A Little Truth

[Zerubbabel]

Stefan places many metaphors and analogies into his UPB. Sometimes I find metaphors too indirect, lacking precision and more obscurant than simply stating the concept directly. But what metaphors do marvelously is to force one to take a new and different perspective. That is what I love about Stefans "Little Truth" and "Great Truth."  

 

So here is a Little Truth which it seems is orphaned from any Great Truth: Contrary to what it says in the description of the Atheism and Religion Topic -"we are not commies"- We ARE commies!  Whatever handle one wants to put on communism: "to each according to need, from each according to ability," or a centrally directed economy, or other definitions (?) ... all these definitions apply to the nuclear family and somewhat to an extended family but fades as we move further away from the core existence of communism as the basic human relationship universally required for the rearing of children - i.e. the propagation of the species. 

 

George Lacoff, another metaphor ("framing") user, explains why the Left tends towards communism as they take their childhood communism Little Truth and apply it as a communism Great Truth. I think the Right is correct in portraying Leftist politics as adolescent, because it is. It is based on their communistic experiences as a child that they want to bring forward into the relations between men.  

 

If this might be considered a philosophical discussion I suggest that the more essential idea is not communism, but parasitism. Yet the idea is seldom ever rationally discussed and the word itself is always reserved as an ad hom invective.

 

 "As yet, no thinker has had the courage to measure the health of a society and of individuals by the number of parasites they can stand."   Nietzsche 

 

 

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[Kevin Beal]

I think that's a really good point. And Stef has actually mentioned before that the nuclear family is communist in nature.

 

I think it's interesting just how many things are reversed in the nuclear family / childhood as in the family's relationship with the rest of the world. Children absolutely need and deserve unconditional love, for instance, but that in an adult relationship is enabling, creepy and gross. Children are expected to be narcissistic to some degree and it's healthy, but adult narcissists are mostly horribly dysfunctional people. Children should not be expected to pay for all the resources they consume as children since they did not choose to be there, but that would be a terrible lack of boundaries if from an adult. Etcetera.

[Peaceful Parent]

I appreciate this topic. It's rich for potential philosophical discussion.

 

Children absolutely need and deserve unconditional love, for instance, but that in an adult relationship is enabling, creepy and gross.

So very true. But I wonder just how intuitive is that truth?

[Zerubbabel]

 Children should not be expected to pay for all the resources they consume 

 

Let me answer this with another Little Truth: Children were once an economic asset - now they are economic liabilities. In the last 150 years, with the paradigm shift of industrialization, there has been an enormous change in the child's self-perception of their usefulness. In the pre-industrial agrarian society children worked. Victorian era child labor in factories was just an extension of this cultural norm. The man who had 10 children was economically blessed. Today each child is an enormous liability. Many studies seek to place a price-tag on the (parasitic) cost of a child - high six figure price tags, some even seven figures for the affluent. While the working child surely had feelings of resentment for having been used as labor they still had to have an intrinsic knowledge of their own usefulness. Today's child can not escape the reality of their uselessness, their parasitic nature, their being a liability to their family - and this can never be compensated for by taking out the trash and cutting the grass.

 

Is this not the source of a new pathos that haunts 20-something-year-olds who try to become useful for the first time in their lives? 

 

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[Kevin Beal]

Is this not the source of a new pathos that haunts 20-something-year-olds who try to become useful for the first time in their lives? 

Great point. I was lucky enough to start working at 13 (in Arizona you can work that early if you work for the state) and I found it enormously valuable in terms of developing a work ethic, learning what employers need, satisfying the customer, etc. I had to grow up somewhat early, but not as early as kids used to, as you've pointed out.

 

So very true. But I wonder just how intuitive is that truth?

I don't think it's intuitive for people who were denied that love and affection as children, because they want to promote it to the level of a virtue. That is, they want to say it's something good people do, something to expect from other people and resent them should they deny it. Constantly seeking to get what they never got as children. At least, that's how a bunch of people I know operate and have made me out to be an asshole when I strongly object. I might even have the opposite problem since I resent it so much when people try and manipulate me into offering that to them that I remain very very suspicious of anybody's claim that they love me. Maybe that's TMI or getting too far off topic, but those are my thoughts anyway.

[Zerubbabel]

 I was lucky enough to start working at 13 (in Arizona you can work that early if you work for the state) and I found it enormously valuable in terms of developing a work ethic, learning what employers need, satisfying the customer, etc. 

 

I hope I'm not tiresome but I will again compare this to another Little Truth. We are all children of our eras. Your language shows that you understand "work" as a wage-earning employment (in this case validated by the State) with a focus on a work ethic underpinned by the needs of  employers. Throughout human history up to about 150 Years ago this would not be the understanding of "work." So complete has our transformation into wage slavery been that we do not even recognize it in our own thinking. It is as if it has always been.

 

Consider this linguistic evidence of how our understanding of "work" has evolved: Listen for it in conversation- "work" is used less as a verb and is increasingly used as a noun -the place where one spends the majority of their life- "I have to go to work."  It has become an intrinsic part of our lives that we accept and only hope to partition off - TGIF.

 

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