Transcription
When you ask people who have gone through a divorce, they will tell you that it was the cheating, or the lack of intimacy, or—I don't know—lack of respect that led to the divorce. And I think that the picture is way too small when you see it from that perspective. I think that the physical structures of marriage in our current culture do not lend themselves to healthy long-term relationships. And until that structure has changed, and I don't think it ever will, it's very unlikely that marriage will ever be a successful institution again.
Let's talk about it. If over half of the children entering into the nation's public school system were to fail or drop out, not earn a diploma, they would be outraged. They would be concerned. Every cable news network in the world would have a spin on it. Every politician would be ringing their hands because the underpinnings of our society would be threatened. Yet marriage, which is one of the most critical institutions to the success of our our nation, of our culture, of our of our species, is failing at a 56% rate. It seems to fly largely under the radar. The national media certainly gives it no attention at all.
So long as people believe that the real reason marriages fail is because of cheating, or overspending, or lack of communication, or one of those, you know, my minute reasons that occur in relationships, well, we're missing the giant picture.
What I always find interesting, and even in my own life, is that before the divorce, there was a very intense love affair. Long before the divorce, in most cases, a very intense love affair where these two people could not see life without the other one. And I have to believe that in most cases, this was authentic. This was not a manipulation. This was something that people really felt for one another. Yet, for some reason, in most circumstances, that's not enough. In most circumstances, the relationship breaks down. In most circumstances, people hate each other at the end.
So today I really want to get into why is this happening, and is there something that we can learn from the past that can help us potentially address these problems for the next generation before it gets out of hand.
The roots of the modern nuclear family really began to emerge following the industrial revolution. And this is when couples and their children removed themselves from the extended family and put themselves into apartments and cities, and we became urbanized, and um, the agrarian society began to fall away, and cities became the places where most people lived. Um, children were no longer um an asset; they were an expense. And as a result, mom and dad, the husband and wife here, became much more dependent on each other to fill multiple roles. In an extended family, there were other people to talk to and other relationships to be had. So when a man married a woman and he brought her into his family, there was his mother, his sisters, perhaps his um sister-in-laws, all of them who were there to provide a supportive environment for her entering into this new relationship with him. And he had the benefit of these other men that were nearby, his father, maybe his grandfather, his brothers, all of whom could bring their experience to bear to help him in this transition into—from being a single guy to being married.
Today, those support structures simply do not exist. Um, and I believe that that is to the detriment of young couples getting married. They don't know what they're getting into because the roles that they're having to fill go way beyond what was ever traditionally what men and women had to do for one another. It's turned into something much more comprehensive and has put way too much pressure on the relationship of the marriage.
The extended family unit allowed for the sharing of resources, which took a lot of financial pressure off of the young couple. So even having a place to live was something they didn't need to worry about, and it was not necessarily an expense. They may have had to contribute to the household expenses, but they weren't necessarily responsible for them entirely on their own. So this extended family really created a soft landing spot for most couples where there was lots of um emotional, psychological, and financial support around them that helped build the foundation for that relationship.
Today, young couples are going off on their own, oftentimes to strange cities where they don't know anyone at all, and they're completely dependent on the other person for everything. For everything. She's got to be your best friend. She's got to be your lover. She's got to be your coworker. She's got to be your confidant. You—she's gonna—she might be your banker. You know, there are so many different relationships that each person has to play for the other that it puts way too much pressure on marriage.
So, it's no wonder that 56% of marriages are failing. I mean, how could they not? But why are we allowing it to happen as a society? Why aren't we doing anything to reverse this trend or to um help people achieve higher levels of success in their lives? Because at the end of the day, if people are not experiencing a profound um sense of meaning and fulfillment in their life, well, life loses all its meaning and fulfillment, and then things go really, really badly.
The basis of our entire culture in the United States is consumerism. We are a capitalist country that feeds upon itself, essentially. We are a consumer nation, and that consumerism—that need for continued consumerism—has driven many of the social movements in our life. Marriage is a critical element in the consumer u cycle. Marriage leads to buying homes. It leads to children. Children lead to enormous amounts of buying and expenses. Raising families costs a lot of money. When young couples get together and they decide they want to create a life together, the financial burden upon them is enormous, which obviously puts an crazy amount of stress on them. But the advantage that society gets from that is they're going to go out and they're going to be spending money that they don't have. They're going to go into debt. They're going to buy TVs. They're going to buy cars. They're going to buy houses. They're going to be spending enormous amounts of money that they don't have. And all this debt is a weird way of enslaving people. And it's one that is so perfectly couched in the idea that we live in a free society that we can make the choice to go into debt to buy all this stuff to support this relationship in this—under these circumstances specifically. It creates the perfect formula for massive amounts of consumerism.
And I know this kind of sounds conspiratorial, but I mean it doesn't take a lot of research for you to, you know, know this to be true. But our politicians, the people that we elect to represent us and to defend our rights, have been completely sold out to these corporations who are dependent on our spending and putting us into this financial servitude through debt. So, it's in their interest to make sure that their overlords, the the big corporations and the banks and the mortgage companies and um the rich and powerful people in our country, that their needs are met. And their needs require that we as the, you know, the peasants class are indebted and paying and are essentially enslaved to this system that inevitably leads to an enormous amount of dissatisfaction and unfulfilling lives. And that's how you end up with a 60% divorce rate because people are fed up with their their lives. They don't feel any relief. There is no time to be romantic, to have a loving relationship. You are enslaved to this system that is set up to force you to fail because, quite honestly, they don't care whether you succeed or you fail. They just want you to start.
So once you get through the first five or 10 years, you've already done all the things that are necessary to—to do all the spending, to create the children, to have the mortgage. You've already invested into the system. You've already paid them tons and tons of money that you just don't have. You've fed the system already. So, if your marriage fails and you get a divorce, well, now you got to feed the system again because you're going to be paying for those lawyers. You're going to be paying at the court system. You're going to be funding her. You're going to go from one household to two households. So, now they're gonna be two places where people live instead of one place where people live. You're going to become more um dependent on um purchasing things to help you get through this transition. Maybe a new car, maybe a new TV, maybe a new house, just to help soften the blow of this emotional trauma that you've just been through.
Yeah. The whole system revolves around the uh beginning and the end of marriage within a within a normal lifetime. Like they depend on it. They need us to do it. They need us to create children. They need us to get married. They need us to um get divorced. And when we meet all those criteria, the system works. You know, the system just works.
Going back to my original question, if the school systems were failing out more than half the kids and most of the balance of the other kids were illiterate when they graduated, we would have total outrage. People would be screaming. They'd be going out of their minds. Well, I think we're beginning to see something like that now when it comes to marriage because men, for whatever reason, and there are lots of reasons, are choosing not to marry. Men are choosing not to get involved in this institution, and it's causing some screaming and crying and upset.
There is a group of people who want to focus in on one aspect of this phenomenon. They want to talk about why young men in particular are not graduating from high school at the same rate. They're not going on to college, and they're not making enough money, and they're choosing to be, you know, um, playing video games. They're choosing not to participate in society, and they are thinking that this is an indication that, um, there's something wrong with these kids, these boys. And I'm sure that for some of them that's true. I'm sure for some there's obviously some some stuff going on there, but I would suggest that for a lot of them, the majority of them, they're opting out simply because the juice isn't worth the squeeze, and they can see that these kids are not falling behind. They're not um dumb. They're not emotionally stunted. I would suggest that maybe they're a lot smarter than we're giving them credit for. Maybe they're seeing that this system is broken and it doesn't work, and they're just opting out. They just don't want to participate anymore. And I think that that might be what we're seeing here.
I think anyone with half a brain can see that the institution of marriage is a failed institution and it does not serve a productive role in our society in its current form—that we need to fundamentally change this um commitment that we're making to one another and create an opportunity for it to succeed because I think that as human beings we have a natural desire and wish to have a meaningful um fulfilling relationship with another person—with a woman or a man or whatever. But we've created an environment that makes the opportunity for that long-term commitment to flourish almost impossible. It's almost impossible. And it's not because, you know, people are cheating, or people are uh not having sex, or because they're uh, you know, they're spending money unwisely. Now those are the um product of the underlying problem. This is what's being produced. This is what comes out of a dysfunctional relationship. This isn't the cause of a dysfunctional relationship. The dysfunction is in the system itself, and that creates pressure on people to have stress in their lives, financial problems, um difficulty with intimacy, and um, you know, it just creates so much pressure on this couple who are now depending on each other for so much. It's easy to see under those circumstances how at some point the dam would break and somebody would let someone down, somebody would not meet someone else's expectations. And once that happens and the relationship starts to crack, it's inevitable that it will fail at some point because it seems to snowball. It just starts to roll one thing after another after another after another. And it's because this is a pressure cooker environment, and there is no way that um it's going to work for most people.
So I think we need to change it. I think we need to go back to something that we had, you know, 100 years ago. I think that the extended family is an option—is a way of providing couples with support structures that make it much more likely for relationships to to succeed. However, from an economic standpoint, these extended families aren't very profitable to the corporate overlords because we can share resources. We all don't need—we don't need four TVs in a household. We just need one, you know. We don't need to have um uh everybody has a car. We can share cars. Um, we don't need to have six houses. We can maybe just have one really big house, or maybe two houses that are right next door to each other. But there's lots of different ways to uh provide the support structures, the extended family, the um environment where people can can flourish and have fulfilling lives. And that's just one. And I'm sure you guys can think of others. But what we're seeing right now in the modern nuclear family is a pressure cooker that's designed to chew up and spit out marriages. And it's working.
All right, you guys. That's all I got for you today. I certainly hope you've enjoyed this video. I hope it gets you thinking um about maybe what we might be able to do, what kind of solutions we might be able to offer—complaining about the problem. You know, I mean, I think it's wise that we have to understand what we're up against, but at the same time, we've got to start putting our heads together and thinking about what the solutions are because I do think that as human beings, we desire having long-term fulfilling relationships. It's just that the current environment makes it extremely difficult for that to happen on a mass scale. Let me know what you think in the comments. Until next time, stay healthy, and if you can, stay single.