Life pulls a dirty trick, one might say, on all of us as we grow up from being children to being adults. It's like life has made us the victim of one of those word tricks.
"What does 's' 't' 'o' 'p' spell?"
"Stop."
"What do you do when a traffic cop holds up his hand towards you?"
"Stop."
"What do you do at a stop sign."
"Stop."
"What do you do when a traffic light turns green."
"Stop."
"Gotcha!"
For the first decade and then some of our lives this thing called maturity is a steady progression of getting better at things like self-discipline, respecting others, and handling responsibilities. Then along comes puberty and no matter how well we've been doing up to that point, it seems we become the brunt of a cruel joke.
Suddenly the chemistry in our bodies presents a challenge of much greater proportion than we had ever seen before to all those things we had come to associate with maturity. The same will that was more than sufficient for many of us to be good is now barely adequate most of the time and woefully inadequate at least some of it. We find ourselves seemingly beyond discipline, driven to think disrespectful things about others, especially those we find attractive, and all too easily we neglect our responsibilities.
Fortunately with age we slowly but surely manage to re-assert our wills mastery over our bodies. But much of this isn't so much a credit to our efforts as to the chemistry settling down. But whatever combination of things it may be, those of us who function in society do regain self-control. Then we move on with our lives as human beings instead of mere base animals.
But I suggest that we are still scarred by this part of our lives. It was a trauma that challenged our view of what it means to be an adult.
Some of us came to understand how it all fits together in our lives. How being human has a base animal side that needs to propagate, but it is part of what makes us so uniquely adaptive as a species that we don't allow that aspect of our being to control us.
Unfortunately though, it seems that far too many of us badly missed the point. Instead of toughing it through puberty with continued respect for the true elements of maturity, too many of us concluded that sex was the true mark of maturity and that things like discipline and respect were there to be challenged.
And while challenging ideas and questioning social constructs is a good thing from a learning perspective, it's only likely to be productive if done in a disciplined and respectful manner. Otherwise the results of the challenge tend to become little more than wish fulfillment designed to satisfy base animal motivations.
This base mind-set, almost a dichotomy, sees no merit in tradition more because it stands in the way of a "good time" than because of any serious examination of the role and purpose of tradition in human society. Chronocentric bigotry becomes the hammer of the day, and everything anchored in the past is perceived as having no worthy foundation precisely because it's from the past.
"Get with the present."
"Don't be on the wrong side of history."
Those are the sorts of phrases typical of this errant, and I suggest, traumatized mindset. Puberty scarred them badly, leaving them out of touch with a human reality where we are capable of transcending our base animal natures enough to appreciate and respect civilization.
And then there's the irony of it all. This multitude of people that seem to dominate contemporary thinking, these people with a base-animal-mindset that allows desire for sexual satisfaction to bias and distort their reasoning, they may be on the brink of destroying themselves and taking a few unfortunate bystanders with them when they do. The irony is that they may do this precisely by failing to satisfy the base-animal need of propagation.
For more details on this sub-point than I'll go into here I direct you to this article here: population trending the wrong direction . The article discusses reputable studies showing that we are likely headed to a world-wide population peak in the next few decades, to be followed by a precipitous decline in population.
The article suggest the cause is woman working and using contraceptives, but I think I see something deeper, and not some how a negative consequence of feminism (scientists should try and stay away from social commentary don't you think?).
I believe the contraceptives are being used more for the sake of satisfying base desires than as family planning tools. And while that in and of itself seems harmless at first glance, there's a problem coming from an angle we're not noticing, like the green light in the string of 'stop's. When we allow our base desires to have too much influence over our decisions we tend to lose sight of our responsibilities to civilization. Sex has a much more important purpose than pleasure and even relationship, and letting it control us is usually wrong. At some point after puberty we must re-assert the mind's mastery, for the sake of us all.
The problem, I suggest, causing birth rates to drop below 2.1 per couple is not contraceptives, but maturity. Too many of us got lost along the way to adulthood.
"What does 's' 't' 'o' 'p' spell?"
"Stop."
"What do you do when a traffic cop holds up his hand towards you?"
"Stop."
"What do you do at a stop sign."
"Stop."
"What do you do when a traffic light turns green."
"Stop."
"Gotcha!"
For the first decade and then some of our lives this thing called maturity is a steady progression of getting better at things like self-discipline, respecting others, and handling responsibilities. Then along comes puberty and no matter how well we've been doing up to that point, it seems we become the brunt of a cruel joke.
Suddenly the chemistry in our bodies presents a challenge of much greater proportion than we had ever seen before to all those things we had come to associate with maturity. The same will that was more than sufficient for many of us to be good is now barely adequate most of the time and woefully inadequate at least some of it. We find ourselves seemingly beyond discipline, driven to think disrespectful things about others, especially those we find attractive, and all too easily we neglect our responsibilities.
Fortunately with age we slowly but surely manage to re-assert our wills mastery over our bodies. But much of this isn't so much a credit to our efforts as to the chemistry settling down. But whatever combination of things it may be, those of us who function in society do regain self-control. Then we move on with our lives as human beings instead of mere base animals.
But I suggest that we are still scarred by this part of our lives. It was a trauma that challenged our view of what it means to be an adult.
Some of us came to understand how it all fits together in our lives. How being human has a base animal side that needs to propagate, but it is part of what makes us so uniquely adaptive as a species that we don't allow that aspect of our being to control us.
Unfortunately though, it seems that far too many of us badly missed the point. Instead of toughing it through puberty with continued respect for the true elements of maturity, too many of us concluded that sex was the true mark of maturity and that things like discipline and respect were there to be challenged.
And while challenging ideas and questioning social constructs is a good thing from a learning perspective, it's only likely to be productive if done in a disciplined and respectful manner. Otherwise the results of the challenge tend to become little more than wish fulfillment designed to satisfy base animal motivations.
This base mind-set, almost a dichotomy, sees no merit in tradition more because it stands in the way of a "good time" than because of any serious examination of the role and purpose of tradition in human society. Chronocentric bigotry becomes the hammer of the day, and everything anchored in the past is perceived as having no worthy foundation precisely because it's from the past.
"Get with the present."
"Don't be on the wrong side of history."
Those are the sorts of phrases typical of this errant, and I suggest, traumatized mindset. Puberty scarred them badly, leaving them out of touch with a human reality where we are capable of transcending our base animal natures enough to appreciate and respect civilization.
And then there's the irony of it all. This multitude of people that seem to dominate contemporary thinking, these people with a base-animal-mindset that allows desire for sexual satisfaction to bias and distort their reasoning, they may be on the brink of destroying themselves and taking a few unfortunate bystanders with them when they do. The irony is that they may do this precisely by failing to satisfy the base-animal need of propagation.
For more details on this sub-point than I'll go into here I direct you to this article here: population trending the wrong direction . The article discusses reputable studies showing that we are likely headed to a world-wide population peak in the next few decades, to be followed by a precipitous decline in population.
The article suggest the cause is woman working and using contraceptives, but I think I see something deeper, and not some how a negative consequence of feminism (scientists should try and stay away from social commentary don't you think?).
I believe the contraceptives are being used more for the sake of satisfying base desires than as family planning tools. And while that in and of itself seems harmless at first glance, there's a problem coming from an angle we're not noticing, like the green light in the string of 'stop's. When we allow our base desires to have too much influence over our decisions we tend to lose sight of our responsibilities to civilization. Sex has a much more important purpose than pleasure and even relationship, and letting it control us is usually wrong. At some point after puberty we must re-assert the mind's mastery, for the sake of us all.
The problem, I suggest, causing birth rates to drop below 2.1 per couple is not contraceptives, but maturity. Too many of us got lost along the way to adulthood.
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