Roth: Every rotten part of our culture has its origin
in the Marxist ideology that the world is divided
into the oppressors or the oppressed.
It's so easy to fall into the trap
of thinking success is limited to our jobs.
We are sold that lie every single day.
We are told that getting married
and having a family is boring.
We are told that being religiously observant
is constraining.
We are told that being involved
in your community is a burden.
We see it every day in articles online,
in movies, in the shows we stream.
Every message we get in this modern hustle culture,
outside of our religious communities and our own intuition,
tells us to throw real purpose out the window
in favor of what amounts to a careerist grind.
True success is climbing the totem pole or being famous
or making lots and lots of money
or even just living in a perpetual "treat yourself" mindset
for your personal fun and ease
to the detriment of everything else.
Where does this lie come from?
Unironically, Marxism.
Every rotten part of our culture has its origin
in the Marxist ideology that the world is divided
into the oppressors or the oppressed.
For sex, the story began in the 1960s
with the women's liberation movement.
Here, the oppressors and the oppressed
were divided by gender.
Women are born victims.
Men are born oppressors.
Men have the power of the patriarchy
and the male privilege to sleep around
and have high-powered careers
without worrying about having children or a marriage.
When it comes to sex, the Left treats a high-powered career
at the expense of a family as a thing men get to do
that women are oppressed by not getting to do.
That was the big innovation
of the women's liberation movement.
All of a sudden,
the fact that men worked outside the home
to support their families became what success looked like,
and that success was something hoarded by men
at the expense of women.
Instead of viewing men's hard work as their role
in helping provide for their wives and children,
men's work became the end-all-be-all
of fulfillment and meaning.
The only way for women to find the same happiness
and purpose these men supposedly had
was for them to do what men do,
working outside the home in a life-consuming career.
The media ran with this,
helping to erase the worth of stay-at-home mothers
by promoting feminists like Betty Friedan
and her book, "The Feminine Mystique,"
which called suburban home life
"a comfortable concentration camp."
The fact that men and women naturally have different roles,
and the fact that women find their joy and meaning
in motherhood, was unimportant in the face of the revolution
that the women's liberation movement was fighting for.
The most important point to understand
about this feminist revolution
is that it wasn't saying that women could work.
It was saying that women should work.
It was saying that the family is a prison
that chains women to misery,
and that truly free-thinking women
would naturally put career ahead of marriage and motherhood.
The funny thing about this masculine ideal of success
that the women's liberation movement sold to women
is that it never even existed for men.
It was never the case that men somehow uniquely benefited
from the soulless, careerist pursuit of money and status
without room for God, love, family, and community.
Some men do live that way,
but no men benefit from it.
The women's liberation movement took the caricature of men
who live only to work and sleep around,
which was a negative stereotype,
and started portraying that as the actual epitome
of the good life.
Instead of realizing
that when men did work outside of the home,
it was for the family,
the Left acted as if a successful career
was in and of itself the point.
The redefinition of success for women
ended up hurting men, too.
For both men and women,
the idea of self-involved ambition
and responsibility-free fun became the standard assumption
of the good life.
Marriage and children became the dreaded end
of the good times,
and something that people could, and should,
keep putting off
until they were older or less selfish or done having fun,
which is, of course, an utterly unappealing way
to think of having a family at all.
So we've established two things.
One, the careerist idea of success
and the so-called freedom of single-ness
at the expense of family is a modern invention of the Left
as part of its attempt to destroy traditional values.
And two, just like everything else concocted by the Left,
it gets human nature completely wrong
and will make you miserable if you believe in it.
Armed with that information,
the next step is to prepare yourselves
to deal with the pressure you'll be under
to conform to this idea of success
as you enter college and the real world.
Not just conform in terms of trying to fit in,
but also in terms of judging
and comparing yourself to others' careers and ambitions
and beating yourself up if you make the boring, unexciting,
or unimpressive decision to live a loving,
more quiet life of family and faith.
Internalizing the careerist,
me-me-me excitement of the modern idea of success
is a big danger for anyone.