Socially-conditioned ingratitude - Leftist family life as a 'perfect bureaucracy'

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It is interesting to notice how pervasive is the Leftist anti-family social conditioning which trains children that they should not be grateful to their parents: that they 'didn't ask to be born', that it is therefore their parents duty to provide, and that gratitude is not just needless but inappropriate (when things are thus properly considered...).

On the other side, parents are told that they have chosen to have a child like a fashion accessory - for their own pleasure, and must therefore serve that child's needs with no expectation of gratitude, nor of a personal and loving relationship.

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In sum, the parent is supposed, as an ideal, to be a dutiful official who impartially distributes and administers the necessary goods and services to their clients (children) whose 'right' it is to receive them.

Parents are conceptualized as if perfect, detached, ideal-bureaucrats; diligently serving a deserving minority. Children are simply receiving what is their due.

Any emotions that might accompany this neutral transaction would be... inappropriate.

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One particularly appealing antidote to this nightmare scenario of modernity (and one which sustains the family) comes from that aspect of  Mormon theology which sees each of us as precisely having asked to be born; and being born into a situation in which mortal and immortal powers are personal, and necessarily - and properly - have passions such as love, sorrow, compassion.

In such a world view, the natural propensity for personalizing human relationships does not need to be suppressed - and certainly suppression of the personal is not regarded as a virtue.

Rather, from God and Christ and the Holy Ghost on downwards through angels and men, the most important reality is of personal relationships - in which gratitude for help is both natural and desirable; and the lack of gratitude is correctly seen as a moral failure rather than a consequence of superior insight.

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