Of course, all of this language comes from the vocabulary most American parents use to children as the means of beating into them a certain patriarchal morality (always prudent instead of passionate), by which they are at all costs to learn to be useful to parents, society, the social system, or a God who highly resembles all these things- instead of to themselves.
How many people really question this? How many people do not think that in order to teach a child to be ‘moral’,one must redirect their base natural instincts from selfishness and pleasure towards society and responsibility and duty? How many people do not think that the essence of moral behaviour consists in subservience to some transcendant deified ‘ought’ or some perpetual limitation of one’s own hurtful desires?
How many leftist and libertarian critics of the status quo simply take their own place as thumping, loud-mouthed fathers, offering their own demands for justice according to the manner and form of parents scolding children? Even many explicit anti-patriarchs sound as if they’d like nothing so much as to bend patriarchy over one knee and give it a good hiding (or in Robert Jensen’s case, a long and gloomy masochistic sermon).
]]>And am I the only one who finds it silly to imagine undercover government agents looking for black market taxi drivers?
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