pelican & onthebeach

Am I the only one who has come to the conclusion that the never-ending financial onslaught is other than accidental ?? Its certainly an effective distraction from the ineptitude of the clowns in Canberra

Pelican, it's all about trying to impose structure on a broken social fabric that has enormous amounts of energy floating around and which has had its basic structural unit, the lifetime pair bond, destroyed. The social energy released has allowed cracks to develop between the layers of society and the cultural fields which kept people within those layers are weakened. People drift together and apart depending only on their individual attraction, with little to keep them together. At any time either could be subject to a slightly greater attraction and drift off.

The more affluent layers are the ones which are maintaining greater coherence, because they had stronger cultural fields in the first place. Even if a pair bond is ruptured, the individuals are recaptured within that social matrix and form new bonds within it.

At every level the structure is under stress and it is only maintained by local cultural force. Even at the very top, the structure is under stress and is breaking apart, with Gillard being held in her social position only because a great deal of force is being applied which is sufficient to overcome her poor fit within the matrix.

The only thing holding everything together is the cultural forces that financial redistribution brings about and since that is dependent on the amount of energy that our society consumes it is going to end very soon.

We are going to experience a great deal of social chaos and our social structure is going to change dramatically over the next decade or two. I suspect that there will arise some new cultural organising principle which is not identifiable at the moment.

Anti

The old moralities and structures that had at their apex the 'the lifetime pair bond,' hasn't been destroyed. It has been seriously questioned. aka divorce.

What is occurring is a reevaluation of the pyramid morality that gives greatest value to 'the lifetime pair bond'. Today men tend to see relationships on a continium and give equal value to all relationships on that continium.(apart from promiscuious or user type relationships to which they attach no value.) Women have not yet done that. They are overwhelmingly still stuck in the morality based on the beliefs of societies that thought women as chattels( The old testament) and futher contrived by celibate priests in the dark ages (aka St Augustine.) and it's evolutions since.

pleased you agree.

praxidice
I have not yet determined whether the financial onslaught is accidental or contrived. It might just be incompetence and a case of the snowball that gets away, too late to pull it back.

Anti
It is a complex issue because some of the older social fabric was flawed. I think there can be value in all sorts of family structures as long as those structures provide the emotional supports that foster wellbeing.

One of the problems is that with change has come the question of what do we do with the children. I have a strong personal belief that children are best raised at home at the very least until they start school. Many will disagree with me and see it as an attack on feminism. It is not, it is about allowing choices and having the infrastructure to support various choices, or at least make them possible. We have essentially outsouced part of the responsibility of raising of children to institutions.

There is accepted a new social construct that 'we can have it all'. Nobody can have it all. It is a intrinsically a selfish concept. Sacrifice is deemed as a betrayal of some cause, more to productivity and the worst aspects of capitalism than feminism. I think feminism has been hijacked by those goals to a large extent. It is time for feminism to morph into a more humanistic path IMO as long as those uniquely male and female issue are not ignored for the sake of political correctness.

OTB
You may be right about them all being the same. The key is to improve democracy through greater participation within a reasonable and pragmatic framework.

Pelican, yes, of course it was flawed, but what has replaced it is essentially unstable.

It's only possible with the active intervention of Government to provide the support that the family unit used to provide. Even those in a family unit are not free of such intervention and that is a force pulling on the bond and loosening it. If that intervention was not there, then the social arrangement would collapse into a new stable state in which pair bonds were the basic unit. Do you really think that your grandmother was less happy than any random woman alive in Asutralia today? I don't, she knew where she fitted into the social fabric, she knew what she was doing, she knew how to do it, she knew she was good at it and she knew she had no competition for her job. How many women can say that today?

Imajulianutter, the value of the pairbond is unquestioned. All that has happened is that a mob of spruikers have peddled petty resentments and offered trinkets that make the pair bond seem stodgy and stale. Once the trinkets run out the trouble will really start.

The carnival's in town and it's women only, but the men are paying for them to go.

pelican

I think you too are on the right path. The family law and courts that support shared parenting is the evuidence supporting our views.

I think when it comes to economic's it is the economics that responds to the changing social mores, which are changing, are the economics which will predominate.

To that end we are in a state of social or relationship and moral change. After that is settled economic values will fit into that new social structures. We are seeing that currently in some way, though crude and to be developed, with paid parental leave, part time work with an acceptance of the need to interact with offspring and partners and the non discrimitory nature of those.

Capitalism will best adapt to those changes.