Ten Lies We Tell Our Children

The ten big lies we tell our kids

Self expression is the greatest challenge, not self control. It’s easy to express yourself, it’s the first thing everyone does by nature. Even when we’re having a hard time expressing ourselves in a group, it’s because of all the self-expression going on, and you are still expressing yourself, just not yourself as you would of you were alone in the world or if you were a two year old. Encouraging everyone to act like two year Olds isn’t an achievement. Self-expression is a tautology, you’re always expressing yourself, even when you’re expressing things like fear and anxiety, deference, caution. That’s you reacting to the existing realities. Often our idea of “self expression” is just coding for selfishness, lack of awareness, and short term impulsivity. Childishness. That’s the core idea and aim, maximizing unreflective short term impulsivity, self expression divorced from any longer term or embedded or thoughtful or morally considered or multifaceted analysis and structure that takes the rest of reality and other humans and their claims and necessities into account. It’s easy to make that a virtue, it’s the virtue of a lazy and immature society, and one that hasn’t really thought through the consequences but just wants it to be true for them. Learning self control, learning to integrate all the levels of your life and bring your various conflicting impulses under a higher, more organized and integrated structure, that’s hard. Very hard. It takes maturity.

Tolerance means supporting what someone else does or believes, not strategically ignoring it. Tolerance doesn’t mean I’m obligated to agree with you or support you or anything. It just means I’ll tolerate you. We don’t have to outright fight about it, as long as we give each other space. Tolerance in a collectivist country means control and uniformity, because we’re all occupying one another’s spaces and have to move and live as a group. In an individualistic country it basically means giving other people their space, and letting good fences make good neighbors. America was designed as an individualistic country, one that provides space, not a collectivist country where we’re all obligated to be the same by the demands of the social trends. Tolerance does not mean I have to agree with you or endose you or even like you or anything you think or do. It means that if you respect my territory, I’ll respect yours, within agreed-upon necessary limits. We’re meant to be a nation of tigers, not ants, so we need tolerance, not acceptance. If you think tolerance means I have to accept your ideas, then that’s not tolerance, that’s tyranny and control and social oppression and manipulation and enforced uniformity. Making everyone agree with you as a condition of society being satisfactory for you is holding freedom hostage, not supporting it. There are, of cours, certain things that endanger the whole fabric of society itself, and those fall outside the realm of what can be tolerated and maintained as personal territory. How we discover and decide on what those are is a matter of great contention, where once it wasn’t. There’s no solution for that. That’s a matter of the fundamental basis of human existence and wellbeing and sanity and flourishing. If your fundamental theories on that seriously conflict, then you don’t belong to the same civilization and probably shouldn’t be part of the same state. The spirit that animates your most basic idea of society isn’t compatible, and that kind of conflict can only be resolved by destruction or conversion (which is what tolerance has become, forced conversion). Tolerance isn’t about creating a world where we don’t have conflict it’s about creating a system of rules and boundaries to manage and minimize that conflict. Tigers, not ants.

Believing in yourself is the biggest thing. If you’ve met these people, they’re the mosst insufferable in the world. Positive self-delusion. It’s not clear it can or should be taught, or that it comes except at the cost of important self and social awareness. That innate psychological system is meant to track something, not just produce the end feeling. Gaming the output instead of doing the work isn’t a recipe for balanced humans, it’s a recipe for unstable, ineffective sociopaths. It’s like injecting silicone muscles instead of working out. You’re creating the appearance of functionality without building the mechanisms that produce it.

What doesn’t kill you makes you weaker (suffering is harm), instead of what you suffer and endure and can navigate makes you stronger. Strength doesn’t come from avoiding having to lift a finger or face any obstacles. It doesn’t come from never needing to maintain your cool in the face of complexity and uncertainty. Great men and women aren’t the product of excessive coddling, but rather of surviving and overcoming challenge.

You can define your own truth or beauty or goodness. Relativism. Isn’t indulging or doing a favor to anyone else. It’s saying they’re all equally wrong and none of their claims to actual truth in any classical sense are correct, only my universal judgement on all of them as toys I can play with is. It’s the negation of everything except itself, and so it’s the least tolerant and least diverse stance, not the most. Beauty, truth, or goodness that’s truly only yours is insufficient for the needs of the human heart and human society. It will break your heart, frustrate you and others, and fragment the soul of your society into a thousand whirling shards.

Follow your heart. What does this mean? Follow your emotions? Follow your impulses, your inclinations? Not your higher thinking? Then what is your higher thinking for? What is the ability to converse with others for? And what is a feeling? Is it an instinct, are we saying we should be purely instinctive? Like an animal? Some people are great at that, at “being themselves” without interference or self doubt, and most people don’t actually like people like that, and they aren’t good to most people. How well do you even understand yourself and all that you contain or could contain if you were to “be yourself”? Are you really familiar with what most people’s instincts are? Or your own? Perhaps being yourself doesn’t mean following your instincts, then, but rather follow your feelings. Well, what is a feeling? Is it a heuristic reaction, a formulaic response so we can quickly respond to something we haven’t had time to closely examine? Should those be in charge? And if so, which one, and when? Because they change a lot and often disagree. Perhaps, then, to be yourself is to favor a response from some single voice within our consciousness defending its individual demands and territory against the rest. What decides between them? Is it another feeling?

Rights exist and support themselves independently of the creative generative power of fulfilled responsibilities. In the strictest sense, rights don’t exist at all. They’re purely negative in nature. They are a carving out of empty space that it’s your obligation to fill with the action of responsibility. But that space only exists as long as those responsibilities are discharged in a way that dilates the human space, creating a place for them and a justification for them. You have rights so you can pursue responsibilities, so the void can be filled. The responsibilities you take on create a space of justified ownership, and therefore a right.

You can do anything. You can be anything you want to be. No, you can’t. You’re finite and particular. And so is the world around you. You have a nature, humanity has a nature, the world has a nature. There is structure, there is particularity, there are limits. And it’s worth knowing what they are. You could be wrong about what they are, you might misidentify the structure or limits, but that just means your data collection (about yourself and the world) and your theory (about the same) need work. You only have so much time, so much energy, this body, this mind, these, these talents, these people, this time, this place. Learning to understand and accept them is part of the burden of being human, because we’re able to be aware of them in ways other organisms can’t. And time marches on and forces us to take a particular path and coalesce a particular role in the drama of life. Wishing to remain pluripotent forever is a wish to not be, to not mature, to not take a particular form. And that’s anti-life. Life’s infinite potential is the infinity of empty space, of nothingness until it becomes some particular thing. A stem cell is amazing because it could become any cell. Not absolutely any cell, but any of the particular cells of its particular species. And it’s amazingness is nothing in itself, it can’t actually do anything. It’s amazingness is entirely dependent on its ability to stop being a stem cell and become something. If it can’t do that, it’s nothing, part of nothing, does nothing. Your inner potential is vast. You don’t really know what its limits are. But as far a character goes, you have a particular one. And learning to understand it and love it and govern it and care for it and develop it is a much an essential part of the burden and adventure of human life as learning to live in the particular time in which you are born, and to whom, and where. You have particular parents, and that limits you, but they’re uniquely yours. There is a belonging, a franchise, an identity, that is generated by that confinement, a power and responsibility too. So too with your time on this Earth, your place, your character, your embodiment. You didn’t get to choose, you didn’t create them. And you will, perhaps, trap some future person in the time and body and place that you help mold, and they must shoulder their part of that burden in their place, for their time, with their being. Only to hand that on, too. We always only ever stewards of the time we inhabit. And we may wish it were otherwise, we may abdicate our inheritance, our stewardship. But it doesn’t vanish, it only falls to others and leaves us behind, frozen in our moment. We may wish that this moment, these parents, this character, this place, this being were not ours to carry. And we all wish that sometimes. But such things are not for us to decide. All we have to do is to decide what to do with what is given to us.