Civilize the Barbarian in Your Home

The barbarians are at the gates. And we created them. 

No, I’m not talking about Hamas or other terror groups like it and any relationship to blowback from the actions of our government or our allies. Far from it. 

I’m talking about our kids here in America and across the first world. The kids who’ve terrorized speakers on college campuses and HR departments in Fortune 100 companies. The kids who scream and cry and throw temper tantrums on TikTok over trivial encounters with ideas they dislike. The kids who believe speech is violence and “silence is violence.” The ones who took to the streets and burned our cities after the death of one man in Minneapolis, but also seem to support the barbaric murder of innocent civilians in Israel. 

Why call them “kids?” 

Well, we used to call people over the age of 18 “young adults” and would drop the “young” once they got into their twenties. But look at them. Look at the behavior we see on a mass scale. The knack for lawlessness combined with the rejection of responsibility we’d normally associate with adults. You know, family formation.

These are kids. I’ll go a step further. These are barbarians. And it’s our fault.  

We’ve not only failed to raise adults, we have failed to act like adults ourselves. We’ve coddled and encouraged a generation of barbarians through both intentional activism, confusion, and neglect.  

Barbarian [ bahr-bair-ee-uhn ] a person in a savage, primitive state; uncivilized person. a person without culture, refinement, or education.

We’ve allowed our education institutions from K-through-PhD to be captured by the enemies of civilization itself and transformed into barbarian incubators. Our media and political institutions have not only cheered this on but profited from it at every turn. 

And now, they are the barbarians inside our gates, and if we don’t do something about this right now, they will tear civilization itself to the ground. 

My greatest fear is that it might already be too late. As a father of a recent high school graduate, our family is looking at all of this in shock and horror. The stakes for my son’s future are high. 

The stakes for our civilization are even higher.  

Incubating the Enemies of Civilization 

I know that using the term “barbarian,” especially against the backdrop of war in the Middle East, is a tad loaded, so let me be clear on what I mean here. Since civics scores in this country are even worse than congressional approval polls, let me quickly recount the origins of this word. 

Barbarian comes from the Greek word “barbaros,” which was used to describe anyone who didn’t speak Greek. They thought other languages, including Arabic, Hebrew, and Aramaic, sounded like people mumbling “bar, bar, bar.” 

Think “Durka Durka Durka” from Team America: World Police. Not so nice. 

The Romans and broader Christian Europeans afterward used it in similar ways to describe everyone from the Vikings to the Mongols. Colonial powers used it to marginalize the peoples they conquered.

The commonality? Tribalism and identity politics, of course. Treating other people based on superficial group identity. 

Sound familiar? I’m not going to hide the ball here. “Critical theory,” the overarching philosophy of our elite institutions, is barbaric. 

The best use of the word “barbarian,” and the one I’m using here, is as a description for those who oppose civilization. Those who are not just uncivilized, but seek to destroy all who are. This is the Enlightenment definition.

It is absolutely uncivilized, and thus barbaric, to reduce other people’s humanity to their identity or some other inhumane and often Marxist abstraction. 

The word “civilization” also has its roots in the ancient world, in the Latin words “civitas,” or city, and “civis,” or citizen. It was Enlightenment thinkers in France and England who took this word and used it to describe the noble, peaceful pursuit of truth and human progress.

To do those things is to be “civilized.” 

Using force and violence to get your way, or the open celebration of those things, is barbaric. It is barbarism that our kids have been raised and “educated” to embrace, and it’s become the animating principle of the institutions that claim to exist for the sole purpose of building up our civilization. 

Our schools. Our universities.  

When you walk onto the campus of Harvard, our oldest and most elite university, you’ll see Romanesque architecture. Stone columns and grand archways. The school’s motto is in Latin. Veritas. Truth. 

Show me an “elite” university and I’ll show you an Enlightenment motto carved in stone. But this is all an echo of the past. A facade. A Potemkin village.  

Harvard’s motto today should be Barbaros. Truth be damned. The tribe is king. 

If this resonates with you, check out this deep dive I put together on the struggle for civilization in America today. 

Utopianism’s Rotten Fruit

How did we get here? 

The answer is simple: our kids are enraptured by the siren song of utopia. 

Wild-eyed academics and philosophers have always cast visions of the perfect society. This mindset goes all the way back to Plato’s Republic, ruled by a benevolent, enlightened dictator. It continued with Karl Marx and his dreams of a perfect, stateless, communist world where selfishness and scarcity would be defeated, leaving only the poetic socialist man. Truly a wild fantasy. 

Utopianism animated the progressive eugenicists who believed they could breed a perfect master race. Eugenics was the early 20th century’s “trust the science” moment and had broad support from the majority of elites. Those are some of the worst fruits borne by utopia. It’s not all bad though. Utopian visions have also animated many great artists, inventors, and entrepreneurs. 

We need visions of a better world. Even of a perfect world. It helps us get out of bed in the morning when we can imagine making an impact of some kind.

But we need counterbalances that ground us in something more solid.  Religion and reality are the most effective of them all.  

Our best religious traditions warn that utopia is not for this world but for the next. We are fallen. We are flawed. And the world will always reflect this fact. 

As Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn put it….

“The line separating good and evil passes right through every human heart.”

To be human and to be civilized is to recognize this nature in ourselves so that we can recognize it in others. That is the path to human dignity and it stands in stark contrast to the “good people vs. evil people” story being pushed on our kids by today’s barbaric utopians. If we’re all flawed, we all have something to learn from each other, even when we disagree.

Reality teaches us humility in a very different way, and one that’s utterly foreign to so-called educators in academia. Trying to build or do anything in reality is messy. It’s hard. 

Your most visionary architectural plans must inevitably make compromises when the actual hammer and nails come out to build the house. Real life doesn’t work the way intricate social theories on blackboards want it to. People aren’t blank slates, or chess pieces that can be moved on a board. Working in a real job teaches you that real quick.  

Reality tempers utopian dreams so that they can be put to good use as motivation. 

Religion provides a transcendental outlet for the utopian dream so that it doesn’t collapse into nihilistic barbarism when reality sets in. 

Our kids today throughout the western world are profoundly lacking in both reality and religion, which is why they’ve been seduced by utopia and the barbarism that inevitably follows. 

What we can do?

So… what do we as parents (and as dads) do about this? No matter where you stand in your politics or personal philosophy, I bet you want your kids to succeed in this world. You want them to find purpose and happiness. You want them to find a loving partner and, I hope, make some grandchildren for you to spoil. 

Perhaps the best I can do is share what my wife Lisa and I have done so far. We’ve tried our best to walk the walk. And definitely failed plenty along the way.

My son had the tremendous benefit of Lisa opting to stay home with him in his early years. That's a big decision, and I realize that not everyone can or wants to make it. Whatever you have to do to make ends meet, make as much quality time with your little kids as possible. 

AND LISTEN UP! Quality time with your kids is not trips to Disney World, fancy cruise vacations, or cross-country road trips. 

Quality is based on undivided attention. If you’re at Disney on your phone, or taking the road trip with headphones in for conference calls, you’ve sent a very clear message to them about what matters most. 

Civilizing kids starts early. 

To that end, Lisa and I made a pact to stay on the same page together in disciplining with a simple set of rules. 

Don’t make idle or excessive threats. Always deliver a clear warning on bad behavior before acting on the punishment. And then always follow through. This worked for us. 

Learning to live with clear, simple rules that you know will be applied is the first step to living in a civilization. 

We quickly realized that screens were toxic at an early age. So when my son entered first grade, we put him in a Waldorf School, which requires you to pledge that there will be zero media use at home. We were on the strict side of the Waldorf parent spectrum. The result? Our son stayed engaged in physical, imaginative, and outdoor play much longer than most American kids. His childhood looked much more like mine. Running around outside with friends. Coming home with bloody knees from falling out of trees.  

Let them fall down. Being exposed early and often to the messy reality of the physical world is good for our kids’ physical and mental health, but it also ingrains a visceral understanding of reality. You don’t climb a tree in the abstract. You do it for real, and it’s messy and unpredictable. That’s better than any lesson you’ll learn in class and it’s an early inoculation against utopianism. 

We did not put our son in a government-run school. Our family was also quick to pull our child from a private school when it became clear that critical theory was driving their approach as well. I’d sooner have my kid work in a coal mine than subject him to that soul-deadening rot.  

Work it out. Speaking of coal mines, our son has worked summer jobs since 7th grade. I don’t expect to see him posting on TikTok faux-crying about the tyranny of a 9-to-5 or leaving work to pull down a statue of Christopher Columbus any time soon. He’s got too much hard-earned summer cash to complain. 

Have I tried to brainwash my son with my values? Yes. And one of those values is engaging in rigorous debate. We’ve prioritized having dinner together as a family, which is really good to do for its own sake. Humans are social eating creatures and this is deeply powerful socialization time. But we’ve also made it debate time, and I will often take on positions I disagree with or challenge him to do the same because, to paraphrase John Stuart Mill, the person that doesn’t understand his opponent’s position doesn’t really know a damn thing.

We pushed him to get his driver’s license. You want them to leave the nest. That’s literally the point of this entire enterprise. Show them how and then let them drive. 

We love this time in which we live. We’ve pushed back hard against the false narratives of environmental apocalypse driving kids to experience daily existential anxiety. Our family reinforces the facts, which are that the world, for all its problems, has gotten dramatically richer and better for the global poor over the past 30 years. You’re lucky to live in 2024. 

Oh yeah… and there’s no chance in hell I’m paying one nickel to send him to a college possessed by utopian barbarism. Nope. Not happening. Instead, we’re sending him to study in Italy. He’ll still encounter plenty of communists, but the lessons from global travel and cultural exploration will be the real education we care about. 

As parents and dads, this fight for the future of civilization is up to us.  

We have to model being civilized for our kids in an uncivilized world. We can’t vote our way into a civilized world. We can’t outsource the protection of civilization. We need to be civilized and raise civilized adults. 

That’s how we save America.