I was dreaming last night about how our kids are now being indoctrinated to be fascinated with death and murder. Atavistic elements occur in their media, and fascinate them. Their parents are no longer parents. They say yes and no to them sometimes, but there is no true bond, in all too many cases, of genuine respect and affection.
Look at all these kids demanding gun control. Why are so many adults so eager to kowtow to them? It is a neurological FACT that brains don’t stop developing until some time in the 20’s. They are literally, from a developmental perspective, half baked.
And actually, would it not make sense to raise the voting age to the approximate age where most developmental neurologists agree that most people are fully developed? We could grant the right to vote early for everyone who serves in the military, because in any event such people are given a structure and sense of respect and honor, at least ideally, which emotionally make them fit to vote intelligently.
But we can’t let kids rule the roost. What I think far too many fail to see is that this is a cultural failure. It implies we see no real value in what is given in the air and water. We see no value in our own history, in the values our parents imparted to us (if any). It implies that it is smarter to start over and reinvent everything ex nihilo, generation after generation, than to listen to the combined wisdom of many thousands of years. This is both stupid and suicidal. Do you really want to place the future of humanity on a series of dice rolls, which will eventually come out ruinously?
We have a long history of brilliant minds. We have a long history of cultural habits that work. Children treating their parents with respect is one of the most important of these.
What I saw last night is that children who do not respect someone older and wiser than themselves can never fully mature into adults themselves. There is no model. They remain half baked. It is one thing to offer respect for a long time, before eventually doing things one’s own way. This respects the system itself, and we all need to live in systems. It is another entirely to begin throwing down something one doesn’t understand to begin with, in order to build something one is making up as one goes along. That is more of less what, in the purest form, the Khmer Rouge attempted. If you are not a complete fucking imbecile, you recall what happened there. It was filled with kids. 13,14,15 year old kids. Middle and High School age kids. Same thing with the Cultural Revolution, where kids were torturing and murdering their teachers, in a purely Satanic inversion of the social order.
It is certainly possible to posit, philosophically, many purposes and meanings for life. But to my mind, one of the most obvious is psychological maturation. This would apply whether you are “spiritual”, religious, or an atheist or agnostic. Maturing means to develop emotional control, interpersonal skills, knowledge of ones self and emotions, and in the end the capacity both to realize dreams, and to develop contentment and inner peace in nearly all circumstances. These are obviously desirable outcomes. It is really not up to discussion if one can remain physically a child all one’s life, so it is equally not up for discussion if one can or should remain so emotionally.
But in our present world, all of this is confused.