Don! Parenting cannot be learned by reading about it, or that teaching kids to become critical thinkers then sets them on a different political path to the asinine absurdities their brainwashed parents were welded to?

And we do need to consider what our kids need, starting with a future! And given we can't eat coal, rule it out, regardless of private/public financial dependency.

Nor do we want them cooked, blown to hell and gone, or fried alive in some massive yet still avoidable nuclear conflagration!

Children learn what they live and by example! And that example, if we ultimately want productive outcomes, can't include disingenuous mendacity, or making mannon your God. But ought include as philosophy. If you can't do a fellow human being a good turn then at least don't do him/her/them or they, a bad one.

At the end of the day, we will be judged by the (generic) man in the mirror, the only one we, none of us, can't fool or humbug and who alone, knows exactly what you did and why, good or bad; and decides what that merits.

And know this, believing is nothing, knowing is everything!

The fact that (brainwashed) generations believed we lived on a flat world in the centre of rotating solar system/universe, didn't make it so!

Or indeed, that a man called Jesus Christ walked around performing all manner of miracles, cannot be validated by actual eyewitness accounts or forensic evidence. And what millions may believe or not believe, matters not one wit.

That said, simply discounting evidence simply because it doesn't fit a preferred narrative is the worst possible and inherently dishonest example. And may even harm countless generations as yet unborn as does bearing false witness, but particularly for money?
Alan B.

life becomes more and more complex, more speeded up, and humans less capable of keeping pace with these changes.
One of the more stable aspects of the human existence is mans ability to mate, to make families and to seek survival as a priority.
This is the simple war. Not only is that self defeating in the long run, it is ruinous to Mother Nature by overtaxing resources with over population, adding extreme demand and extreme competition for scarce resources.

Ideologies are simple pointers towards survival. They are designed by nature to expose us to competing human interests, and to thin out the competition.
There are (in the end) few winners. And what awaits the winners is a booby prize; little remains for the victor at wars end.
While the wealthy pile up and protect their winnings, losers lick their wounds and scheme revenge.

A new ideology emerges, tough, powerful and tempered with suffering! A revolution is born.
Mating continues, the new vanquished, the new victors...

Round and round it goes, where it stops nobody knows? Perhaps when enough folks have had a bellyful of endless time wasting humbug, trotted out in place of doable positive action, some folk will just kick over the traces and have Diver's quiet revolution?

Maybe sooner than the power brokers and analysts think or are ready for?

A few one term governments and the major parties losing any semblance of power and through them the really powerful behind the scenes players, who control voting preselection and policy paradigms?

And last but not least whether our kids have a future or affordable housing etc/etc!

We used to be able to do all this stuff in the not too distant past! What has changed? Massive tax avoidance on a hitherto unknown scale?

Moreover, political point scoring and massive humbug campaigns, thundered from from the dispatch box, no substitute for (deliberately) withheld essential (every boy and his dog knows) action! Stuff older generation of leaders did in their sleep!

As pete noted, this lot couldn't organize horizontal recreation in a brothel.
Alan B

What a disappointment!

After all the grand promises in the author's previous article and this article's grand title,
there is nothing here about the purpose of life,
nothing about mating either and its purpose,
only some petty review of the history of European/British politics.
The author could just as well write about gardening.

No Alan, it is actually massive tax, on a previously unimaginable scale, & people expecting government to pay for everything for them.

Fifty five years ago, when I first achieved something near the average wage, I paid 7.25% tax, & hospital & medical insurance, [called benefits back then] at 1.15% of my salary. My home loan interest was 4.2%, on an $8000 loan. It was a very average suburban house for the time, but easily affordable for average workers.

The rest was mine, about $40 at the time. This was adequate to pay the mortgage, & support my wife quite easily.

The taxpayer was not expected to support over one & a half million non working people in anything like the comfort expected today.

Today we have bulk billed doctors, & free hospital, & much higher welfare payments, but everyone actually pays for all this in much higher tax, & housing costs.

Governments desperate for the money to pay for this vote buying add hidden rip off taxes everywhere, forcing housing costs through the roof. You can't even drive to work without some government tax collector in the form of a camera trying to get a dollar out of you.

Husband & wife both have to work to pay the mortgage, with what's left after paying huge child care bills. Somewhere about 40/50 years back we took a very wrong turn in how we organise our world, & I don't see us getting back on track any time soon.