The Family Farm

Every aspect of a parent's perception of its relationship with its offspring revolves around the position of total authoritative control. Parents need not prove themselves worthy of their children's affection. It is taken for granted prior to age 5 and demanded without explanation thereafter. Neither stage allows the child any self-actualized participation. Parenting is being plotted along an evolutionary course that has legitimized it's adaptation of some extremely ill-conceived idealizations more reflective of capitalism than paternalism. These things called children hold far more value as possessions than as emerging individuals.

"The bourgeois clap-trap about the family and education, about the hallowed co-relation of parent and child, becomes all the more disgusting, the more, by the action of Modern Industry, all family ties among the proletarians are torn asunder, and their children transformed into simple articles of commerce and instruments of labour." --Karl Marx (1884)

Children do not work as they did in Marx's day, nor was the concept of childhood as important then. These days, children are not considered candidates for "physical" work, but they have assumed a new social utility, as has the family unit. They are both consumers and marketable, and they work very hard perpetuating the regime that spends millions to molest their wills and change their sense of self to one that best perpetuates the economic engine. Under this current western regime, the supposed sanctity of the family holds no meaning outside of the social regulations keeping it on life support.

It has long been known that, all things being equal, a birthparent is no more beneficial or harmful than any attachment a child makes with an adult--so long as the attachment is a secure and loving one, a child will find a "parent" in anyone. The role of the parent is no longer reserved for birthparents, but in western materialist culture, that which proceeds or emanates from it's creator inevitably carries with it a right of sole ownership. The child as an individual is a piece of property governed by the rights of attainment by those who have procured it--it can be transferred, it can be repossessed into the invisible care of the invisible state when it's care can not be assured it--but it always remains intact as a thing owned. If the child is the piece of property, the livestock, the cattle, in this formulation, then the modern family is little more than a farm for cultivating human product to serve the social engine that went into creating it.

Modern families are thus alienated from themselves in the midst of this property exchange. Parents alienated from their children, children from their parents and society, and family units are forced to compete with each other over the social ladder, pit their children against other children by means of social comparison, and find validity in their unit functionality by amassing what it can produce for society. And yet, despite all this, it somehow manages to hold onto its sacred place at the heart of civilization--which no doubt has more to do with maintaining its productive output than any of the sentimental "bourgeois claptrap" normally ascribed to it by the indentured denizens of culture.

Procreation is if anything the antithesis of a 'profound achievement', yet it grants by default, ownership, an alleged necessity due to the 'heavy degree of responsibility inerrant in raising children'. This is also referred to as 'personal sacrifice'. These are the self-described traits of a species that is the most heavily personified example of intra-species aggression in it's biosphere. What then is the logical process that validates hanging all the blame for all conceivable acts of evil upon children around the necks of solitary rogues (non-parents) of either species who unwittingly acknowledge love, in defiance of free will, for a child owned by someone else?

Such a person (a person who's love for a child is not taken for granted and demanded without explanation) is undoubtedly a wolf--stalking the flock. Or is it?