The Surface, So Near, The Depth Unfathomable

[behavioralist]

That, between birth and parenthood, some people suffer bad experiences which become inculcated is something the great majority of people accept, and having become bad praxis or everyday machinations these traits then constitute bad parenting. Each new generation of these disagreeable people endures the same bad experiences, becoming the same bad parent.

If goodness is how we are at birth, then this is in diametric contradiction to the human nature, and it is so in a way that most people recognize as such. Goodness gives way to criminal malice or mania, and we presume ourselves different, even antipodal and utterly unrelated to the products of such circumstances.

But how do we understand good and evil; or do we only imagine that we are doing so? Perhaps there are only the bad, the worse and the worst? ---except at and near birth, the age of passionate but futile censure of society; of being heeded as scarcely as a pig during its slaughter.

Given only degrees of bad the existence of the worst people connotes cause to pause rather than provocation; the response becomes “meditation upon karmic responsibility” as Hindu scripture puts it, which means it is always your own fault and you have only one person’s violence to put an end to, not as stopping your behavior (self-programming merely mirrors programming) but as the violence is reflecting your dearth of the original evolved and unprogrammed goodness. (Cognitive science is not all that new! It only seems that way because by the time anyone checks the author’s book out of the library its language has become archaic.)

We do not as a rule recognize normal parents as antithetical to this innate goodness of the newborn. The experience of being born to normal parents and exposed to them and isolated with them day after day is not recognized as the parents' self-willed extinction of the goodness their children are born with, as with the more clearly inbred or specialized worst-case gene-pools. Custom rules, just as “Italian food already is health-food! Here we will never need health-food stores!”.

Contradictory behavior toward children, however normal or even lofty and magnanimous, reflects an intractable goodness-blindness. We cannot nurture that in a child which we cannot see. The goodness in us was displaced by our upbringing, relegated to a state called subconscious; and what displaced perception (the quality of goodness) as the focus of our lifespan becomes our perception or cognition of children, so that we are only seeking to nurture this processed iteration of ourselves in them. Society and its constituents are akin to mass-inertia: the pebble on the moon does not take either of them places, and the moon does not take the Earth places, and the Earth does not take the sun places, etc.

Opportunism conflated with sensualism (the surrogate for irretrievable perception) to “inspire” thought cannot rest, and something that cannot rest does not heed something that rests to recover actual social equilibrium, actual love for the sum of life, as goodness does. Goodness recovers itself, and so parents assume no harm was done during the traumatic episodes, but eventually the recovery has become vestigial and erratic, and the goodness subject to being deposed, the present traded for the memory that can be exploited as private and dissimulated thought.

The problem adults have had throughout history is that they have nothing to offer a good person that elevates him above the captive animal to the status of participant or "buddy", and we are perpetuating the solution we know of from before the advent of writing; that no child of ours is going to vilify what we have to offer by being too good to admire it. The pederasts’ solution is no different in its essence from the diligent and sober wage-earners’ solution.

The only difference is degrees, as reflected to the common observer in the degrees of academic potential, a difference in the ability to broaden one’s scope even in a doomed culture. Instinct (subconscious, the newborn goodness) meets every culture with absolute apathy (like a goose whose mental compass is guiding it to hell with each beat of its wings) as said culture rends a planet’s goodness to extinction in its haste to proffer its vile product for tokens of approval before death executes that final sentence on the new self, the conscious, the self no one else can find or judge.

Hubris is that any adult or adult-consort who joins a throng of “the good” in what appears a good protest or cause is quite aware that he is not good; that his goodness or kinship with it is impersonated. If hubris is the common factor, then the goodness of the cause is mere appearance to every member of the throng, and there really is no cause but the one skulking in that privacy whose contents would disgust any and all but the sole person privy to it (along with whatever God he imagines has made him and only him in his own sweet image and can fault him for nothing done to those lesser beings. "Boy-gods will be boy-gods!").