Notes on Fallibility As Revealed in Children and Adults
The Child as a Willing Entity
It doesn’t take a good deal of imagination to believe the child is a willing entity. The child exists in midst this irrational world as an irrational being capable from the very earliest of fronting their personal will out on their surroundings. The will is a behavior that is directed intentionally, and thus would not incorporate infants who may to much degree be guided by instinct and necessity. Every young child comes to a point where they begin exercising behaviors by intent, affecting and experimenting with the physical objects of their environment as directed from their own internal directives, as well as at the suggestion of others.
Western culture naturally accepts that children are willing entities (regardless of whether they are or not), and regardless of whether they are legally given status a willing agents, for if they did not think a child had an independent will, then they could not believe that a child’s will could be corrupted by the Harsh World to begin with. It would be impossible for the world to corrupt or exploit something that has no material or even existential being. In this society much is done to prevent child corruption and exploitation, and much corruption and exploitation is maintained, so it seems obvious to conclude that the culture views children as willing entities with certain entitlement and restrictions. Even if we observe the sociology, it appears obvious that western society regards children as willing agents simply because they are easily exploited by adults who “know better.”
The child’s will is in tandem with their biological capacities and environmental opportunities, and is often nothing but a slave to them. As a child encounters situations in the real world, the will is created out of biological initiatives or environmental proximities. When individuals form in their heads the conception of a normal child, one typically expects to find a child who is naturally autonomous, independently driven, perhaps even to the point where they suffer from lack of self control. Whether or not this is an accurate depiction of children in general is misleading, because obviously so much of what determines how autonomous a child is by “nature” depends on their temperament and socio-cultural upbringing.
Not all children practice the same degree of autonomous behaviors, but all children have an independent will that expresses itself. The expression of the will takes on innumerable varieties, even if it doesn’t express itself in developmentally appropriate ways. For children who do take initiative in their environment, and even for those who are slow to warm up, their originally non-discretionary movements are obviously subject to criticism, coercion, punishment and reward, as well as their ability to interpret these external stimuli and a host of other internal and external factors. Young children, just as adults, don’t always act in regards to rational thought, and at the earliest are not capable of certain higher function of reasoning without the scaffolding present by an adult caregiver.
This indiscretion on behalf of the child potentially exposes them to many powerful experiences that can have self-induced benefits on their development, such as wandering off and discovering new opportunities for learning and experience when adults would more prefer to remain along the preset path. Just as well though, this indiscretion potentially exposes them to many hazards. An autonomous will takes risks in the world, often without contemplation about the realistic consequences of such, and never truly with an accurate picture of the realistic resulting outcomes. Children experience similar periods of “not knowing” the full consequences of their actions of their phenomenal selves. Therefore, having a will carries with it consequences in the material world as well as opportunities for positive expression.
When a child goes running after a ball that has just been tossed into the street, if the child has not been made conscious of the fact that the open road is a potentially hazardous area, they may simply run out indiscriminately and place themselves in a hazard by the mere act of their will. For purposes of discussion, we’ll just assume all they will is that they are able to retrieve the ball, and unfortunately may not foresee or adequately understand the danger that can happen as a result of acting on that will in that circumstance. This is probably the clearest example of a young child placing themselves into a hazard based on the combination of acting on their independent will as rationalized by their still ignorant faculties to assess outcomes in hazardous situations. Often they reveal their fallible human qualities, and just as often as those fallible human qualities expose them to danger, they also expose them to beneficial situations.
Another characteristic of the effects the will is that they may be either or both immediate—in that the child immediately acquires the consequence of acting on an ignorant will, and the not-immediate—in that a child will at some point based on the actions of the present face consequences equally unforeseen to them in the present. A child who is motivated by an ignorant will is opened up to both potential benefits and serious hazards, either those hazards are expressed in short term and/or long term consequences.
This distinction between the hazards is important because it defines what type of hazard a child is potentially exposing themselves to. Hazards that affect the body, such as drinking bleach, have very dire immediate effects that require immediate attention by anyone in charge of caring for the child. Hazards that affect the child’s psychology, such as exposure to sex and violence, are traditionally thought to have more long term effects (positive and negative) on the child’s life and personality, for instance. How an adult reacts to these events should reflect the immediate seriousness of what the child has exposed themselves to and not dwell on estimating the future. The future outcomes of a child exposed to a so-called psychological hazard are incalculable in the life of that particular child. One can guide their intuitions about the non-immediate affects of hazards based on scientific trends, but with no certainty generalize the results to any child. Doing such is nothing short of jumping the gun for the purpose of alleviating personal fear or for the sake of satisfying an individual feeling of responsibility for the state of youth. When a child encounters any hazard that has its effects in the non-immediate it is imperative that one work slowly and consider possible positive outcomes of the situation. Broad brush strokes slapped down in the rush to "do something" only bury the child’s fine-line character on the canvass, they don’t make it more vibrant.
The most important aspect of the hazards that a child’s will finds itself stumbling upon, from the fallible perspective of adults, is that some of them are not truly hazardous. Just as a child’s innocence is a mainly a social construction, so are so many of the so-called hazards that are said to inevitably affect children negatively. In the broadest sense, if one necessarily considers the Harsh World to be a hazard to children, then they are guilty of turning the representation of the Harsh World as a hazard into something that is necessarily and objectively negative. The use of the so-called negative effects of hazards can often create positive outcomes. If a child is reared to fear all hazards, they’ll become consumed in them, but if they are reared to understand all hazards, there is the possibility they can grow off them and direct their will to work around them. A child needs a moderate degree of hazard in their life, as anyone does, in order to grow resistant, and the child grown protected from all hazards is the child who is most vulnerable. So therefore, the ultimate end result of extreme protectionism, if it were capable of actually achieving it, is contrary to its own principles.
It should be noted that children through their ignorant will are just as responsible for perpetuating the mechanism driving Harsh World as adults are. By exposing themselves to hazards due to their inadequate conscience, they open up for themselves the unforeseen consequences of their actions which include the furtherance of their own subjugation and the paranoia in society. Most often this comes in the form of discipline or some restrictive impositions on the part of an adult who is looking out for some idea of the child’s best interests. A child is often capable of foreseeing the immediate consequences of their actions, whether they anticipate or have experience with receiving discipline or some kind of immediate reprimand following the action, and then it’s just up to them to decide whether to do the action or not.
As child wills are made subject to adult ones, a child will at any one time decide to direct their will in retaliation or in conformity, and this is how they choose to impress their will on adults who are seeking to impress their will over them. A conforming child takes away an adult’s ability to overtly impress their will over them, and a retaliatory child directly challenges the adult will. All children vitalize their will in both respects at different times, as the only function of them being made subjects. It is this nature of retaliation on the part of the adult to the child’s so-called misbehaving that will form our critique of the adult will. From a child-centric standpoint, the adult will and “way of life” is depicted as somehow dethatched and distinct from the one they hold. How a child views adulthood varies between children, time periods, cultures, and innumerable other variables—from complete and even religious deference to authority to rejection and dismissal of such conventions. In any case, a child’s opinion of adults is influenced out of a desire of envy for the adult’s authority. As with the case of religious deference for authority, the child expects to gain status and approval from the authority as means to acquire power from its so-called source. On the other hand, a child who is persuaded to reject such conventions attempts to gain authority through redefining its meaning, usually such that it enables them to emancipate themselves.
Children live in a world where being small is considered a deviation from humanity, and have it drilled in from the earliest days. Adults frequently resort to conventions such as “bigness” as being more worthy states of being. How often do adults say to a child, “Look how big you’ve grown,” as a means to uplift the child’s self-esteem? Or how often do adults ask a child how old they are, for whatever purpose, and usually impart that being a child is not as preferable to being grown? In any case, such linguistically pretences of “bigness” and “smallness” seem decidedly adult-centric, and if society were one arranged in such a way that children were the authority, we could expect to see a reversed evaluation of the worth of being big verses being small. From an objective stand point, it doesn’t appear either is a preferable position of reference. It is like asking the question on whether it is better to be short or tall. Though children are objectively smaller than adults, it does not strike one that such qualifications in and of themselves mandate one’s authority.
In the example of a child running out into the street after a ball, it is often the case that a child is cognizant of the potential hazard but faces a moral dilemma going to retrieve it if the roadway is clear but going into the street is forbidden. Like adults though, they are not always capable of foreseeing the secondary consequences of acting on their will. Sometimes the non-immediate consequences of an action such as running after a ball in the road aren’t clear, and most often the consequences aren’t defined in the haphazard state of affairs that is the world. In such, children are bound to be in harms way regardless of any equally fallible adult intervention, and regardless of whether or not they are truly willing entities.
The Adult as a Willing Entity
We accept that individuals can and do work in the world for their own motivations that both benefits and harms the world in its immediate effects and maintains the structures that perpetuate the Harsh World. The adult will is not always effectively capable, just as the child’s isn’t, of understanding where a child’s will is placing the child in jeopardy and where it isn’t, and then reacting appropriately. An adult’s will is not objectively administered in the world, seeing as no pure objectivity exists outside of its social construct. The adult will suffers from the same reliance on the phenomenal, here-and-now, material existence as a child’s will does. This is how an adult is capable of making the same mistakes in reasoning about the outcomes of their activities that a child does, but only on a more complex level of typical adult intricacy. This expansion of intricacy in the adult social world is more than likely developmentally relative.
Despite the fact that an adult’s will is not completely objective in rationalizing the world for their child, they still have the ability to help their child avoid falling into these hazards. If a child runs out into a busy street after a ball ignorant of the hazards of their surroundings, it takes an individual with the experience and knowledge of such hazards to rescue the child from the indiscrimination of their will. This defines the very nature of most interactions with children that are motivated at least in part by a desire to improve a child’s situation or save a child from the potentially harmful effects of their ignorance. Note that this does not include adult interactions that are primarily personal or profit oriented, as we shall observe more in detail later in this discourse.
It stands to reason that while adults rush about attempting to protect children from potential hazards that not only are their capabilities to recognize a real hazard often wanting, but also is their ability to foresee one. Actions occur in the world and people interpret them as being potentially hazardous or not based on their specific qualities usually by measuring in some subjective or scientific way the harm that they cause. Some actions are deemed no more potentially hazardous to children than what the child would normally be exposed to and are not dealt with, while others amass much criticism and reproach. Often there is not an agreement, even in the scientific community, on what is truly hazardous to children in and of itself, and just as often people inflate, misunderstand, and/or create hazards for themselves and children. This is all a part of the inevitable mechanism.
In fact, there is little to distinguish the adult will from the child will. Both are for the most part socially and biologically produced imperatives to act on the world in various means, and both are subject to the same lack of foresight, schematic over-simplifications, and what Nietzsche described as a Will to Power. The distinguishing factors between the child’s will and the adult will are structurally based; the adult will has greater complexity but still the same fundamental flaws, it has the same altruistic streak but still the same oppressive nature. In this, children and adults express their human qualities regardless of the developmental stage they are in. Despite the fact that there is little to distinguish them, the adult perspective prevails because it maintains its power over the child, so the world as we know it runs on the adult point of view. We have only ever rarely been able to escape the adult will to power.
Just like the child will, a characteristic of the effects the adult will is that they may be either or both immediate—in that the adult immediately acquires the consequence of acting on an ignorant will, and the not-immediate—in that an adult will at some point based on the actions of the present face consequences equally unforeseen to them in the present. An adult who is motivated by an ignorant will is opened up to both potential benefits and serious hazards, either those hazards are expressed in short term and/or long term consequences. The following will attempt to sketch out how judgments by an adult’s ignorant will perpetuate the inevitable Harsh World and feed the social mechanism, particularly in regards to the dehumanization of children and the social hazards that reveal themselves as consequences in the non-immediate.
According to the adult will, a child is super-human in the sense that they embody some pure aspect of human nature lost to adults, but sub-human in the sense that they are too immature to vitalize their faculties in the same way adults do. Let us see this statement regarding the innocence of children as not an objective fact, but rather just an example of the prevailing adult ideology that imposes itself onto reality. Youth rights advocates in decades past have called this view adult-centrism, which seems to be an adequate term to describe it. As adults are prone to say that preoperational children are ego-centric, by the same notion most adults are adult-centric in the mindset and impress this perspective onto children. Regardless of whether the adult-centric mindset posits that children are sub-humans or super-humans, the one thing it does not posit is that they are humans. Human, at least to how even the most liberal adults understand it, is that which is closest to the adult way of life. What is left out is the human qualities of the child.
A child’s way of life is considered to be a special deviation from what is human (either it is held to a higher standard or than adults or on a lower one). Often an adult will assume they are uplifting a child by raising them to a higher standard than adults, but in actuality are just subjugating them in much the same way that women were once placed on pedestals. What is meant by an “adult’s way of life” or a “child’s way of life?” At the risk of imposing schematic representations onto these categories, it should be sufficed to say that a child’s way of life is whatever lifestyle possible for them with the cognitive and physical abilities they have, and likewise for adults. This definition is purposefully broad because there is considerable overlap between what adults and children are capable of and maturation and individual circumstances determine what they are capable of as does culture. In any case, in most societies view childhood as a distinct entity from human nature, and even pose elaborate rituals signaling the passage of their youth from childhood to adulthood. Entrance into adulthood is entrance into humanity.
Much has been written about how the Western, affluent world, nurtures its young from childhood into humankind, it is done through adolescence—a time of life that has disturbingly become extended over the last century to encompass an individual’s life long after biological and socio-cognitive maturation has occurred. Traditionally, maturation meant the child had attained biological and socio-cognitive parity with adults. In the modern world, for cultural and societal reasons, the process to being an adult is more complicated than it would be if the western world subsisted as hunter-gatherers, and likewise feels it takes more years than biologically necessary to prime children for adulthood. During this time in particular, youth are subjugated, marginalized, stereotyped, and oppressed. Most often the justification for this general oppression of the adolescents, a time of life that Lewin critiqued as socially constructed, is that such is for their own good. It becomes a sociological phenomenon that as societies modernize, the infantilization and subjugation of otherwise mature youth increases.
The adult will posits that children are natively innocent—a term we shall define more thoroughly later in this discourse. The idea that a child is innocent stems from an inherent dislike that adults have for the power they inevitably wield over the world, a guilty conscience for the state of the world, the pain in the shoulders from the burden of responsibility they acquire and so forth. To appease this inner turmoil, they create a fantasy realm distinct from human nature but especially from their adult complexities, fears, hatreds, complaints, and quarrels—a representational “golden age,” or “good old days,” that embodies what they’re lacking in their adult life. One place they project this fantasy golden age is onto children and childhood. The more they subconsciously hate their real lives, or can be made to hate their own lives due to this very same social schema, the more they fight to preserve the imaginary innocence of children.
Thus the adult construct of childhood innocence in modernized societies has an economic feedback mechanism. It becomes highly commercial to sell to adults who are taken to believe that such a “golden age” of childhood existed, not just for products and services designed for children, but for those designed for adult consumption as well. The longer children can be made infantile, even long after physical maturation, the longer their store of perceived innocence can be exploited for profitable returns. Often these legal and commercial alterations to keep youths infantile come with the rationale that they are more enlightened ways of dealing with young people than time periods before where youth were given more freedoms but less structure. Despite this notion of the past itself being a fabrication to justify current trends, in actuality these new considerations maintain the same lack of structure and only increase restrictions on youth freedoms to the point where they begin revealing themselves as hazards according to the very same structures. These hazards then need to be “quelled” or else the fear for the innocent children boils over into further harmful action. This materialist conception of the perpetuation of innocence goes hand and hand with the earlier proposed mechanism of paranoia, and many times could be said to be the ultimate underlying factor driving it in the modern world.
In this materialist conception, the adult will is made a slave to the social commands in much the same way a child’s will is made a slave to their own environmental dictates. The media has perpetuated an image of childhood for them just like it has a standard of beauty that is often difficult to escape. From the psychological perspective, adults often become convinced of what a proper childhood is based around this artificial conception of this “golden age,” and either liken their own childhood around it, regardless of whether it objectively was, or suffer great depression or self-loathing if it was in any way different. This emotional baggage, whether beneficial for the individual or not, is then projected outwards in ways that often perpetuate the conception of innocence and the fantasy image of childhood. From this perspective, it becomes easy to see how the ignorant adult will is both persuaded by and directs public consciousness, and then how children are exploited on the grounds of whatever those popular constructions are. It is a part of the mechanism and feeds the Harsh World.
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