Loved this essay from Paul Graham on the Lies We Tell Kids. This quote struck me as useful for the future:
If parents told their kids the truth about sex and drugs, it would be: the reason you should avoid these things is that you have lousy judgement. People with twice your experience still get burned by them. But this may be one of those cases where the truth wouldn’t be convincing, because one of the symptoms of bad judgement is believing you have good judgement. When you’re too weak to lift something, you can tell, but when you’re making a decision impetuously, you’re all the more sure of it.
Another idea from the essay: that jadedness cuts off the opportunity for growth. I haven’t seen it expressed before, but it rings true for me. It’s one of the reasons you won’t find me jaded about very many things. As soon as you’re willing to blow off anything at the surface you cut yourself off from being able to learn from it – good or bad. Another good quote that’s related:
Innocence is also open-mindedness. We want kids to be innocent so they can continue to learn. Paradoxical as it sounds, there are some kinds of knowledge that get in the way of other kinds of knowledge. If you’re going to learn that the world is a brutal place full of people trying to take advantage of one another, you’re better off learning it last. Otherwise you won’t bother learning much more.
Very smart adults often seem unusually innocent, and I don’t think this is a coincidence. I think they’ve deliberately avoided learning about certain things. Certainly I do. I used to think I wanted to know everything. Now I know I don’t.
Indeed.
This is exactly the mentality that cults like Scientology take advantage of. People simply don’t want to know about the abuses, the manipulation, the contradictions, the lies, the coverups, the overcontrolling, the scaremongering, the bait and switching… I could go on.
Withholding such truths is so much easier when the members are willingly obliging to not seek out the information that will wake them up to what they are really in.
I can’t read Graham essays without cringing anymore. It’s painful to see the terrible writing design (footnotes as an aside to the reader? isn’t the whole piece) and outright contradictions (‘unconfident people are more likely to try to be confident than confident people’) (‘innocence is open-mindedness, but as an open minded individual, I want to stop learning’) embedded into this conversational and authoritative piece. How does Paul come to know the all the important classes of lies told to children without having raised any of his own? Did he really ask more than two people why they lie to kids?
But the games he plays with connotations while specifically laying out definition inconsistent with your own is an evil rhetorical trick, just as bad as the time he wrote an essay to call a critic an idiot without telling any of his other readers. It’s quite insidious — the laymen who don’t see the definitional problems are fine with accepting that artists are scientists or that parents lie specifically to kids with purposes in mind, and the experts themselves give pause before arguing that artists are intellectually lazy or that religion isn’t an obstacle to scientific inquiry. They’re inclined to agree with the tone, even though the facts are sketchy at best.
Spotted the surface-level contradictions along with jldugger, though Graham’s entire point is a very pomo “looking closer to see truth in spite of the contradictions.” While I may agree with his observations—Fight Club, in particular, is a very de-motivating movie for me—part of maturity has always been finding the strength to deal with uncomfortable facts and function in spite of them. There is some truth to hoary old quotes about “fighting on when all others around you etc. etc.” even if war is about the stupidest way to learn that lesson.
On the other side, I took a course in college called “Racism in American Culture”, which was effectively an alternate-history rundown of the black experience in the Americas/U.S. from 1492 to present. At one point, a woman in the class asked demurely whether you had to be somewhat crazy to continue to function day-to-day knowing all that. The professor responded that the level of denial you need to avoid flipping your shit when you know some facts has to come fairly close to a clinical condition in and of itself, yes.
Back to disliking Graham, is this gem: “People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction, and anyone who insists on remaining in a state of innocence long after that innocence is dead turns himself into a monster.” –James Baldwin
The comments on this post are great. Perfect, even.