The "Psyop" of Independence
Leaving home just makes you poor, lonely and easy to exploit
Goriwei
Leave home. Move to the city. Find yourself. Collect a few sexual experiences. Rent a shoe box in a postcode you can’t afford. Call it independence. Congratulations you are not an oik; you are upwardly mobile. Mobility is freedom. Deracination is sophistication. Financial precarity is character building. Positive steps on life’s journey? More likely, bitter social control.
Leaving is often less self-actualisation than swapping affection, kinship, stability and belonging for administration, landlords, stale anecdotes, and a cubicle job from which you can be fired on a whim. Leaving home for war, plague, pestilence, famine or domestic violence is one thing. Leaving home because Netflix made it seem cool is another.
Yet choices leading to such as life, as promoted by the media-industrial complex, are being called into question as more adult children are moving back in with their parents. This is not a cause to panic; it is an opportunity.
There are stages of life that the modern westerner takes as a given. Children live at home until the end of school and then they move away for university, become indebted, or, perhaps, to get a job and a credit card. They then take on more debt to inhabit a “starter home”. When that pattern is disturbed, the people involved are blamed; it is assumed that it’s their fault.
Adult children move back with their parents because of employment and housing issues. This is not a failure of character, but a decision based on a dysfunctional economic and bureaucratic system. It is a rational response to the rug being pulled from under the feet of the younger generations.
The price of residential accommodation has been manipulated by the financial system and government regulation. If people can’t afford “to buy” a house, it is because banks, by expanding mortgage credit, are pushing up prices faster than wages are following. Such financialisation of the housing market has been a deliberate policy which has allowed the extension of credit to residential property not only for people who want to live in the property but to investors and landlords. As more money is lent for residential property, the more prices rise. This makes property seem like a good investment, so those who can, are able seek out further bank loans to buy even more property. Prices are correspondingly pushed higher. Simply put, if prices go up, prices will go up more. This is the phenomenon that investor George Soros calls “reflexivity”.
This state of affairs could be corrected by suitable government policy, however, governments across the world have been doing the opposite. To maintain the value of residential property, certain tricks have had to be applied. These include allowing residential property to be used for short-term rental, that is, AirBnB, encouraging mass immigration because housing all these people pushes up prices, giving visas for international students, which increases demand for property in towns with universities, and encouraging young people who have not yet been able to afford a “starter home” to turn to parents to finance the deposit. These tactics increase the demand for residential property, but as wages remain stagnant, property becomes increasingly unaffordable for normal people.
It’s a game that can’t be won and is pointless playing. Those who check out are being rational. Moving back in with Mum and Dad is sane.
After all, it is reciprocal social obligations that are the basis for society and the economy rather than transactions between strangers. Reciprocal social obligations mean that families can support each other; it’s how people get through hard times.
The paradigm taught by the media-industrial complex doesn’t work for most people. Some will take this hard, because they are unable to view any relationship other than as transactional:
While 60 per cent of parents said they do or would charge rent, 33 per cent charged between £101 and £200 per month.
It means the children are getting a huge discount on market rates, with the monthly average rent at £1,332 according to the Office for National Statistics.
Over a quarter of parents said they wouldn’t charge rent, but would ask for a contribution to bills or housekeeping, while 28 per cent said they wouldn’t charge anything at all.
Writing that children are getting a “huge discount on market rates” is an expression of sullen resentment. It reduces relationships to financial transactions. It puts a price on everything, including those things where a price shouldn’t be attempted to be assigned.
This is the mentality which devalues and vulgarises everything. Filial relationships need to be based on love, affection and duty, that is storge, στοργή or philia, φιλία; they need to be based on the moral order of the universe.
The hand-wringing by thisismoney, the Independent and others is a thin gauze of the deeper lie: copying life strategies pushed by the mainstream media was always a bad idea. Had people stayed at home, rather than chased the bright lights of the big city, they could have made more favourable financial decisions, saved up some money and then side-stepped the whole racket.
Getting people moved around whether voluntarily, forced through war and famine, or trafficked has always been big business. For example, following WW2 huge numbers of people moved, many forcibly; they came from Prussia and the Sudetenland, from Ukraine and Rumania. They fled as the Soviet Union cast its shadow over eastern and central Europe. Many ended up in western Europe, Canada, the US or Australia where they could make up for labour shortages and, thereby, suppress the wages of the local workers.
The thing is not to get sucked in by this and make your way around the profiteers and hucksters.
At 18 young people are encouraged to break family and community ties and attend university in a town other than the one they know. Thus is formed a national elite class that develops a suitable disdain for the oiks and plebs whom they can govern with haughty disregard. Similarly, the Erasmus programme in Europe is an attempt to create a class that is loyal to Europe and not to their states of origin. This is government-sponsored deracination which creates a state of sociopathy that makes the forging of relationships, whether conjugal, familial, communal or commercial difficult. Away from a support network, deracinated people develop coarse mercenary strategies, and having no structure to fall back on when things get tough; they become the system that has abused them.
Leaving home for success is a trope that is common in all sorts of media, but it is a lie peddled by a system that wants cheap labour and would rather have you travel to compete with other itinerants to bring down wages, rather allow local people bargaining power. The media pushes it through music like Bronski Beat’s Small Town Boy, Frank Sinatra’s New York, New York, or the Mamas and the Papas' California Dreamin’. It’s pushed by TV shows like Friends, by the New-York backdrop by Woody Allen’s movies, or romantic comedies like When Harry met Sally. These days it’s influencers; even a low-flier like, Annalena Baerbock, former German foreign minister, thinks it’s worth posting on Instagram about her sinecure in New York.
But don’t be fooled. The bright lights of the big city will empty your wallet and lead you from one disastrous relationship to another.
What they don’t tell you is that metropolitan success is usually an inside game. Big cities already have their elites, that is, a network of people who have gone to the same schools, the same universities, who have seen each other on holiday or at the same sports clubs. You’re either one of them, (you’ll know if you are), or you’re not, more likely. And it doesn’t matter how hard you try to “make it”, you’ll be looked over.
In your home town, this problem doesn’t exist. There is already a family, a community and you have the knowledge of how things work there. The building blocks of a successful life already exist.