This article is not about the fact that the nuclear family has been turning into a niche phenomenon in the current year. Instead, I am going to talk about the social forces that were once necessary to push people towards forming nuclear families and what we would need to do in the present day to achieve the same.

The nuclear familiy consists of man, woman, and children, where the children are biologically related to both parents. The man is supposed to work, and the woman should run the household and raise the kids. Due to technological advances, though, it certainly became feasible for women to take on a part-time job or even a full-time one once the kids were old enough. The key aspects are: the man works and provides and in the process more often than not sacrifices his whole life, the woman is loyal and moral. Women are genetically predisposed to love children and that’s what she’s getting out of this deal. She may be dreaming of Chad dick, but the puny pecker of her husband may be the only dick in her life. Yet, she’s virtuous so she will not seek out opportunities to cheat on her husband.

What I just sketched used used to be the norm in society. Within living memory, single motherhood was stigmatized and even cohabitation without marriage would have made the people around you wonder what kind of morally depraved person you are. Social pressure, supported via relatively centralized messaging via mass media, kept Chad from fathering kids with every young female in his street. Young women were likewise not encouraged to sleep around. Instead, they were told stories of “fallen women” who ruined their life by getting involved with the wrong guy. This used to be a trope. Today, the inverse is a trope in mass media, i.e. the successful hyper-feminist single mother who has success against all odds and still bangs the chaddest Chads in her 40s.

Back then, just as now, women were the gatekeepers of sex, so you needed social control to keep them from spreading their legs on a whim for random dudes. Of course, in order to push for a nanny state, the father had to be removed from families, so that is what was done in the 1960s and beyond. We suddenly had a big welfare state that ensured that women no longer needed a man. There would always be Daddy Government. Yet, even without that, you could achieve social control rather easily. All it took was strong community cohesion and corresponding mass-media conditioning. This also affected guys who were told, form a very early age onward, that their role in life was to be a workhorse. Little Timmy got the lesson early that he needed to work hard to provide for a family. He may even have heard the occasional speech on the topic, “son, if you work as hard as me, you’ll also get to have your own house and your own wife and your own children”, while the father looked like some miserable sack of shit. However, if that is all you are exposed to, how would you know better? You may feel that something is off with this picture, but acting on that takes a level of independence and ability to think critically that the average man simply does not possess.

While I do not want to downplay the role of social engineering at all, which I blame for the systematic destruction of the nuclear family, it is also the case that due to technology, it would be much more difficult to get the same kind of uniform messaging nowadays. We also (still) have somewhat free access to information online. Several big names have disappeared or were “cancelled”, but the cat is now out of the bag. The average man now has much more easily access to stories of men who entered relationships and suffered financially, professionally, mentally, and physically. I don’t think there is any way to revert this, except by a massive cleansing of the Internet (I think this will eventually come, but it would take two generations of draconian censorship to make men more docile, but our hostile elites may have other plans for the future of humanity anyway).

Let’s think the issue of mass-media messaging through some more: imagine we had moved on from the 1960s to the current year, without the current year being “current year”, i.e. instead of a utopian hellhole full of vibrant diversity, Antifa riots, and Joe Biden stealing the US presidential election third-world style, we live in a sane, wholesome society in which there are still nuclear families. The problem, though, is that there is still technological progress in this alternate reality. Without active social engineering in the 1960s and beyond, things may just have taken a bit longer because technological advances also would have happened. You could no longer tell your daughter that she’ll find a husband in her local community because that would be awfully limiting considering that she’d have access to millions of guys online. Of course, with stronger social control you would have less whoring around, but you would nonetheless women would have a lot more temptation.

Similarly, guys have gotten sidetracked as well, and possibly even worse than women. You have guys openly saying that they don’t really care about having a career or even a job. In contrast, imagine Teen Joe twenty or thirty years ago who doesn’t want to bother with high school or doesn’t care about a career. He may be able to live rent-free in his parents’ basement but how is he going to spend his time? He couldn’t just fire up his PlayStation for some Fortnite or Warzone, pull up a porn site to fap a few times, access more than enough anime for twenty lifetimes, and chat with his buddies on Discord or WhatsApp. Instead, he’d have access to a few books, TV, and a telephone. The latter two may even be shared with his parents. Compared to that, I’d say that getting a job, possibly even any job, is rather attractive.

I think only by artificially curtailing technological progress could we have saved the nuclear family as well as kept women virtuous and men willing to sacrifice themselves. This might have meant not opening up the Internet for commercial activities. In fact, it is doubtful if this was even a net benefit for society overall, judging by statistics on mental health. Arguably, we would have had to freeze technological progress and our social institutions to perpetuate the nuclear family, think of the Amish taking over the Western world. This would mean building a different society. Answering the question whether that would be a better or worse society than what we have today is one well worth considering. I’d argue that most people would be a lot happier, though.

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