Best time to raise dragon-slayers is when dragons are everywhere

By David McElroy · March 15, 2022

I overheard two couples talking today about what a terrible time it is to be bringing children into this world.

“The world’s going to hell in a handbasket,” one of the men said. “You can’t do anything about it and your kids are going to end up rotten and screwed up from the drugs and peer pressure on TikTok and stuff. We wouldn’t have had kids if we’d known it would be this bad.”

The others seemed inclined to agree. For a couple of minutes, they talked about the bad influences that had affected their children — teen-agers, it seemed — from schools and social media.

It wasn’t my conversation, so I didn’t interrupt. I agree with them that the world is messed up. Western culture has become horribly dysfunctional, even though most people are too intimidated to be honest about what they see going on. There are deadly problems facing us everywhere — intellectual, cultural, moral, economic and more. These problems are fire-breathing dragons who threaten us all.

But I kept thinking about some words I read the other day:

“Never feel sorry for raising dragon-slayers in a time when there are actual dragons.”

Yes, there are dragons all around us. They’re a danger to you and me. They threaten our values. They threaten our futures. These dragons endanger everything good and decent about what humanity has struggled to build today. They threaten to drag us closer and closer toward evil.

And these dragons threaten our children. If left unchecked, these dragons will program our children to become the dragons of the next generation. The dragons don’t just kill. What they do is worse. They’re more like “vampire dragons.” They poison the minds and hearts of our children — and turn them into creatures who fight against everything good and holy.

But that happens only if we refuse to raise dragon-slayers.

Human beings are born with an instinct to fight for what’s right, but our dysfunctional popular culture numbs our young to that desire. It teaches them to be docile and compliant. It programs them to reject any notion of truth and objective reality. The culture turns them into consumers — people who will do what they’re told and imitate what they see on a screen.

If your children end up “rotten and screwed up from the drugs and peer pressure on TikTok,” it’s because you allow social media and their peers to raise them. It’s because you have given up the decision-making and education of your children to politicians and activists and “experts.”

If you turn your children over to the influence of popular media — whether television or social media or entertainment — they will learn to earnestly believe in things which you know to be nonsense. But they won’t know that.

If you turn the education of your children over to a government-run school establishment, you will end up with children who believe what the dominant culture wants them to believe. Your children will believe they are educated and prepared for the world. They won’t realize how their minds and values have been poisoned.

Why do you do these things? It’s because you’ve been taught to believe this is what good parents do. You’ve been taught that “experts” know how to educate your children — and that you don’t. You’ve been taught that keeping your children away from dangerous media influences is “isolating” them. And you’ve been taught that “public schools” are the bedrock of a positive society.

You believe these things because you grew up exposed to popular culture and government schools and peer pressure — and it didn’t ruin you. So you assume your children will be fine, too.

But if media and schools were already heading in the wrong direction 20 years ago or 40 years ago, they’ve reached a far more dangerous place today. What your children experience — from popular media and from government schools — is not what you experienced.

Politically motivated schools have become dangerous dragons which are often turning your children into creatures you won’t recognize. Media sources are dumbed-down and filled with dangerously evil dragons. Exposing your children to these dragons will very likely destroy them.

If this is the way you want to approach raising children, maybe it’s not a great time to have kids. If you want the culture and the politicians to raise your children, of course you’re likely to be disappointed.

But you can choose to raise dragon-slayers instead.

You can choose to decide what your children learn. You can choose to associate with people whose values reflect truth and decency, to the best of your ability. You can choose what your children are exposed to — until you’ve built their values firmly in a way that they’re likely to oppose dragons.

The notion that you shouldn’t “isolate” your children from media and peer influences is bizarre to me. If your family was exposed to a massive pipe which was spewing raw sewage all over them, would you fret about “isolating them from this sewage” or would you do everything in your power to protect them from the danger?

The world is full of dragons. Until we start raising more dragon-slayers, the dragons are going to keep winning.

Even if you do everything right, it’s possible your children will still turn out wrong. But if you do everything in your power to turn them over to the clutches of evil dragons, don’t be surprised if they become dragons themselves.

You can raise dragon-slayers, but it has to be a conscious choice.

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