(Please note, the following essay is constantly in a state of improvement and so will be expected to change as I work on it. Consider it a work in progress. I welcome comments and criticism.)
A Primer on My Main Tenets
Relentless advocacy on behalf of children is often just as destructive as the forces that overtly harm children. I posit that the "harsh world" that children grow up in is inevitable, that no solution will fix it, any attempt to do so perpetuates it, that it has broader cultural and social implications than just its effects on children, and that sometimes its effects on children are beneficial for them as a product of its mechanism.
But here's a caveat: there's a difference between this "harsh world" scenario existing despite our actions to help children, and this harsh world existing because of our actions to help children. What I advocate for is that no help should be given to children as a whole, rather, help should be afforded to individual children (the ones with faces and names), such that it has benefits for them in their immediate effects. Thus, since trying to save the world for children in general is fruitless idea, trying to save a specific child is a better one.
The State of Youth
This is a world of terror. In such a paranoid state anyone can be lead to believe what protects the innocent actually does so, regardless of its efficacy, on the basis that it relieves a piece of the paranoia. Terror inspires action, but action and benefit are not the same. An act or force that protects someone deemed innocent has only come to be regarded as effective to the extent that it can quell the sense of terror. Our activities in protecting the so-called innocent have thus, on the whole, become distracted from their purpose. In this age we over-protect children, or at the very least, hold an opinion of even aged children as being purely infantile and helpless—an idea that encourages rampant over-protection. We criminalize eight year olds and infantilize fifteen year olds. Then the resistance against the over-protection comes as rigorous and ultimately ends as destructive. Once we were calmed, we expect the innocent are safe.
There’s nothing but a slow perpetuation of the harsh world; nothing but the same old hatreds that have governed human history; nothing but the antagonism that drives the engine of society. What really harms children and what they are being protected from is a discrepancy. We understand this to mean that the world of the adult has inserted itself upon the world of the child with only fearful speculation, superstition, and the classic human lack of understanding. What is best for children and what children receive from a paranoid world underestimates their humanity and overestimates their vulnerability. Out of this world comes forth the models of thinking that are waged with the shallow purpose of resisting it. Thus terror becomes one inevitable. What else could we expect from a childhood in a world of terror?
Ever since Rousseau speculated that the savagery of children is in fact what makes them purer, the rush to cure them of every disease, shred every stitching of malice, bar them from anything adults deem unsuitable, spare them every sacrifice and hardship of mankind has grown to heights of delusional obsession. In the modern world, the rush has been to culturally indoctrinate the youth more, limit their expressive capacity, tame their thoughts, forcibly modify their behavior, and infantilize their passions—and yet binge them on developmentally useless and sedative playthings; to otherwise cure children of the very thing that supposedly makes them purer, more human, and turn them into toys or appendages for the adult lifestyle.
In the crudest sense, this is how the current mentality can appear to an average observer. Yet even this simple conclusion is not the full image of the modern state of childhood, because those who have endeavored to shelter the purity of children by leashing them, building higher hedges, and setting them apart from their world of terror—are little but the arbiters of terror themselves. Only their motives are far more harmful in practice. They come in the veil of some self-righteous savior of childhood, and in doing so are not so explicit about the harm they cause out of their deluded nonsense. Terror is the force that drives their social mechanism. Ultimately children are separated from their world, their families, other beings, and most dangerous of all, themselves, under the banner of protecting them from harm. The only ones who end up being protected are the so-called protectors—those standing beneath those banners protecting themselves from feeling fear. That is the end result, the final function in this structure that maintains the social order keeping youth from fully actualizing themselves. Those that seek to do right, who seek to help and not to harm, have become assistants to the infliction.
They are able to prey on vastly more children under the banner of protection than that of predation, with the same amount of cunning projected on far greater numbers of children and often with the same lack of insight to the harm their actions cause. The protectionist is primarily motivated selfishly, but that it not their downfall. Their downfall is their lack of honesty about their motives. Every protectionist who is not motivated to tamper with children’s lives to quell a sense of their paranoia, lessen their embarrassment for not following the pack mentality about what constitutes child welfare, or redirect the feelings of inadequacy regarding not having youth through dominating them, either submits to all three of these vices or to others as prime justifications for their actions with children.
Here is the honesty that this discourse wishes above all else to impart on all the institutions for child welfare in societies the world over. There exist numerous institutions and schools of thought about what is in a child’s best interests, what programs are vital for fostering right trajectories for children from wrongful ones. The presence of these institutions, regardless of how helpful they may be, ultimately satisfy a human need to protect oneself from fear that our offspring may be jeopardized. Regardless of whether the medical industrial complex, for instance, actually protects children from various mood disorders not proven to exist in childhood is inessential. What the medical industrial complex does is serve the needs of the adult—whether that means protecting an adult from having to deal with a moody child or giving someone passionate enough a platform from which to launch a crusade against it, pinning the “protect the children” slogans to their self-righteous chests.
Similarly, there is little to be said against the institution of Protectionism, as it is a purely human reaction to paranoia and could not be extinguished in such a manner that isn’t also motivated by some selfish desire to protect its extinguishers from having to fear it. What can be said regards its effects—the patterns of irresponsibility at the behest of paranoia for the so-called benefit of the innocent. These patterns play out in the grand stage of the Harsh World.
The Harsh World
How often is it said that a parent’s goal is to do whatever possible to keep children safe? This statement always comes across as some absolute necessity, as if the world be damned lest some abstract description of safety be applied to all children. One can not fight the irrationality of paranoia with further paranoia, thus all the remarks regarding the state of youth in the current age thus far have been simply the illustration of the incredible ability to use fear tactics to persuade the minds of vulnerable adults into believing anything is justifiable so long as children are protected from something—exactly what, it doesn’t appear to matter. Is it reasonable to assume that in the incessant need to keep a child safe at all costs only further exposes children to the very harsh realities that they are being protected from? And if such is the case, is there any way possible to actively help children to live as unharmed as possible in this seemingly inevitable Harsh World?
The harsh world our children are living with is no longer as much created by the demons of our past—those who have become the scapegoats for the current predators—but is created out of incessant paranoia and fear regarding their safety, health, and well-being. Even these definitions have become more devious, perverting the meaning of a child’s “well-being” to include all things pursuant to their own selfish objectives respectively. Every entity in society that has the trust of public consciousness for the well-being of children is poised to exploit, molest, endanger, or jeopardize them because the definitions of well-being can be easily written to include such actions of exploitation, molestation, endangerment, and jeopardy, but only to the extent that such remains subtle and does not effect the overall conception of childhood. So long as the concept of the happy childhood is retained, the abstract label of innocence can still be applied, individual children are considered safe. Children become safe when they are seen as being saved, even if they didn’t need saving. Individual children are meaningless within the system. It’s the preservation of the child-concept—the phantom—that the new age of Protectionism is looking out for.
While the concept of childhood remains stagnant and unchanging, and the so-called “majority of children” are said to pass through the mechanism unharmed, individual children are being passed over for the purpose of preserving the so-called constitution of the majority—the abstract ideal. Individual children grow up on leashes, in between high concrete walls, and latch-keyed into their homes. Individual children are allowed to walk only in the specified lines under supervision never learning to train their own step. Individual children are given every opportunity to follow the specified thought and expressive pattern of emotional and social development and yet become criminals when they venture out beyond those lines—into the realm of the real, the passionate, the human. Individual children become ticking time bombs at the suggestion of their social rebellion; linked with terrorists and school shooters.
All this happens to individual children while adults race around to assure themselves that indeed the concept of a childhood is safe. The artificial notion of the happy, safe and sound childhood is maintained even as the real disintegrates one child at a time. What will benefit the individual child to be stigmatized for their own protection that can not also be rectified through letting that child live their lives and experience their own faculties and interests? Simply because the school shooter haunts one school for one day does not justify setting loose the less visible but just as destructive predator of fear on all youths and families at all times—not to the extent where our liberty and sanity as a society are endangered.
The Harsh World, as described, could be defined as the societal result of the fear-induced irrationality that causes well-meaning adults to tamper with the lives of children for some socially constructed reason of the child’s own good. Under this definition, the Harsh World is inevitable, for any attempt to assist children out of the Harsh World could be viewed as attempts to tamper with the lives of children for the sake of protecting them from this rampant over-protection. But as is with anything that is an essential feature of the world: if it is permanent, it serves a purpose.
Protectionism holds that protecting a child from experiencing a potential hazard is always in the child's best interests. Best interests are traditionally defined as being the child's degree of not being harmed by an action, since harm is inevitable. Thus protection is said to necessarily increase a child's likelihood of not being harmed by a certain hazard in the world. However, if we understand a hazard to be anything for which a child is vulnerable to (to the extent that they are likely to be harmed by that action), than anything which serves to put a child in harm's way increases the degree to which the child is made vulnerable to the action. If protectionism were true—that it is in the child's best interests to always remove them from harm's way (if such was possible), then it should also be true that a child ought to be best off if he or she never experiences a hazard to begin with.
Psychologically we understand that the consistent removal of hazards actually increases a child's vulnerability. The act of making a child vulnerable normally isn’t considered to be in a child’s best interests, especially by the very principles of Protectionism. This is similar to how the removal of stimuli from early child often increases a child's degree of sensory deprivation. A degree of hazard in a child's life, therefore, should be necessary to decrease a child's vulnerability, and therefore be in a child's "best interests," as we've defined already. Thus, Protectionism's ultimate goal, if attainable—to remove all hazard from a child's life—does not serve a child's best interests because it increases the child's degree of vulnerability to those hazards. So therefore, the ultimate goal of protectionism is actually contrary to its own objectives. If one then chooses to define a child’s “best interests” as something else, we may further see how Protectionism is a very loose nail upon which to hold together the supposedly protective and universally objective structure it builds around children.
(For a more in depth essay about why Protectionism is a flawed idea, see The Protective Circle)
Once again, wherever there is a child drugged to the point of developing neurological problems at the hand of some fast talking businessman of a practitioner; wherever there is a child in fear at the custody of some invisible parent-state; wherever there is a child made socially incompetent by the slow confinement of their lives—from the permanent closure of their “un-safe” or “unprofitable” public play spaces; the deforestation of their gathering areas; the pathologization of their natural desires; the criminalization of their natural behaviors—wherever there are angst ridden suicidal youth without a feeling of purpose or destination—no motivation or sense of self; society has already lost the war to protect them from all harm. They have instead unleashed a world harsher than all the evils their imaginations were so kind to have dreamed up for them to begin with. To these youth, it makes no difference whether the artificial edifice of the happy childhood is maintained in popular consciousness, reality is far more potent.
The Mechanism of Dehumanization of Childhood
We begin in the Harsh World, as we have established. Not every action to assist children necessarily perpetuates the Harsh World, but many do. We accept the Harsh World as inevitable. We define the Harsh World as the societal result of the fear-induced irrationality that causes well-meaning adults to tamper with the lives of children for some socially constructed reason of the child’s own good. In some form it is an extension of Hegel’s dialectical Spirit determining its will in the world, but rejects the pretence that such follows a dialectical pathway. The Harsh World is in the most basic sense, just the perpetual world of human inefficiency and fear that protectionists attempt to protect children from, and that in doing so often perpetuate.
A child’s immature and innocent position in such a Harsh World seems to necessitate special protections and assistance on the basis that any such action is ultimately beneficial for the child. As stipulated in the opening, not all actions taken to protect children in this world necessarily perpetuate the Harsh World in their immediate effects on a child’s life, but all actions inevitably perpetuate the Harsh World in their secondary effects on society. More concretely, an act of assistance or protection for children that helps children immediately (thus the immediate effect) is far more preferable than an action that only protects some lofty idea of childhood (the secondary effect).
For example, a tutor giving up his or her spare time to teach a child to read genuinely seems to be justifiable and for that child’s actual benefit, simply because the immediate effects on that child’s life seem to outnumber all the potential residual negative effects that such a system may have in society. These secondary effects seem almost arbitrary, but in regards to these negative side effects it could be said that many of these reading organizations and companies can only stay in operation so long as illiteracy is a problem in childhood. Their profit or perpetuation motives depend on childhood illiteracy to maintain their beneficial immediate effects. Thus the Harsh World is maintained, but only on the societal level, and not on the individual child’s level, where the benefits of learning to read help break down the Harsh World that holds these social structures in balance over him or her.
Therefore, protecting a child’s immediate effects regards providing assistance to their immediate person, and protecting children in their secondary effects regards protecting childhood as some lofty representation of childhood in society. It is the second group of effects that more often than not perpetuate the Harsh World.
The second step in this mechanism concerns the methods by which adults intervene to prevent or lessen the effects of the perceived Harsh World. As established above, adults intervene to protect children through many self-serving motivations, but the most important for this discourse are reason and fear. The example above represented a reasonable approach to the assistance of real-life children by measuring the effects of such behavior in the real world—it exists within the inevitable Harsh World, but remains a great benefit to a child at an individual level. Unfortunately, this reason does not always govern societal treatment and dealings with children in general. When paranoia becomes the motive, the only solution becomes nothing more than personal alleviation, which becomes its own higher motive. Anything that alleviates the fear, regardless of whether it does any benefit to real-life children in its immediate effects, is often heralded as necessarily beneficial. In this sense, the behavior is only successful in that it alleviates fear, and is not so concerned with the immediate effects on the child. This is ultimately a distracted approach, for it is not the idea of children we should be trying to preserve, rather the individual children themselves.
This is the essence of the “fixable” Harsh World only so much as human beings are conscious of their fearful vices and work to redirect their motivations towards real live children rather than phantoms. If they can not, the Harsh World governed by fear inevitably necessitates all manner of public policies; restrictive boycotts; limits on freedom of speech and expression (in furtherance of political correctness); lower curfews; the passing of ageist laws; cruel re-education camps; irresponsible profit-motivated prescriptions for behavior modification; state removal of children in situations where no actual reasonable abuse or neglect is present; and other acts of irrationality that are fear motivated and alleviated only by swift brush strokes that sentence whole communities of children to potential psychological jeopardy (at least according to its own definitions of jeopardy). They all share one thing in common; they all attempt quick fixes for systemic social problems. That is where human fallibilities add to the Harsh World. That is the fine line between rationally working to better a child’s life in the midst of the Harsh World and haphazardly working to save children from all assumed harm as the Protectionists do.
The third step in this mechanism concerns the wars fought over the protection of children from these very same potential sources of jeopardy, whether these be the selfish few who prey on small numbers of children, such as child molesters, or the selfish multitude who prey on whole communities of children, such as exploitative child marketing. Wars are launched within society to protect the young from all these sources of danger at great damage not only to the children’s sense of self and relationship to society, but also at the disintegration of society’s sense of self and the relationships among it. The damage supposedly inflicted on children within this mechanism is only a microcosm of the damage on society as a whole for which the majority of the Harsh World is fortified. Upon these bases these foundations and institutions are built in order to root out the causes of these harms to children, and those that do not surrender to reason but to fear and superstition are those who make it such that their work in protecting children from all the harms in the world is never realized.
At the same time, representing children as a vulnerable entity elevates them, makes them stick out in the public eye—a place where they are inevitably subject to hazards. This exposure can be both direct, in the sense that children are physically put into harm’s way because of their exposure as vulnerable entities, or indirectly, whereby the cultural acceptance of their vulnerability creates a social norm that increases the likelihood of them being in harm’s way. A child’s actual vulnerability is socially created—the idea that they are innocent, uncorrupted, or pure creates and maintains it more than their natural human ignorance does. In spite of all this emphasis on children as innocent, vulnerable, in needing of protection—and because of the hazards that inevitably come from that cultural exposure and attention—individuals can easily exploit the exalted position of the child either for purposes of harming them or protecting them. Just as the position exposes children to the very hazards it is established to protect them from, as well as exposes them to more concerted assistance in the event they are put into jeopardy, but it also gives them exposure in the popular proliferation of the media upon which industries can begin exploiting a child’s vulnerable position for profit. This is where individuals like John Walsh can find an easy niche in the social mechanism to create careers around the exposure given to children as vulnerable entities.
Similarly, though they are objectively weaker than adults on the most part, a child’s innocence is just a social construction. Children who are physically and emotionally weaker are often considered to be more innocent and uncorrupted and therefore end up receiving more protection than other children who may be perceived by adults as physically and emotionally stronger—regardless of the child’s actual characteristics. It is nothing short of ignorance that such a categorization is made in the first place, but such is the way these lofty and subjective ideas of protecting “childhood innocence” are harmful to youths. Under these circumstances, children become weaker in society because they are seen as weaker, and ultimately become targets for further systems of Protectionism, subjugation, and exploitation, and equally exploitative (often profit-motivated) systems that replace these when there is backlash against them.
The final step is simply that we end where we begin. The Harsh World is restored, and the mechanism repeats itself, over and over, often creating microcosmic spinoff cycles within larger and more defined ones that deteriorate social life in general. The only end products of this consistent fear-fed social mechanism are the dehumanized children, the ultimate harm of the very children for which the system attempts to protect and psychologically, developmentally, emotionally, and socially nourish. They are forced to live in this world of fear, paranoia, and irresponsibility, and ironically nothing could be more damaging to a child than that.
However, by making this assertion we must also realize that the mechanism is intact and functioning and that no force can or should be manually inserting itself to stop the cycle completely. Any attempt to do so would only feed the engine by which the Harsh World is constantly running at an increasing boil. Let us not make the decision to assist children out of fear that the Harsh World has gone amok, or on the pretense that any one action, or many, is going to absolve the mechanism in its turn. These are always the actions that perpetuate the mechanism. Let us instead pursue the cause of helping children by educating them about the nature of the mechanism, and teaching them to use reason rather than extremism to work toward solving social problems, knowing themselves that no action will ever be a final solution.
No comments:
Post a Comment