The Saturating Corruption of Influence

The boiling water.

We’re getting boiled alive and we don’t even know it. A friend and I were having a discussion that turned towards how we’ve been affected by other people. You find yourself among a group of people who all think a particular way, or under a leader who is charismatic but not necessarily a caring shepherd, or you’re just floating along in the current of your subculture. There’s an influential pull to all that. Our sons are under the influence, too. They have that person that is speaking into their lives. Perhaps those words don’t bring good out of them. Instead of putting fire in their bones or steel in their spines, the well or ill meaning are draining the spirit from our sons. These influences could be individual people, culture, entertainment, news, peer groups, all sorts. If we recall back to when we first talked about the three cords of Poseidon, he looms in the waves of spiritual, world, and personal.

It can take years to see it. By then, it might feel too late. You can either give up and drown or compromise to living a lie. The blinders are on and it’s been dark out there. Life is rolling along and the family ship is getting rocked. Heck, there’s days where you don’t even feel qualified to be the captain of your family because of all the ways you’ve screwed up.

You’ve followed a wrong heading.

You’ve stopped at a debauched port.

You’ve chased a fading and worthless treasure.

You’ve listened to the whispers about secret knowledge.

Why did you do all these things? You followed an influence. You either made decisions on the best information you had at the time, if I’m being generous, or you made decisions out of a completely lazy, selfish, and abdicating purpose. Probably somewhere in between. We’re all a motley crew of motivations being influenced and pulled and directed by maps that aren’t the easiest to follow. The bottom line is our situation is dire, the time is short, our days our numbered, our sons are getting older and we’re not getting any younger. Poseidon is raging, prowling the waters in search of someone to devour. What better way to wreck a people than by wrecking the men or the boys who will turn into men.

Are you following so far? Stick with me. We have a ship to turn around.

The rot in our bones.

Slowly but surely we and our sons become the proverbial frogs in boiling water. Except instead of being boiled alive, we marinate in these influences so much that our bones begin to rot. As our bones rot, we don’t have the strength, stamina, and structure to become men who can look into the storm of life with a sneer. We don’t pass down a legacy to our sons as we struggle with it on our own. They don’t learn to laugh at the days to come. All of this equals boys failing to launch. You can see it all around and it manifests in different ways.

Our sons have a lack of ambition.

Our sons accept being mediocre.

Our sons become shortsighted and only live for the cash of today instead of building a life that will serve as a lighthouse for the generations to come.

Our sons build mud pies in the slums because they don’t know anything about having a holiday at the sea. (C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory)

Our sons become jellyfish floating on the waves of life.

Today’s boys aren’t incentivized to rise above a future as anchorless waifs. I train automotive technicians for a living. This week, I saw an advertisement for a gas station that pays more per hour to clean bathrooms than most entry level automotive technicians can make. Why have an education when you can succumb to the influence of dollars now?

Here’s the rub. You may make the dollars now. Your son may make the dollars now. When the unexpected chaos of a white whale sinks your ship, how will you provide then? What do you have to fall back on? If all you know how to be is a grunt, you won’t have the sea legs to stand when the ship starts being tossed about by the waves. Search engines didn’t help me come up the original author of this quote, but it still holds true: Prepare your child for the road, not the road for your child. 

This is one of the reasons I write Fightin’ Poseidon. Boys are stuck at 12 years old. We have to help them but we have to become men than can help them.

We can’t give them what we don’t have ourselves.

The wind in our sail.

I wish there was a single silver bullet for this wolf. It’s a complex problem and I’m over here trying to tackle it with an appeal to nautical heroism and adventure and fighting watery dragons. If you haven’t already picked up on the irony, I am acting as an influence. The downside here is that I am also in the cultural pot you are.

How can we even know which way is north let alone set a course to follow?

There’s so many voices. Our family. Our friends. Our pastors. Our YouTube channels. The manosphere. The dadosphere. The intellectual dark web. The news. Our leaders. Our rebels. The old guard. The new guard. One voice that I believe shares wisdom worth giving an ear to is Aaron Renn. There’s a lot of fog out there.

I propose two anchors that will be helpful yet I suspect will be seen as boring, expected and unfollowed.

Anchor 1. In the book God in the Dock, there is an essay C.S. Lewis titles On the Reading of Old Books. We are under all kinds of error in our age and the only way to combat this is through the reading of old books. Yes, those old books were written in the influence of the error or their age, but those errors will not be the same errors as ours. Truth will stand the test of time and error is ever fluctuating.

I have gone to Lewis twice so far in this e-mail, which reveals I am influenced by what he was writing. Yet he is still closer to our age than older men like G.K. Chesterton, J.C. Ryle, Charles Spurgeon, Thomas Brooks, John Bunyan, Boniface and Augustine. All of these men found themselves in their in the world and zeitgeist that was dominant in their day.

Yet, there was a bedrock of truth that was a rock to build their foundation on. Anchor 2. That truth is the Bible. Before we slide down the slippery slope of how unreliable the Bible is because of how much has been lost in translation, we have far more copies of the Bible than we do the works of Homer yet we don’t doubt the Iliad.

Of course, it will take more than the reading of books and collection of knowledge. We must do something with it. We must take action, but what action we take will largely depend on what influence we’ve been under. Influence is much like the wind and currents which act upon us, so which way will we go? Staying still is not an option for those who want to go somewhere.

If we are influenced and blown about by every newsletter, podcast, friend, enemy, acquaintance, musician, church, pastor, denomination, news outlet, social media post, channel video, author, influencer, family member, neighbor, co-worker, client, employer, governing authority, or anyone else I didn’t name, we’ll never go anywhere. We must be anchored in what’s true, and despite modern appeals to relativism, it is possible to know what’s true and what is not.

If you can test what is said and hold it against a standard that has not shifted, you will find what is true. If you search out the treasure of wisdom and test that it proves true instead of only fashionable, you will find out what it true. Truth is trustworthy, but it doesn’t always make us feel good. It’s not nice. Its not what we want to hear, but it is kind. If we set our courses on truth, then the wind will be in our sails and not blow us into the rocks.

If we are sailing in this way, ridding our bones of the rot by filling them with spirit and truth, then we will be far better equipped to show our sons how to fight Poseidon for themselves.

What other way can we save our sons from becoming shipwrecks?

If you found this newsletter helpful, please share it with someone who would also think so. Talk to y’all in two weeks.

~ J.P. Simons

PS: The podcast Cultish did a series last year on the reliability of the Bible. If you’d like to spend a couple hours testing these claims, it’s well worth your time.

Cultish: Did Constantine decide what was in the Bible?

Cultish: Nicaea and the Lost Gospels