention has been paid to ‘Godification’ which is much the same thing on an existential scale. Every generation since the Boomers has been raised with the knowledge that they are expected to save a declining world because of the sins of their parents and that there is no higher power that can be expected to help them. They’ve been abandoned to do it all alone.
Ted’s real-life counterparts have been both ‘parentified’ and ‘godified’, deprived of the comforts of believing that parents and adults can protect them, and that when they fail, G-d can help. Without responsible adults or divinity, the child is both a miniature adult and a little god. And if these children appear monstrous sometimes, that’s only to be expected from being raised to know that the world is doomed and that somehow they’re expected to do the impossible.
The rise of socialism was closely linked to the decline in faith. Adults who stopped believing in the kingdom of heaven came to believe implausibly that they could create utopia on earth. The Left is a religion whose believers are so difficult to dissuade because they have literally nothing else to believe in. When the angry young men and women fail, as they inevitably must, they put their faith in the next generation of angry young activists to do what they could not do.
That is where Ted and Greta Thunberg come from.
The Left believes that it is saving the future from the past when it is actually destroying the future to validate the destructive ideas of the past. The damage is most keenly felt in the children who are recruits and the testbeds for the exciting new future that is to come. There’s no horrific leftist fad that hasn’t been developed and tested using public education.
Critical race theory has been in schools since at least 1968 when teachers conducted the infamous racist brown/blue eyed experiment. Environmentalism doomsday preaching came soon after. Now it’s down to childhood sexualization and mutilation. Next year it will be something worse. Religion of the traditional kind has been removed from schools, but the leftist cults that have replaced it embody physical and emotional abuse of every possible kind.
Despite all that indoctrination, the children raised this way have nothing to believe in. They are taught to hate all sorts of things and people, but they are never offered a convincing vision of a better future. The adults teaching them have no idea of a better future. How can they provide what they themselves lack? That is the one question that leftists can never answer because they have deliberately set aside the one thing that can make up for human limitations.
“Change will not come if we wait for some other person or if we wait for some other time. We are the ones we’ve been waiting for,” Obama told a delirious crowd trained to repeat back the pseudo-theological slogan, “Yes, we can.” What Obama was really saying was that total mobilization was required. It was a familiar enough message from centuries of leftists.
Anything short of total mobilization would fail. By joining together, we could do anything, the mass ‘We’ could “heal this nation”, “repair this world” and “make this time different than all the rest.” All the rest of the previous leftist revolutions had failed, this one would succeed. The collective, abandoning its individuality, would become a mass man-god capable of anything.
Universal ‘godification’ failed then as it always had before leaving its followers, angrier, more broken and more prone to radicalization. That had always been the revolutionary plan.
“If socialism as a form of human government would be equally or even approximately successful, it must first attain that perfect individual discipline and absolute self-control, self-abnegation, self-surrender, and self-devotion to the good of the whole community that one sees in a commonwealth of ants,” Rev. Dr. Henry C. McCook had argued a long time ago.
We are the ‘We‘ of Yevgeny Zamyatin’s novel that we are still waiting for. The only true socialist answer is to sacrifice for the whole by abandoning our individuality, to meet a mechanistic universe on its own terms by making mankind into a machine. And no one wants to do it.
Unable to become ants or machines, and faced with the impossibility of being gods, existential despair spills over into political self-hatred and self-mutilation. From critical race theory events to the transgender mania, there is an unprecedented appetite for degradation and destruction. Unlike the counterculture era, there is little self-gratifying about these exercises. They’re frantic efforts to destroy the face in the mirror: a face both narcissitically worshiped and despised.
W.H. Auden’s pacifistic apologetic for Nazi Germany, “What all schoolchildren learn, Those to whom evil is done, Do evil in return” applies generationally to schoolchildren abused by the Left’s culture wars Each generation, in the grip of a new era of leftist narcissism and despair, has broken the next generation further by robbing it of the great birthright of the future: hope.
Pandora’s box has been opened and there’s nothing left inside. There’s only Tikkun Olam Ted and a million children like him, told that they are the ones that their parents and the world have been waiting for, all they have to do is recycle, protest and demand a brave new world.
G-d is the ultimate and final antidote to despair. In His absence, there are only different flavors of despair for those who want to imagine a better world. ‘Godification’ is the great despair lurking at the end of all leftist schemes. The ‘godified’ men fall, their collectives come apart, the experiments collapse and then having learned nothing, they ‘godify’ their children.
Is it any wonder that their children despair even before they arrive at puberty?
Children are naturally happy. Hope is innate to a child’s heart under even the worst conditions because they cannot conceive that things will steadily get worse. That is what the Left teaches them. It ‘parentifies’ them and then ‘godifies’ them, telling them that they must be the adults and then that they must change the world or everything around them will be destroyed.
One of the most incomprehensibly horrifying phenomena in our society is the rise in child suicides. One recent study based on poison center calls found suicide attempts through poison and pills among children 10 to 12 had quadrupled from 1,058 in 2010 to 5,606 in 2020.
10-year-old girls are hanging themselves and 9-year-old boys are shooting themselves. The numbers shot up during lockdowns with a 47% increase in suicide ER visits among 5-8 year olds and 182% higher among 9- to 12-year-olds. But even in previous years, the rates were horrifying. Why? Go ask Tikkun Olam Ted and his real-life peers whose childhoods were stolen.
Adults discover to their painful chagrin that they cannot be gods. But what happens to children when they are confronted with the knowledge that there is no future and everything is on them?
Turning children into adults does not make them men and women. Inflicting responsibilities and knowledge on them that they cannot bear destroys their childhood without giving them the strength or maturity to make the necessary decisions. ‘Godified’ adults are despairing and committing suicide at great rates. So are ‘Godified’ children.
No human being can shoulder all the burdens of the world. Least of all children. And yet that is what the Left demands of all people. Despair has become commonplace, not only among leftists, but among some conservatives, who see everything as hopeless. Without the conviction that, as George Washington reportedly put it during the Constitutional Convention, “the rest is in the hands of God”, a natural despair sets in at the hopelessness of the great tasks ahead of us.
The countervailing force to the despair of ‘godification’ is hope and faith in G-d. History and human nature tell us conclusively that ‘godification’ will always fail. No cult of personality, no mass movement, can do everything. We do everything we can and then we know, as Washington did, that “the rest is in the hands of God” and then we can do anything.
“Anyone who has the power to make you believe absurdities has the power to make you commit injustices.” ~ Voltaire
The supernatural miracles of the Bible and the Koran are logical absurdities. If the Red Sea can be magically parted, a dead body rise from the dead, a Conception be Immaculate, a Birth Virginal, and Mohammed ride a chariot to Paradise, then why can’t a man can be a woman, a woman a man, and men have babies if they truly believe it? Faith makes all things possible, no?
“Christianity prepared the ground. It paved the way for modern totalitarianism by entrenching three fundamentals in the Western mind: in metaphysics, the worship of the supernatural; in epistemology, the reliance on faith; as a consequence, in ethics, the reverence for self-sacrifice….
The concept of faith does not pertain to the content of a man’s ideas, but by the method by which they are to be accepted. “Faith” designates blind acceptance of a certain ideational content, acceptance induced by feeling in the absence of evidence or proof. It is obvious, therefore, why Nazi (and Fascist) leaders insist on faith from their followers. “Faith” writes Hitler, “is harder to shake than knowledge…. I have followed the [the Church] in giving our party program the character of unalterable finality, like the Creed. The Church has never allowed the Creed to be interfered with. It is fifteen hundred years since it was formulated, but every suggestion for its amendment, every logical criticism or attack on it, has been rejected. The Church has realized that anything and everything can be built up on a document of that sort, no matter how contradictory or irreconcilable with it. The faithful will swallow it whole, so long as logical reasoning is never allowed to be brought to bear on it.” – Leonard Peikoff, “The Ominous Parallels: The End Of Freedom In America”
Same crap. Except you wrote it on day that ends in ‘y’. Don’t you get tired of posting the Peekaboo article over and over again.
I’m sorry. I realize that I just attacked the messenger, because I can’t rebut the message itself. I hope God will forgive me and I can still get past those gates into Heaven.
18 For the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.
The left also demands faith to its diktats. Of course, for some silly reason, they have this unshakeable belief that their form of socialism is some how better than Hitler’s. Tyranny is tyranny no matter how you get there.
testing.
As Ayn Rand said the CRUCIAL issue for mankind is not religion versus secular philosophy. The crucial is how do we know what we know and how can we prove it’s true?
How shall we deal with each other as human beings? There’s only two choices, either we choose to respect each other’s minds, we choose REASON, and we proceed to discuss and persuade by demonstrating the demonstrable facts of reality that we can all rationally agree upon or NOT.
But if we choose the NOT, the only alternative is the INITIATION OF FORCE to make others believe what is not provable by reason and pointing to the facts of reality.
Rights, decency, dignity, freedom, liberty, peace among men, are all rational values derived from reality and reasoning correctly about reality because as Ayn Rand correctly identified, we live in a “benevolent” universe. A universe which makes sense, which is understandable to man’s reasoning mind.
“Although accidents and failures are possible, they are not, according to Objectivism, the essence of human life. On the contrary, the achievement of values is the norm—speaking now for the moral man, moral by the Objectivist definition. Success and happiness are the metaphysically to-be-expected. In other words, Objectivism rejects the view that human fulfillment is impossible, that man is doomed to misery, that the universe is malevolent. We advocate the “benevolent universe” premise.
The “benevolent universe” does not mean that the universe feels kindly to man or that it is out to help him achieve his goals. No, the universe is neutral; it simply is; it is indifferent to you. You must care about and adapt to it, not the other way around. But reality is “benevolent” in the sense that if you do adapt to it—i.e., if you do think, value, and act rationally, then you can (and barring accidents you will) achieve your values. You will, because those values are based on reality.
Pain, suffering, failure do not have metaphysical significance—they do not reveal the nature of reality. Ayn Rand’s heroes, accordingly, refuse to take pain seriously, i.e., metaphysically. You remember when Dagny asks Ragnar in the valley how his wife can live through the months he is away at sea, and he answers (I quote just part of this passage):
“We do not think that tragedy is our natural state. We do not live in chronic dread of disaster. We do not expect disaster until we have specific reason to expect it, and when we encounter it, we are free to fight it. It is not happiness, but suffering, that we consider unnatural. It is not success but calamity that we regard as the abnormal exception in human life.”
This is why Ayn Rand’s heroes respond to disaster, when it does strike, with a single instantaneous response: action—what can they do? If there’s any chance at all, they refuse to accept defeat. They do what they can to counter the danger, because they are on the premise that success, not failure, is the to-be-expected.” – Leonard Peikoff
It makes no sense to mock people who worship a supernatural entity while simultaneously worshipping as a goddess a dead human woman. Everyone has reasons for their faith.
Everyone is a socialist after a natural disaster. Just ask Ron DeSantis.
There’s plenty of evidence for God. Every atom in your body is a testament that you didn’t have a material creator, you had a spiritual one. Atoms can do supernatural things, so supernatural is the norm, and what you consider the rules of nature are ones placed on us.
Christianity teaches the exact opposite of totalitarianism. That has always come from atheism. No matter what you want to believe. When you reject a creator, morality itself becomes whatever society says it is. Morality becomes a shifting imaginary sand dune.
Can you prove anything from your first paragraph?
Who’s God are we talking about? The Jewish God Yahweh? The Trinity God of the Christians? Or the Allah God of the Muslims?
Judaism rejects and denies the whole of the New Testament, it denies the divinity of Jesus of Nazareth, the Resurrection, the whole kit and caboodle of Christianity. So who’s God are we talking about?
Are we talking about a generic Almighty Creator severed from a Jewish, Christian, or Muslim theology? That generic Prime Mover can no longer be the Jewish Yahweh, the Christian Trinity God, or the Muslim Allah.
Such a generic God idea is in fact the result of the secularization of the idea of God. Such a generic God is not possible when Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are taken seriously. Such a generic God idea is Deism and Deism properly speaking is not a religion but is in fact a result of the atrophy of religious belief.
As religion becomes more rational it develops from polytheism, to monolatry, to monotheism, then to deism. But in fact this progress towards rationality of religion does not mean the religion is “maturing”, or “developing”, or becoming more rational. What in fact is happening is that the religion is in the process of atrophying, of eroding, of becoming diluted by reason. Reason is slowly eroding and diluting faith.
“Many of the Founding Fathers, of course, continued to believe in God and to do so sincerely, but it was a vestigial belief, a leftover from the past which no longer shaped the essence of their thinking. God, so to speak, had been kicked upstairs. He was regarded now as an aloof spectator who neither responds to prayer nor offers revelations nor demands immolation. This sort of viewpoint, known as deism, cannot, properly speaking, be classified as a religion. It is a stage in the atrophy of religion; it is the step between Christianity and outright atheism.” – Leonard Peikoff, “Religion versus America”
Same tired crap. Except you wrote it on day that ends in ‘y’. Don’t you get tired of posting yet a different Peekaboo article over and over again? I’m starting to think you really don’t read all that much given your limited collection of anti-religious propaganda.
Also, he’s been saying the same things ever since he came here, like he hasn’t learned anything new in all that time.
Post traumatic stress due to his religious upbringing petrified his brain which is fixed in a certain worldview.
Excellent article. Kids books these days are dangerous. I have one particular case in mind, which I bought with great expectations, knowing the author. It was a huge, crushing disappointment, I had to stop reading after a couple chapters, thinking how the kids are being misled.
“When we stopped believing in G-d, we started believing we had to become gods.”
Or, paraphrasing Chesterton, or C.S. Lewis:
When man stops believing in G-d, he starts worshipping idols.
if I were still teaching, I would make a class set of this article and use it!
A fine compliment.
Reading is NOT Fundamental…
If truth were a jewel, the blinding gem held by Daniel Greenfield would blaze above mere mortals in the heavenlies. God bless and keep him. May the beauty of the LORD rest upon Daniel, and establish the work of his hands. Psalm 90.
Amen!!!
Wonderful article. We all have expectations of our children, but perhaps they need to be the right expectations. I raised my children with a far stronger religious faith than I myself had been raised with, gave them a very good religious education, and expected great things of them. In their thirties now, they are all decent people and the majority are highly religious, married, and have children and good jobs to support them. These adult milestones great things, given how few people their age have attained them. So it is possible to place a burden on one’s children in the hopes that they will be better than oneself, and not have it crush them.
But I would have to take issue with the statement, “Every generation since the Boomers has been raised with the knowledge that they are expected to save a declining world because of the sins of their parents and that there is no higher power that can be expected to help them. They’ve been abandoned to do it all alone.” We Boomers were the children of the Greatest Generation, the heroes who saved the world. We grew up admiring and trusting our parents, who even if they were very young were real adults. They protected us from knowledge of the horrors of war that they had seen and from the prospect of nuclear annihilation that we faced. They never let us in on the prospect that we might well not grow up. They gave us childhoods untroubled by the prospect of an expanding mushroom cloud a few miles away. So no, the Boomers might have been the last generation to have one, but we had real childhoods. It was somewhere along the way, perhaps with the parenting of the cohort ten to fifteen years our seniors, when things really went wrong.
Adult responsibilities are good things, but they emerge under adult guidance. What leftist programming does is tell children that their parents have failed to save the world and it’s all up to them now.
Expecting children to marry, have jobs and raise children is a good thing. Expecting them to save the world was not.
” “Every generation since the Boomers”. Meaning the Boomers were not raised this way. But too many Boomers raised their children this way and the phenomenon grew worse with Gen X, M’s, etc…
Ah, yes. “Saving the world”, something that repulses Conservatives (by definition).
Good article. Timely. Thanks!
Tikun Olam is an ersatz woke attempt at substitution of RFS social justice agenda for traditional Jewish values
indeed, it’s what the left always does, it hollows out an organization, a people, a cause, a belief system and replaces them with its own programming
the cuckoo principle
You are assuming these organizations, people, causes and belief systems are all good. You assume so because of your own “programming”.
Wonderful post for Yom Kippur. Thank you for the statistics… horrifying but we need to be aware and have louder (religious, G-d centered, voices) reaching out to people in despair.
We do. We need to know the weapons of the enemy to be able to resist and teach our children and grandchildren to be strong and resist.
Gmar tov.
Thank you. This reminds me of a child in my family a decade ago or more. She was just starting public school. She looked worried a lot. One day I tossed a paper in the trash. She began to sob. She explained that her teacher told her that all the fish in the oceans are dying. Dying because we humans made too much trash. I had just added to the death of innocent fish in the beautiful ocean by adding a page of paper to the trash.
What cruelty to burden 5 year olds with such dark heavy responsibilities. And guilt and blame. Why is this in a Kindergarten lesson plan? Where is the joy? Theres plenty of time for adult responsibility when children grow up.
This child cried because she could not save the entire world’s seas. At age 5!
Thank you for another wonderful and inspirational article.
And just in time.
We here wish you and your family well.
Thank you. It’s ugly. It’s emotional child abuse done to turn children into activists. And it leaves deep scars.
You need a License to get a Dog… Think about that…
When I was teaching (a long time ago) a recurrent theme in class was that religion was the cause of all the wars of history. I showed them a list of the 200 or so deadliest battles ion history. The overwhelming majority had nothing to do with religion; especially the deadliest wars of all, the two world wars. The Second World War was largely fought between an atheist Soviet Union and a secular Nazi Germany; National Socialists against International Socialists. The more secular a society gets the more it is enticed into evil. Only a belief in God can prevent it. Everyone knows the obvious truth here: If there is no God … then all things are permitted. All things.
Your comment is the “atheist atrocities” fallacy.