SERENA HUDSON writes:

Yet another feminist breaks down under the stress of working and having a family and passes the buck to society at large. In this article about Katrina Alcorn and her book Maxed Out: American Moms on the Brink, one thing stood out for me:

“If you’re feeling on your edge, you need to figure out how to take care of yourself by any means necessary. I heard a story recently about a mom who took a vacation from her family for a month. She felt she had to completely remove herself and stay with friends for a month and recoup.”

I could not imagine leaving my family for a month! I could not imagine having a husband who would let me either.

Thank you for all the work you do – have a lovely weekend!

Laura writes:

Thank you.

Katrina Alcorn says absolutely nothing new. These lies have been dished out for years. Jobs should somehow by magical decree be made so that people can “take care of the kids and do the grocery shopping and fill out the school forms and attend the parent-teacher conferences in the middle of the day.” And she was the manager of a whole department?  Like most socialists, Alcorn doesn’t seem to know the first basics of running a business.

Interestingly, she did not quit her job to take care of her children and deal with her depression. She quit her job to write a book about quitting her job and dealing with her depression. All this overwork, all this tiredness, all this “maxed-outness” covers up the big emptiness. When you talk to women like this, it’s like trying to converse with a gust of wind or a current of electricity. There is nothing to say before this display of raw energy. There is no real thought because energy does not think.

Notice how she says she doesn’t blame men and then goes on to blame men:

“I think it’s different for men because the cultural expectations are still different for women than men.

That doesn’t mean that it’s better for men but I think that there are some things that are simpler.

Men do not, in general, deal with the same kind of guilt that women have. Studies also show that women are still doing a lot more of the housework even when both parents work. So we’re still not experiencing it in the same way.”

Yes, men have it easy. Women carry all the burdens of the world. (I assume her husband did not have the option of quitting his job so he could write a book about how victimized he was by his job.) How is it that this still seems to have the air of novelty to people? The Vitalist woman is intoxicating. She’s energy for energy’s sake. There’s a big nothingness inside and people need this exciting display of energy to cover it up. Nihilism is not slow-paced. It’s very, very busy. Put a busy feminist in a room by herself for a couple of days, without her job or girlfriends or Smart phone, and she would go insane. She would glimpse the void within and it would not be a pretty sight.

— Comments —

Hannon writes:

I enjoyed your response to “Maxed-out Mother.” Such people cannot run away fast enough from that empty place in their gut. Just about everything in popular culture is precisely about doing that, and enjoying seeing how others do it.

Jane S. writes:

Laura writes:

“Like most socialists, Alcorn doesn’t seem to know the first basics of running a business.”

Right. Because the first rule of running a business is that the customer/client comes first. If you are too busy with your personal affairs to attend to your customers/clients, they will go elsewhere. Socialists want to make sure there is no “elsewhere” for them to go to.

Paul writes:

Part of what you are saying is that the feminist thinks there are no necessary norms or rules for men and women.  One complementary pair of norms used to be that women should concentrate on the difficult but necessary role of being housewives and mothers and the man should concentrate on the role being kind husbands and fathers and making enough money to take care of his wife and children.

My mother had a nervous breakdown when I was in the fifth grade, and she was in the hospital for weeks or a month or two.  She had become a working mother about six months earlier.  But she has never blamed society.  She also had personal demons, one or two of which she could not help from passing on to me.  She blamed those demons.  When it happened, I understood clearly (and maybe without being told) she had been taking on too much.  I empathized with her.

She was more energetic than the average woman or man, was a devoted wife and mother, and was wise.  So she was able to recover fast and go back to work.

My grandmother (one of my mother’s demons) lived with us, so she did the cooking and maybe some other things.  She was crippled from spinal surgery but could walk like a slow toddler.  That brings up another norm; families were supposed to live near one another and to help one another rather than to take jobs all over the country.  I am helping my mother and brother now, for example.  None of us moved away.

I would have moved away if I had had in hand a job I knew was going to be much more likeable; but I knew the grass just seems greener on the other side.  It is a good thing for people to take their close families into consideration before flitting off to take that dream job of being a cell biologist or a fire jumper two thousand miles away.  There are plenty of careers. Humans are adaptable.

Buck writes:

You write sublimely:

The Vitalist woman is intoxicating. She’s energy for energy’s sake. There’s a big nothingness inside and people need this exciting display of energy to cover it up. Nihilism is not slow-paced. It’s very, very busy. Put a busy feminist in a room by herself for a couple of days, without her job or girlfriends or Smart phone, and she would go insane. She would glimpse the void within and it would not be a pretty sight.

Jane S. writes:

Socialists want to make sure there is no “elsewhere” for them to go to.

Wow.

Laura’s description of the “Vitalist, nihilist” woman is now the last word for me on that. And Jane S.’s short phase simply nails the unnatural, anti-human essence of socialism in an undeniable way. I’ll be stealing both of these.

Laura writes:

Thanks.

At least you admit you’re a thief. : – )

Jeff W. writes:

It seems to me that exhaustion must be the end stage of Vitalism.  I saw this article recently, which describes a trend where women are competitively bragging to each other about how tired they have become in their quest to have it all.  The competitive Vitalist lifestyle consists of conspicuous consumption, high-level business meetings, fantastic sensual experiences, and a whirl of other activities among successful, exciting people.  When Vitalists stop competing in those areas and start trying to score points based on who is more exhausted, it seems to me that the game is winding down.

What comes after exhaustion?  Exhaustion proves that the promises of Vitalism (e.g., Having it all!  Excitement! Really living and feeling alive!) are lies.   After recognizing that one has exhausted oneself in pursuit of lies, what can come next for a Truth denier except the Nihilism of Destruction?

Vitalist women can continue to appear in the media in attempts to sell accessories to the Vitalist lifestyle.  Some of the wealthy can continue to live a Vitalist life, supported by a crew of servants and helpers.  But I see many of the masses now rejecting Vitalism and taking the next step down to the Nihilism of Destruction.  Persistent talk about exhaustion seems to me a signal that this transition is taking place.

Laura writes:

“Vitalism” and the “Nihilism of Destruction” are terms used by Seraphim Rose in his book, Nihilism: The Root of the Revolution of the Modern Age. He identifies the phases of modern nihilism as Liberalism, Realism, Vitalism and the Nihilism of Destruction. The Nihilism of Destruction does not entail immediate cultural collapse, but the determined destruction of social order. But nihilists always think they are achieving some necessary good. He wrote:

War against God, issuing in the proclamation of the reign of nothingness, which means the triumph of incoherence and absurdity, the whole plan presided over by Satan: this, in brief, is the theology and the meaning of Nihilism. But man cannot live by such blatant negation; unlike Satan, he cannot even desire it for its own sake, but only by mistaking it for something positive and good. And in fact no Nihilist–apart from a few moments of frenzy and enthusiasm, or perhaps despair–has ever seen his negation as anything but the means to a higher goal: Nihilism furthers its Satanic ends by means of a positive program. The most violent revolutionaries–a Nechayev or Bakunin, a Lenin or Hitler, and even the demented practitioners of the “propaganda of the deed”–dreamed of the “new order” their violent destructions of the Old Order would make possible; Dada and “anti-literature” seek not the total destruction of art, but the path to a “new” art; the passive Nihilist, in his ” existential” apathy and despair, sustains life only by the vague hope that he may yet find some kind of ultimate satisfaction in a world that seems to deny it.

The content of the Nihilist dream is, then, a “Positive” one. But truth requires that we view it in proper perspective: not through the rose-colored spectacles of the Nihilist himself, but in the realistic manner our century’s intimate acquaintance with Nihilism permits. Armed with the knowledge this acquaintance affords, and with the Christian Truth which enables us to interpret it aright, we shall attempt to look behind the Nihilist phrases to see the realities they conceal. Seen in this perspective, the very phrases which to the Nihilist seem entirely “positive” appear to the Orthodox Christian in another light, as items in a program quite different from that of Nihilist apologetics.

Michael D. Scully writes:

Hannon writes:

I enjoyed your response to “Maxed-out Mother.” Such people cannot run away fast enough from that empty place in their gut. Just about everything in popular culture is precisely about doing that, and enjoying seeing how others do it.

Spiritual reading excepted, this is easily the most profound thing I have read all year.

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