CONSERVATIVES AND THE FAMILY 47

younger members, from the family was an absolute neces-

sity. And this planned spiritual alienation from kinship

was accomplished, not only through the negative proc-

esses of spying and informing, but through the sapping of

the functional foundations of family membership and

through the substitution of new and attractive political

roles for each of the social roles embodied in the family

structure. The techniques varied. But what was essential

was the atomization of the family and of every other type

of grouping that intervened between the people as society

and the people as a mindless, soulless, traditionless mass.

What the totalitarian must have for the realization of his

design is a spiritual and cultural vacuum."

George Orwell, in his novel 1984, describes London

children taught to spy systematically on their parents, and

approved for bringing about their destruction. This final

disintegration of family love, and all love, already is a

reality in the nations dominated by the Communists. And

if the family continues to decay in the rest of the world,

such a culmination is conceivable even in our society.

Some of the deliberate or quasi-deliberate techniques

of the mass-state for undermining ti-Ii family are these:

(1),Taking the instruction of children entirely away

from their parents by the official adoption of theories that

prescribe "educating the whole child" in the state schools,

with a corresponding depreciation of parental intelli-

gence and rights.

(2),Creating "youth organizations" to take young

people quite out of the sphere of the family in their

leisure hours, and to indoctrinate them in the ideology of

the mass-state.

(3) ^Abolishing the inheritance of family property,

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