Boundaries matter

How could they not?

I found the above quote online; empathy without boundaries is self-destruction. It seems especially appropriate for today.

Empathy is a virtue many strive to demonstrate. But few will discuss its downsides. Why it is not universally good or useful. How it can be misdirected.

In some situations it is lethal. It can reflect a suicidal urge we now see in Western nations.

Much empathy in society is in fact sentimentality, which is dangerous. Sentimental ideas about mixing cultures, elevating poor performers through quotas, or tinkering with traditional gender roles have real world effects.

With such an emphasis on empathy, which many think of as niceness, we overlook the need for boundaries to maintain a functioning society.

This is the issue at the heart of much that is damaging us today.

Individual rights

We live in an era that champions individual rights to an almost autistic degree. This is a product of Western liberalism, which now seems to be entering its terminal phase as its effects ultimately destroy what made Western societies strong.

Since an individual’s rights trump everything we cannot easily enforce boundaries our ancestors could take for granted. Try challenging a gay pride parade or transgender material in schools on the grounds of public decency and the least you can expect is to lose your job.

Profound changes have happened just in the last few decades and all in the name of individual rights. The erosion of boundaries on behaviour is one of the most visible aspects of this.

Physical boundaries

The concept of boundaries is almost universal and spans everything from the mundane to the spiritual.

Most countries recognize the right to private property and inherent within this is the notion of boundaries. My car is mine and no one else’s, for example.

This is applied to our homes and gardens. These are ours and defendable from theft. Ultimately this in turn includes a neighbourhood or locale, even a region or state. All these things have visible boundaries that demarcate where they begin and end.

Most famously this applies to national borders, a traditional form of boundary in use for thousands of years. Failing to enforce this barrier is national suicide. The world is not like us and if it comes to us we will look like the world in return. Borders keep the barbarians out.

Everyone instinctively grasps these kinds of boundaries. We close our windows and have locks on our doors because of this understanding.

Using boundaries to exclude others feels natural.

Cultural boundaries

Less explicitly visible are cultural boundaries, often transmitted via tradition and convention. We have spent the last century attacking many of these as old fashioned, with little pause to consider why tradition emerges in the first place.

Marriage between men and women. Complementary gender roles. Sexual mores kept private. The sanctity of childhood, its innocence protected from intrusion.

As we removed constraints in the name of progress we destroyed much of the glue that held our societies together. We are now watching things unravel as people marry less and produce fewer children. We see widespread mental illness and anguish as the few basic certainties of life are destroyed in the name of progress.

People don’t know who or what they are when cultural boundaries are deleted. Women, men, natives, newcomers, the working class. Who are we really without some certainties in life?

Spiritual boundaries

Many of us feel adrift in this artificial world. Tradition is being erased, even ridiculed. As we become unmoored from who we could have been our spiritual lives have suffered.

Religion is in decline across the West, and the social structures it brought with it crumbling into nothing.

Inevitably materialism is filling the void, although we have been doing it long enough we now realize it is not a substitute. This is creating an even deeper anguish when we look at our material accumulations and sense their hollowness, we learn how little they really bring us and over time become aware of how much of our existence we exchange to purchase them.

We have a knack for replacing substance with ephemera. No one goes to church but they religiously watch Netflix or a social media feed they quickly forget. They cheer on some political party staffed with psychopaths who ignore them but rarely stop to think why this continually happens.

Leisure time is now filled with distraction, anything but boredom. Downtime is increasingly understood as non-activity or minimizing activity, conserving energy in some sense and not the more traditional idea of a hobby or engaging pursuit, something enjoyable that requires effort.

Instead we see inaction encouraged by passively consumed entertainments. And the transmission methods for these are becoming more invasive because they are always there within reach.

Technology is everywhere. We cannot escape. Work video calls at home. Notifications to keep us tethered. Convenient handheld computers enslaving us to shallow consumption.

Technology has moved from being a useful tool to being the main mediator between individuals and the world.

We manage life via a screen. Reality kept at a remove, nice and safe.

And all because we opened those mental borders to the exciting rush of modernity, never stopping to think what it would cost us.

In it came, bringing its constellation of attached beliefs with it. Atheism, materialism, the lure of progress, single-click and always on; more, more, more from the modern hose of pseudo-experience channelled through invisible pipelines.

The Christian West has traded in its cathedrals for shopping centres, addicted to the spike of pleasure commercial transactions briefly bring, like smoke in the wind.

We ignore the inevitable hangover as our wardrobes and cupboards and garages creak at the seams with all the stuff we don’t need or even want.

Our spiritual plane has become a wasteland of consumption and a drive for ever more tat masquerading as empowerment.

What a farce. What we’d give now for a few boundaries against all that.

This is going to cost us

The recent trend in Western nations is to destroy traditional boundaries for sentimental and utopian reasons. We are now learning in real time what that will cost us.

Can we do anything about this decline? Yes, insomuch as it is related to boundaries the solution is to enforce them.

Spiritual boundaries matter. Rejecting the distractions. Aiming for substance.

Recognizing much of modernity encourages passivity, the same accusation once aimed at TV watching but the model now embedded in everything as corporations chase eyeballs.

The antidote is to get moving. Do something, anything. Decline spreads through laziness. Restoration requires vigour and strength. It has the added advantage of feeling good. Accomplishment beats short-term thrills every time because we have to invest in it.

Reclaiming leisure as activity rather than loafing around would help many people. Our mental energies like our physical energies are often enhanced through effort, as counterintuitive as it seems.

Conversely, passively consuming wears us out, it drains us despite the notion it is well deserved time off. No one feels refreshed after a Netflix binge. We don’t seem to work like that. Our spirits need exertion to thrive.

Culture matters too. We must preserve it better and learn to push back on anything that erodes it.

Porn is not harmless despite being a private matter. Young women on OnlyFans and equivalent platforms is not harmless either. It cheapens life and weakens the bonds between men and women, turning aspects of relationships into transactions.

Blindly accepting alternative lifestyles in the name of liberalism doesn’t work either. It does seem to matter if people are abusing longstanding norms. The effects can be subtle, and it can feel odd that anyone in the West would endorse something that sounds so intrusive. It sounds like policing private behaviour.

But this is not about stopping people or regulating private lives. It is really a kind of withdrawal of endorsement, a willingness to consider society needs rules and boundaries on behaviour. Some are in a greyzone where we would not want to intervene but nor do we want to see it. We lack the courage to say this.

Is it such a bad thing to state porn and hookup culture and substance abuse is not for us? What about the endless grievances about unfairness, inequality or supposed sins of our people from centuries past? The championing of sexual fetishes too, until recently understood as aberrations, misfirings of sexual impulses we should learn to control rather than indulge. Why are we so unable to say go elsewhere if you wish to embrace such things? You cannot behave like that here.

Societal boundaries matter too, the most important being national borders. Without these countries become porous and face strife as incompatible newcomers begin to assert themselves within our own territory.

Ethnic mafias are a difficult problem for the open-minded West. We have no defence except exclusion and exile, difficult with people obsessed with individual rights. Easily exploited too. Dogooders don’t seem to understand most of the world is tribal and considers altruism a weakness to be exploited.

This affects local areas, states, regions, cities and towns. It all matters. Civilization is defined by who you keep out as much as who is within your borders.

When border protection is a natural part of a culture it seeps into personal matters. We use the same terminology to defend ourselves because it is familiar to us. Our body, and its contents, is understood as our own property. We are sovereign. We have the right to defend ourselves from intrusion.

When we condemn the defence of our nation, our locale or our people we also erode the notion we are allowed to defend ourselves, an obvious weakness others exploit. Look at the Covid response. It quickly descended into discussions about mandatory medical procedures. They had already destroyed our autonomy by then with emergency orders on movement.

How far would social engineers get with digital IDs, social credit scores or carbon taxes if we were primed with the experience of enforcing boundaries at all levels of our existence? It would seem absurd to most by then just as it did to America’s founding fathers, steeped as they were in the language of liberty.

Today’s equivalent is the concept of boundaries, what they are, why they matter, how to enforce them and our absolute right to do so.

We must remember much of the boundary erosion has been driven by misplaced empathy.

We can’t have borders as foreigners have human rights we are told we cannot violate. We cannot condemn young women prostituting themselves online as it is their life and their right. We must assist the drug addict in killing himself because we cannot tell him to stop, it is his right to abuse himself.

We cannot question the sloth and mindless passivity of those around us as anything goes in a permissive society, so nothing can be condemned or even commented on. Criminalizing offensive observations is a logical next step for people who think like this and it is already with us.

Not only can we not criticize, but we are expected to embrace the outsider, the deviant, the civilization destroyer in our midst. We are told it is the greatest virtue to provide a place at our table to our enemy when healthy societies understand they need to be sent packing to wreck somewhere else.

Enforcing boundaries deweaponizes this nonsense and provides a more sensible foundation for civilization to flourish.

We keep empathy in check. Or, rather, we keep sentimentality in check. We don’t let emotions decide.

It then becomes more difficult for dangerous utopian schemes to become established, reason enough for some to destroy all our barriers as their performative compassion is wielded as a weapon.

But we are learning the hard way that empathy without boundaries will destroy us.

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