https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=5Jh35JALT4s
You’re going to be for your entire life unable to understand what it actually takes in order to create human order. I mean, the various people have noticed that the European, that many of the European leaders are unmarried and don’t have children. And the situation in which young people don’t learn how to govern, they don’t learn how to be a king and a queen in their own homes, they don’t know how to govern a family, they don’t know how to hold it together despite the incredible pain and difficulties that often takes place between men and women. And children are, you know, children are, you know, they’re sometimes fun, but they’re sometimes incredibly difficult, incredibly painful to raise. This whole concept that every young man and woman who can do it must take the responsibility to bring life into the world, to create the world anew, to try to build up on the basis of what’s been inherited, to try to make it better than what it was in previous generations. That view, I think in many ways, that’s like the bedrock Jewish and Christian view, which says, you know, we’re not slaves to the gods, we’re partners in creating this world, but that means we have an obligation to do the act of creation. And the most fundamental act of creation is creating a family. Once you’ve done that, then, you know, you were hinting to this, then I think you can also learn to create congregations, to uphold nations. All of that flows from the first step of very young people taking responsibility for creating, you know, basically their own little world in a family. Just like physical exercise, daily spiritual exercise is critical to your well-being, especially in a world where attacks on faith and religion are happening all around us every day. There’s no better time for a daily habit of prayer than during this season of Lent with Hallow, the number one Christian prayer app in the US and the number one Catholic app in the world. 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I mean, one of the things that happens to a parent that, and I think it’s very difficult for this to happen if you don’t become a parent, is that once you’re a parent, there is definitely someone in your life who’s more important than you are. Right? So your orientation to the world, well, I would say it matures properly, and it matures under the force of moral obligation fundamentally. You have this person now who’s, for better or worse, almost entirely dependent on your not-so-tender mercies, you and your wife, and who’s subject to all of your trials and tribulations and inadequacies. And if you have any sense at all, that wakes you up as much as anything will. And without that, I think it’s very difficult to shed the constraints of hedonistic adolescence. That’s not good for people. You know, it’s not good for people. So, go ahead. Yeah, no, I think that’s exactly true. As you said, you can’t, in a lot of ways, you can’t actually mature until you’ve created and are the government of a household. And the alternative that sort of mainstream liberalism gives us, this view that when you reach 18 or 20 years old, you’re a rational individual, and now you can do whatever you want, usually doing whatever you want. We can see in young people that doing whatever you want means that they get too scared to get married. They get too scared to have children. Even I’m talking about something that even affects Orthodox religious communities. You can see it very, very clearly that they look at these responsibilities as a kind of, with terrible fear, as though it’s like an enslavement, something they need to spend another five years and another 10 years and another five years, get more degrees. They need to keep preparing in order to be ready to do it. And that’s the opposite of the traditional view that says, take the responsibility and then live up to it. You’ll grow by living up to it. You’ll become a complete person, as the rabbis say. You complete yourself by taking the responsibility of marriage and children. And the alternative is adolescence that’s extended forever. You think that when you’re 35 years old and now you’re going to start looking to get married, it’s going to be easier to get married. You’ll actually be more capable of it than when you were 23. I don’t think that’s true at all. I think what you learn during those extra 10 or 15 years of adolescence is to just care for yourself instead of to learn how to create something, to learn how to command something. That idea also highlights in some sense both the practical necessity and the inevitability of faith or the lack thereof. Many things in your life you have to throw yourself into without first knowing that you can do it. I don’t mean to do that in an impulsive and foolish manner, like heedless of all risks. I mean that when you get married, you don’t know if it’s going to work. In some sense, that’s even a foolish question because the issue is that when you decide to get married, it’s the first and foremost decision among 50,000 decisions that are going to determine whether or not you can stay married. You can boil that down to a question like, did I marry the right person? The answer to that is always no. They didn’t marry the right person either because neither of you are the right person in your current unbelievably flawed condition. You throw yourself into it thinking that having faith that you can manage it and also having faith that the alternative, that no matter how dismal the reality, the alternative is likely to be far worse. I would say the same thing is true on the child rearing front, which is, as you pointed out, it’s difficult. It isn’t obvious that you’re prepared or that extra preparation is really going to help you. But what’s the alternative to the difficulty? One of the things I love about the story of Abraham, one of the things I think that makes it such a profound story is that Abraham is really characterized by quite the protracted adolescence according to the beginning of the story. He’s quite old when God finally convinces him to get the hell out of his tent and to get out there in the world. And God in that story is definitely manifests himself as the call to adventure, even to the pathologically underdeveloped, the call to adventure. Of course, Abraham just steps into any number of catastrophes as soon as he leaves the confines of his tent and his father’s home. But the story is a triumph in its totality because despite the fact that he encounters tyranny and the likely loss of his wife at the hands of people who are essentially tyrants and starvation and war and all of the catastrophes of life, he has a great adventure. And that’s the adventure. As far as I can tell, it’s something like the adventure of truth and dedication and responsibility. And that’s very seldom marketed by conservatives to young people as an adventure. Right? And you said their default position is often to regard these strictures of community as what would you call it? Impediments and impositions on their hedonic freedom. But there’s very little value in that hedonic freedom and all of the adventure in life, as far as I can tell, is to be found, weirdly enough, in truth and responsibility. Yeah, I completely agree. You have God telling Abraham, look, I’m going to give you an opportunity to become a great nation, to become a great tradition, to become a teacher of all the peoples in the world. But that’s the biggest adventure that the prophets could imagine was setting out to become a teacher to the entire world and to create a great nation that would influence the whole world and would be in covenant with God. The prophets can’t imagine a larger scale adventure than that. And yet the whole thing pivots around, you take a wife, you have to have a child, you have to raise that child. That involves hardship, that involves difficulty. And there’s all of these descriptions of Abraham’s adventures. And it takes many generations until you can see the full consequences of what he did. But the first step is taking responsibility, as you say. And now we have to ask. Now we’re talking about tens of millions of young people and not so young people who are beginning to realize that a career, meaning your place within the corporate economy, which cubicle, getting to that corner office, that’s nowhere near the adventure of creating a family which is creating a little nation which then has the opportunity to grow if you do it right.