We Get What We Allow

Giving in to pressure and grievance groups is a never ending doom loop.

A few years ago, I related the following anecdote from when we lived in the UK.

A friend related to me a story of a young Chinese student, a member of the Little Emperor generation, who had come to Edinburgh for graduate school. His parents had done literally everything for him, every whim was indulged, and every task done for him. He had never packed his own bags – didn’t even know how to open the luggage, never learned to cook, had never shopped for food, or even ordered for himself in restaurants before leaving China, so independent living and everyday life away from mom and dad was a major challenge.

The friend told me he had said of the situation:

“I hate my parents. They raised me as a pet for 23 years and now I can’t live like a normal human being.”

I ran (slowly) a couple of miles this morning, the first real run since I had my bad knee replaced 16 months ago, and I did something I have missed for the three years I haven’t been able to run.

I got lost in thought.

It was such a hugely satisfying stress relief.

What I am doing right now is the most stressful situation I have ever experienced – it is stretching me personally and professionally, so I needed to focus on something other than work puzzles and problems to relieve a little pressure. I realized running provided that for me, but I guess I never acknowledged how much of a restorative event running was.

This morning, that quote came to the fore as I considered the downward spiral, the doom loop, we find ourselves in. A comment from a friend triggered me to go all the way back to the 1960’s when the “free love” movement and the counterculture ideas of "Turn on, tune in, drop out" intersected with the Cold War, Soviet communist push to destroy America from the inside.

When you look back, it seems clear this is when the wheels began to come off.

And it was all because we (collective society) stopped saying “no” to the destructive demands of manipulative individuals and groups.

Those of us with children can relate to a simple rule: you get what you allow.

Three important parts of rearing responsible children into adulthood, probably the most important parts, are 1) paying attention to your kids in a way they know you are paying attention to them, 2) placing boundaries around the things you will allow and those you won’t, and 3) educating them why you allow something and disallow something else.

For the past 60 years, we have broken every single one of those rules.

And we got what we allowed.

Every pressure group was mollified, every movement indulged, every blackmail and protection racket paid off.

We are not the only ones who should know the “you get what you allow” rule because from alleged racial justice groups to the antisemitic “Free Palestine” groups, we allowed it. They all learned how to push to the limits to get paid off but perhaps none was so radical as the “identity” and racial essentialism groups – these were the ones over the past few years that learned there actually is no limit.

Like the Chinese grad student mentioned earlier, giving these anti-American civilization groups what they want never satisfies them, it leads to hatred of their erstwhile cultural “parents”.

When society does not stand against the people who have stopped petitioning for tolerance and inclusion and demand society completely reorder itself into an unsustainable form to satisfy their desires, today’s conflicts are to be expected. These conflicts tend to be approached by the complainant as a “zero sum” game - because the greater society must lose something for them to win something.

There are clear reasons why our society needs to stay within its bounds. There’s no reason why every deviance must be publicly celebrated – especially when that deviance is harmful to social cohesion and the maintenance of a civil society.

We get what we allow.