The reason the government makes such a poor substitute for either, is its inability to convey either love or expectations in meaningful way. It is hard to perceive the love and care in the bureaucracy of your monthly distribution of benefits from the state. The love of big brother is too distant and abstract to mean much. It is like the love of a cage wire mother monkey, dispensing milk but starving the sensibilities of those in its care. Similarly, the expectations of the state are too distant and inhuman to carry much weight, except their punitive value. They might convince you to do just enough to avoid punishment or earn basic rewards, but for most people will fail to profit them much in their character. The courage of communism was a machine gun at your back. The enforced expectations of do or be punished, rather than internalized heroism.

Even in a less extreme culture, one like our own, the government is often provided as a remedy for those lacks in either support or expectation that exist in the lives of its citizens, often either because they lack parents or because they lack parents able to effectively meet those needs (and one shouldn’t underestimate what a demanding and difficult job it is and what a hard balance it is to maintain). And although it is well and kindly meant, the government’s effectiveness as either caring mother or paternalistic father is very limited. The state can’t love you. Nor can it make you better than you are. Neither easy circumstances nor better character flow easily from the fountain of government administration. The view of the founding fathers was rather that the role of government was to protect the means of their production, which belonged to the individual citizenry.

There is always a temptation to try to provide through administration what some miss by ill fortune. And it is kind to attempt to provide some of what a lack of motherhood or fatherhood has failed to produce. And I wish it were as simple as that. But several problems arise from trying to do so. First, people may not realize what it is that they are actually trying to replace. And if you don’t, you might misunderstand both the poverty you are attempting to fill and the solution you are attempting to provide. Both a misunderstood disease and a misunderstood virtue are terribly dangerous things to leverage the immense, blind power of the state for or against.

Second, people might have a inaccurate idea of how much the state is actually able to convey the benefits of the love and expectations of parents. They might believe that the state can and should be able to do it as good as, maybe even better, than individual humans. And they might be upset when the perceive the lackluster results and so misinterpret the reason for them. This will likely result in much outrage and wringing of hands, as well as manipulation of the system and its parameters. Blame and punishment will be widely assigned, and benefits will be very unevenly accrued. And the nature of the pathology of the systems will not be comprehended.

Third, the state might become an actual competitor to individual care and discipline. This is perhaps the most tangled and complex and realistic risk in society like ours. It’s such a big and subtle risk that it’s not easy to address it in any pithy way. It’s effect doesn’t come from the direct production of negative effects, but from the dislocation of investment into less productive means. It’s an effect produced by stealing or subverting or diverting potential. It’s a false idol or bad investment. Its danger is primarily in the incorrect quantity of power and value assigned to it and the amount of devotion and investment it steals away from better objects.

Fourth, people might decide that parental love and discipline is actually a negative feature of human life and desire to replace it with administrative love and discipline, so as to secure a more even result than relying on individual parents. This could lead to the ideological abolishment of the family, the best, most historically proven method among humans for conveying love and expectations.

Of course, parents are themselves an uneven and unreliable means of conveying love and expectations. Obviously. We all have parents, and many of us have been parents. And if we have learned anything from thousands of generations of human life, it’s that people are imperfect vessels for their own good intentions. The question isn’t whether parenthood is imperfect, and thus corrupt and should be rejected and discarded, but, considering that all human means of conveyance, like humans themselves, are at least somewhat corrupt and imperfect. The question is, what is the best means we have for conveyance of love and expectations?

Partly that question has been answered by theory, but partly, because it is an empirical question, it has been answered empirically, and continues to be answered to this day. Nature provides you, to begin, with two parents, each of whom share equally in humanity and in the conveyance of all your needs, but may sub-specialize according to psychological temperament and biological capabilities in their general roles. If you lose one of those parents, either through death, abandonment, or general pathology, you have truly lost something. We can try to make up for that with state services, with grandparents, with step parents and foster care, with siblings. Most of our solutions consist of substitutionary individuals, as they should. That is the nearest equivalent to the provision of nature, as we seek to create baby formulas as close as we can to the formula of breast milk.

State services are the furthest removed from the provision of nature. They demand the least sacrifice from specific individuals, who otherwise must drastically alter the life they might have had to care for a child, but they also provide the least similar substitute. And much as rat babies provided with all the food and water they need in the absence of parental care still die, humans provided with all the apparent needs of provision and direction by the state still suffer and grow pitifully in the absence of meaningful human-scale relationships. The expansive greatness and power of the state simply doesn’t translate into meaningful long term impacts on the human spirit. And if you tell people that it should, but they’re still suffering, they’re going to start looking for someone to blame, and they won’t understand who.

In a world in which both starting points and ongoing efforts are unevenly distributed, in which we cannot be certain what amount of care or discipline any given set of parents will be able to provide, we do have to ask ourselves how we should respond. Surely it is in the general interest to alliviate, as much as is actually possible, unnecessary suffering (which is itself a problematic term we can’t go into right now, perhaps a better term would be amenable suffering, suffering it is in our power to relieve). However, because the primary means for the active reduction of suffering and production of love and expectations is individual care I’m parenthood, we have to be terribly careful not to enact any policies that might undermine its operation by means of any of the four dangers I listed earlier (and any others I might have skipped).

Our primary, first, and highest (I don’t say only) concern should be to protect the capacity of those engines of production to operate, not to attempt to legislate half-clocked substitutes into existence. Unfortunately, I think many people see the business of government these days as being the production of outcomes, rather than the protection of the means of production. That is the key difference between the American system of government and that of a utopian state such as, for example, that of the French revolutionary government or the Soviet government.

Parenthood and the development of the individual can work. It can be incredibly powerful and durable. We have not so far developed an effective substitute for it. So whatever other steps we may take to help, and I’m not saying there should not be other steps, our greatest investment should be in the protection of the family. If for no other reason than that individuals appear to have a capacity for conveying these basic human needs in an effective, meaningful, and balanced way, scaled to the appropriate level of human experience and individual uniqueness, that the state simply does not possess.

The state is an abstraction, and it is hard to interact with either love or discipline from an abstraction. The state might be useful for throwing up large-scale, even, and featureless walls around certain problems of either poverty or behavior, but it cannot approach us and meet us where we live. It remains high and far off and impersonal, and so its intervention cannot easily reach us in our inmost being and develop us into the kind of person who develops the means of provision for those needs within themselves. It does not easily touch or inhabit our character.

But our parents are the very things that produced us. They literally inhabit us. And we see them and receive from them, and eventually we discover them in ourselves, both literally and figuratively. By seeing the love and expectations expressed in their lives, we discover how they could be connected to them in us, how they can be imitated and inhabited in us. Love and discipline in them becomes the love and discipline of them in me. We become able to generate those capacities ourselves by finding that connection between us, and in the way they help us specifically and individually to discover that connection. In the same way our parents hand down their genetic capacities to us and give us the ability to also hand them down to others, by their example and their inhabitation of that inherited being before us they hand down to us that cultural knowledge of how to express the power of love and discipline in our own lives, how to discover and develop and maintain it.

The family has generally been seen as the fundamental unit of government, of human society, of human maturation and education, and of production (or at least the development of productivity). Humans take an awfully long time to mature and to raise the next generation too, and have to invest an awful amount in that process. Because our continued existence and the quality of that existence largely depends on it, historically we’ve invested a lot at the state level in promoting, protecting, and preserving it.

After all, it only takes one generation to break the chain and damage a society in a way that is hard to recover from. A society that makes no provision for the production of the next generation to come after them is in denial about the state of existence, their own mortality and the inexorable movement of time, and will cease to exist as they are by necessity with out a special effort to prevent it. And this is the key structural factor, that a society will not by its nature persist or remain stable, much less grow. Every generation will age, weaken, and die. No exceptions. And if you do not pay the price in the present that is necessary to produce the future, the future of your society will cease to exist, and will likely degrade even in your lifetime as your powers to maintain your position wane toward the end of your life.

Because such movements rarely happen wholesale, or perfectly evenly, it’s unlikely that a society will end overnight. But the life that they enjoy will not remain stable. It will not persist against entropic forces without a deliberate anti-entropic effort, including one that is able to transcend the inevitable waning of our own strength and presence. Each generation must find it in themselves to maintain the love, care, expectations, and discipline that provide for the life of mankind. Each must inherit those capacities from the generation before them, and each learns them best and most easily from the generation that produces them (and inherits from the generation before them most easily poverty or riches in these areas).

Each generation in their turn shoulders the burden of present being, the cost of the future, the inheritance of the past. And the greatest question they face is how to address that equation. Will they be willing to pay the price of the future? Will they make the proper investments? Will they make use of the conveyances of the past, whatever they are? Can they understand and respond to the inheritance of the past, taking what they can from it? Most importantly, will they shoulder the burden of the present that lies in eternal being before them?

We cannot, after all, place all our hopes and investments in some other time. The past is gone, beyond our ability to reach or alter. The future has not yet come. But we touch both in the present. We meet the legacy of the past and propel it into the future through our present action. Both past and present are of inestimable value, but if they distract us from our main aim, shouldering their burden in the present, we seek to live and affect change in a time that is beyond our reach.

It is not the the past and future do not exist or do not matter, they are of inestimable importance. But it is in the now that we must live. And in the now, our greatest question is, how are we shouldering the burden of the present by developing the capacity within ourselves for love and discipline? How are we becoming the productive individuals that our parents were (or failed to be) and how can we develop that capacity effectively so that we can demonstrate it and (hopefully) hand it down to the generation to come?

On a side note, I have developed elsewhere the arguments for why love and discipline are the essential and complimentary animating factors that both produce and describe human development. They correspond roughly to the human qualities (and problems) of individuality and choice. The world we find ourselves in and our response to it. The orientation toward the world as we wish it to be and the world as it must be confronted. Although shared, produced, and needed by all mankind, they can be conceived as an Anima and Animus, as generally feminine and generally masculine, if you wish to represent them archetypally. They are in a kind of marriage that produces human growth and development and continuation, just as the marriage of actual human cells, bodies, and lives does.

Human society is essentially a marriage between these two halves of humanity, both genetically, biologically, psychologically, and socialogically, writ large because written from the lowest to the high, from the scale of a single united strand of DNA to the unity of a whole species. And the maintenance and protection of that marriage that stands across all levels of human expression is the first duty of all mankind, and so the first duty of the state. Because everything else depends on it. It is far from the only duty, but shirking this one will inevitably degrade and frustrate all others.

That marriage, of all levels, inherently centers around the production and development of individuals, is a clue to the dignity, importance, and centrality of the individual. It is the appropriate level for human intervention. It is where we meet these forces of past and future and can interact with them on meaningful terms. It is where we live, and where life is to be found.

The refusal to accept the inheritance, burden, or price of either past, present, or future will not end with our long term flourishing. They must all be integrated, all brought into meaning in our present lives. The lessons of the past must be extracted so it can be laid to rest as our foundation and soil, the seeds of the future must be planted in our present lives. We must water all with love and discipline in the present.

Both love and discipline reach from the present into the past and the future for who we are and who we wish to be, for the world as it ought to be and for ourselves as we ought to be, for us as we are and the world as it is. That is why they are the tools we use. Because they see us as individuals and love what we are, the legacy of the past. And they see our potential and who we could be and love us too much to leave us otherwise; they have learned the hard lessons of the past and see what must be done, and they have expectations that lift us up into that destiny and discipline us to achieve it. They give us the strength and sutenance to survive the past and the future and give us to power and focus to respond to and make use of the past and shape the future. One supports us while the other challenges us. And together we reach higher and higher states of being against the arrayed forces of entropy.

Neither love nor discipline alone would sustain us against the forces of entropy. One gives everything and one demands everything. On their own, neither would raise us veey far. Without the gentle rain to water us we would wither, and without the fire of the sun to draw us up from our roots to meet its rays we would have no vigor. A dried stalk or a soggy mass of roots would be the only result. It is the pathology of one to be tyranically harsh and of the other to be softly devouring and degrading. It is only in combination that they find their balance and produce the life of mankind. The power of the sun drives the antifragile response that draws the water up from the roots into the stems and leaves and out through the process of respiration. Together they make a cycle where both fire and water become sustaining forces instead of degrading ones.