While the breakdown of marriage and the family has, I believe, long been blamed for many social ills, I really appreciate the particular approach you’ve taken here.
I’ve come across a couple people in the psychology field who postulate a connection between the increase in the divorce rate (in the US in particular) to the apparent (and actual - albeit often anecdotally since serious research on this topic is fairly new) rise in people with Narcissistic Personality Disorder and Antisocial Personality Disorder. There’s certainly more sociopaths running amok than we might think (see Martha Stout’s book _The Sociopath Next Door_).
So, I don’t think it a stretch at all to say we can trace it farther back down the communal family tree to see that there’s also likely a cyclical and exponential component over time to the breeding of amorality, to which promoting marriage in the way this article describes is a viable antidote. I’ll venture to take that a bit farther however, and say that the proper formation of a marriage might need to be considered, lest one fall prey to a dangerous cycle; marriage can also be a hiding space for disordered people to appear not-so-threatening. Perhaps that serves as more support for your argument, since marriage itself would then still create a bit of a buffer to the larger society?
Even in the case of intact marriages where one parent is personality disordered (and as such, an emotionally immature child in an adult’s body) marriage itself cannot “right” that person, nor prevent the ill-effects it has on any children in the family system. So, I do believe the end result for that subset of marriages would be the same regardless.
I like that buffering idea, as it makes sense. Is consistent with Yi Cheng's 11th century image of the neutered boar to refer to cultural mechanisms that anticipate and then dampen or prevent human-caused damage to self and others. Also, with less of such a 'buffering capacity' because of a dearth of marriages (and other buffering mechanisms) in the US, you'd expect individual and group behavior to become less stable and more subject to sudden shifts and extremes. With regard to the matter of single people doing their best to rise above the pleasant music of their hormones and avoid entering into extremely risky marriages in the first place, it seems like it would be a great help to simply introduce them to the simple decision-aiding checklists like those provided here: http://albernstein.com/checklists.php. Think of the samurai who mysteriously knew not to enter a room during the early testing and recruiting scenes of "The Seven Samurai". Something to shoot for.
While the breakdown of marriage and the family has, I believe, long been blamed for many social ills, I really appreciate the particular approach you’ve taken here.
I’ve come across a couple people in the psychology field who postulate a connection between the increase in the divorce rate (in the US in particular) to the apparent (and actual - albeit often anecdotally since serious research on this topic is fairly new) rise in people with Narcissistic Personality Disorder and Antisocial Personality Disorder. There’s certainly more sociopaths running amok than we might think (see Martha Stout’s book _The Sociopath Next Door_).
So, I don’t think it a stretch at all to say we can trace it farther back down the communal family tree to see that there’s also likely a cyclical and exponential component over time to the breeding of amorality, to which promoting marriage in the way this article describes is a viable antidote. I’ll venture to take that a bit farther however, and say that the proper formation of a marriage might need to be considered, lest one fall prey to a dangerous cycle; marriage can also be a hiding space for disordered people to appear not-so-threatening. Perhaps that serves as more support for your argument, since marriage itself would then still create a bit of a buffer to the larger society?
Even in the case of intact marriages where one parent is personality disordered (and as such, an emotionally immature child in an adult’s body) marriage itself cannot “right” that person, nor prevent the ill-effects it has on any children in the family system. So, I do believe the end result for that subset of marriages would be the same regardless.
I like that buffering idea, as it makes sense. Is consistent with Yi Cheng's 11th century image of the neutered boar to refer to cultural mechanisms that anticipate and then dampen or prevent human-caused damage to self and others. Also, with less of such a 'buffering capacity' because of a dearth of marriages (and other buffering mechanisms) in the US, you'd expect individual and group behavior to become less stable and more subject to sudden shifts and extremes. With regard to the matter of single people doing their best to rise above the pleasant music of their hormones and avoid entering into extremely risky marriages in the first place, it seems like it would be a great help to simply introduce them to the simple decision-aiding checklists like those provided here: http://albernstein.com/checklists.php. Think of the samurai who mysteriously knew not to enter a room during the early testing and recruiting scenes of "The Seven Samurai". Something to shoot for.