A Reckoning

I did not write this, it was something I found many years ago and held onto long after the site containing it passed on. As far as I know, the original author has been lost, but I post it only in good faith. Just absorb it right now. The magisterial world in the eyes of a child is but the minutiae of the adult's daily experience, but there is no reason to deny a child the majesty of the world. Every minute detail of life has to start out as a blinding revelation.

A Reckoning

My name is Jacob. I am the last brother born in my family. I have 3 older brothers, all of which have gone through the reckoning. It is a coming of age tradition that has been in our family for several generations. A test of survival in the 'real world', and it was done at a very early age.

Now it was my turn to carry on the tradition of the Reckoning. I was turning 6 years old today. All of my brothers had turned 6 when that day arrived for each of them. My mother had awakened me early and she fixed me a big breakfast. My father was also downstairs, and upon my arrival, he was sipping on a cup of coffee. For some reason, all my senses were heightened. I could smell the caffeine in my father's cup. I felt the heat from the toaster and I was 10 feet away. The sound of a knife spreading butter on a piece of toast was almost deafening. I could hear my breathing, and my own heart beat.

I sat down at the oaken table and began to eat. Not a word was spoken between the three of us. My mother and father spoke not to each other, but you could see the fear in my mother's eyes. My father was a rock. Unemotional, stone-faced, unflagging.

After breakfast, my mother ushered me up the stairs to my room where I found a brand new suit laid out across my bed. The 2 surviving older brothers, who had gone through this when they were 6 years old had purchased it for me. The reckoning required formality as opposed to normality. As I put on the white shirt and black pants, I started thinking about little things that were said amongst my brothers about the reckoning. Just bits and pieces were picked up from overhearing the conversation, but I was never able to make any real sense of it. The tone was clear, however. It was one of fear and foreboding, and if a conversation ever came up about this tradition, it was never meant for my ears to hear.

Dressed, and down the stairs, my mother and father took me by the hand and led me to our car. I got in the back seat, and father began to drive to the place where IT was. The trip took an agonizing 23 minutes as I saw it on the clock on the dashboard. Each second ticked away to the flash of a colon between the hour and minutes, and I felt each one pass through me. Perhaps counting the last minutes and seconds of my existence on this planet.

The conversation between my mother and father in the car was slow and deliberate. Many words I did not understand, yet the mention of IT was ever present to the point that it made the air thick with dread. Then we arrived at my destiny. My mother and father, again, led me, by the hand through a silver arched entryway into a place I did not recognize. It was dark inside, but soon spots of illumination broke through the blackness. I was too frightened to look around, but out of the corner of my eye, I could see statues of boys dressed in all manner of clothing. I thought that this might have been, in some grotesque way, a remembrance room to those boys who did not survive the Reckoning. Under a single spotlight, directly ahead of me, I saw what my mother had feared and what my father had remembered from his day of reckoning.

It was at least 50 feet high, it's small serrated teeth glistening in the precise light overhead. It's long black arms, stiff and shiny, lay on either side of this unspeakable thing. It was sleeping at the moment, but I knew that this condition would not continue much longer. My mother let go of my hand and stayed behind. A small, oval tear ran down her cheek and she said her silent "goodbye". My father and I continued toward IT. After a few more steps, my father released my other hand and took a couple of steps backward. He looked toward my mother, then looked down over his shoulder at me. His voice was unswerving as he said to me, "Approach it, boy. Hold onto it's arm and stand fast."

It was at that moment that I finally realized my fate. I was to be offered up as a sacrifice to this hideous thing, and if I survived the offering, I will have gone through the Reckoning with honor and dignity. The monster was still in its nocturnal slumber as I silently stepped nearer and nearer. The closer I got, the stronger the fear welled up. It got to the point where I my heart pounded in my chest almost beating to punch free. My breath came in short, heavy heaves as I lifted my hand and touched IT's arm.Then the beast awoke with a tremor and a whine. I clenched its arm even harder as I tried to stand fast as my father had told me. I was slowly being picked up by the thing and lifted into the air. The beginnings of a scream started to form in the pit of my stomach. I had opened my mouth, but even the sound was too terrified to came forth. Higher and higher I was lifted toward an opening near the top. An opening into what, I did not know, perhaps the opening to the end of my short existence. Sweat started sheeting off my forehead stinging my eyes, but I dared not close them for fear of what could happen next. I was breathing so rapidly, that I thought I was going to faint, but I held on with both hands and let out a yell that ripped from my being as a bolt of lightning is ripped from the heavens above. This kept me conscious as I was being pulled up, up, up, into what?!

I glanced over my shoulder and looked down to the ground where my mother and father stood. My mother cried and held out her arms in futile frustration. My father cupped his hands over his mouth and yelled out, "Look ahead, boy. It's almost completed". I broke my gaze with my parents and concentrated on this black opening that lay ahead. I was STILL alive. It was almost over. Suddenly the fear had turned to determination. Determination to last this ordeal. To face the unknown and be able to tell my children about it. In that split second, my mind raced to my future and I vowed I would NEVER put my boys in this situation. EVER. I closed my eyes and wished the ordeal were over and done. This was the moment that I would either survive or the monster would take me quickly. Then, the movement stopped. IT had been silenced for reasons I could not fathom. I had survived the Reckoning. I was alive and my small body was quivering and tingling at the sensation of success. Slowly and carefully, I walked off the escalator.

The Forbidden Toy

In the last post I made the argument about the fallibility of adult cognition in both the extreme (cults) and the everyday, which should not be such a watershed. By the same extension, the same behaviors can be seen in children, but once again reproduced and expressed through "smaller means." Exactly what is meant by "larger" and "smaller" is a relative question pertaining to the existential, psychological, and biological differences we associate (via imperfect "adult-centric" cognitive schema) between childhood and adulthood, but children can be shown to be no more infallible than children in forming their thoughts about the world, relative to their cognitive capacities to do such.

One way the action of cognitive dissonance has been observed in children is characterized by an experiment carried out by Aronson and Carlsmith (1963), where children were asked to rank a selection of toys from the ones they found the most enjoyable to the least. After they were ranked, the experimenter would take a toy the child liked and leave the child alone with it in a room. Half the child subjects were told that they would be severely punished if they played with the toy and the other half were told the punishment would be temperate. Obviously they weren't going to punish the children.

Later the experimenter would remove the punishment, saying that there would be no repercussions from playing with the toy. The children in the moderate punishment condition were then less likely to play with the toy, even though they now understood there'd be no punishment. On the other hand, the severe punishment group were more likely to play with the toy once the punishment was lifted. When asked why, the children in the moderate condition expressed more disinterest in the toy, even though at one time they had ranked it as one of the most enjoyable to them. The children in the severe punishment condition expressed even higher interest in the toy than they had initially.

The conclusion from this study represents a concept called overjustification. The children in the severe condition had what is called a good "external reason" for not playing with the toy, because they believed they'd be punished severely if the did, even though they still found the toy as desirable. When the punishment was lifted they were more likely to play with it. The children in the non-severe condition had an "insufficient external reason" for not playing with the toy, so they had to make up their own justifications against playing with it. They had to convince themselves to find the toy less desirable, and therefore resort to not playing with it. Either way, children's internal feelings towards a toy were influenced based on how their beliefs about what the ramifications would be of playing with it, and once those beliefs turned out to be false, they had to resort to justification in order to suppress the effects of the disconfirmation. The stronger the effects of disconfirmation, the more justification is needed.

This overjustification for the children in the moderate condition when observed in childhood appears to result in a child's forced compliance (usually with an adult), and when observed in adulthood, results in the more extreme forms of social cohesion, shared social schemas, adult compliance (as seen in the Milgram studies), and all sorts of applications in social psychology from hierarchial structures like the military and government, to how adults formulate their laws and regulations or whether they resort to obeying them, and in the most extreme cases, where psychosis is involved, the formation of cults and other shared delusions (Festinger et al. 1956).

All this goes to show how children react in situations when prophesy fails. As is seen in adults, the stronger their personal conviction, the more they'll seek to justify their conviction retroactively when it doesn't pan out the way their beliefs where structured initially. Children behave much the same way. Any attempt to label children as cognitively handicapped in comparison to an adult is ignoring the similar expressions of the very same falibilities adults express.

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.

Pop Superstition

What is controversial to adults is commonplace to the young. What the adults find amusing about contemporary social awakenings, children living today have been hearing about their entire lives. There is nothing special or even different about the gay lifestyle, for instance, if you have grown up in a world where it is an acceptable part of your culture. What is exotic or abhorrent to one group becomes the new normal in the course of even just one generation's time on earth.

It is totally understandable that human beings are continual prisoners to the customs of their little spot on the globe in the little span of time they have to dwell in it--what is not understandable is why, given this, so many of them seem to think that their unique (regional and temporal) perspective is the be-all end-all truth of existence. Take whatever superstition you have about a social issue, and move that idea half way around the world, or even just 50 years into the future, and suddenly you'll find no more truth in it than the superstitions a half a world away, or from 50 years ago.

There are a few constants over time though--the so-called eternal human condition. These are what may constitute general categories (good and bad...etc.) for assigning temporal phenomena. When I talk of what is evil and what is good, this is what I mean.

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.

Three Theories

The first I call, Developmental Ageism, which is just as it’s name implies, a prejudice against certain individuals on the basis of their developmental state. This is the view that suggests children ought to be barred from certain activities completely until a specifically determined age at which they should be able to demonstrate complete competence.

This view holds that children and adults exist along two separate planes, and that the child plane dies out and is replaced by the adult plane through physical and cognitive maturation. And lastly, this view holds that full “adult” maturity is a child’s teleological path. This view is bigoted and leaves no room for a child to actually do the very all-important transformation from "child" to "adult" in any meaningful way, despite best intentions. In seeking to protect children, it starves them. Children and adults are not two separate species, either.

The second I call, Developmental Egalitarianism, which is commonly called the “children are little adults” rationale. This is widely denounced in the modern world simply because it is has been largely scientifically discredited with the movements of Empiricism, Darwinism, and countless developmental studies into human physical and psychological growth over the past 200 years.

Proponents make the supposition that child development is stalled by social or cultural expectations, and that children are naturally able to do adult tasks long before they are said to be developmentally capable, and therefore argue that only through full incorporation into "adult" society can children develop in a natural way. This view is ignorant and also leaves no room for a child to fit into an adult world made for other adults, and therefore become systemically disenfranchised, despite its best intentions. As you can observe, it is just as bigoted to ignore a child's unique developmental characteristics as it is to limit a child by them.

The third I call, Developmental Relativism, which I personally believe to be the right way of looking at human development, if not the correct manifestation itself. Unlike Developmental Ageism, this theory posits that the developmental plane between children and adults exists along the same continuum, and therefore behaviors carried out along the continuum are the same behaviors as they would be at any stage in human development, only expressed in ways appropriate, physically and cognitively, for that developmental stage.

Unlike Developmental Egalitarianism, this theory posits that children are not capable of certain adult tasks, but may be capable of adult tasks that take into account the unique developmental differences that impair a child from performing certain tasks. Therefore, it is the view that forbidding a child from participating in an adult activity (as in Developmental Ageism) should not be necessary so long as the level of participation is appropriate for the ability of the child. Children and adults are the same species, just express the same human strengths and weaknesses relative to one another.

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.

Adult is No Standard

Children are often accused of thinking the world revolves around them as if believing this was such a "low" or lesser thing--as if it were a behavior divorced from the adult. Believing one is at the center of something important is as human as human, whether it's believing that all one's friends are spending their time talking about them or believing that extra-terrestrials would have any reason to travel endless light years to us for momentary visits. No. Far from being something divorced from adults, it is the very nature of the human ego to assume itself untouched by behaviors it deems low or lesser than it. By so easily dismissing the child's egoism, adults reveal their own.

Advertisements will even exploit this standard, simultaneously depicting children as rambunctious egoists bent on gratifying their passing fancy along with an adult, normally the mother, in desperation for what she deserves--attention to her plight, attention on her struggles and efforts, only to find that her labors are such that only some godsend product can help dissolve. Advertising is the propaganda of its target audience. When adults are the demographic, the advertising is unquestionably adult-centric. Because adults reserve for themselves the resources of society, they are inevitably the main target audience, thus the majority of advertising is adult propaganda.

Adult-centrism is reinforced by this propaganda. Its main tenet being that whatever constitutes adulthood at any time and place is the standard and pinnacle lifestyle, ideology, perspective, culture, and developmental ability of the human race. Indeed, "adult" is often interpreted as meaning or being synonymous with "human." Childhood and youth is considered unfortunate temporary states of being on the way to becoming adult, which is to say, becoming human.

However, all is subject to interpretation, and all interpretation that prevails is a function of power. Alternative positions, whether adult or child, are simply alternative positions--developmentally defined expressions of humanity. One is no more "superior" by virtue of its power and authority as the other is "inferior" by virtue of it's ignorance. No one is inferior or superior. All expressions of humanity are relative to one another. The only thing maintaining the adult as the standard form of human being and all it's various alternative (child-like) positions as "lesser" or "inferior" states of being, is a function of their power to enforce this perspective. This is done through their propaganda.