In my previous post, I have provided a much more broader but related context for what I will be discussing here.
In some conversations I had with some friends, the conversation naturally gravitated from the thinking-problem in the masses to the academia to the children and then to parenting. We observe the children in our surroundings, and the way they are being brought up, and we consider it to be very much problematic. There is this one extreme where children's brains are being lobotomized by them being given unsupervised access to mobile phones at a very young age. The parents of such children had not had these technologies when they were young, and so they do not have any mental framework or policy to be able to supervise their children. But then there's an even bigger problem that is only going to be exacerbated in the near future. The generation of people that are having their first newborns at this time, or will have their first newborns in next 5-10 years is the generation of people who themselves have an extremely unhealthy relationship with technology. Children are excellent learners, and the behaviors they are going to learn from their parents will be extremely problematic. This situation is extremely depressing.
My roommate has a very troubled relationship with teachers at his academic institute, and in one such a rant, he commented that if only the Principal would take one suggestion from him, it would make his life easier. He would suggest that, they should check teachers' social media profiles for signs of mental maturity before hiring them. I asked him how on earth will then this normie institute find teachers that pass the criteria?
This is the social environment in which our children will be born, where parents and teachers (to whom parents have started entrusting their children at a younger and younger age) are not mentally well capacitated to provide children an environment that allows them to develop a thinking capability.
All of this might sound dull and gloomy, but the situation does not warrant pessimism. I believe children have extraordinary capabilities beyond our imagination. Have you ever tried learning a new language? You probably haven't, but if you know about the process, it's not an easy one. But look at children, they learn a completely new language without any guided or structured process within span of a few years, and that too effortlessly. This is crazy if you think about it. You just have to put them in the relevant environment and they learn insane things. (These children then grow up and become human beings who solve complicated problems and build unimaginable stuff.)
But as I mentioned, creating such an environment for our children is not going to happen by itself. It will require a conscious and sustained effort on our part. That is why I have read and thought (and argued with my mother) a great deal about homeschooling and parenting.
However, there's one point where all my previous frameworks of thinking break down. And I had to accept this when my friends asked me about the same point, that I haven't been able to figure out a solution for that part (yet). The problem is this. You can think and conjecture all day about what kind of environment children should have, but there is a crucial detail you are omitting from the scene, and that is that a child has two parents. If your partner does not have a shared understanding of this whole problem, and is not aligned with you in these principles guiding your child's upbringing, this is simply not going to work. Period.
So, the sub-problem that is unsolved yet is this: How do you find a life partner who aligns with your goals and is similarly committed in achieving those goals together?
The fact that my framework of thinking breaks down at this sub-problem means that it needs serious thinking. And when I think about this, then I do think a part of problem is that we (or at-least I) shy away from thinking or discussing this problem. So, the purpose of writing all this, is to stop sweeping certain crucial details of this problem under the rug, and confront them.
For a person to be the right life partner for you, they must align with you in the broader principles of how you are going to live your life. These broader principles are linked with the context I discussed in first post. One aspect of it is about what kind of things would we be spending most of our lives doing, and second is what kind of environment will we be giving to our children in which they will spend the transformative years of their lives. If two persons, do not align in both of these aspects, then I don't see any point in the marriage or relationship of such persons.
So, how do you find a person who aligns with you in these aspects?
I don't know. So, let me look at how it's being done in my environment.
In my environment, I see two different cultures which have a separate mechanism for how people choose their life partners. One is the culture to which I belong. This culture's mechanism is more traditionally rooted where matches are made or suggested by the greater kin and relies on the kin's perception of the two individuals but even more than that, their perception of the two individuals' parents, because a fruit inherits the characteristics of the same tree. If the two families find themselves compatible or aligned in their values and socio-cultural aspects, the match is made.
The second culture's mechanism is relatively a new one, where an individual's kin or even parents have effectively no role in such a decision. While the first culture discourages pre-marital relationship between two opposite gendered persons, the second culture freely allows it. In fact, since there is effectively no role of the kin, the pre-marital relationship is exactly the mechanism through which people are supposed to find the person they are willing to spend the rest of their lives with. Marriage is a commitment between two individuals for spending the rest of their lives together. In this mechanism, there is a pre-marital process called dating. During dating, the two individuals live together and kind of simulate the post-commitment life, to try to see if that will end up well, before actually making that life-long commitment.
This is a very rough sketch of the mate-matching mechanisms I see in the two cultures.
I have described these two mechanisms, because they are distinct in their methodology and the people I get to observe and know about, follow either of these mechanism, and it would not be logical that while observing the situation of their relationships, we do not keep in consideration that mechanism.
So, when I observe the current situation of relationships in the people from both the cultures, the situation is pretty bad at both places. However, the nature of relationship problems is different in the two cultures.
Let's consider the second culture first. In the second culture, individuals are exposed to this process of dating in their teenage or early-20s, when they are very young, and their worldview isn't properly developed yet. However, their bodies have sexually matured, and hormones have started kicking in. So, when these young individuals will start talking to opposite-gender individuals, they will naturally gravitate towards them due to the purely natural biological attraction toward opposite sex, even if there is no deeper principle aligned between the two of them. So there will be inevitable failures in relationships in early years because their process is not a process for finding a life partner but a process for finding a sexual partner.
This was the general-population problem. But then there are people within this culture who are serious about things they want to do in their lives and serious about finding a life-partner with whom to live their lives. This culture's mechanism causes problems for them in two ways. The major problem with this mechanism is because it has made relationships too much fungible. It is relevant to note that this second culture's mechanism had emerged as a reaction to mechanism of the first culture. In the first culture, relationships were too rigid; incompatible people felt compelled to continue their relationship further than they ought to, and thus suffered. So, this second culture first encouraged divorce and ending of long-term relationships, and then in continuance of making relationships more flexible went as far as discouraging the initial long-term commitment in the first place, by abolishing the tradition of marriage. So, the lines between short term experimentation part called dating and the long-term commitment part got blurred. As I defined earlier, the dating phase is an experimentation phase where you kind of simulate the post-commitment life before making that commitment. So, it is a fake simulation, because due to the idiosyncrasies of each individual, there is a certain minimum level of compromise or tradeoff you will have to do to be able to live together, but you will not be willing to make that tradeoff, if you are not committed about it for the long-term. So what happens is that on every hiccup in the pre-commitment experimentation phase, you either (i) consider moving on to a different relationship, or (ii) when you have done that enough, you become defensive and start doing things to ensure that the other person does not move on to a next relationship, and thus you start compromising a bit too much and that is also a problematic because it might take the relationship to the commitment phase, but then you will stop compromising too much and the other person will have a rightful objection to that, and things will start going downhill. All this happens because without commitment, the simulation is fake. A true simulation pre-commitment is simply not possible. So, this is the problem in this culture. How are you going to be able to build relationships that are based on broader life principles and not natural biological attraction owing to the hormones, and how are you going to find a life-partner when no one is willing to commit to a longer term relationship without a short-term fake simulation phase that does not in fact tell you about your compatibility with another person?
Now, let's discuss the first culture, where although an individual might make the final decision regarding choice of his partner, he himself would not be the one looking out for potential-partners to decide about, rather his extended family or kin would be doing this task for him. The primary problem with this mechanism, specially in this age, is that individuals have become more differentiated but with that many levels of hierarchy involved in finding the potential partners, the actual preferences or values of the two individuals get completely abstracted away. And for individuals who are supposed to make the final decision, there simply is not enough information to be able to judge whether the other person believes in same kind of principles as they do. It's just a blind guess. But since the problem of complete abstracting out of individual values started getting felt, the culture (or some subcultures) allowed flexibility in the mechanism. That is the individuals are now allowed to talk and discuss with each other, before making the final decision. This flexibility is limited, but still I think you can get to know a lot about other person's worldview by having a few conversations with them. But the problem is that this flexibility only solves part of the problem not the entire problem. The flexibility only allows you to filter out incompatible partners, but it still not solves the problem of how the kin is supposed to suggest potential-partners that are actually compatible, given that the kin does not understand the true goals or values of the individual. Maybe, if you are lucky, one of your parents might understand your preferences or values, but the sample of potential partners that your parents will directly know of is too small, and if they take suggestions from kin, then those suggestions would be not guided in any way by your individual preferences or values.
Another problem with the first culture and its mechanism is its traditionally rooted association with patriarchy. Apparently, the strictness and rigidity regarding the lives of females has loosened a lot on surface level. But the actual autonomy females living in this culture have with their lives is still low. The first part of their lives is governed or influenced by their fathers, and the second part by their husbands. Traditionally, females were married at a younger age and thus when they were married, they would be more adaptable to the ways of their husbands. Now, when marriage age is relatively later, the lives of females get well adjusted to their father's way of living which makes re-adjustment to their husbands' way of living much difficult. But either way, females do not have any kind of autonomy in their lives. This is a big problem. Because as I discussed in my previous post, there are already too many of a forces forcing a person to switch off their minds and follow the bureaucracy. Now, those few females who have somehow still developed the ability to think by themselves are very negatively impacted by this lack of autonomy. What lack of autonomy does is that it makes one's mind reach this conclusion logically that there a lot of (fixable) problems that can't be fixed, because the lack of autonomy disables them to even consider a big portion of the solution space. So even in areas of life where they do have some level of autonomy, they do not use it as much as they can, and that is a problem.
So, that is where I find myself currently in. This is the culture I find myself living in. And the one discussed before it is the only other culture I see or know of. And there are problems existing in both of these.
So, the problem at hand that I haven't figured out the answer of is this. Given the context of the graver problems I described in first post, there are certain broader principles I have developed (of course they are coarse and less developed now, and might go through some changes in details, but at a broader level I don't think they are going to change) that are important to me, so how do I find a life partner who aligns with these principles and is willing to put in the conscious effort to live by these principles, specifically given the context of the cultural environment I find myself in.
The problem is already complicated enough, but there's another element that I think is of crucial importance in this problem, that is one's religious belief system. Most people subscribe to religious belief system they inherit from their parents by default. They not merely inherit the name of the religion/sect or the loosely-defined belief system, but also the degree of its influence, i.e., in which affairs of life does that belief system influence the actual practices or actions of a person (and to what extent) and in which affairs it doesn't. For the values and goals of two individuals to align enough to be good life partners, it is important that both the set of beliefs (or lack thereof) and the degree of their influence must also align. For instance if A is agnostic, and B subscribes to belief-system X only in practices of social traditions like marriage ceremony and funeral and not much else, then in belief-space they are close to each other. But if say, C belongs to belief-system X and is influenced by it to the extent the kind of work he'll do will be influenced by it, while D only follows belief-system X in social traditions, then they are further apart in the belief-space than A and B even though both of them apparently follow they same belief-system.
Currently, I'm in the phase of life where one starts to question and re-define the belief system he inherits by default, and I believe figuring out this part is going to take a while, but whatever the final redefinition is, it might add another level of complication to the already complicated problem. Because, if you plan to have children, it will be cause severe conflicts in their upbringing if both the parents do not lie close in the belief-space.
So, the final form of problem is this:
How do you find a life partner who:
- aligns with you in your broader principles of how you are supposed to live your lives
- aligns with you in your vision of the kind of environment you would like for your children to have and is willing to put the conscious and sustained effort in providing them such
- is autonomous and believes in these principles independently, and not merely because their life-partner believes in them
- thinks for themselves, so that both of you help each other get unstuck in hard problems of life
- lies close to you in belief-space (regarding belief-set and its degree of influence)
This is the unsolved part. I notice I had titled this piece as The (yet) Unsolvable Problem, which is funny because I should have used Unsolved instead of Unsolvable.
So, this is the yet unsolved part.