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. 

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?

Kids and Sexual Suggestion

It's not so much a problem that children are exposed to sex early, it's the way they are exposed to it. People seem to prefer exposing sex to kids coyly and comically on a regular, daily basis, rather than honestly and factually in small doses. Society is still hung up about sex, and so (after decades of declining standards over the acceptability of its suggestion) has been going to great lengths to throw sex into everything "suggestively," failing to find suitable any honest and accurate depictions of sex acceptable for viewing by children.

So if we have to be concerned about anything (and I don't think we do anyways), it would be that kids are getting the wrong idea of what sex is, and the real implications of it. A child can watch a commercial where a bikini woman opens a beer bottle with her "parts" while serving it to a leering man, and it is completely acceptable, but it is thought that if that same child saw even just the image of a vagina, or a penis, he or she is going to be traumatized for life. Neither is traumatizing. To view one as more hazardous than the other is mere superstition, and just an indication of how backwards a child's everyday reality is in the 21st century.

Expose them to sex early, sure. Expose a child to sex suggestively, sure, but counter it with exposing them to sex as an uncensored reality as well. If we leave it up to parents to pick the time when their children are "ready" to see an accurate portrayal of sex, the kids have already had 15 or so years of seeing sex as a series of untruthful, amoral, absurd, sexist, and exploitative imagery, and will likely have a misunderstanding about the word. It will all have to be unraveled and untangled before any discussion about sex as a real thing with real implications can be presented.

All the parental controls in the world are not going to stop the abundance of media from seeping into a child's everyday life, so it's best to just confront the issue early on as an inevitability. Show and tell them the honest truth about sex the way one would if asked any other question concerning human biology, and move on--tailoring the lesson to their developmental comprehension. Censorship of reality doesn't work, all it does is turn the illusion into reality.

Make it Personal

Unspeakable evil is created by groups, where noteworthy good is created by individuals. In the group, individuals absolve themselves of wrongdoing, they distance themselves from being a part of a problem because they are not fully responsible for it. They may be good people as individuals, and they more than likely are, but once inside the group, they become a cog that spins the gears that may power such unspeakable evil. They may be able to sleep at night knowing that they're decent, honest folk, who are by themselves no more guilty than anyone else, but they still go to work everyday to help perpetuate what is evil at worst, and nonsense at best. If they are honest with themselves they realize this, and the knowledge that they are a cog plagues their conscience night and day. Hopefully it inspires them to do some good in the world on their own terms to make up for it.

Those who create our media, the advertisers who exercise no regard for decency in their fight to insult the buying public, are a perfect example. Consumerism is choking the life out of our love and respect for one another, our kindness, and our generosity, all because such things are of trite importance when the emphasis is on selling to human selfishness. Those who produce these spectacles of poor taste have done nothing but intentionally try to turn us against ourselves, turn man against woman, woman against man, adult against child, child against adult, and so on. They produce a relentless barrage of group favoritism that enforces cliched ignorance and antagonism toward the variety of human expression.

They create characters who are as they'd like to see people in society, loathsome and self obsessed, and then perhaps read their children to sleep at night with fairy tales that preach the opposite. They make their living with the intention of pinning one against another, dividing and conquering (so that all may fall), so that they may hawk their company's products at the very people they can get away with putting down or building up, insulting or devaluing. It's a tactic. If you devalue people, then you can get them to value products. These are the same people who may preach to their children about respect and kindness, but work only to produce the opposite.

Troubling still is how those who make and sell products believe they are justified only because of their desire to make and sell quality products to enhance people's lives. It is the engine that perpetuates our standard of living, after all. Doing this, they never have to fathom the desperate depths they have to sink to in order to hawk their "quality products" at the public, and what psychological toll this warfare has on human relationships. They don't have to feel guilty for perpetuating stereotypes in their advertisements, or just being distasteful, because all they see is profit at the expense of what they see as "dumb consumers" eating it up.

They'll be the first to make the case that they are simply reacting to "repressive" political correctness by choosing to be offensive, and may even believe their material to be thought provoking or challenging. This is not so, because something is only offensive when it causes people to reconsider their cultural standards, it is just abhorrent and meaningless when it perpetuates those standards and still manages to offend for pure shock value. The depiction of men in advertising, of fathers in particular, is not offensive, it is abhorrent and sinister.

They'll be the first to liken themselves truth-sayers for "instilling" what they consider to be "critical thought on an area of sketchy acceptability." If such was the case, why not drag this motivation to its natural conclusion? Why not offer us something new to consider, rather than just heaping on the same old nonsense in worsening depravity? How long will it take before our media depicts human blood being splattered over a sandwich like a condiment? How long before we get to see fathers being ritualistically dismembered and devoured by their wives because they surely have no clue about their children's peanut butter preference? How long before we see children gleefully disemboweling their own parents as a form of torture so that they may ring a video game paid for by the credit card clasped in mom's lifeless hand? How long before we see parents shoot their children in the back with a pistol so that they may enjoy the Margarita mixer in peace and quiet? How long before we see the wife stitching together bedsheets she made from her husband's flesh after she skinned him alive? How much more critical thought could be inspired by these eventualities? Is there no low our consumerist culture will overlook to try to hawk their precious little "quality products" in our faces?

The worst, or best, part of it is, we are all implicated in it, not just those who produce this lifestyle. We are all responsible for setting these abhorrent cultural trends in motion, if not because we sold them, but because we bought into them. I say our implication in it may be for the best because it is all the more reason to take personal responsibility for it. When culture decides that it is fair to do the equivalent of public dismemberment for shock value or some twisted sense of humor, when it feels alright turning boys into slugs, men into idiots, girls into sluts, and women into objects or self-righteous bigots, we ought to feel implicated as if we ourselves had offended our loved ones, our sons, daughters, sisters, brothers, parents or friends. When we buy into some campaign that seeks only to put down a segment of the population, we ought to feel as though we just did some horrible misdeed by our loved ones. We ought to feel as though we put stones in our children's hands when they hungered. We ought to feel as though we put black eyes and broken teeth onto those we care deepest about, all so that we could feel good about ourselves--all so that we could feel like "we're worth it."

If we don't make it personal, if we don't take it to heart, if we can't see the faces of our loved ones on those our consumerist lifestyle wants us to make fun of, despise, and demean, then we have absolved ourselves from any wrongdoing, and we succeed only at buying into nonsense. On another level, we may even succeed at buying into and thus perpetuating unspeakable evil against human life. Freedom comes at the expense of human dignity, it is true, and people should have the freedom to buy into whatever they want just as they have the freedom to sell whatever they want, but they should not get away with not feeling guilty for what they have been directly and indirectly responsibility for.

Freedom from want is a right, freedom from guilt is not.

Play Spaces

It's true, the play space is where kids plot out their method for world domination. These methods won't be taking effect immediately, but at some point, the children alive today, who you see out playing, will take over the world, and the kind of space they have to practice out their methods now makes all the difference over whether they chose to simply replace us, or take us out by force and demand something better. The powerful and the downpresser would prefer a gentle replacement that benefits them unto and beyond the end, but the powerless want their children to be a force onto themselves, bold enough to fix what does not work, stand up for what is good and just, and throw those benefiting from the broken system into the ground as fast as possible. At least, that is how the adults have decided to use children.

The economic engines of our society have attempted to create a generation contented on its own gluttony and self-absorbsion, and it's not so much a conspiracy as it is just good business practice. If you want future customers or constituents, you only tell the incoming generation to challenge authority if you intend on being the authority, otherwise, you close and limit their play spaces, and distract them with your gadgets so they never have to leave a parent's sight. But then when that technology expands their new insular play worlds to the largely unregulated spheres of play found online, a problem develops, for they become "beyond control" once again, and therefore a threat to power. The powerful then endeavor to turn even their newly formed online play spaces into havens of corruption. Simply put, adults don't want kids playing in or outside the box, not behind the shed, not in the house, not in their room, not stuck to their computer--they don't want them playing here or there, they don't want them playing anywhere!

A child caught walking the public streets could easily find themselves in the back of a police car. A group of kids playing in the woods could find themselves branded as hoodlums and once again thrown in the back of a police car. Gone are the days when the cop would tell them to "get on home." Now the message they're given, should they choose to accept it, is that either their home is the shopping plaza, their own backyard, or if not, it's the hold up at the police station. Simply put, adults don't want their children in this day in age to play in the uncouth, unstructured, unsupervised ways in which a child seems naturally drawn. Most parents, most townships, most police, don't want children learning too much about what it means to be a free individual because a free individual is encouraged by a free, wide open to roam place space to think free thoughts--thoughts that threaten those who stand to gain from a broken world. They want the next generation to be "good little goobers" now, and forever.

One play space is really no more or less superior than another for children to learn about the workings of the world and other people, whether it is online or out in the neighborhoods of the sticks and concrete jungles alike. They will naturally test out their strengths and weaknesses, socialize, and grow fond of each other in these social spheres, regardless of what any adult tries to do to stop them. They carve out their own decadence in a world that adults wish to fashion for themselves alone, and that's why it is discouraged. But the adults are fighting the losing battle, for it is just a fact of nature that the children, regardless of what is put into them now, will someday rule the world, it is only a question of time.

We didn't really have what the kids growing up in this day in age have, we of the generation Y. We were in the unfortunate position of having our physical play spaces limited by the PC "don't let the kids ever get hurt" parenting, and at the same time, didn't have the boundless internet where we could replace that missing play space. We had no acceptable place where we could be truly beyond the eyes of our overlords, and because of that lack of opportunity to direct our own purpose, we were grown spineless. Due to the internet, we can't expect the same from generation Z, who grew up in a world divorced from many adult's understanding. The internet has become our mode of cultural rebellion, it is our play space--for now at least, so let the revolution commence.

We are Anonymous, legion.

Political Correctness

What compels a person to see something beautiful and helpless, sleeping beneath the willows by the brook in the spring, delicate and docile, and rape it, destroy it, cut it to pieces and devour it after a slow boil? Calm your heart, because it's the same urge that causes seemingly rational people to swear an allegiance to political correctness. PC is the demon of social decay, the lord of the flies, that feeds off otherwise healthy and passionate human behavior and shits out its prefabricated, soft and grotesque version of reality. Originality, essence, meaning, it's all lost in the transformation, and what is produced is nothing less than the ultimate victim of molestation--the slow decay of our free society.

Children grow up in a prefabricated world simply because the world has already been established before their birth, but adults seem to want to go one step further. Raising a child on a PC version of that world is similar to feeding them food that has already been chewed up and regurgitated by the parent. There is the real world, let's say, the cheese on a cracker, and then there's the PC version of it, the cheese and cracker mush laced with saliva and stomach acids that has been thoroughly chewed and digested by an adult. Both plates contain the essential food product, the only difference is that one contains the real treat and the other is what occurs when adults have to intervene. After that, it becomes difficult to tell what is real, seeing as the regurgitation is sitting right there on the plate and seems real enough, it's just that now we have to begin force feeding to get the child to eat it when they could have just eaten it themselves.

Many "concerned parents" won't think this is an accurate comparison, because in this case the cheese and cracker is obviously more healthy than the pre-digested slop, and in reality, many things that are PC don't inflict all that much damage on the young--at least no more or less damage than exposing the kid to the real world. It is an accurate comparison though, as all adult intervention to censor reality, limit freedom of expression, limit knowledge, or ban outright any part of a child's ability to reach out to the real world around them is dangerous, not only for children but for all of free society. The reality we want our children to eventually live in is the real one, not the fabricated "inoffensive" one called politically correct. They already live in the real world, and one day will possess it, like it or not, and no amount of focus group tampering or "concerned parent" molestation of reality is going to stop them from possessing it.

How Not to Corrupt Children

How often do we hear about the various forces out there corrupting children and then ignore the fact that despite all our fretting very few are ever actually "corrupted"? It's no mistake that people do this--the fear of children being corrupted sticks in our heads better than when they actually are. Imagination takes precedence over sight. In reality, the majority that grow up to be average adults easily pass right through the social cognition of most people and the few that are corrupted by these forces usually don't constitute any real threat to civilization anyways. So why are we spending our time fretting?

Here's an example I stumbled on today. Children's films are often dripping with various political messages or ideologies. When filmmakers decide to make a simple story out of a series of plot devices to push a certain message (such as "save the rainforest"), with a few New Age beliefs mixed in, suddenly you have a lot of angry adults hemming and hawing about the "leftist propaganda" smeared all over children's media and how every child who sees it is going to grow up corrupted by it inevitably. Likewise, mix in some religious elements or conservative ideologies, against homosexuality for instance, and suddenly there's an outcry from the other side about how children will grow up to be intolerant. Either way, it seems children are always "raised" by the adherents and "corrupted" by the opposition--two trajectories defined by adults, not by children.

Each side of the adult divide seems to have it's own ideas about what a vile thing political correctness is, they just can't seem to identify what exactly is politically correct. Have you then ever stopped to wonder about whether or not the kids are actually corrupted by such implicit "propaganda" or "intolerance?" Such a question doesn't normally factor into the binary vision of most adults so long as the other side is seen as the politically correct oppressor and the corrupter of the youth. In reality, the children who are supposedly being fought over to win their hearts and minds either don't care about these implicit messages or don't understand them anyways. This isn't to say kids don't or can't understand these things, it's just to say that these adult perspectives rarely factor into their daily lives as much as they do the lives of adults, who are more personally served by such trivialities.

And even if they did factor in, it's not like children are on some moving platform where ideology is pumped into their open head at one end, stored for a while as they move along, and then emptied into the world when they drop off the other side without any permutation or elaboration by the child themselves in the interim. Lest we forget, it's quite the contrary. Young people are constantly challenging the ideologies they are exposed to. Would we as adults want it any other way? Should they not be exposed to a variety of ideas and given time to hash them out in their own heads? Are we more afraid of corrupting children or of letting them think for themselves?

In this case, the last thing we ought to be worrying about is exposing our children to a certain ideology in fear that they will inevitably follow that ideology without question straight to their dying bed (what an unrealistic expectation, but such is the adult). What we really ought to be afraid of is cheating them out of a good story by filling it up with self-righteous, shoe-horned, one-sided politics, ethics, or other  ideological claptrap. Give them a good story and the morals will always flesh themselves out on their own. Children have the ability to reason. They're not going to become New Agers or homophobic simply because some animated character in a movie they saw when they were six espoused those views. If they are going to get that way, it'll be for other reasons entirely centered around their own will and the social rewards surrounding belief. And most likely, 20 years from now they'll be right along side you calling out the shallow ideology in children's media just as you do, as will their children 40 years from now. Nothing ever changes.

The only corruption that takes place is just how pervasive the protective paranoia over children becomes after the first 30 years of life.