In truth, all the problems we face revolve around a single core issue. Every problem we encounter today, the West encountered first. Social atomization pulls individuals out of their original stable, low-cost structures. Once extracted, these individuals — whether materially or spiritually — are left helpless, without foundation or support. This state of acute instability inevitably drives people to do two things: 1. seize resources through overconsumption, and 2. squander resources in their spending. Both of these accelerate the intensification of social division of labor, and more importantly, the rapid concentration of social wealth.
Student Question:
Was the formation of our traditional functional structure — the so-called provider and bearer roles — specifically designed to contain the costs of child-rearing (including its risks) within the family unit, society’s smallest cooperative cell? Is it then feasible to transfer these costs elsewhere?
Looking at overseas policies that have successfully encouraged birth rates — from incentive systems and reduced education expenditures, to legislation protecting working women’s reproductive rights, to policies encouraging men to take paternity leave — at their core, all of these transfer a portion of costs onto society. Yet one of the reasons these policies actually work, in my view, comes down to a fundamental difference in mindset: the question of who children belong to.
Over twenty years ago, a German exchange student boarded at my home. We talked about Germany’s social welfare system, and what struck me most was exactly this issue. She felt that the German government had raised her, so paying high taxes was simply the natural order of things. This didn’t mean she didn’t love her parents — in fact, her family of origin was very harmonious. But she had no intention of supporting her parents in their old age, because that was the government’s job too. There, children are society’s shared property, collectively supervised by the community. Hit or berate a child at home, and neighbors can call the police and report you for abuse. Precisely because children’s upbringing has a social safety net beneath it, and children’s futures are disconnected from the family’s fate — the moment a government launches birth-incentive policies, birth rates can rise.
But in our country, children are the private property of the family — the family rises and falls as one. The provider role can fall to a father or an eldest brother. Separating children from the family unit is enormously costly, and doesn’t fit our national reality. So where do we go from here?
Master Chi’s Response:
Birth, aging, illness, death — and the emotional needs of human beings — will all become industries.
There were no kindergartens before, no nursing homes — they emerged gradually alongside industrialization. Food delivery platforms and domestic services are, in essence, pulling the daily functions that once constituted family life out of the home and centralizing their supply, turning them into purchasable services. As more and more is extracted this way, the fortress of close human connection gradually gets hollowed out. Ordinary people will fully accelerate down the path of atomization. In this process, social fragmentation and the formation of tiers will reveal themselves through purchasing power.
If the ordinary person’s family of origin exerts a profound influence on them — even a kind of binding — then the atomized ordinary person, unable to afford services whose prices keep rising, finds that their human needs — emotional fulfillment, the sense of security — do not disappear just because they can’t pay for them. And so, they will be captured and controlled by another form of organization.
In America’s radical California, a trend is emerging: legislation that strips parents of the right to define their child’s gender. Meaning that while the child is born to parents, the question of gender identity must be determined by the child alone. For example, if you have a son and raise him as a boy — perfectly natural — you can be prosecuted and stripped of parental custody. Once stripped, the child leaves the family and custody is transferred to some form of social organization. Whoever funds that organization determines what ideology is instilled in those children — creating another form of “family of origin,” and a more brutal one at that.
Felix Dzerzhinsky, founder of the Cheka (Soviet secret police), built the welfare institution system of early Soviet Russia, taking in millions of children orphaned by war. He then raised these children through his own ideology and training methods. Children raised under this system grew up to become the most battle-hardened fighters when Germany invaded. Even as they entered middle and old age, they remained among the most fervent defenders of the Soviet Union.
This pattern has repeated throughout history. It is no less relevant to the new era. Pull people out of old stable structures, and the apparent freedom of the individual is only temporary. These individuals will inevitably be absorbed into new, larger, tightly organized structures — and become pawns to be moved at will. This phenomenon has already shown its early signs in the West. They are ahead of us on this path.
The way a family “binds” a child amounts to two things: material support and spiritual guidance. The child’s material needs are provided by the family; the child’s emotional needs, sense of security, and understanding of the world all flow from the parents. Thus, parents hold absolute influence and control over the child. Funded social organizations operate on the exact same principle — except the people they mass-condition are trained to serve their financiers. They become the cannon fodder and enforcers by which those financiers achieve their goals.
What goals do these financiers seek? Naturally: the acceleration of resource concentration, while dismantling any possibility of coalition or resistance from others. The effectiveness of this conditioning can be seen in the failed dollar-harvesting operation — not only was a war orchestrated, but all of Europe was manipulated at will. Because they don’t just control media and the internet — they also control the discourse system, the power of narrative, and critical nodes within social power structures. The European figures who so zealously cooperated in these machinations share a common impression: you can tell at a glance they lack genuine ability, their virtue doesn’t match their position, yet they sit in high office. These people are themselves pawns — placed in those positions by the architects of the plan. How did they manage to rise within the power structures of ostensibly normal nations?
Because over the past decade, certain ideas were gradually cultivated into mainstream orthodoxy. For these ideas to gain real momentum, a tight organizational structure was required. The members of such an organization must come from groups with stronger material and spiritual dependence. That is precisely the value that ordinary people can be exploited for.
As I have written in the foundational essays of structural theory: living organisms, by building larger communities, occupy more resources, elevate their organizational density, and strengthen their control over those resources — thereby gaining an advantage in the competition for survival. Resources themselves create barriers to entry. Those who hold resources continually push up their prices, making it impossible for more and more people to sustain basic living costs through their labor alone. Such groups get locked beneath a certain tier permanently, never able to pose a threat to those organisms that occupy greater resources.
Beyond the barrier of resources themselves, there is a hidden barrier: organizational cohesion. In 1946, Marshall tried to dissuade Chiang Kai-shek from pursuing the civil war, because every calculation showed that Chiang’s organizational density — his capacity to mobilize and the resources he could command — was inferior to his opponents’. History proved this correct. A community with low organizational cohesion, even if it controls more resources, spends more energy simply maintaining its own internal order. Thus, its actual grip on those resources is paradoxically weak. In the competition for survival, it is easier to defeat.
Among all the organizational forms available to living organisms, blood ties are the most primitive and the most cohesive. By pulling more individuals away from these tight organizational forms — while continuously strengthening your own blood alliances — you give yourself double insurance in the competition to control and occupy survival resources. This is precisely why the more powerful a family, the more they emphasize cultivating their descendants to build grassroots connections. The more middle- and lower-class a family is, the more easily they are drawn to fashionable ideas that actually undermine competitive strength — continually spending in ways that destroy accumulation, pursuing atomized freedom in ways that accelerate the dissolution of any possibility of forming higher-cohesion communities. A dysfunctional family is always a loose one. Whatever the specific cause, all its members will be pulled by invisible forces toward this same outcome.
As for your question of what we will do — before answering, one must first understand where we currently stand. The mainstream ideas and intellectual frameworks of today, the standards by which right and wrong are judged, the guiding philosophies across every industry — all of these originate from the West. The inertia is enormous, and there are enormous numbers of entrenched beneficiaries. If such groups have embedded themselves in key positions throughout our social system over the past forty years, that inertia cannot be suddenly reversed. Society will continue moving in the Western direction. Only when the lighthouse goes dark will our society turn its gaze inward and re-examine everything from scratch. Only at that point can we speak of standing at a genuine crossroads of choice. Before then, we can only follow someone else’s rails, driven forward by inertia — step by step.