On Lying to Children

We teach children not to lie. We teach them that lying is an act of cowardice and an affront to the dignity and respect that others deserve, so of course we feel comfortable lying to children. We actually seem to enjoy holding the truth over them, just out of reach. We invest energy and years into feeding their delusions only because they are willing to accept what is being told to them. This is their nature, as is human nature when sources beyond our direct involvement or understanding (the media, government, laws...etc.) dictate how we are to think. But how much more human potential could be unlocked if we valued the truth as much as we value maintaining a child's delusions?

The child molester lies to his victim to gain access to their trust, but just imagine what that child would do in that situation if the child molester had told the kid the truth upfront. Image if what society told our trusting children was the truth also, and what kind of change that next generation could bring about in the world as a result of knowing the truth. If the truth could save a child from trusting a child molester, then truth could save a child from trusting our kindly police, teachers, parents, and society in general as immediately. Imagine for a second how many children would be saved. Imagine how many could be saved from committing the hypocrisies of adulthood if they were told as children to loathe corporate and political hypocrites as much as they are told to fear "strangers." 

The next time someone respects a child's dignity, it will be because they will be telling them the truth. And while it's true that "the truth hurts," how much pleasure do lies, sarcasm, and delusions bring? How much disillusionment and disengagement could be spared in our young adults if as children they were reared from the start to know how the world is and what it will take to change it? Imagine how many children could be saved from learning the lies of our fast-money, sex-obsessed, violent, materialist, culture of selfishness and sin from all those back-window sources, if we as adults could be there at the front door to greet them with the truth when they asked for it? How many could be spared the draconian sentences of the law for naively exposing themselves to each other if they could be told upfront how the law does more to punish them than it does to protect them? 

Empowerment is the enemy of ignorance, and it is given with the truth. It does no child any good to have the truths of life withheld from them, even the most unfriendly truths. For instance, everyone says "death is a part of life," but no one wants to accept that a child of theirs is ever going to die. People either deny to themselves the fact that children are living entities capable of death, or they deny to themselves and to their children the fact that living things have to die, in order to keep their emotions on the issue intact. They have to lie to themselves to justify stripping the humanity away from a child in the process of protecting that child's delusions. Delusions that keep the child a corporate slave, for instance, do little to nothing to empower them, no matter how much "girl power" or "guns and ammo" you get them drunk on, but the truth will always set them free. 

Every lie to a child is also a lie to the one perpetuating the lie. The one confusing the maintenance of ignorance for the "safeguarding of innocence" is lying to herself. The liar is only safeguarding themselves from their own anxiety. The liar is only safeguarding their authority and control over a child's will born out of their fear of the world. Conversely, the one telling the truth to the child is the only one doing everything the liar has convinced herself she is doing. The one telling the truth is actually the one doing the protecting, respecting, and sparing of the child from grief. If a child is capable of asking a question, they are capable of hearing the truth as assuredly as they are capable of hearing a lie. The air does not discriminate one from another. 

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?

So-Called Adulthood

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

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

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

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

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

Don't Stone the Abstinent

I've been asked about my sexuality and it seems that because I require more than your average one or two words to explain it, it means I am abnormal. I am abnormal because I choose to be abstinent and people can not accept this. What I have come to find is that sexuality is enforced for adults where it is denied to young people. Choosing to express one's sexuality differently than the majority only seems to become a crime against nature when one has crossed that artificial and arbitrary edifice into adulthood, into the coven of humanity. It seems voluntarily going without intercourse is a greater crime against nature than forcing others to involuntarily abstain.

It's as if human sexuality is some prize to be won for years spent in enforced abstinence. Suddenly as an adult, you're supposed to be living it up, you're required to be expressing your sexuality, enjoying it, because you earned it. Decadence is how adults celebrate the fact that they've made it to adulthood, it's how they reap the benefits bestowed on them for simply being an adult, and one of the most obvious is the way they are expected to express their new-found sexuality. The adult way of doing things is indeed steeped in unhealthy decadence. Sexuality is natural, and however an individual chooses to express or not express it should be acceptable (as long as it doesn't conflict with the rights and dignity of others)--this either/or extremism between involuntary abstinence and involuntary decadence is not. It's a perversion.

Because adults enforce that no individual below their line in the sand edifice for sexuality is allowed to be sexual, they expect and require sexuality from each other. Abstinence is first required, expected, and then it is stoned to death. People react, with the same shock, to the incongruities of a sexual child as they do at an asexual adult--or at least, an adult with a sexuality that deviates from the norm. If one has to explain their sexuality in more than one or two words, then it is considered abnormal.

Normal sexuality for adults is whatever advertisers have told us it is. It is an erection at the sight of a beer bottle, a sleek car, or a hamburger. What is normal for the adult only becomes an abomination, it seems, when the same effect rubs off on a child. Children are not supposed to have a normal sexuality after all, they are in fact required to have no sexuality. When they express a sexuality, it is an automatic abomination--so says the west.

However, it seems the moment a youth reaches this magical deadline, sexuality is not just expected from them, but demanded of them. Adults will not accept one of their own confessing to be asexual, or at least, confessing to have a sexuality that is not one the consumer culture has picked out for them. When adults speak candidly about their sexuality when gloating on their self-defined "ability to be sexual," they react with little more than scorn when one member of their group does not jump right in line with their sexual fetish proselytizing. Sexuality is demanded from the adult, and with it, the open and constant expression of it, lest they become outsiders.

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.

Babylon

What is Babylon? The Mesopotamian city-state once bearing that name has been used as a symbol for human folly, oppression, material worship, corruption, and moral depravity throughout history. It may have been the site of the infamous Tower of Babel, where mankind exercised the height of hubris and was securely humbled, at least according to tradition. The name "Babylon" has thus been appropriated to many lands that have fit these symbolic descriptors, including Rome, Europe, and the Americas--all places assumed at one point to have flown too close to the sun as Icarus only to burn in their own shame instead.

Probably the most severe charge leveled against this mythic pinnacle of human endeavor is that the people who inhabited it were not just morally bankrupt in their deeds, but the deeds and practices partook within its walls were contrary to nature itself. It is for these abominations that Babylon was torn asunder like Sodom and Gomorrah, and Rome in the following epoch, and perhaps our own high flying civilization in the near future. The western world, it could be argued, has decided to run its course contrary to nature in a multitude of ways, in clear defiance brought on by timeless human arrogance, but for the purposes of this dialogue, the most pressing appears to be the way it has decided to raise its children.

We are living in the midst of a new Babylon resurrected in the modern age to reclaim the same historical legacy. Our society has been gripped by an unnatural bureaucratic regime that imposes a skeletal will of its own on how children are to be dealt with in our age. For our purposes, we see this in the rise of "nanny state" politics, public education, and the Child Protective Services, to name a few sources. From these sources we observe widespread alienation in both society and it's children, and between society and children born from the paper trails and false pretenses strewn amok in the world. In this new Babylon a child becomes free to be secured so adults may not have to look at them, and little else, and it has ignored how nature has gifted them two arms and legs to go where they please. Babylon has forbade a child from bruising a knee where nature has equipped them capable of healing. This is an abomination.

From these sources we see how bold-faced corruption at the hands of the trusted few carries no horrified weight in the public heart when compared to the muted love felt by those the system deems superficially undesirable--the non-parents. The irony is that Babylon asserts Childlove is contrary to nature, when everything our society does in the raising of children at the "official" level can scarcely be found in the natural world. If Childlove is unnatural, then where does that leave the Child Protective Services? When was the last time you saw an animal, a mother tigress, have her offspring carried away to be wards of the animal state? In this confusion over what is natural and what isn't, Babylon creates a daily abomination out of what it calls modern childhood, and then goes on the hunt to purge that which is natural (loving adult/child bonds) by singling them out as abominations! To live in Babylon is to be an unwilling or unwitting slave to such illusion. That is an abomination.

We see bold-faced media moral depravity over children as we fret about outside sources of contamination on their so-called weaker minds. We see bold-faced consumerism regard children as personal corporate pawns to extort money from adults, and the constant bombardment of the developing mind with worshipful imagery of "me-first" gratification--an economically necessary self-actualization through material pursuits that has to "take root early" to grow as its planters desire. Within Babylon, children are not considered competent to resist the forces that seek to dominate them, cultivate them, and nurture them to fruition for the dreams of the powerful, so they are expected to be tame, passive, and to define their self worth and the worth of others through material things. Childlove is of nature because it teaches us to use things and love people. Babylon teaches our children to use people and love things. That is an abomination.

But because not all children are tame, they are subjugated where they deviate from what is expected of them from the corrupt culture. Within Babylon, they are expected to be sedated. They are expected to live an "ideal happy childhood" at all cost to their actual living human dignity. They are to be put under arrest for being young at the wrong place and wrong time (the definition of the "status offense" in juvenile law). They are expected to lay low in their bedrooms playing on their computers, buying into what is profitable for someone else, rather than out being human beings themselves, because home is where they can be easily monitored, easily controlled, and easily converted. Babylon is the residence of the downpresser. That is an abomination.

Babylon is wherever the soul has lost its way in its own arrogance and decadence. It is a metaphor for human folly--the slow destruction of the human being and spirit when its true passionate nature has been perverted, distorted, and separated from it. The modern world claims not only its children, but all those who choke up whenever it requires them to, who feel hatred for whom it orders them to feel hatred for, and sympathy for whom it reserves sympathy must be given. The modern Babylon controls its subjects (child and adult alike) through the subtle mind control of sentimentalism, inflated at ten times its natural size, until society can not tell what has been sensationalized from what is truth. In Babylon, phantom children (the idealized ones) take precedence over the real ones with faces and names, and whenever you have a civilization where imaginary child victims take precedence over the less visceral living and breathing ones, we have a civilization that has turned its back on nature.

We can save our society one child at a time, one person at a time, by reinstating the primitive values of personal responsibility, charity, and above all else, human-to-human love bonds--such things Babylon had no use for in its self-absorbed quest to build its towers to God. Who needs to worship children when you can simply respect them as human beings? Who needs a three-story chain link fence to keep our children safe in a world where children and adults were allowed to personally look out for one another? Who needs an all-consuming, expensive tower to God when we can bring Him to earth with just a friendly nod, or a loving embrace?

To get there, Babylon must first devour itself from the inside out, as it has before and will again.

Run Down the West

The decadent west has been described as a "vampire" by some critics, sucking children dry of blood. Blood is a life sustaining fluid, and to be robbed of it is to be dead or dying. Here, the west is said to be depriving children of their essential life elements--typically understood as the catchall term for modern affluence. The west stresses individualistic egotism, instant gratification, progress and persuasion over such mundane things as wisdom, guidance, kindness, charity, and patience. Indeed, in the west people seem to be fighting to retain these virtues on a personal scale in an environment that does nothing but encourage the opposite.

Children grow up in this environment, and learn quickly the world does the opposite of what it teaches. The so-called character in their "character education" is actually forged in a fight. It is caught between coming and going, between doing what is right and doing what the market and the media encourage, between valuing humility and respect and climbing to the top of an artificial social edifice to spit in the face of those who lost out. In truth though, virtue is just as important to sustaining an individual as blood. If to be robbed of blood results in a poor health and death, then to be robbed of personality by culture is to be in a state of comatose where one's will is no longer in control of the body just barely kept alive by the external system. Children need individuality like they need blood or air, otherwise they are living a life of a slow drown in the depths of illusion (aka. what the mystics call maya).

However illusion-based the west is though, it is also a free world, and the "big bad media" is simply an organization of individuals producing a product by utilizing that free will. Censorship of the content of the media, or managing culture, should be no entity's sole discretion. The culture simply "is" and nothing can be done about it. It is an engine fueled by a collective perspective shared by hundreds of millions of people, it is not inherently evil or even wrong, it's just ubiquitous and persuasive and limits our resolve to resist it (and therefore utilize our own individual will against it). The only solution to tempering the pervasiveness and destructiveness of western affluence on the minds of younger generations is through direct love and guidance of an adult who is himself also a victim of that "vampire" of affluence. It can hardly be argued that the CL is anything but.

Unlike other sources of guidance who may be entrenched in the will of society, or even be benefactors of the system (such as social workers), the CL is an independent agent. Through their outside charity, their love and guidance, a child is able to truly prosper as an individual. The CL is able to teach children about the grip of the west, to understand what makes it so powerful over human life, and ultimately how to respect that human life more than any product, social system, idea, or even society itself. They learn through their interactions with the non-parent how to swear allegiance to no artificial pillar of culture and only swear allegiance to themselves, how to be self reliant, how to be a person and not a puppet. When a child is given that kind of deep appreciation for life, theirs and others', by observing the works of the person who loves them of their free will, then they grow so much more protective of life. They'd see material things to be temporary pleasures that add to life, and not life itself.

In doing so, the vampire, the Babylon dragon, is rendered tame.

Fighting Decadence

The most potent question for resolution in all these musings may be over whether the CL is fighting a battle for inclusion or exclusion--that is, the difference between thinking children ought to be included with what adult's have determined to be the "human society," and the thinking that they ought to be excluded from adult civilization because they shouldn't need the permission of their taskmasters to claim human dignity for themselves. The question boils down to the same fundamental disagreement that has haunted the entire evolution of every youth movement in history: do children belong in an adult world or in their own?

Decadence defines all adult social interactions and motives for action. It is not a wrongful behavior, just a pervasive one built into the very nature of socially constructed adult life. It is a lifestyle of culturally-assigned self-indulgence--for our purposes, we could understand self-indulgence on the part of the adult to be benefits granted to the individual adult by other adults, but systematically denied to those not termed "adult," such as children. The right to vote could be considered a self-indulgence. The right to express one's sexuality would be considered a self-indulgence.

Thus we can understand an adult's decadence in these spheres of self-imposed freedoms and the lack thereof imposed on young people for the preservation of their own indulgence, similar to the balance of power kept between ethnic groups, "the first world" and "the third world"--essentially, divide the world into those who get to enjoy the decadence and those who can not. It is this aspect that the CL, as an adult, seeks to go beyond. They may perform the functions of an adult, even the decadent ones, but not in a way that reeks of deceit and false pretense.

What makes the CL distinct is that while they may and do work within the system, their ideal is to perform their good works for a child they love on the basis of pure charity. By doing such, they work to toss off adult society, with all it's shallow conceit and false pretense, and carve out a role for themselves as human beings separate from the so-called "age defined" limitations of culture. Casting aside the decadence that adults have reserved for themselves in light of their flaws is a show of revolt against culture. It is a show of humility in the face of that decadence to then devote oneself to being a peer to children, but the task is not so much to just raise them up to that very same level of adult decadence, but to supersede it--to go beyond it as well.

Thus it could be said the ultimate mission of the CL is an existential one, emphasizing the essential humanity of young and old and downplaying all the socially contrived nuance that typically defines adult and child interactions. Working within the system produces healthy young person fit to be the followers of a conceited adult social system. Working as a rogue individual doesn't produce anything, but gives the child room to experiment in the infinite possibilities available to human beings from the word go.