It’s simple. It’s the mother of invention. It’s necessity, or, to be exact, the lack of necessity. Before the Industrial Revolution, the world’s slowest, most influential and most damaging revolution, manly men and their womanly wives had to plan their marital relations to coincide with certain moments in the menstrual cycle. They did this because multiple children were necessary to ensure financial success (in part because we had not yet discovered that you can wrap a penis in a thin sheaf of rubber and still have, arguably, barely decent sex). Agriculturally speaking, the more kids you have, the more unpaid farmhands you get. You could also make a few extra bucks through the popular money-making technique of letting your sons and daughters marry outside the family, thus helping ensure a non-mongoloid genetic lineage and generating quick cash by receiving what they should’ve called by its proper name, “Daughter Liquidation,” but did, in fact, call by the more polite and socially-acceptable term, “Dowry.” Look it up. If you were really hard-up and your kids were cute, you could just straight-up sell them. People used to marry for all kinds of reasons, none of which had their own Hallmark card.
So, there humanity was: farming, building houses, tents, and tee-pees, hunting, sewing clothes, storing vegetables for the lean winter months, celebrating when the seasons change under various religio-mystical guises, having to pay up when their daughters got hitched, praying to all kinds of different gods for a good harvest, getting a little cash when their sons got hitched, living, loving, burping, sowing the seeds, harvesting the wheat, farting, telling stories, burning heretics, etc. And then this Industrial Revolution thing happens. It changes everything. We didn’t realize this fact for a while. People still needed to eat, so we still had farms, but ever-so-slowly the basic human unit of farm life, the family, got replaced by the same entity/the same structure that runs the factory, the company. It didn’t dawn on us until much later how much better families are than companies.
It can’t be denied that this Industrial Revolution did bring us some useful advances: the railroad, the telephone, and vastly better sex toys. But, it also brought with it a whole host of negative side effects, many of which took us centuries to even move a few inches over from the “necessary evil” box to the “oh crap, this can’t be good” box. Things like crowded, disease-ridden tenement living quarters, a new breed of overlords not all that different from their predecessors but more obvious, more overtly evil and better able to suppress and torture a wider range of people, corruption which permeated new and exciting territory, the slow death of the idea of the gentleman farmer, the even slower death of the idea of the gentleman at all, and pollution that not only poisoned our air and our lungs but was so bad that it poked holes in one of the layers of protective candy coating that partially shields us from the sun’s radiation. Yeah, this can’t be good.
Basically, families don’t stick together like they used to because, in this post-Industrial Revolutionary world, they don’t have to, and they’ve long ago forgotten that at some point in history, they actually wanted to.
Luckily for our Industrial Revolutionary overlords, people stopped thinking almost entirely somewhere around 1989. And thank God for it. Do you know how much harder it is to control people who can actually think?
For the full piece, visit hereticpicayune.com.
Like what you just read? Support Flagpole by making a donation today. Every dollar you give helps fund our ongoing mission to provide Athens with quality, independent journalism.
