HOW TO CURE AMERICA'S SOCIAL ILLS

 

The excellent US publication Foreign Affairs just published an article about the fentanyl epidemic, one of the many social ills afflicting American society.

The main weakness of the article is that the real problem is not supply, but demand, more precisely: the use and overuse of fentanyl. In a larger sense, the real problem about demand is that it exists in the first place. What's or who's to blame for that catastrophe? And what's or who's to blame for all the other social illnesses of American society (high crime rates, drug use, marital instability, low birth rate, sexual deviations of all kinds, etc.)?

The main culprit for all that is something that as been overtly and willingly promoted, in the Western world in general, but in the US, since at least 1945. Excessive individualism is the key to understand everything.

At the juncture of the end of the Second World War, and the beginning of the Cold War, the United States found itself opposite of the Soviet Union, soon join (in 1949) by Red China. Both powers were seen and described as totalitarian dictatures that denied individual freedom and promoted instead collectivism over individualism. Individual rights and responsibilities were then praised and overpraised, over collective rights and responsibilities.

The individual was the key to everything, the collective was seen as some kind of inhuman hive, a totalitarian evil that crush everything good in mankind. The fight against Stalin's USSR and Mao's China became at the same time a fight against communism, a fight for individual rights and freedoms, a fight against an evil to be extinguish at all costs.

In this matter, a comparison between America and Africa might be useful. In most African countries, the crime rates are extremely low, drug use is very rare, the birth rate is much higher than the minimum required (2.1 children per woman in average), couples are more stable, and anything but homosexuality is generally looked down and widely discouraged, both by men and women. It is mal vu. The differences between the two continents of North America and Africa are striking: extreme economic wealth but big social problems for the first, extreme economic poverty but excellent social health for the second. Why?

One word: family. Africans don't value the individual as such, they value the family, first and foremost, they always put family over individuality, and they're quite right about it. It can be observed in many ways. The Dark Continent's age-sold wisdom as a lot to teach us, who are mere barbarians in comparison, savages who live outside the real cradle of civilisation, that is to say: Africa, the mother of humankind.

In the African country I happen to know the most (I've been there two times, a month each time), which is to say the small republic of Bénin, located between Togo to the West and Nigéria to the East, and between the Niger River to the North and the Atlantic to the South, most family dwellings in the most populous city, Cotonou, the economic metropolis of Bénin, are really family compounds surrounded by ten-feet high walls, usually made of concrete, the most useful construction material locally available, the walls being surmounted by broken glass.

In the small villages that I have seen, here and there in the tribal areas that covers most of the country (in the extreme North can be founds a vast complex of natural parks, hunting reserves, and conservation territories that extend into Niger and Burkina Faso and harbor many wild animals, notably the last populations of lions in West Africa), in those villages, there are no walls around family dwellings, simply because most inhabitants know each other since birth, and even theft is rare.

Bonds between individuals are particularly strong in rural areas, in Bénin (as in most countries), cities being usually multi-ethnic pools of usually disconnected people. Even in Cotonou, members of the 40-odds Beninese tribes -each tribe being a society in itself- are dispersed here and there, all over the city, with no concentrations, except in two cases. One is a Muslim quarter called Zogbo, similar to quarters of the same name in other large cities of West Africa. The other is a tribal territory on a small peninsula jutting in the Atlantic, just south of the downtown area, where lived the 5,000 members of a very small tribe and where Cotonou citizens avoid to go.

They avoid it simply because it is being bad form to visit a tribal territory without any invitation or just a good reason to go there, an very old and respectable custom that predates European intrusion and still survives. It's simple: one doesn't go into somebody else tribe jus like that, the same way one would fill ill at ease to enter a house belonging to somebody else and whose front door has been left open by accident or mistake.

It should be added, here, that there are many good reasons why sanatoriums are always located in rural areas: quietness, absence of stress, presence of nature. There is something true to the saying that cities are not conducive to a good mental health. For most of our existence as a species, we lived in small groups, villages or small cities. 25-millions strong metropolises are a relatively new phenomenon, and they are luckily not very numerous.

To return to the walls, they define the limits of the family unit, composed of two or three generations. They also prevent theft, created by poverty, the only kind of crime existing in the country. Capital crimes (murders, rapes) are so rare they are talked about for weeks. The crime rates that are stratospheric in the United State, and somewhat lower in Canada (maybe because of the old British traditions of stiff-upper lips and reserve among the English-speaking part of the population), those crime rates are almost to the bottom of the scale in Bénin, and elsewhere in Black Africa in general.

Speaking of walls, I must say that in Ouidah, a large city (and old slave station) located to the west of Cotonou (it was notably depicted in the recent movie The Woman King, but as a port, even though old Ouidah and modern Ouidah are kilometers away from the sea...), I've seen a walled family dwelling that covers an entire city block. It was used by one extended family unit (ménage), made up of the two old grand-parents, their many children, and their many grand-children, each family, subfamily, and sub-subfamily having its own pavilion, for reasons of intimacy. To cross from one end of such an enormous home to the other (there's even parks here and there, outside the buildings) takes about one-half hour, if you are fast.

Outside the safety of the walled compound (in cities), or outside the safety of the case or house (in villages), lies the outside world. In Africa, that outside is very safe (if poor, of course), especially compared to America, because of its gun culture, creeping individualism, abundant serial killers, ever-increasing collective shootings, and growing violence in general. America is not a peaceful place, unfortunately. Africa is, despite its many economic weaknesses.

If Americans want to better their society, a revolution of the mind is necessary. They must go to the source of their problems, and turn the spigot on individualism, while starting to promote and reinvigorate the notion of family, as opposed to the way too much overblown notion of individuality.

In truth, the idea of unlimited individual freedom, so common in North America (the freemen on the range mentality, also called the Individual-King: I-Can-Do-Whatever-I-Want-Period) is non only deeply anti-social in nature, it corrodes by definition social cohesion, the bonds that binds people together.

A society, any society, whether a very large one like the one formed collectively by the Americans (USA) or the Hans (China), or the very small ones formed by the Fons, Goun, or Mina people, in Bénin, for instance, is not (and just cannot be) made up of unrelated individuals uncaring about each other. It just can't. A nation, which is to say a society, is made up of clans, subclans, families. A country is a political structure that is not a nation, nor a society.

A nation his made up of existing families and families to be, all build on individuals. An individual can be seen as a single brick. A wall (or a whole house) is made of rows upon rows of bricks, organized together and linked together. What matters the most, then, are not the bricks as such, but the wall (or house) that they shape and form together. In that image, the mortar holds the basic elements together, like a glue, and represents the binding bonds.

Men and women don't matter individually. They only matter when they unite and functions as family members, as fathers, mothers, and children, and as uncles, aunts, cousins, grandpas, and grandmas, etc. In this sense, individuals are irrelevant, because families are everything. To see oneself (and define oneself) as an individual is ultimately to miss the whole point of being alive.

Africans don't make that mistake. Children of one particular Beninese family I know define themselves not only by names, but also as grande-soeur, grand-frère, petite-soeur, petit-frère. Everyone who have seen the high degree of control exercised by African parents, and particularly African mothers, over their children have no doubt that those kids better follow a straight line. Parents, there, instinctively knows how to encourage their children when they're doing the right thing and how to discourage them when they're not.

Just one real-life example to prove the importance of siblings. A few years ago, at the time of the trucker’s manifestation in Ottawa (Ontario, Canada), at the time where Covid-19 was everywhere, I met by chance a woman born in Philadelphia (Pennsylvania). She was living near Midland, a small town located many kilometers north of Toronto, in the old La Huronnie country that was destroyed by the Iroquois a long time ago, at the beginning of New France, and she survived by driving a small delivery van.

That woman was around 55 and was childless. She used to be married to a now-estranged man that she hated (she looks for his name each week in the local paper, hoping to find it in the Necrology section). She was an only-child, born of two only-child parents, now dead, who themselves descended from only-child parents. It means that she had no family to speak of: no children, no brothers or sisters, no parents or grandparents, no aunts or uncles, no cousins of any sort, no nephews of nieces, no step relations, no nothing. She was of good spirits, but she knew that she can only counted on herself to survive, apart from what few friends she had. In practice, she was all alone in the universe, with only her job to support her.

In time of economic uncertainty, family relations are like a safety net. Don't be surprised if Los Angeles and New York have tens of thousands of homeless people who have lost everything and have nowhere to go. Even Canadian cities like Montréal and even Toronto have thousands upon thousands of homeless people. That is not normal. It may pass for normal, but it is not, and it is a sign that something is wrong somewhere, in the social tissue of North America.

To be honest, individualism isn't the only reason behind the social ills of America. The sexual revolution of the 60s is also one of the sources of the problem. It didn't happen everywhere on the planet, thankfully. It happened in the US, mainly, and a bit less in the rest of the Western world. Other societies on Earth were spared the effects of that scourge, and for the better. That revolution (it really should be renamed the sexual devastation) brought fashionable ideas of freedom-at-all-cost on a very important instinct, sexuality, that is better left alone, without being made the object of social engineering. It had a lot of negative effects: it made sexual deviations socially acceptable, encouraged infidelity, encouraged pedophilia, lowered the birth rate, lowered marital stability (nowadays, about 50 % of formal Western marriages fail, a not-at-all-normal-rate), lowered inhibitions of all kinds.

A real-life example. A few days ago, I saw a video, on Tir-Tok or Instagram, I don't remember and it didn't really matter, showing a white man, about forty, white, with a big belly, walking in the streets of a large American city, covered only by a woman slip and a bra, otherwise completely naked, except for shoes, evidently oblivious of the many people staring at him. He was in public, and didn't care less about the whole thing.

As an aside, let's say that one of the spectators, in that video, made a spontaneous comment: 'Here's a Democrat!' (I'm not even joking...)

For America to avoid more social decay, many things should happen. The above-mentioned revolution of the mind is one thing, maybe the most difficult, because it must happen in the minds of many ordinary people, here and there, from the ground up, in a manner of speaking, but it would not be enough. The creation of a department of Family Rejuvenation, on the model of the relatively new department of Homeland Security that was formed after the terrorist attacks of 9/11, would be a clear signal sent to all citizens of the US Republic, and to all people over the world. Then, that department could start implementing policies and find ways of rebuilding American society upon new foundations, better and deeper foundations, and this time, from the top down.

Whatever happen, we must never forget that, outside families, there's nothing, simply nothing, that really matters:

anything else is just dust floating in the wind...

* * *

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/mexico/why-america-struggling-stop-fentanyl-epidemic

* * *

MORE:  @charles.millar3 (Twitter)