The Best Laid Plans of Adults

[kokopelle]

It occurs to me that the rational intentions of the adult world/mind are constantly at odds with either literal children or the inner child. The coulda/woulda/shoulda of the adult world look good on paper, but the rude reality of childish needs and energies derail the focus of the adult thrust. It occurs to me that this paradigm is prevalent in so many places...

• Wars are waged by the childish; adult pacts and logic are ignored
• Self-empowerment and realization is put aside for the support of children
• Religious dogma and canon is insufficient to explain the behavior of children and 'control' the same

In these examples the veneer of adulthood is paper thin, overlaying a vast sea of childlike desires and whims. The goals of the adult are subordinate to the care of the physical and emotional child, inner and outer. To not be subordinate is done at the risk of the future generation and perhaps our own sanity.

I wonder this... what place does the adult have in this picture? Are they push to the back row? How does one balance the adult and child, or does the differentiation between the two create an artificial demarcation? Your thoughts please!

Comments

[breimh.livejournal.com]

I'm pondering this, and have a thought... I don't see your second point being appropriate between the relationship of "adult" and "child", so much as "responsible" and "irresponsible". Self empowerment and realization can occur within children, as easily as it can within adults. Albeit, the child doesn't label their feelings, actions or awareness as "self-empowerment" or "realization"... they'll just point out it's what they feel, want, or think is "right".

Personally, I don't think most adults give children the benefit of differentiating "right" from "wrong", being "selfish" or "considerate", or even weighing "pros" and "cons". I've seen children follow these same outlines of thought, time and time again, but the one difference is that they don't have the labels for them that adults do. Their vocabulary isn't as highly developed, so they just intuitively follow their instincts of being aware and/or being self-preserving/self-serving, depending on a given situation or on how they are being taught as they continue their development.

We attrubite selfish desire to being "childish", but I have seen more children be considerate of others than most adults in the world. If that is the altruism of what the literal or inner child is, I'm all for adults being shunted to "the back row".

[greensh.livejournal.com]

My Point #2 was more along these lines:

Adult goes to self-awareness and empowerment class. They are taught that they are masters of their universe, able to create anything they want. After the class they go home, clean the house, feed the kids, put them to bed, and then think about time/events that cannot be manifested while there is the responsibility for raising the children.

Your other comments bring up a good point. Children are not paradigms of virtue and goodness. Teasing and selfishness are incredibly intense during the childhood years. This is the shadow side of the experience, but it is also partially a manifestation of the child coming to awareness themselves. The good and the bad of it is that children do not put labels on things (as much), and hence they are less able to canonize the experience. Adults have the wonderful(?) ability to categorize life, leading to dogmas, canons, rules, regulations, and so on.

Neither the child nor the adult are "better" because of what they do, and I believe it is a mistake to emphasize one over the other. My thoughts partially began because I believe that adults take themselves so damn seriously, believing their own propaganda, and this comes into conflict with the world of child.

[breimh.livejournal.com]

Ah, that makes more sense, now. I'm glad we were able to clarify, and that I was able to help with the thought process in a small way.

[iskender.livejournal.com]

The differentiation is itself artificial.

I don't see how thievery is any more childish than pacts are adult. There is nothing inherently adult about either obedience or disobedience, war or peace... One can go about any of these things in more or less complex ways, more or less mature ways.

Adulthood and childhood are useful concepts in only a few physiological ways. Otherwise, they are abstract, emotional concepts that have little place in factual philosophy.

[chimerae.livejournal.com]

As individuals, it's important to differentiate between cultural "adulthood" and personal maturity.

Successful CULTURAL adulthood is about effective integration into cultural standards and inculcating cultural norms into personal reality. Cultural norms of any culture include overt rules of justice and communication, shadow realities, taboos . . .all sorts of things. Culture is a successful technology because it arranges and trains thresholds of unawareness. Culture is a sort of organized inattentional blindness.

Wars are about cultural conflicts -- wars happen when paradigms clash to the point that people would rather kill than examime their cultural blindness. It's very rational, since if you kill off the other culture, you elimante the competing software of the alternate set of paradigm. It's one of OUR culture's areas of inattentional blindness that we are generally unable to see that our paradigms, taken to their natural consequences result in war.

Contracts, as currently practiced in our culture, are not negotiated toward parity nor sustainabilty but rather a sort of communications warfare where the "side" with the best weapons crafts a paradigm of engagement to their benefit. It's our part of our culture's inattention blindness that this creates a "company store" effect where the lesser contractural party is "mined" for resources. Contracts don't need to be practiced that way Contracts are about 1.) How do the parties join into engagement. 2.) How do they conduct themselves while in the engagement. 3.) How do they separate?

Children are "rude" because they are natural and in consequence contrary to culture. Cultural adults are so inculcated with inattention blindness that they miss, through ontology the natural genius of childhood. Mature beings, conversely, value both the genius and idiocy of childhood, culture, natural law, human intellect and take a sort of relaxed personal responsibility for their place within those continuems.

Our culture is dualistic adult/child, good/bad, rude/polite, inner/outer. Reality is concurrently systemic and discreet.

[chimerae.livejournal.com]

I increasingly think of culture as a Microsoft Windows environment.

You can be a really great processor, but unless you can achieve cultural adulthood (MS compatibility) with all the attendant upgrades, virus protection, spywear protection yadda yadda yadda . . . AND have the right geographic location culturally, you're going to have a hell of a time functioning on the World Wide Web.

On the other hand, as sloppy design accrues toward systems collapse, the degree to which the WWW made room for Apple, Firefox and others is the degree to which MS users can migrate without leaving home.