The Tethered Master

If only the mature people could see how incredibly childish they are. In the back of an adult's mind, they seem to know it implicitly, but always defer to the cultural expectation of the authority placed on them. The expectation they use as a catch-all justification for all age-iniquity is that the adult is limited by their responsibility, tethered by their professionalism, constrained by their worry, and tied down to the standards of conduct and pretense, and that for some reason, are and should continue to be, the masters of this planet solely by virtue of this fact.

They are slavish masters, it would seem, if that makes any sense. The one who is the most tethered, the most constrained, the most limited, is the one who grants him or herself the most unconditional respect. How much ego does it take to crown oneself master of a planet and then call children "egotistical" for claiming ownership of every toy they see? It takes the full maturity of a person's faculties to even know how to stretch logic and justification so far that even carrying a self-applied burden can somehow now become a "virtue," and yet it's what adults do every day. They anoint themselves "masters" to make themselves feel good about being slaves. It's childish human nature through and through.

They envy childhood and demean children. They go from believing fairy stories to looking down on the creatures who do, and instead grow up to indulge themselves in their own fairy stories--fairy stories of the child molester behind the face of every man, fairy stories about the constant hidden menace to their young in the world, fairy stories about the hazards of the air, the sunlight, the water, the ground below their feet, the sky above their heads, and the immanent destruction of what they love in that space. They'd sooner take their child out of that space if they were told by their cable news parents that "air" was deadly.

They're pacified by their parent media, like children, are told when to feel good, when to feel sad, and when to feel outraged at all the right parts in the fairy story, by musical cue, by expert editing--close faces, black and white, blurry images--and it works on them. They gasp, they panic, they clutch their children close and push others away at the behest of an invisible force, and all when they are told to, and all for the sake of saving themselves from the tedium of being "adult," to justify such a malignant position of authority because they know without it they would have no reason to do so.

They dread their quickening decay, their inevitable death, and in so doing decide to deny life to the young to spare them of any and all fate the same. They manufacture inhuman hardship for children in the effort to maximize their little one's comfort, convince themselves they are in the right, and then pat themselves on the back for their so-called selfless ingenuity in fleeing from the fear and guilt that rides their lives for doing it. That is the modern human adult at play--a child having his way when he's wrong.

Adults set the standards by which they judge themselves and others, and by that fact alone, are powerful. It is arrogance, but it is human. Being tethered to responsibility does not equate to virtue, as the Sword of Damocles teaches us, but an arrogant human mind in seeking to justify its doomed and slavish position of personal limitation, will ascribe to it "virtue" to save itself. Likewise, being carefree as children are said to be (which also is not the case, children are far from "care free") does not equate to its own assigned virtue. Once again, an arrogant human mind in seeking to justify the deprivation of rights and dignity to children, will ascribe to childhood the virtue of innocence, and the lack of virtue when comparing it to that of an adult's.

That is to say, an adult looks at a child's reality by way of distance and when in comparison, assigns their own reality to virtue by deeds (for them, a superior method of human appraisal, because children are supposedly deemed incapable of willful deeds), and assigns a child's to virtue by its mere existence--as one subservient, humble, and incapable of willful deeds (ie. innocence). These are not truths about either reality, but arrogant presumptions made by adult psychology. They are human, and therefore childish, things to presume. They are a part of human nature, but they are not justifiable.

More Honesty, Less Irony

Irony is the package that truth is delivered in, so that it can be palpable to comprehension. Contrary to what people think, truth is actually pretty simple, but it's impossible to comprehend due to its simplicity, so people invented irony to tease it out. When truth is delivered with naked honesty, it is feared at best and disregarded at worst. So society is full of irony, which is to say, pretense, which is to say, lies in the guise of truth and truth in the guise of lies. Our intuitions are always an honest representation of ourselves, but adults in particular (far more than children) are contented to bury their intuitions under false pretense for the purposes of keeping up appearances. Adult society is built by honest conviction that is delivered and made palpable by lies, self-deprecating humor, sarcasm, and ironic twists of personal judgment to fit in with prevailing cultural standards. If society decides to castigate or lynch a group of people, the individuals within it are more inclined to support that lynching with their love of irony, sarcasm, self-deprecating humor, and misrepresented values, than they are with their honesty and truthful conviction to their gut.

Truthful conviction and honesty tells us that all people deserve respect unless they have personally done something that amounts to a forfeiture of that right by their own discretion alone. For instance, our honest, truthful, "heart of hearts" knows by pro-social evolution that to disrespect an individual on the stereotypes or heuristics of the class, race, sex, or creed they belong to (or are perceived as belonging to) is shameful. Our intuition directs us to value some version of an equality standard for all, and not solely base an individual's inclusion in that standard on the perceived class or "group" that an individual belongs to. For most non-sociopaths capable of shame, it seems unconscionable on the face of it to show disrespect to someone for a reason having nothing to do with that person's own character or actions, but to circumstances totally beyond that person's control. This is not a novel concept to most people, so we have every reason to assume there is at least some truth to it, but let's see how irony will cause a person to break those very same conventions in the name dishonest truth, often for humor's sake.

Irony in the broadest sense is a narrative device where a circumstance exists for which an unexpected result occurs with the property of contradicting or going against the meaning behind the circumstance. It is usually easier to depict than to define, for instance: when a child and an adult are competing, and the inexperienced child outwits the adult, it is an ironic situation because it is not expected that someone of smaller experience would outwit someone of larger experience. Adults find such joy in irony like this because they have more of an experience with social conventions and like to see something that challenges them or contradicts them from unexpected sources. Girls outwitting boys, for instance, is another common trope, even now when we should no longer consider a girl to be an "unexpected source," but such is the backwards way with irony. 

Adults use irony to accomplish the opposite of challenging convention though, and deliver the "unexpected truth" by confirming convention only so much as to kill it with kindness. This forms the basis of most deconstructionist, post-modern philosophy. For instance, by saying something like "children are better than adults by their savagery," there is an attempt to combine "superiority" with "savagery" (an unexpected pairing), and children (traditionally considered to be pure and inferior to adults), with the same, for the purpose of exposing the more intuitive truth that "adults are no better or worse than children." But why all that diversion when one could have just said: "adults are no better or worse than children?" It's because that truth is made more thought-worthy when it comes dressed in a subtle poetic quip involving lots of comparisons. Blatant statements of belief mean nothing to anyone beyond the church pew, but lies that cover up truths seem to really cause people to stop and reconsider their thoughts. That is just how the secular world prefers its truths. But by confirming something that one does not actually support, even with the intention of laying bare some truth about it, one is essentially dressing a truth in a lie, which is to say, lying.

So human beings can get away with making the most ludicrous and crass statements, cast misguided judgement, purposefully misrepresent where their values lie, and get away with it, as I have done at times, by calling it "sarcasm" in the pursuit of a higher truth, or by being humorous. But where do we draw the line before we've totally divorced our honest intuition from our outward dishonest personality? Do we get away with saying that "boys are stupid" so that we may appear ironic for saying it and therefore be "interpreted" as saying anything supportive of girls? "Boys are stupid" will never be a supportive statement for anyone. Do we get away with calling a particular boy "stupid" because of the circumstance of his sex (which he had nothing to do with)? Do we get away with advocating for the lynching of ethnic minorities just so we can feel sarcastic and witty enough to be espousing truth in furtherance of tolerance? "Lynch him in a back alley" will likewise never be a statement endorsing tolerance, no matter how ironic it is perceived to be. 

It is not that sarcasm this hurtful should be outright censored though, just that those who speak it should be regarded shamefully. It is shameful to say something that contradicts one's better judgement, whatever that judgement may be. If we have to assume that no one truth exists, but that each one of us has our own truth, the best we can do is be truthful to ourselves as best we can, and that is called direct honesty. The truth does hurt, which is why we invented irony--to soften it, to make it more palpable, to make it humorous, to add distractions so that we're not forced to accept it as much as we'd like to--but the truth is always the truth and it can't be twisted, even if one doesn't agree with it. As much as the truth hurts though, dishonesty hurts more. When you are being honest by saying "peace on earth," chances are, it was dishonesty that lead the first battle cry.

Saying "equality for all people," is the only way of truthfully conveying the message of "equality for all people," even if it sounds comically vague or naive on the bare surface like that--but that is what the truth is! The truth is naive. It is simple. You can not arrive at "equality for all people" if you're going around, cheekily saying "girls are better than boys," for instance, because you know that statement, when expressed categorically in relation to a whole group of people, is false, and therefore, a comic lie. It is a statement of devaluation toward one group and a superficial support of another (not on the basis of merit, but on the basis of circumstances neither child had any control over) against your better intuition. You know you are lying when you say it, so why don't you feel shameful? If you are saying the opposite of truth--a falsehood---and if you know that it is false, then you are lying.

Adults don't think of irony or sarcasm as lying because they know a deeper truth is attempting to be exposed with its phrasing, but they only arrive at that conclusion because they have adult brain capacities. Ask any child what a lie is, and they will tell you about the time they lied to get away with something they didn't want exposed. In our case, what we don't want exposed is the truth, and instead, favor a pretense of falsehoods, lies, and sarcasm. How does that not describe, in its entirety, all that the sarcastic, ironic, hypocritical, pretense and illusion that the adult social world is built on?

Who's Watching the Watchers?

Because of what the adult brain loses as it develops from adolescence, adulthood is not great. It is not qualitatively better or greater than adolescence by experience than adolescence is greater by innocence, or ignorance (as it were). The adolescent brain is simply fighting to express itself in a world governed by unbridled adult expression, for better and worse. By contrast, the adult brain is fighting itself in a world governed by its own self-imposed inhibitions, those learned by experience, and also for better and worse. So where do adults get the idea that they are qualified to judge the young?

The adolescent calculates the why not while the adult simply contents itself with knowing the why not. The adolescent tests its limits while the adult lives comfortably within them. The adolescent strives for a costly adventure as the adult settles for safe and clean complacency. The adolescent seizes life regardless of the consequences while the adult lives in a world of consequences and denies life. The teenage mind defies expectation while the adult mind defines it. When the teen mind defies life to its detriment, the adult mind defines it to the same extent. The adult is superior though for its longevity while the teen is superior for its aspiration--both have what the other lacks.

If you're an adult, and you find this characterization limiting, then you are experiencing the same effects of decadence (which is to say vanity) that limit the youth perspective. Characterizations of people on the basis of age are naturally limiting. The only difference of course is that these characterizations draw a line of equivocation between adults and adolescents (and children), while most adult heuristics in regards to young people do nothing but reinforce the so-called superiority of adults (in the active realms) and children (in the passive ones). All the truth in the world adds up to adults thinking in adult ways and framing non-adult situations with adult-centric perspectives. That's all there is to it. Truth is a function of power, and because adults are in power, their truth prevails. And yet, their truth about humility still applies to everyone.

In the name of humility, the justice system is often considered to be the sociological "parent" for adults. It's supposed to be the high-holy thing that judges adult behavior and punishes indiscretions in the rational world. It is however formed and created by adults, so one is left to wonder, who is watching the watchers? Who is judging adults in the manner in which adults judge the young (other than the young people themselves?)? Adults are given unbridled expression because they exist free of judgement half the time, and when they are being judged, they not only participate in, but create the system for which they are to be judged by. What child has that much authority over the judgement system when he or she is facing the scorn of adults? If only children could set the terms by which they could be judged by, because then they would have the same free terms that adults reserve for themselves. As it stands, adults are policing both themselves and children, so adult judgements go unchallenged in either case. 

It is entirely human for an adult to be taken by the decadence that is bestowed on them by culture, and there isn't one alive that doesn't think, in some way, that they are superior to young people. Adults don't need to be derided for their egotism any more than kids do for theirs, they simply need to be awakened and cut down to size so they may see themselves as the increasingly decrepit apes they are. None are so high and mighty that they should be beyond reproach, whether adults (in active realms) or children (in passive ones). Chances are, in the grandiosity of the cosmos, nothing an adult human says makes any real difference or carries any more universal a truth than the children who were once told "not to speak unless spoken to." Whoever said the adults could talk?

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.

Running with the Egg

For all the fretting that adults do foretelling the demise of human civilization based on the behaviors and interests of children in the present, what good has it done the human race? There's this error in our reasoning that suggests the way a child is today inevitably predicts with straight line accuracy what the child will be like as an adult. If the child is playing video games or preferring their virtual social life to their surroundings, it's seen as if we're destined to have a future where all are strapped in to a virtual existence from which there is no escape and human civilization is once again doomed. Adults may even take pride in the action of stripping a child of their opportunity to engross themselves in the media of the times, thinking that by doing so they are single handedly saving the future of humanity. What self aggrandizing pride is this?

What human beings typically lack is the ability to foresee a future for humanity no different than the present, not better, not worse (as far as these basic grievances are concerned). There's this thinking that if a boy is allowed to play violent video games today, that the society he grows up to participate in will be one that looks the other way on gun crimes (as they had been exposed to so much of it). They do not factor in the humanity of their own children when forecasting the downfall of human decency. They figure "once a mindless drone, always a mindless drone," when their child was never a drone to begin with, but a person capable of reason.

There's a failure to foresee the likeliest of all possible futures, one where the children of today grow up to become adults who will themselves be fretting over something else the children of that time have been exposed to. Despite this trend happening every generation for hundreds of years, adults seem to think this is the generation that finally breaks the cycle and destroys society. Every generation is the end of the line for us, whether it be caused by rock and roll music, video games, rap music, drug use, internet, cell phones, or anything else adults have had trouble understanding.

Let's not fret over what children are involved in today en mass--individual children we can at least talk to--because en mass they simply are not as fragile as adults think they are. In 50 years time, many of the adults alive today will either be dead or elderly, and the world will be a much different place than it is now. The issues and problems of today will either be long resolved, or will cease to be major problems--the preoccupations of today will not last forever. The children will have grown up into similar versions of the adults that came before them, with all the same fretting, perhaps only about different trends.

In 50 years time, the children of today, who have grown up in a totally different world than the previous generation, will inevitably take the trends of today and expand upon them in the future--and no amount of restricting them now is going to stop this from happening. Children change over time, they don't stay children forever. They grow up and become the next wave of adults doing exactly what the previous wave did, only responding to different wind shifts.

Each generation gets its one shot to move the world and society along on the track before handing what it has created off to the next batch of people to do what they please with it. The passage of the earth from one generation to the next is like the old "running with the egg" race, where one player passes an egg balancing on a spoon off to the next player, who then takes it a ways before passing it off to another. The object is to not crack the egg, which for our illustration represents the earth. The thing is, adults do not trust the player they are handing the egg to continue seeing the value of keeping it intact. What happens though is the next generation always does anyways--as they go off to become that society, while the previous generation becomes too old and too dead to really see how their progeny has defied their expectations, time and time again.

So please, be not troubled, because the first one now will later be last, and the last, first. There is no better or worse, no more depravity or social isolation, or whatever our anxiety makes us imagine--there is only progression through time. Children are going to rule the world someday and move it in directions we can only fathom, and they're going to do it regardless of how much fretting is done about how they've been picking their noses today.

Time and Change

Time is something fleeting. Human beings can only perceive time through movement, and movement is only a series of changes in position and state. We sense that time is unfolding because we can see objects resting in one position one moment and then observe them resting in another position just by moving them, or understand that a child has aged based on observing them being seven years old one moment and eight years the next. The interim between these two moments where a change has been observed is what we call time. If an object could remain stationary and completely unchanged at all so-called "times", we'd have no evidence of time existing around that object.

Because we're unable to fully observe time itself unfolding on an individual, we tend to assume that they are whatever they appear to be in the moment we observe them, and that they will continue to be what they were in that moment for every one thereafter. On the contrary though, we may look at a new car one moment and then watch it run off the road and wreck on a tree, and consider the wrecked car and the new car the same vehicle and focus on the change in its state, but we don't see the child and the adult as one entity at two different times in the same manner. This is to say, there's a disconnect in how we perceive the line between child and adult, we may not see it as a straight line from one to the other.

Rather, we seem to observe children as if they were a race of subhumans coexisting along with adults, and the line connecting them to the human race appears to us to be divergent, mysterious, or just totally heading off into obscurity. Cognitively, of course, we understand that all adults start out at one time being children, and that all children (unless they meet with an unfortunate end or have some other circumstance), eventually mature into adults at another time, but because we can't see it happening, there's a tendency for our minds to assume that it's not happening. This is how a child can "grow up so fast," for instance. In reality, they are not in fact growing up fast, they're growing up normally. It's just that we don't perceive that growth has happened unless we can physically observe it in the space of a much shorter interval.

Due to this inability to perceive natural growth, adults may make inaccurate assumptions about a child's maturation. For instance, the eye can observe a moving image that the brain perceives as a static one, and will judge the image to be static--as in, no change from the time the image began to when it ended--all because the image is moving imperceptibly. If the growth of a child is similarly imperceptible, then adults may often judge the child to be static over a definite amount of time--as in, no change from the time they began seeing the child and when they stopped--when in reality, the child is maturing every day, as are adults in one way or another.

Children also make inaccurate perceptions about adults, and don't perceive their parents' hairs growing grayer, or in general, tend to believe that the way their parents are in the moment is the way they always were and will always be. Children have an unnatural expectation that things will never change, and perhaps only have a fleeting idea of what it may be like to change over time based purely on what they know about the nature of the world. Children who've no doubt experienced a lot of change will be more adept to notice how time impacts all things regardless of how stable everything appears in the moment. But however inaccurate children and young peoples' perceptions of adults may be, only the adults have granted themselves the authority to flex their inaccurate perceptions over a child's development and even punish them for growing up faster than is perceptible--no matter how natural the development is proceeding.

These errors in perception account for the majority of ageist prejudice against adults and children alike, and everything in between. Racial prejudice is a shorthand way of categorizing a person based on characteristics that are permanent (skin color for instance), whereas ageist prejudice is a shorthand way of categorizing a person based on characteristics that are impermanent (short stature in children, or mental capacity for instance). To underestimate or overestimate a person for a characteristic they exhibit temporarily, and assume that because they are exhibiting it now, in the moment, they'll continue to exhibit it forever, is discrimination.

For instance, if a child exhibits a sexual behavior with another child as a purely natural expression of their temporary lack of knowledge on sexual social customs, to criminalize or at least stigmatize that child as a lifelong pervert would be age discrimination. In it, those making the assumption would be choosing to focus on the immediacy of the action's appropriateness, factoring in the child's lack of understanding, and ignoring the temporary nature of the circumstance. It could be that in twenty years time, that child is not the sex beast that their actions at the age of four would have led us to predict, and perhaps even less so because of the abundance of negative attention those actions might receive in the present. In many ways, children are at the mercy of how adults perceive or don't perceive them changing over time.

Due to the fact that we are never fully here or there between being born and being in the full maturation of our faculties, what sense does it make to continue dividing up individuals along artificial categories spread out across time? Can we not just look at a child and think "human being," as we do for adults, and just expect that any differences between them are expressions of being in two different developmental timezones, and that all behaviors and expressions pursuant to one are simply relative to the expressions of the other? For while it may be sunset in one timezone, in another that very moment, it is dawn--and for all the hoopla surrounding their objective difference, the only thing that separates them is their relative distance from one another across time.

Road Rage

Anyone who believes that adults are superior to children needs only look so far as the driving habits of the typical adult to be put off that notion in a hurry. The road is truly the adult at his or her most childish, most aggressive, most vulnerable, and most impatient, and the morning commute, nothing but a group of adults throwing a collective temper tantrum. The same amount of self-centered fury you'd expect from a four year old who can't get what they want, you should expect from what the state considers to be its "competent drivers."

Those who criticize the bushmen for beating drums to ward off evil spirits haven't seen freeway drivers honking horns to speed up stopped traffic--indeed, it is all a matter of a relative expression of universal human superstition. This same human nature also links adult and child behaviors, because in no way other than formally are adults better than children, and in no way are children better than adults. All the same virtues and vices apply to each, just on a bigger or smaller developmental scale.

A child might throw a tantrum when they are forced to wait their turn, as if expecting to be first for everything, and by comparison, an adult will throw a tantrum on the road when they are forced to slow down behind a driver who has to merge. They'll ride straight up on the slower car's rear as if to virtually push the other car to accelerate beyond the speed limit, and if such an expectation is not met fast enough, actually start to lane jump their way around the vehicle (which by now has sped up sufficiently). Then they'll pull in front defiantly, having advanced ten feet from their starting position mistakenly believing to have made significant progress. Both behaviors are indeed childish.

Children throw tantrums, it doesn't matter if they are three or thirty. It is only adults though who like to believe that they are in control of themselves simply for being recognized as an adult and being granted responsibilities and rights, but they are not. They are just as much a slave to instinct and environmental demand as the children they routinely demean for their "childishness." Neither tolerate impediments on the scale that directly affects their level of awareness, and both scoff at the "tribulations" suffered by the other on a daily basis. Adults laugh at a childhood squabble that children take very seriously, and children fail to grasp the significance of putting other drivers in danger to move 10 feet forward in traffic--for example.

Despite what any adult may think, being bigger means bigger things frustrate you and cause you to take your temper tantrum. There is no such thing as "handle it like an adult," because nobody's perfect.

Adult Irony

The most deplorable thing about the adult is their love of all things ironic. It's the adult equivalent to a small child's egotism in its annoyance and almost as ubiquitous. Television is littered with examples. Adults love an unexpected pairing or an incongruous situation, and one of the most prevalent is the pairing of a child in a context that adults have reserved for themselves. There's the classic example of a child stumbling onto his parents making love (where a child is supposed to represent "innocence" and "ignorance," and the sex act is supposed to represent the "dirty little secret" that only adults know). Adults love to revel in their so-called advanced experience with the world, and parade it in front of children's ignorance as if gloating the old "I know something you don't know."

Arguably, this phenomenon can be tied to the same egotism that causes the child to believe that every object of their desire is ultimately theirs, even under circumstances where it is in the obvious possession of a peer. Adults want to feel important, as is human, and because they have the power to do whatever they want, they have the ability to exert these desires in larger social domains (like television for instance). The problem is, just as it is with children, the broad majority lack the insight into why they enjoy feeling better and smarter than children. This makes them as childish.

In the same way that a toy doesn't belong to our proverbial child simply because they want it, the truth about the world (and all those dirty little secrets) doesn't "belong to adults" simply because they will it to be. Adults don't know anything a child should be kept from knowing just to preserve the little "smarter than you" game. Everything should be on the table because everything is on the table. We need honesty, not irony.

Sweet By and By

For all that is made about the "insufferable" childishness of children, adults can be quite childish themselves. At least it is appropriate for a child to act childish, according to the adult perspective, but in reality, the same should be true for adults. Because what is childishness? It is the inappropriate actions of a child who has not grown snug into the customs of his or her surroundings limited by the circumstance. In short words, it's the temper tantrum when they can't get what they want, the egotism, the pre-conventional understanding of morality. Essentially, it is the expression of a developmental mindset at odds with the requirements of the universe it finds itself in. This is true of kids, but it is also true of human beings.

Could it be said that any adult has worn the universe so snug around them that they haven't acted like just another sentient ape running around, throwing tantrums and basking in self importance on this spec of dust in the limitless chaos? Of course not. Human beings are not gods, but because they are not gods, are these inappropriate actions then, given the circumstance they find themselves in? If we can determine a child's childishness, how do we determine what is appropriate for humankind in the grand scheme of the cosmos if all we are is human beings?

If religion and spirituality does anything, it renders the adult mind as they would prefer to keep a child's, it's the only thing stopping an adult from assigning even more self-importance to themselves than they already do. It forces them to look out at the world with the same humility and subservience that they expect and demand from their offspring. It reminds them of how truly childish they are, as they sit around on earth gloating about their so-called importance just for being adults. Perhaps Christ himself was onto something:

Verily I say unto you, Except ye turn, and become as little children, ye shall in no wise enter into the kingdom of heaven.

When we speak of childishness, what we're really talking about is the overly expressive human ego. It doesn't stop expressing itself simply because a child has matured into adulthood, instead, even as the adult becomes more aware of it, it comes to define civilization. Materialism is a concept for people who are not easily swayed by the humility that religion imposes and spirituality inspires, those who want to believe that because they are in the "full maturation of their faculties" that they are gods themselves, and the material culture of western civilization feeds into and is a product of that egotistical belief. These are the people who believe the full maturation of their faculties means there can be nothing higher or more transcendental than the narrow adult human, animal, five-senses, culture-specific, planet Earth perspective they have. Given the massive scope of "existence" itself, there is nothing more childish than that.

What is childish is human. In the grand continuum that is human nature, there are many shades. Adult is just one variety. It is no more or less important than any other. It should command no more or less authority over the universe than any other because it has no more authority over it than any other. It can't. Just like all the other varieties, it is too self-absorbed.

A Slow Disintegration

They're not entirely the slowly disintegrating corpuscles that they often believe themselves to be, but adults are grotesque, and they know it. The adult is motivated in part by their own slow deterioration, while being uplifted into the social realms of their own creation--having attained human rights and responsibilities--by the maturity they've earned through experience, they inevitably find themselves at a point where they see the transaction for what it really was. For rights and prestige, they've sold their passions. For maturity and responsibility, they've sold their enjoyments. Once this realization has been made, and it can be made at any age past the one drawn in the sand, the boundary between the noble savage and the burdened conqueror, they begin to envy the young, and in envy, there is aggression, and the result of aggression is control.

In the typical portrayal, the child envies the adult's rights without regard for the responsibilities that come with those rights, and the adult envies the child's sweet naivete and youthful ambition, and sexual virility, without regard to the restriction it is under. The child is not envious of the adult's actual state of disintegration any more than the adult is envious of the child's actual state of being inhuman property, but this typical portrayal is not necessarily an accurate depiction of the two psyches at work. Obviously children are at least aware of the adult's responsibilities, and being able to obtain the sacred rights of being human seems to them, from their state of reference, to be worth the price of responsibility. In the same way, to obtain youth or at least the closest proximity to it, the adult is also willing to pay a hefty price.

The plan is simple from there on out. One, control those who have what you want. Adults have granted themselves the power and authority to rule over every aspect of the lives of youth, to restrict their freedoms of expression, love, sentiment, and ability, guide them along preselected pathways to attainment that inevitably suit adult purposes, prosecute and otherwise stigmatize those who don't follow those routes, and all under the half-fast and yet bold-faced ideology of "protecting them." Two, transplant the activities and interests of those you envy into your own life once you've made it impossible for them to have them. It goes without saying, that so many advertisements geared for adults will focus on reattaining youth. Even the word "rejuvenation" which is so often touted in these ads is taken straight from the root word that forms "juvenile." Adults want to live the lifestyle they have assigned in their own imaginations as being that of a juvenile, and have all the rights and responsibilities that go along with adulthood. Essentially, once the actual juveniles are subjected, turn their subjection into adult "rejuvenation."

This is not to say that this is the result of some grand conspiracy, although most adults are in fact aware that this is part of their fundamental makeup. Regardless of whether or not the typical portrayal as described above really exists, many adults believe in it to such extents that they use it to justify the social set up they have constructed and are no doubt ashamed to keep. Like any gratifying thing though, they're helpless to its subtle lure like an addiction, even as they realize that their so-called protections for children are just a neatly packaged front for their ulterior motives. The more they push the button of subjecting youth, the more they get fed their rejuvenation, even when they know it doesn't, and will never work. They know they'll never be young again like the child knows one day she'll be human.

The overfed fear of child predators takes its cues from this dilemma. Adults fear the child predators because they fear that part of themselves that wants to re-assume the qualities of youth for their own pleasure. They hate child predators because they hate the audacity of the child predators for dragging their own psyches out into the open. When child molestation occurs, they not only hate and fear the captured slug, they take personal pleasure in watching it get squished, and they don't mind if their children are watching. The uncorrupted stasis of their children's eyes only needs to be preserved in times when "protecting the children" serves to position the adult as right and pure, but when it only shows them for what they are--gratifying succubi of youth--suddenly the slug must be squished and it's entrails rubbed all over the kids' faces, if only to distract them from the ugliness, the grotesque disintegration, that is them.