Why Marriage is Dying

By One Man's Kingdom | Source | April 4, 2009

It is a biological law that any abundant resource will eventually be exploited by a living thing.

Oceans full of vast plankton numbers will eventually bring forth creatures as large as whales that will consume in volumes equal to the resource available. Great numbers of whales will draw out enormous numbers of humans to plunder them in turn. Today, all the resources we live off - our fisheries, our arable lands, our fresh water - are rapidly being depleted. At the same time, our numbers and waist-lines are increasing. The connection is too obvious.

The labour of men is a resource too. Kings and women have recognised this for as long as humanity has existed. The king, or his modern day equivalent, exploits this resource through taxes and compulsory service. Women exploit it through marriage.

It's clear to see who the beneficiaries of marriage are, even if one only looks at the direction its legal reform takes. In the past 200 years, marriage has been radically altered. Fathers lost automatic custody of their children. Women became able to divorce unilaterally. A man's assets were re-branded 'marital property' and then control of them handed to the wife. 'Marital Rape' was established as a crime, and used with great effect to diminish a husband's status in the relationship. All reforms have been to benefit women, without exception. None have been actioned to benefit men as a group (although it's easy to find many men who are glad to be divorced).

What all these reforms represent is not so much the truth of the parasitic nature of the relationship, but the exercise of that biological law. Men's labour, once abundant, has now been exploited by its natural predator to the point that it is becoming scarce. Marriage is dying as surely as the Atlantic fishing industry. When you take far more than can be replenished, you end up with nothing, sooner or later.

One of the more interesting aspects of this phenomenon is the near blanket ban on informed commentary. In our more innocent years, we might have expected the media and academia to have kept tabs on any significant social development such as this, but they are less than useless on this subject. In fact, they tend to be agents of disinformation more than illuminators of mystery on this and several similar issues. The reasons are simple.

The media, contrary to their own P.R., are not voices of the public interest. They are salesmen. Everything they publish or broadcast is done with a view to their profitability. Women control 80% of all consumer spending, and wherever a man and woman buy cars or real estate together, it is the woman who decides 95% of the time. For the media, women are the only people that matter. No media will offend its most valued customers, and it certainly won't tell them that men are increasingly finding them odious and dangerous to be around. If there will be any coverage of the demise of marriage, it will be reframed to give the impression that it is women who are turning their backs on it.

Academia, apart from being dominated now by women, has other reasons for being ineffective. Throughout history, whenever intellectual muscle has had nothing to push against but the unknown, it has amazed us in its ability to cast light on what was once darkness. It is for this reason that we have so much respect for learning - we know what it can do, we have already seen it do great things. However, everything changes when the academic begins to inquire into matters that may compromise the interests of other people of influence. Galileo found this out when he probed the night sky with the telescope of his own invention and began to realise he could prove Copernicus's assertion that the Earth circled the sun. This huge advance in scientific knowledge, not only the fact but his method, earned him the unwelcome attention of the powerful Roman church. Galileo was contradicting the received view of the powers of his time. He was tried, found suspect of heresy, and spent the rest of his life under house arrest.

Such is the case now within our universities. The hard sciences and mathematics continue to astonish us as they explore ever further into territory unguarded by any gate-keeper, but as the focus of academic thought falls into any line of study that is already dominated by vested interests, progress slows or stops. Psychology, History, Sociology, Anthropology, Political Science and Law are not so much academic pursuits as they are citadels of special interest. They have become the new church of our time, with their established received views of how the world is. The academic is as much a defender of established faith today as he has always been (note that it was the church that established universities in the first place, for the training of the faithful).

However, whether our institutions care to acknowledge the truth ar continue to wallow in denial, the reality of marriage's decline continues unabated. Eventually even the most stubborn deniers will either relent or die. But don't expect any golden era of informed thought to follow. As usual, the traps of deceit will be set for the unwary in the future as well, only the deception will take a novel form. There is only one simple test to brave it all - who gets the benefit of your labour? You, or someone else?