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. 

The Tethered Master

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.