Student Question (L茵Z):
A question for you! Was our traditional so-called “provider and reproducer” functional structure formed precisely to suppress education costs — including educational risks — within the family, the smallest unit of social division and cooperation? And is it feasible to transfer those costs elsewhere?
Looking at successful pro-natalist policies overseas — from reward systems and reduced education spending, to legislation protecting workplace rights for mothers, to policies encouraging fathers to take paternity leave — at their core, all of these transfer a portion of the cost onto society. One of the reasons these policies actually work, in my view, comes down to a difference in mindset: the question of who “owns” children.
Over twenty years ago, a German exchange student lived with my family. We talked about German social welfare, and what struck me most was exactly this mindset question. She believed she had been raised by the German government, so paying high taxes felt entirely natural to her. This wasn’t because she didn’t love her parents — in fact, her family of origin was very harmonious. But she wouldn’t support her parents in their old age, because that, too, was the government’s job. Over there, children are the common property of society, collectively overseen by everyone. If you hit or berate a child at home, a neighbor can call the police and report child abuse. Precisely because a social safety net exists for children’s education — and because a child’s future has no bearing on the family’s own fate — once pro-natalist policies are rolled out, birth rates can climb.
But in our country, children are the family’s private property — one rises, all rise. The “provider” role can fall to the father, or to the eldest son.
Pulling children out of the family structure is enormously costly and doesn’t fit our national conditions. So where do we go from here?
Master Chi’s Response:
The truth is, all our problems circle around the same core question. Every problem we face today, the West encountered first.
Social atomization tears people away from their original stable, low-cost structures. Once extracted, individuals — whether materially or spiritually — find themselves unsupported and adrift. This deep instability inevitably drives people toward two behaviors: 1. seizing resources through overconsumption, and 2. squandering resources through excess. Both tendencies increase the density of social division of labor and accelerate the concentration of social wealth. Even birth, aging, illness, death, and human emotional needs become industries.
In the past, there were no kindergartens, no nursing homes. They emerged gradually alongside industrialization. Delivery platforms and domestic services are, in essence, functions once embedded in family life — extracted, centralized, and sold back as purchased services. As more and more of these functions get extracted, the fortress of close human connection is hollowed out from within. Ordinary people accelerate toward total atomization. In this process, social stratification and hierarchy express themselves through purchasing power.
…but this violates the law and strips parents of their custody rights. Once stripped, the child leaves the family, and custody passes to some form of social organization. Whoever funds these organizations will propagate their own agenda to these children — creating another kind of “family of origin,” and a far more ruthless one.
Felix Dzerzhinsky, the founder of the Cheka, built the Soviet welfare institution system, taking in millions of children who had lost their parents in the wars. He then raised these children using the ideology and training methods of the organization. These children grew up under this conditioning, and when the German invasion threatened to destroy everything, they became the most battle-hardened fighters of all. Even as they moved into middle and old age, they remained among the most ardent defenders of the Soviet Union.
This pattern has repeated itself throughout history — and it applies just as well to our era. The individual freedom that appears when people are extracted from old, stable structures is only temporary. These individuals will inevitably be absorbed into a new, larger, more tightly organized structure and become pawns to be moved at will. This phenomenon is already taking shape in the West — their process is ahead of ours.
What do the funders aim to achieve? Naturally: accelerate the concentration of resources while dismantling any possibility of collective resistance. The effectiveness of this domestication was on full display during the failed dollar-harvesting operation we’ve all witnessed. Not only did they orchestrate a war — they played all of Europe like a puppet. Because they don’t just control the media and the internet; they control the discourse system and the power of narrative, and they control the key nodes of the social power structure. The people in European countries who most eagerly enabled these shadowy operations all share a single unmistakable impression: clearly lacking in competence, holding positions far beyond their merit — placed there by those who laid the game board.
How were they able to rise within the power structures of otherwise normal nations? Because over the past decade, certain ideas were gradually cultivated and grew into mainstream currents of thought. For an ideology to take root and shape the climate, it requires a tightly organized body. The members of such an organization must come from groups with stronger material and spiritual dependency. The way a family binds a child is through material support and spiritual guidance: the child’s physical needs are met by the family; the child’s emotional needs, sense of security, and understanding of the world all come from its parents. Parents therefore hold absolute influence and control. By the exact same logic, these socially funded organizations play the identical role — except the people they condition en masse are meant to serve the funders, becoming their cannon fodder and enforcers. This is precisely the value that ordinary people can be made to provide.
…rapidly dismantling any possibility of forming a higher-cohesion community. A dysfunctional family is always a loose one. Whatever the specific causes, all its members are drawn toward that outcome by invisible forces.
As for your question — what will we do? Before answering that, you first need to understand where we actually stand right now.
At present, the mainstream ideas, thought systems, standards of right and wrong, and guiding philosophies across every field all originate from the West. The inertia is enormous, and there is no shortage of those who benefit from keeping it that way. If groups like these have occupied key positions throughout our social system over the past forty years, that inertia won’t dissolve overnight — it will keep pulling our society in the Western direction.
Unless the lighthouse goes dark, our society won’t turn its gaze inward to reexamine everything from the beginning. Only at that point can we say we’re standing at a genuine crossroads of choice. Until then, we will simply follow the tracks others have laid — driven by inertia, step by step.