These lines in David Mamet's Recessional gave me food for though. The book reads like a rambling rant of an older, disgruntled relative at family dinner. He is just unhappy about everyone and everything, dishes out edgy opinions to get a rise out of others and mostly gets yawns.
..Imagine an individual taught it is unnecessary to work, to pray, to study, to marry. Expand the notion to three generations, and we see the results in our civilization that we would expect in the individual: terror. The terror has been ascribed to impending global catastrophe—that is, the revenge of the sun, winds, and tides—or to an influenza epidemic..
Taught by words to this effect or leading by example - both would result in the same outcomes perhaps. If a child grows up seeing their parents not having any work ethic or stable employment, no baseline education or desire for self-improvement through learning, disengaged from faith and not in a committed relationship, then they have no foundation at all as a human being. There is nothing to anchor to. They can drift along and hope not to sink. That has to be terrifying as Mamet says - even for the first generation never mind three.
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