Mind over matter

When I was aged around ten, at some point in the 1990s, I have a very clear memory of going Christmas shopping for my rather large extended family. My parents had six siblings between them, most of whom had spouses and multiple children, and at the time, I still had three remaining grandparents, and even a great-grandparent. I took my duties to appropriately seasonally shop for all of them very seriously.

Having fulfilled most of my gift-buying obligations at various economy and discount stores (a lot of people got those '90s staple Aapri Apricot Scrub gift packs), I vividly recall then venturing into Partner's in the Potteries Shopping Centre, and considering very carefully what to get for my uncle, Steve, and his then-girlfriend, Helen, because - unlike various other aunts and uncles - they were not married.

After careful deliberation, I decided that - as they were only boyfriend and girlfriend and not formally wed - a joint present would not be proper. They would have strictly separate gifts until they had formalised the arrangement. Steve therefore got his customary Christmas Lynx, whilst I recall finding a miniature flowery plate, engraved with Helen's name on it, on a special rack in Partner's, a discovery of which I was very proud.

Soon after this, Steve and Helen did indeed get married.

Then, rather inevitably these days, about fifteen years later, they got divorced.

(I like to think that Helen retained the miniature flowery plate in the division of marital assets, though.)

Now, in one way, what this illustrates is that children are little traditionalists. They like things to be proper and tend to think that grown-ups ought to be married (grown-ups of all species, it seems. One of my friends has a cat, which her seven-year-old daughter has named "Mrs. Cat". Not Miss Cat. Certainly not "Ms". But Mrs.).

However, it speaks of something deeper and more troubling, too.

It's that things used to matter more.

It was genuinely a very grave consideration for me as a ten-year-old, whether an unmarried couple should have a joint gift or not, and this was not borne out of any particular religious sentiment (I was vaguely Catholic, but rarely went to Church or in any other way observed the religion).

I suppose my reasoning at the time was along the lines of, whilst they're still unmarried, there's a chance they could split up, so one should not give a joint gift, because who will get it if they separate? But once they're married, that's it, they're a unit and together for life, so then joint gifts become appropriate and expected.

I maintained this belief despite the fact my own parents had divorced some years previously, but I regarded this as an anomaly and outlier that wouldn't go on to be repeated. Which wasn't particularly irrational given that, at the time, there were no other divorces in my immediate family and none of my friends' parents were divorced, either.

Fast forward a few years, however, and - as Alicia Silverstone declared to an astonished and anachronistic Brendan Fraser in 1999's Blast from the Past - "everybody's divorced!"

('Blast from the Past' tells the story of a 1960s couple who, worried about the threat from nuclear war, hide out in an underground bunker where the wife gives birth. They seal themselves in there for 35 years, raising their son with the societal values that were typical to the early 1960s. When the bunker opens in 1997, son Adam goes out to explore the world, and is left reeling in shock at all the social changes that have occurred in the outside world, as contrasted to the far more innocent and stable world his parents raised him in - changes such as widespread divorce.)

What this illustrates is that, in a very short period of time, an institution that was once - and quite recently - considered so binding to a ten-year-old that she wouldn't get unmarried relatives a joint gift, has wholly lost that level of significance and permanence, and I can't imagine anyone of any age having that dilemma now.

Couples are now generally assumed not to be married (hence "partner" replacing husband / wife in everyday discourse), and if they are, it's perceived as ultimately no more likely to be a permanent arrangement than simply "going out".

This is because, as I said earlier: it all - the concept of marriage and relationships generally - are overall seen to matter less. On a society-wide level, these things simply lack the same gravity and significance they once held.

It's not just marriage that has been subject to this degradation of significance, though, it's lots of things.

For instance, I was reading recently in the paper about the disappearance of young estate agent, Suzy Lamplugh, who went missing in 1986, after an appointment to show a client a house. I don't remember this, I was little more than a baby at the time, but I certainly remember the legacy.

It was in the press and the national conversation for years, to the extent that, decades later, "Suzy Lamplugh alarms" (lone worker devices programmed to make a loud noise if the worker intuited they were in danger) were still very much a thing.

This is because it was genuinely a source of profound national concern and distress that this young woman had gone missing, and there was a very deep feeling that it mattered.

Now, young women go missing all the time, and, on a nationwide level, nobody really bats an eye. Okay, the papers were excited about Nicola Bulley for about three minutes, but that's quickly been forgotten, even though still nobody has a clue how she actually met her demise.

Then there was Leah Betts, she of "one pill can kill" infamy. Even though we now know she died of water intoxication, and not a single Ecstasy tablet, she was still headline news for months, and used as a cautionary tale to scare kids off drugs for many subsequent years.

Now, though, we see teens dying of overdoses all the time (and actually dying of them, not of drinking too much water), and they barely merit a paragraph in the back pages of the local paper. Certainly, the whole country doesn't remember their names for years to come.

I could illustrate this essay with many other examples, but I think you get the general point: nearly everything around us, including and especially people and their general significance, have been degraded to matter less.

Leading on from that, I remember what a huge national scandal and shock it was when TV presenter Anne Diamond lost a baby to the then little-known "cot death" (now SIDS) in 1991.

It was such a shock to everyone, because, back then, babies didn't "just die".

Now, of course, they all too frequently do.

Anne Diamond's baby, Sebastian, was four months old - sixteen weeks - at the time of his death. According to today's schedule, infants are due to receive multiple vaccinations at 16 weeks old, having already received up to six or more in the first 12 weeks of life.

Although the 1991 vaccination schedule was less intense than today's, it is still highly likely that Sebastian had been vaccinated very shortly before his death, as is the case for most "SIDS" cases.

People were shocked and blindsided with grief on Anne's behalf when Sebastian died, but now, neonatal death, stillbirth, and late miscarriages are "the new normal", and SIDS deaths very rarely, if ever, make the headlines any more.

It's not just a decline in the significance of the "big things" like births, marriages, and deaths, though: even the "little things" like films and music don't seem to count like they used to.

Remember what a big deal it used to be who was at number one?

Now who cares, or even knows?

Films used to matter a lot, too, it was an enormously big deal when a big blockbuster was coming out, and I remember as recently as 2000 what a huge deal 'American Beauty' was, and going to see it in a packed-out Stoke cinema where the crowd literally rose at the end to give a round of rapturous applause.

That's impossible to imagine now. Even the concept of a packed-out cinema at all, never mind a standing ovation at the end.

Whilst some of this decline is inevitably down to technology - why be excited about the charts when you've got Spotify; who cares what's at the cinema when it'll be on Netflix next week, etc. - ultimately, it's a reflection of the much deeper and much darker societal-wide trend that tells us things - all things - simply don't matter the way they used to.

This is not a natural consequence of modernity, and we do not see this trend equally in all worldwide cultures.

We see it most acutely in white Western secular countries - ours - and this is of course by design: it was necessary for social engineers to degrade the significance of things, to literally deteriorate the meaning imbued in life, in order to make it more throwaway.

They are ruthless depopulationists, after all, and want to terminate life at all stages of the life cycle, particularly the very young (abortion, vaccination) and the very old (assisted dying, vaccination), but in order to achieve widespread cooperation with these goals, they have had to sew the belief that life really doesn't matter very much. That individual people don't matter very much. That relationships don't.

Even people who aren't explicitly, consciously cooperating with the accelerated death agenda, have in many cases tacitly given their consent to it, by often being rather inanimate when a close friend or relative is prematurely killed by medical means. It is by far the exception and not the rule that friends/relatives object and fight when elderly and/or disabled and/or ill people are euthanised in hospitals (which already happens all the time, despite it currently being illegal).

It's by far the exception and not the rule that parents kick back and demand justice when their babies are severely injured, or killed, by vaccinations.

Things that used to be profoundly shocking or profoundly sad are simply now airily dismissed as normal and unremarkable.

Epidemic "autism" (vaccine injury), for example, we're now told is either "a gift", or simply down to "better diagnosis". Nothing to see here.

The fact that cancer rates are shooting up in younger and younger people is due to - so conventional "wisdom" has it - bad luck or bad genes. Oh well, the nation has been instructed to shrug, that's just the way it is.

And the aforementioned Steve and Helen I talked about in the beginning of this essay, do you know how I found out they'd divorced?

I saw a picture of their son on Facebook with a caption mentioning he was "at his dad's".

"At his dad's?", I thought, puzzled. Wasn't "his dad's" his mum's also?

I contacted one of our cousins.

"Yeah, they divorced last year," she confirmed. "Steve's got his own place now."

There was a time in the very recent past a divorce would have sent tidal waves of shock through a family, but now it's seen as so everyday it's sometimes not even worth mentioning.

This is not a comment on whether divorce is good or bad (it can often be both).

But there's something wrong with the casualness that now surrounds marriage and divorce, and just about everything else, as well.

A casual culture is not one people value, feel deeply connected to, or will fight to preserve. (A friend was telling me a very sad and revealing anecdote of talking to a colleague at work who was opining that he didn't really care what happened to him in the future and wouldn't be bothered if he got a terminal illness, because "I've had my life". He's 47.)

In my view, this is not only the explanation for why people so much more readily accept expedited death, but why they have become greatly reluctant to promote birth, as well.

The birth rate has collapsed in every single Western country, to the extent they are all below - and some dramatically below - replacement level fertility.

Many explanations have been offered for this historically unprecedented trend, such as: the spiralling cost of raising a family; the lack of nearby support networks; women prioritising career; and environmental toxins making people generally less fertile.

Whilst all of these are absolutely valid, and certainly do account for some of the fall in the birth rate, I believe the single biggest explanation remains that people increasingly fail to see the point of having children, because ultimately and historically, people have had children in order to transmit their culture.

That has always been the number one job of parents and elders: the transmission of culture to the next generation to ensure the culture survives.

But in order to want to transmit your culture, you've got to value your culture. You've got to feel it really matters.

Social engineers and depopulationists are well aware of this fact, which is why what they've systematically worked on over the post-war years is gutting the meaning - the profound sense that "this matters" - from Western cultures, knowing this is far more effective a prophylactic than any contraceptive, whilst laying the foundations for the expediting of death at all stages of the life cycle.

This is why we now have physically healthy 20-somethings being euthanised for being "depressed" (and a big part of why so many 20-somethings are depressed in the first place), and why it is seen as acceptable to offer disabled people assisted suicide rather than the support they need to live.

Because, the message we are being pummelled with from every angle, is: "life doesn't really matter very much any more. So why not just end it?"

That's what they want us to believe.

Of course, the objective and immutable reality behind all this ruthless and devious social engineering is that life matters profoundly, and as much as it ever did. Individual people matter profoundly, and as much as they ever did. Relationships do, too, and the PR makeover relationship breakdown has received as "no biggie" hasn't stopped it having all the same profound effects on those involved that it always has had (and this is not to suggest people should stay in bad relationships, rather, it's to underline the fact that dissolving any long-term relationship is not a meaningless blip, and can and does have transformative effects on people, families, and societies, not all of them good).

To reverse the "culture of death" we currently find ourselves descending into, the solution is not simply to oppose the legislators and practitioners who make various forms of death more accessible, but to reverse the very cultural ennui that got us to the place where a majority of the population actually supports state assisted suicide.

To do that, we have to rediscover real meaning and significance, and take steps to actively promote and preserve what's important and valuable, rather than allowing it to atrophy and degrade.

We as a society have to once again unanimously feel that it - people, relationships, art, music, culture, life - matters. After all, we're constantly being told that various other things "matter" - 'Black Lives', for example, or, as per the name of my other resource, informed consent.

But we can't just compartmentalise: we've got to recapture the indelible belief that - not just various politicised parts of it - but that life itself matters.

It is, in fact, even possible - in a nostalgic, fond festive tradition sort of way - that Aapri Apricot Scrub gift packs matter, too...

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