So-Called Adulthood

We don't become adults out of biological inevitability, but on the basis of social expectation. In order to get around in society, we're expected to assume the qualities and characteristics of adulthood--the seriousness, the possessions, the decadence, the so-called sophistication. I say "so-called" because everything in adulthood can be prefaced by "so-called," as there is no law of biology stating that because one has become sexually mature, one must adopt an air of "sophistication" and suddenly be standing around at cocktail parties and sipping liquor out of tiny glasses, or whatever adults consider to be fun. Just like childhood, "adult" is a heuristic invented by adults, a product of culture that is informed by culture. It an illusion, and believing adulthood is intrinsically better than childhood is delusional.

Adults exist so that they can parade around their excesses and decadence as they desire. For instance, why should an adult prefer to stand around drinking liquor out of a tiny glass at a party? What purpose does it serve? It's not going to get them drunk, nor refresh them, nor even taste good. They are only drinking it so they can prop it at certain angles in their hands, feel the "ting ting" of the smooth glass (something so fragile in such capable adult hands, no less), and sip it so elegantly for something known to be so bitter (adults love irony like that), and all to project the image of some hallowed "experience." The projection of "life experience" accounts for nearly everything an adult does in the world, from the miniscule reflexes such as this to the creation of life itself. This projection becomes decadent when done in self-aggrandizing revelry beside a child, who is meant to be deprived of it.

To picture an adult expressing their self-aggrandizing decadence before a child is to see the non-verbal expression of the childish--particularly the taunt, the old "I know something you don't know!" or "I can do what you can't do!"  It is when an adult gets an ego boost or a feeling of superiority simply for being as nature made them to be, so that they may engage in certain behaviors to show off their superiority. During their self-aggrandizing revelry, they begin feeling superlative simply for being older--not for any particular reason (such as a special accomplishment), but simply for the fact of being older than someone else, as if that were its own accomplishment. If being older is a virtue, what other routine bodily functions we all share equally besides "growing up" can we make hallowed then? Breathing maybe? The point being, there is no such thing as emotional maturity, simply larger means of expressing the same old childish "one-up" behaviors.

Adults implicitly know this, or are at some level cognizant that they present the same behaviors as children, just with increasing intricacy. This is taken as granted, considering the writer of this piece is an adult and has concluded these things. Much of art and philosophy is an expression of mankind from a larger and more transcendental vantage, and the conclusion drawn most often is that mankind's own hallowed perspective is merely childish in comparison to this universe and the laws that fill it, or don't fill it. If adults are cognizant of the fallibility of their reasoning, on some level, and adult thoughts and behaviors are merely "larger" representations of  childhood ones, then we should expect that children are also cognizant about their own fallibility to a certain degree appropriate to their developmental capability. Nevertheless, both children and adults, including this one, fall prey to making inaccurate assumptions about this universe as if they were universal truths.

Just as a child may create and maintain fanciful scenarios to describe the workings of nature even as they are schooled in the sciences, that superstitious behavior does not stop at the artificial threshold of childhood. One inaccurate assumption is that adulthood is superior to childhood due to its experience, and childhood is superior to adulthood due to its innocence. This is pervasive, but that doesn't make it true.

Father's Day

Being a father or father figure, and being there for and taking care of a child, is the most important thing a man can do of his own free will. Absolutely nothing else comes close. Children need guidance and care, and they need men to provide this for them. In exchange, men need justification and purpose, to give of themselves for the benefit of our collective destiny, and children provide this for them. Paternal resolve is trivialized where maternal instinct is celebrated, but as with instinct comes mere biological necessity, with resolve comes human vindication.

Thus, we celebrate the strength of that personal resolve where it is most needed and cherished, in the form of fatherly love, in the will of the male role model, as do the children themselves.

Molestation Fixation

What good reason is there for the news to report on an incident such as molestation or bullying, involving a child, toss around speculation and rumor and tie in every major thought-stopping social issue and cliche whether related or not, for twenty paragraphs, and then not post a followup? What reasonable purpose does it serve to whip a community of readers and watchers into a frenzy over an isolated incident involving a child during a time when there are no answers (preceding a trial for instance), and then not report on the outcome or result of the events?

Are we to believe that the first mention of "Man facing rape charges" or "Area teen arrested for bullying" is the definitive statement on the event? What if the charges are thrown out? What if there is insufficient evidence? What if evidence was obtained illegally? These things don't seem to matter as much as the initial speculation, the unfounded rumor, and the redundant "reactions from locals" on those speculations and rumors, which the news media revels in with such lack of insight. Of course there is no reason, it is simply a ploy to sell news media to the public.

The inevitable outcome of this is that, particularly in cases where children are involved, the news media is able to get whole communities riled up about something, have them coming away believing that the whole world has gone to hell or that their children are in imminent jeopardy (as if they weren't prior to the broadcast) or that the kids have all gone crazy, and then not be there to inform them when justice is served and when all has been rectified. If there is no reason for people to be concerned, no reason to fear, no reason to pass unqualified judgment or dispersion, then the news media isn't interested in telling the story. 

In reality it is not the world going to hell, it's not the system failing itself, it's not the kids going crazy, it's the adults who have made money selling insanity about otherwise sane institutions, sane kids, and sane sets of circumstances. We live in a world where things happen and then they are resolved, some issues persist and some don't, some gain in intensity over time and some lose relevance. That is all there is, but in order to make it worth the public's while, these isolated events have to be turned into catastrophes, outrages, and emotional pits where we are expected to dump our personal burdens and frustrations. The outrage is presented and then we move on, and nothing is gained. If it was meant to be genuine, we'd hear the followup. 

There is a fascination with child molestation in particular that is grotesque in its own revelry. It is pornographic. Adults don't want to see healthy, happy children living healthily and happily, they want to see stories involving healthy, happy children getting abused or traumatized. If they didn't, then it wouldn't sell as well as it does. News media knows this fact about human nature, and it's time the viewing public becomes honest about it as well. 

We're all against child molestation and bullying, but all the expressed concern about child safety we're required to feel after the fact (once we're reminded to worry about it) isn't doing anything to prevent it from happening before the fact. Perhaps if we weren't so fascinated with the harm and destruction of children after the fact, we'd put more consideration into how we deal with situations before the fact. We're all for children living as happy and healthy as possible, but that doesn't mean we have to get ourselves off to the stories, speculations, and rumors of children who have been violated and victimized on (and by) the 6 o' clock news. 

Children get abused every day in every community, and nobody ever hears about it. Does every parent who loses a child (by state intervention) due to abuse or neglect or any other reason become vilified on the news? Of course not.  Only the easy targets get vilified: the bullies and the child molesters. That which doesn't land on the news is that which has become so customary we don't even pay attention to it anymore. Those who are being abused, the children, see it differently. And just as child molestation was once something just as swept under the rug, the "routine abuse" of children that so bores modern America will one day be as vilified as molestation.

It's a sane world with insane people living in it, so justice prevails, no matter what anyone thinks. 

The Forbidden Toy

In the last post I made the argument about the fallibility of adult cognition in both the extreme (cults) and the everyday, which should not be such a watershed. By the same extension, the same behaviors can be seen in children, but once again reproduced and expressed through "smaller means." Exactly what is meant by "larger" and "smaller" is a relative question pertaining to the existential, psychological, and biological differences we associate (via imperfect "adult-centric" cognitive schema) between childhood and adulthood, but children can be shown to be no more infallible than children in forming their thoughts about the world, relative to their cognitive capacities to do such.

One way the action of cognitive dissonance has been observed in children is characterized by an experiment carried out by Aronson and Carlsmith (1963), where children were asked to rank a selection of toys from the ones they found the most enjoyable to the least. After they were ranked, the experimenter would take a toy the child liked and leave the child alone with it in a room. Half the child subjects were told that they would be severely punished if they played with the toy and the other half were told the punishment would be temperate. Obviously they weren't going to punish the children.

Later the experimenter would remove the punishment, saying that there would be no repercussions from playing with the toy. The children in the moderate punishment condition were then less likely to play with the toy, even though they now understood there'd be no punishment. On the other hand, the severe punishment group were more likely to play with the toy once the punishment was lifted. When asked why, the children in the moderate condition expressed more disinterest in the toy, even though at one time they had ranked it as one of the most enjoyable to them. The children in the severe punishment condition expressed even higher interest in the toy than they had initially.

The conclusion from this study represents a concept called overjustification. The children in the severe condition had what is called a good "external reason" for not playing with the toy, because they believed they'd be punished severely if the did, even though they still found the toy as desirable. When the punishment was lifted they were more likely to play with it. The children in the non-severe condition had an "insufficient external reason" for not playing with the toy, so they had to make up their own justifications against playing with it. They had to convince themselves to find the toy less desirable, and therefore resort to not playing with it. Either way, children's internal feelings towards a toy were influenced based on how their beliefs about what the ramifications would be of playing with it, and once those beliefs turned out to be false, they had to resort to justification in order to suppress the effects of the disconfirmation. The stronger the effects of disconfirmation, the more justification is needed.

This overjustification for the children in the moderate condition when observed in childhood appears to result in a child's forced compliance (usually with an adult), and when observed in adulthood, results in the more extreme forms of social cohesion, shared social schemas, adult compliance (as seen in the Milgram studies), and all sorts of applications in social psychology from hierarchial structures like the military and government, to how adults formulate their laws and regulations or whether they resort to obeying them, and in the most extreme cases, where psychosis is involved, the formation of cults and other shared delusions (Festinger et al. 1956).

All this goes to show how children react in situations when prophesy fails. As is seen in adults, the stronger their personal conviction, the more they'll seek to justify their conviction retroactively when it doesn't pan out the way their beliefs where structured initially. Children behave much the same way. Any attempt to label children as cognitively handicapped in comparison to an adult is ignoring the similar expressions of the very same falibilities adults express.

When Prophecy Fails

Often when adults make conclusions about a child's "fantastical beliefs" it is usually to belittle the child's grasp on "reality" and reaffirm the adult in their ability to "perceive," as if perception was in their nature as adults. Clearly though, with the number of unverifiable beliefs that adults hold at any one time, adults are no better "perceivers" than children, it's just adults have a larger "sphere" in which they can draw resources from when perceiving and practicing meta-cognition. Nowhere was the fallibility of adult perception more dramatic than in the Festinger research into cognitive dissonance.

It's 1956. A story in the local Chicago news reports: "Prophecy from planet Clarion call to city: flee that flood." Apparently a housewife came to the conclusion that she had received a message from the planet "Clarion" about how the world was to end due to a massive flood, and that how on December 21st, all of human civilization would be wiped out.

In the analysis of the apparent similarities between childhood behavior and adult behavior, invariably the subject of "prophecy" comes up, and likewise, what happens to individuals when their beliefs about the world and their activities are incompatible. This tale of the housewife and her message from Clarion became the subject of a landmark study headed by Leon Festinger.

This housewife was successful in amassing a close-knit collection of believers from the community and surrounding areas, and they founded an encampment, where through their various stages of shedding selfishness (giving up jobs, families, all their money and possessions), they would be deemed worthy and be spared the devastation by the interception of a flying saucer. All of this was revealed through the "automatic" writings of the housewife, Mrs. Marion Keech.

More skeptical minds saw this event as an opportunity to gain some anecdotal insight into how human beings adjust when their beliefs and their behaviors come into conflict, for surely the the scientific community assumed the prophecy would fail. The idea, as carried out in Festinger et al. (1956), was for a team of social psychologists to infiltrate the group as prospective members and record the happenings as they observed them, the justifications, rationalizations, and social dynamic of the group. It was known that each member of the group had invested heavily in the belief that they would be saved from a great flood through their actions. Festinger hypothesized that following any disconfirmation of their belief the group would proselytize in order to lessen the negative effects of the disconfirmation.

The research team was so successful in presenting themselves as believers that one of them was thought to be an alien messenger in disguise, and soon the night of December 20th was drawing to a close. When midnight struck and no saucer appeared, the group wasn't devastated, and insisted that it wasn't technically midnight yet because another clock in the room was slow 5 minutes. By 4:00 am, with no visitors yet, another automatic writing session produced a "new response" from Clarion--that the "God of Earth" had spared the planet due to their actions. There was to be no devastation.

"The little group, sitting all night long, had spread so much light that God had saved the world from destruction" (Festinger et al. 1956).

The term "cognitive dissonance" refers to the uncomfortable feeling from having two conflicting thoughts at the same time, or from engaging in behavior that conflicts with one's beliefs, or from experiencing apparently conflicting phenomena. The theory put forth by Festinger based on his observations, as well as other more experimentally designed studies, is that when a human being is placed in a state of cognitive dissonance, they will engage in some thought or behavior that will sooth the discomfort--they'll warp their beliefs to fit their behaviors, ignore information that does not support their beliefs, or create new information that does.

My first comment in regards to this episode is that young children could not have constructed such a belief as elaborate as these individuals did in 1956. This is due to a number of factors: that children normally have little knowledge of extra-terrestrial bodies, extra-terrestrial intelligence, and the phenomenon of automatic writing, and that children don't physically own anything, and therefore "investment" in any one particular belief can not be measured in terms of what the child has "financially invested," (but it can be measured in other ways). Often if children do seem to have inordinate amounts of knowledge about such things, less skeptical adults see them as "Indigos," "Star Children," and other such entities, and more skeptical adults are right to point out the proliferation of children's educational media for the early appearance of such leaps of cognitive reasoning. It takes a lot for a young child to recognize the permanence of the Earth, and once a child is capable of doing that, they will broaden their cognitive sphere to that of the cosmos, as this adult cult was capable of doing.

To be fair though, to both developmental stages (and all those in between), the beliefs described above about the cult represent only a small fraction, a fringe in a larger majority. The majority of individuals do not believe such radical beliefs, but they experience conflicting beliefs nonetheless. One does not need to be a fringe, a cultist, or mentally disturbed to hold beliefs that could be termed "irrational beliefs," and one does not need to be less cognitively mature to experience cognitive dissonance over those beliefs when they fail to be confirmed in reality.

Beliefs lead to the amazing diversity of the human imagination, and to much of human culture, lore, and myth. The human race would not be as socially cohesive without these shared traditions. The point is not to diminish the importance of irrational beliefs but to understand the difference between what is fact and what is fiction, and the larger gray area in between that the human mind, for all it's abilities, has not been able to perceive yet. Most importantly, this notion of adults having the ability to perceive the optimum should be dismissed. It is simple arrogance on the part of one adult over another, and one adult over a child. Instead, human cognitive development should be interpreted as a summation of the resources physically and mentally available to the individual at each stage of development, along the lines of a continuum, the likes of which Piaget only hinted at: that the adult is in fact not a sage of "cognitive competence," but like children, simply displays a "relative degree of functioning."

If this is so then adults couldn't design a test to verify whether or not adults are cognitively competent, because to do so would require knowledge about the universe and higher functions of the mind that human beings have not accessed yet. It would be the equivalent of children testing themselves on knowledge and cognitive functioning that only their respective biological and psychological development has access to, and then declaring that result definitive. If this is true, than it poses a problem scientifically, and must be taken on its own terms.

Is Childlove Pedophilia?

No.

Nobody is ever going to relate to a pedophile's perspective because nobody but the pedophile is a pedophile. It's kind of like a guy who has been blind since birth, trying to tell a room full of sighted people what the room looks like. They know what the room looks like, so anything he says isn't going to convince them to un-see what is right before their eyes. In the case at hand, what is right before our eyes is that any advocacy for pedophiles is superfluous and meaningless to the treatment of children in society, and therefore, it is a perilous distraction.

Advocates for that particular group continue on under this blindfold, attempting to dictate to a world full of non-pedophiles the shape of that world without ever having seen it first hand. They mangle sighted science to fit their blinded perspective. They distort sighted opinion to fit into their blinded schema of personal oppression. They do not do this consciously though, as society often thinks. They genuinely believe that they are better apt to see a sighted world with their blinded set of eyes than the sighted are--to see children better under their own eye than society does under its eye.

Neither eye is all that partial, and both seem exploitative. To society, children are garden plants which just absorb services from the environment like plants, and have to be cultivated like plants for proper harvest. To pedophile advocates, that "garden plant" perspective is just an obstacle in the path of their agenda for personal self-fulfillment in a world that hates them, to be fought against for their own sake, or stepped around. Children have nothing to do with either perspective, which is why pedophilia and Childlove are not the same thing and can never be the same thing.

The childlover does not love a child because an aspect of his biology (for example, his sexuality) compels him or her to, he or she does it because to not do it would result in two deprived souls--one a child, and another an adult, who would otherwise be crying out for love, attention, and guidance. Intercourse never amounts to something this intimately deep or strengthens the human bond on its own (without love being present), and therefore, should not be prescribed for children or adults in the manner that the pedophile advocates do (as good "in and of itself"). Nothing is good in and of itself, for anyone, least of all sex (adults included).

Coming Off the Community

The thrust of everything I do is not to distance the childlover from society, but to invite society into his world. I wish to compromise the extremism in the fringe group that is Childlove and instead appeal to the combined better nature of humanity with the better nature of this movement. I want to help redirect the undeserved resentment for either side of the divide into something that we can all work together on for society's own benefit. I don't want to be a part of any agenda that seeks only to separate mainstream people from the childlover, and the childlover from the mainstream of society, society from the child, and the child from society, but I will support any agenda that wishes to find common ground among all members.

The fringe groups bound up in this want nothing more than to alienate society with their "outsider behavior" just as society has alienated them. There is however no chemical on the skin, no mutant formation, nothing to distinguish them apart from society on the face alone, and even still, they prefer to alienate the society which may have never personally alienated them. They complain of how "their kind" is treated, and then do nothing on the "personal" level to rise above the treatment of "their kind" as an individual.

Keep in mind, they assigned themselves the category of "outsider," not society. Society can't tell the difference between someone who has declared himself an "outsider" and someone who has not. It can only judge them by their works. And because, on the whole, they have no works to speak of, they can only be judged on their words. And because their words only revel in their own self-mockery and ironic stabs at being clever, there is nothing to judge them by, and must simply be left to their own disintegration.

Those who assign themselves "outsider" put so little value on the clarity of their face, which appears no different than anyone else's, and instead put such a large value on the obscurity of the community they assigned themselves. They place so much value on being supported by that community, and so little value on supporting themselves so that they may learn and grow by their own initiative. They don't teach themselves to walk. They maintain their communities because they're comforted enough by them to keep crawling back.