Most people love their home. For most people their home is the object of their love.
Homes are built by loyalty, tenacity and love. The adults must struggle in the world beyond the home to bring back enough money to pay for the family. This is, and has been, the basis for human life. The family home is about building a structure of love, trust and security.
Until the Industrial Age people regarded their village or town as a form of home. Most people had friends and neighbours who they had known since a young age and who lived locally. In late teenage life the conflicts between children tended to settle down and adulthood was marked by a large measure of mutual respect amongst peers (modern young adults never discover that this happens). This made the village or town into a tenuous form of family and hence home. The people used communal worship and communal assistance to try to build a structure of love, trust and security.
In the Industrial Age the population began to move to the sites of production. In the UK these production sites were often fairly stable and allowed the local population to begin thinking of home as the industrial-residential complex where they lived. They expected their children to be trained and work locally. They attempted to build cities and even a nation based on love, trust and security. Schools, health services social services were slowly added to towns and counties. These developments were powered by ordinary, decent people, not ideologues, and were based on a homely view of humanity.
While the Industrial Age was being tempered with kindness another socio-economic change was happening. The rise of the trading empires in the nineteenth century created Multi-National Corporations and the rise of tertiary education created Socialism, especially Internationalist Socialism. Both of these developments relegated home to the status of a resource to provide workers.
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| Homeliness (hygge) abused |
Even after capture by corporate and public sector employment adults can still escape. Adults have two choices when they have been working for a while. They can continue working for other people or create goods and services that they can use to provide their family with money. This divides society into two groups: independent adults and their employees and corporate/public sector employment. The first group employs about 60% of all workers in the UK.
We must never forget that the people who create goods and services through their own abilities are usually passionate about doing this and value their freedom. Those who work in the corporate and public sector are usually happy with the apparent security that corporate employment gives them and may lose even the idea of freedom.
Politics is about the conflict between those who wish to build a home and those who wish power and wealth for themselves and their apparatchiks.
Human beings are happiest if they have a good home. A good home only works if the adults love and care for each other and for their children. This means that it needs a religious foundation where "religion" means being committed to the belief in love and care for each other, especially in the home. If you cannot practice this religion in the home then you are not qualified to proselytise it in the world.
In the twenty first century we have almost two hundred years of well documented history to judge political systems. This is what we know:
Communal systems such as Marxist Socialism lead to disaster (Stalin, Mao, Mengistu, Pol Pot, Assad etc.), communal systems such as National Socialism lead to disaster (Mussolini, Hitler, Franco, Peron, Xi Jinping, Putin etc). Rampant Multi-National dominated states lead to unrest and unhappiness in large segments of the population (USA, UK, Germany, France and much of EU).
These disastrous countries and unhappy countries all share the same credo: home is a place to create the workforce of the future. Many of these countries tape over the flaws in their ideology by introducing psychological services for the lonely and depressed, benefit systems for children in poverty, free tertiary education for the "disadvantaged" etc. However, by mounting unrelenting attacks on the true source of human happiness, the home, they show their true sociopathic colours.
It is no coincidence that the most dedicated supporters of the corporates/public sector are young adults. There is a period between leaving home and establishing your own home in which we are susceptible to "causes" and to the service of large organisations. These give the young adult a sense of belonging, a sense of almost having come home. It is only when they start a family that they realise that their wages and work conditions are too inadequate, unsuitable or insecure to support their own home. Worse still they find that their family is afloat, alone in a hostile environment. There are few homely cities or countries that have survived the corporate desire for mobile workers.
Home is something that we build as individuals and a society. It must be the prime object of politics. Home is a hierarchy, it is based on the family, extends to the village or City and out to the Nation. The ideal world is where all the nations are good neighbours so that it can contain diversity.
We will never be happy until we take the basic message of our great religions, the belief in love and care for each other, and implement this as belief in the home.
How does our society destroy the home and sense of home?
It instils in children the false belief that the most important thing in life is education and career. It removes young adults from the locality and indoctrinates them with corporate values. It idolises mobility and expects individuals to be mobile without reference to family commitments. It fails to provide the security of one wage earner having sufficient income to support a family, without this the illness or departure of a single adult can wreck the home. It burdens areas which have built successful and vibrant socioeconomic systems with large influxes of labour rather than resolving problems elsewhere. It gives little or no weight to civic pride or love of the countryside. It mocks and undermines loyalty to family and locality. Corporate bodies and parties that have no sympathy with the home, locality or nation are given the keys to government.
How far have we strayed? Towns and villages used to ring out with the sound of children playing unsupervised during holidays and weekends. We used to trust our neighbours with our children. Even the Danes are forgetting hygge except as an advertising slogan.
4/1/2021
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