Why adults lie to their children and why you will do the same

You are not 100% in charge of your life. You will fall victim to emotions and hormones, to circumstance and power imbalance. And no decision you ever make will be 100% within your control. When you account for all the variables of over which you have no control, your own intent is probably less than 20% of the relevant input.

A huge portion of life is largely beyond your control. Wayne Gretzky's father built his son an ice rink in their backyard. Bill Gates' mother got him into one of the few schools at the time with access to networked computers. External circumstances give huge head starts, or weigh you down like nothing else.

Do people overcome negative circumstances every day? Of course they do. But keep in mind, that even them overcoming negative circumstances is hugely dependent upon other outside circumstances.

So when parents and adults tell children that they can grow up to be whatever they want, the adult is obviously lying. But it's a necessary lie. Life is something of a lottery, unfortunately. But you only win the lottery, if you buy a ticket.

You cannot do whatever you want. You cannot be whoever you want. But if you don't act like you can, you will never achieve what you want. Much of your success is determined by circumstances beyond your control, and the one piece you can control is not as important as you think. But if you don't take control of that one thing, nothing else matters.

Buy the ticket.

Because if you don't buy the ticket, you end end up being human resources that somebody else will use to achieve their goal.

Life is short.
Work is crap.
Join my cult.

Old Word Repurposed: Warrior

Warrior is an ambiguous term to most people.
But then so is adult. People become adults by trudging through time one second at a time, and accumulate additional privileges through no achievement or effort in most cases (earning a driver's license and graduating high school are the most arduous things that people must do to acquire the traditional trappings of adulthood).
You can become an adult in the modern world so easily that term is meaningless. Warrior is something that you become by doing something. Like being an athlete or a writer or a scientist or a scholar; being a warrior implies a doing in the word itself. If you claim to be an athlete, but look like Homer Simpson people will rightly question your claim. But to claim to be an adult, one need merely get older and have a piece of ID if you wish to enter a bar.
We use Warrior not to mean one who is violent, but one who is ready to face the world: capable of critical thought, able to be self-sufficient, and able to defend their self against opposing forces.

New Term: Year Zero

Year Zero is the time and process of becoming intersufficient. Named after the tradition in DC Comics of giving heroes a new back story by writing retrospective revisionist origin stories (retcons) and titling them 'Year One'; most famously 'Batman: Year One' by Frank Miller and David Mazzucchelli. Grant Morrison pitched a reboot effort for the Batman movie franchise after the disaster that was 'Batman and Robin', by proposing a Batman origin story called 'Batman: Year Zero' that would focus on how Bruce Wayne became Batman rather than his early time as Batman. The title has recently been coopted for a new Batman story arc with similar aims.

And so with this pedigree, we coopt the idea of Year Zero as the period of becoming who we were meant to be, the period in which we become the heroes that the world needs.

It is tempting to use Matrix inspired terminology like the 'red pill', however simply waking up to what must be done is only a very small part. Bruce Wayne's training and discovery process that is inherent in the term Year Zero is far more accurate and more empowering.

Monday Meditations: The Path of life

The path of the free human, the path of the wild human is thus: from dependence to independence to Interdependence. To stop early is to never learn how to be human, and never learn how to properly be an animal, and how to properly live upon the earth. 

Dependence

You were born a child, helpless, in need of protection, instruction and nourishment. You were cared for and taught and fed and sheltered. This is the way of the child, and those of us who still cannot make our own way without the resources of others are here still, and thus still children.

Independence

Your mission, your task, your purpose as a child is to learn. You must learn to be an adult. To be an adult you must know how to think for yourself- to spot deceptions, to reason things through, to ponder, and think creatively. These are the marks of an adult- an active intellectual life. To be an adult you must be able provide for yourself, food, and shelter and clothing and tools that you will need. The mark of an adult it the ability to make or find what one needs to live alone.  To be an adult you must also be able defend yourself and your home. What good is the ability to grow food, if a man with a sword shows up each day to take your food from you and eat it himself? What good is the ability to think great thoughts if a man with a sword can force you to turn you mind to making him a more effective conqueror? Thus you must defend.

Interdependence

As essential as those three things are, they do not make you fully an adult yet. Until you have used your skills to contribute to your community and connect into that web of interdependence- teaching and providing willingly to continue the community into tomorrow, you are only an adolescent. The skills are essential, giving those skills back is what completes the transformation from child to adult.

New Word: Intersufficiency

Intersufficiency or intersufficient is a word built from the words interdependeny and self-sufficient. The word means to be self sufficient in order to be part of a healthy interdependent group. The premise is that you cannot contribute properly to the group and the group cannot function in a healthy manner unless all members are able to contribute sufficiently to make everyone feel as though the arrangement is fair. Intersufficiency can be seen a trait of both a group and an individual. An interusfficient group is one where the members are all self-sufficient enough without the group that all members are able to contribute without coercion. An intersufficient individual is one who is able to provide for themselves, but who is also able to apply those self-sufficiency skills for the benefit of the group.

Thoughts on Training

Human life traditionally followed a three stage progression.

• First you learn
• Then you do
• Then you teach

In other words, we move from dependence to independence to interdependence. We move from needing others to get by, to being able to get by on our own, to helping others get by so that everyone can prosper. To stop early is to never learn how to be human, and never learn how to properly be an animal, and how to properly live upon the earth.

Dependence

You were born a child, helpless, in need of protection, instruction and nourishment. You were cared for and taught and fed and sheltered. This is the way of the child, and those of us who still cannot make our own way without the resources of others are here still, and thus still children.

Independence

Your mission, your task, your purpose as a child is to learn. You must learn to be an adult. To be an adult you must know how to think for yourself- to spot deceptions, to reason things through, to ponder, and think creatively. These are the marks of an adult- an active intellectual life. To be an adult you must be able provide for yourself, food, and shelter and clothing and tools that you will need. The mark of an adult it the ability to make or find what one needs to live alone.  To be an adult you must also be able defend yourself and your home. What good is the ability to grow food, if a man with a sword shows up each day to take your food from you and eat it himself? What good is the ability to think great thoughts if a man with a sword can force you to turn you mind to making him a more effective conqueror? Thus you must defend.

Interdependence

As essential as those three things are, they do not make you fully an adult yet. Until you have used your skills to contribute to your community and connect into that web of interdependence- teaching and providing willingly to continue the community into tomorrow, you are only an adolescent. The skills are essential, giving those skills back is what completes the transformation from child to adult.

Some Simple Training Guidelines

Read books all the time. Read challenging books, especially non-fiction- and avoid Junk Reading. Read outside your comfort zone. Read books that disagree with your ideas and ask the three questions of it and yourself.

Seek out mentors. Seek to be around people smarter than you. Seek to be around forward looking people. Seek to be around people who are happy outside their comfort zone. Seek debate and for those willing to disagree with you. When somebody challenges you, thank them and ask them to elaborate. Seek out friends who are willing to call your bullsh**. Ask questions and listen to the answers. Shut off the 'I know instinct'. Ask questions to draw out more information.

Take classes, and seek to Constantly expand your skill set. John Maxwell's 'ACT' Note Taking System can be really useful here. Just add and ‘A’, a ‘C’, or  a ‘T’ when taking notes: A= Apply this (Apply this to my own life), C= Change this (stop doing what I was doing and start doing this), and, T= Teach this (Teach my group this thing).

Remember the need for quiet time. Without quiet time you can't evaluate what you are exposed to. Without quiet time you are easily bullied and overwhelmed. Without quiet time you can't reflect and recharge. Reflect on who you are. Quiet time allows you to decide what you agree with and what you disagree with. Quiet time allows you to build your identity. Quiet time allows you grow and change who you are. Reflect on what you believe. Quiet time allows you to evaluate what you've read, heard and learned. Quiet time allows you to decide what you can prove and what you simply believe.

Use quiet time to center. Quiet time allows you to recharge your emotions and your mental capacity. Quiet time allows you to calm down and regain focus. Use quiet time to sort information. Quiet time allows you to evaluate what you know. Quiet time allows you to make connections between different things that you know. Quiet time allows you create new information by combining different things you have learned.

And finally, get out and try things. Glory in Doing something difficult that you can screw up.  Glory in being outside your comfort zone. And glory in Making Mistakes.

The Problem

The basic ‘dependence to independence to interdependence’ structure of human community life has been broken. We begin in a state of dependence, because its pretty hard to be McGuyver when we still think technology ends with the hanging mobile and food production ends with the warm bottle. The problem is that we rarely progress anymore.

These days, culture is not set up to support us in our instinctual quest for independence. Bureaucratic systems from schools to corporations consistently punish creativity and critical thinking. Questions are not encouraged, and authority is unappreciative in the face of such questions.

We face a barrage of social conditioning, bent on making us discontent, impatient and certain of our own innate specialness. We are told not to create something of value, or to have the patience to work hard and earn what we want. We are told 'Go ahead", "You deserve a break" "Because you're worth it". And after a while, we start to believe it.

We are bombarded with information, and not given a chance to have alone time or privacy- and so (as with cult conditioning, which does similar)- we do not have time to develop our own fully formed views and ideas. Instead we are reduced to merely reacting to the views others tell us. 'Yes, I agree' or 'No, that's wrong'.

Very little of this happened intentionally. Most of the changes were made with the best of intentions. But complex systems often breed surprising results.

And so here we are: generation after generation of shallow, impatient, unfulfilled, egotistical, self-conscious, easily led sheeple. Calling us adults would be a joke.

The fact that most of our so-called adults mark their transition into adulthood by drinking until they risk alcohol poisoning should be a warning sign.

Most of us, around the point we are told we are adults, start to feel cheated. Often we don't know why we feel cheated, but life seems less than we were expecting. We should feel cheated. We used to become adults at puberty, we were expected to stand up and take our place.

Admiral David Farragut received his first command (a captured British Whaling Ship) at the age of twelve. At fifteen Benjamin Franklin was an apprentice printer and authored several popular articles under a pseudonym. By fifteen you could be a squire in the middle ages (or even a knight). We are told that the world is more complex and that it takes more time to learn about.

Do we really think that it takes less maturity to command a vessel in war time than it does to flip burgers? Do we really think that it takes less skill to author articles in a commercial newspaper than to text message incessantly? Are we really supposed to believe that they training of a knight was somehow less difficult than modern P.E. class?

The void that exists in modern life is an absence of adulthood. We have never been allowed to grow up- to become Men and Women. When we leave school we are helpless and adrift in a world that we are helpless to hold our own within. We must indenture ourselves to employers to survive. Skills that would allow us to stand apart from this are not taught to us.

We are not taught proper critical thinking skills in most cases. We are almost never taught useful survival or defense skills. We are left- deliberately I think- at the mercy of the world we have all created. Because, after all, who would flip burgers or or stock toy store shelves or fit shoes or man the technical help desk at 3am if they had another option.

We are a society of parasites, feeding collectively off of each other.

I am tired of being a child. I want to grow up. Peter Pan was a liar! You don't forget to fly when you grow up, you learn to fly when you grow up! The only reason we don't know this is because virtually nobody has grown up since the Second World War.

Genus Rex exists to help people help each other grow up. We need to regain the ability to stand alone. Because until we can stand alone, we cannot honestly stand together.

So your first job is to study and train and prep yourself as much as possible. This book will provide you with a guideline on how to train and what to study.

I need to learn arithmetic and calculations, but do I need to learn it in a classroom over twelve years and including things such as calculus and quadratic equations that very few people need to understand and fewer actually use?

I need to learn to read and write, but do I need to learn the difference between a Shakespearian or Petrarchan sonnet? I need to know the history of our culture and the changes and context that it will provide for understanding current events, but do I need to know who the commanders were at the battle of Leningrad?

I remember being tested on all of these things and I know that I answered most of them correctly on the test. I do not remember the answers to these questions now, although I remember that I was asked them.

Accounting, however, was an optional class and I was never given any lessons on the laws and paperwork that I have encountered as a adult. I was never taught, despite five years of career planning classes, how to deal with my taxes or my health insurance or any things that I would actually need.

There is a distinct benefit to schooling, but that benefit is for those people who wield the whips. When we emerge from schooling, we lack basic knowledge of how to manage in the adult world, and because of the increased work load and the need to do extra-curricular activities to earn scholarships and be accepted into post-secondary education- parents have very little mentoring that they have allowed to add. And thus the domesticated adult emerges from the womb of high school blind and hairless. He lacks the teeth and claws that are used by modern society and the knowledge of how best to defend himself with them. He is unable to hunt for himself and so is relegated to a subservient role within the pack- begging from scraps from more the alpha and other successful hunters.

"The most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor

is the mind of the oppressed."

Steve Biko- Activist

For twelve years, the developing mind of the young domesticated human is engaged in challenging and intellectually stimulating tasks- such as organic chemistry, the politics of Shakespeare's Macbeth, trigonometry, the history of the Russian Revolution, and how to dissect an earthworm. These tasks are deliberately challenging and seem very important. In this way, the mind of the young domesticated human is distracted.

Once they have grown out of their most active period of learning, the young can be discharged into the wild where they are easily captured and roped into the existing herds. They are domesticated humans now, and not wild humans. But when the wild submits to domestication- it also sacrifices its freedom.

So What Do We Do?

Our generation needs to learn how to educate themselves and how to self-correct. We need to learn how to effectively question authority, while still learning from experience.

We need to learn how to be responsible and self-sufficient so that we are able to contribute to our community and be interdependent. Our goal at Red Cedar is to teach habits that will enable members to become social, economic and ecological leaders in the future.

For years now, western nations have been living as though theirs was the final generation. They could do as the please, and damn the consequences. Now the consequences are becoming visible and frightening. Positive change in this world will depend upon the actions of today's youth. Those of us under thirty will be deciding on things that will affect our lives for years to come, just by how we live. Most activism seeks to sway those people in power, those with everything to lose and little to gain from a change in the status quo. The leaders of today are not where we should be looking.

We should be looking at the leaders of tomorrow.

Imagine learning skills that will make you able to stand alone, not merely more employable. Imagine learning how to care for yourself and your family, not how to pay others to do this. Imagine learning how to think for yourself and analyze what the experts tell you, instead of being forced to react to them on gut instinct. Imagine being in charge of your own life, instead of feeling as though it is crawling along on automatic along a route you never chose.

Make self-reliance skills widespread. Enable the current generation through enhancing what they are able to do. Because we believe that with this, we be able and proud to stand up and make the world a better place.

Growing up basically boils down to five things.

First, as an adult you must take responsibility for yourself.
Second, you must think for yourself.
Third, you must provide for yourself.
Fourth, you must be able and willing to defend yourself.
Fifth, you must leave something of value behind.

We are going to deal with these in a slightly skewed order. We will begin here by telling you that you must take responsibility for yourself, but we won't go heavily that step right away. We are going to focus on several others steps first, so that by the time we get to that step in detail.

For the moment, we ask you to provisionally accept the idea that you must take responsibility for yourself. It isn't a hard idea to accept. If you are not responsible for yourself then somebody else is responsible for you. if that is the case, then you are not free. If that is the case then what are you? Certainly not an adult, and certainly not a citizen. you are a child or a slave. We'll get into this in more detail later, but mull this over.

We don't like to admit responsibility. We equate it to guilt. We don't want to be blamed, and we don't want to admit that we are at fault. But look at things from this angle. If things are not our fault, then how can we fix things? To admit fault, to claim responsibility is to take power and say "I will do something about this." To pass the blame, or claim no responsibility is to say "I can't do anything about this." One gives power, one gives power away.

So for the moment, just trust us on the responsibility thing.

The first section is going to deal with thinking for yourself. The second section will deal with providing for yourself. The third section is going to deal with defending yourself. The fourth section will come back and re address taking responsibility for yourself. The fifth element of growing up, will be dealt with in the fourth Section as well. We refer to the sections respectively as "Speak Out", "Start Fires", "Fight Back", and "Grow Up". This order is for a reason. By starting with the ability to think for yourself, you will be better able to examine the other sections. By ending with taking responsibility and leaving something of value behind you will have a better sense of perspective on the whole process of becoming and remaining an adult.

Keep that in mind- not only can you become an adult by choice, you can cease to be an adult in the same way.

What’s the Point?

The new generation has been left holding the bill for the previous generation's carelessness and excess.

I say- no- we should not accept this. I say that it is time to create our own space. I say it is time to push back again armageddon and give to those people who have no place a place to stand. We are not mistakes, we are not broken, we are not outcasts. We are the awakened. We are the next generation of leaders if we can only find our place.

I do not intend to find my place. I intend to create my place.

In his book, 'Ishmael', Daniel Quinn examines in depth the idea that human beings are imprisoned within a civilizational 'system', a mental and social construct that is so pervasive that they cannot even see it as separate from themselves, and so it human nature. Quinn goes on in 'Ishmael' and his later works to explain that not only are these systems and our feelings about them (such as our constant frustration about our lives) not human nature, but they are not even natural to humans in the first place. Rather, the feelings of hopelessness and stress are analogous to the danger signals that any wild animal feels when it is put into captivity. We have been in captivity for so long that we no longer realize that we are captives.

In a later work in the series "My Ishmael", Quinn looks at what keeps us imprisoned in the culture. In "Ishmael" he points out that in order to be free from this system of captivity we have to convince people to stop telling the story, stop buying into and replicating the system of imprisonment, because the system is built and maintained by us-and rebuilt with each generation.

The irony is that we are imprisoned because we have broken the prime law a culture can break. We have imprisoned ourselves because the breaking of the law actually creates the situation we now find ourselves in. To put it another way, breaking the law results in the law-breaker creating their own jail and locking themselves in it. In his book, "The Book of the Damned", Quinn refers to this as "The Law of Life", based on what the Ihalmiut Eskimos of the Great Barrens of Canada called it. He goes on to say the following about the law of life:

"It sounds almost too good to be true, but that's what they called it. It really couldn't have been called anything else, any more than the law of gravity could be called anything else.

It is the Law of Life.

Followed everywhere in the seas, on the shores, in the forests, in the ponds, on the plains, in the deserts.

Followed by everything that moves in the community of life: great and small, naked and armored, scaled and feathered, spined and spineless, brainy and brainless by paramecia and elephants and sharks and grasshoppers and frogs and wolves and ticks and deer and rabbits and turtles and owls.

It's a universal law.

Written where only the gods could have written it.

In the fabric of the living community.

And so a law was in readiness for Homo habilis.

A single law.

A biological law. But not merely a biological law.

A sublime law.

The pattern for a million cultures, no two alike.

As it is the pattern for a million species, no two alike.

A law good enough to be the basis for a billion years of cultural experimentation.

A law never to be outworn or outgrown.

Because it had been written by gods who were actually gods. And not blunderers."

Why Should I Care?

We are supposed to forget about our discontent and join the great march of civilization. Our parents did, clearly. But some of us, and the number appears to be increasing with each generation, cannot find it within ourselves to join the march of civilization. We resent it. What our parents saw as progress, we see as folly. What our parents saw as contribution, we see as despoiling. What our parents saw as achievement, we see as armageddon with life itself. Not all of us of course, but more all the time.

What are we to do? Where can we stand? Is there a place for us? Or are we simply errors, broken cogs that jam this beautiful system?

"Among the people of your culture, which want to destroy the world?"

"As far as I know, no one specifically wants to destroy the world."

"And yet you do destroy it, each of you. Each of you contributes daily to the destruction of the world. Why don't you stop?"

I shrugged. "Frankly, we don't know how."

"You're captives of a civilizational system that more or less compels you to go on destroying the world in order to live."

Daniel Quinn, In 'Ishmael'

Why do people feel trapped? Why is captivity a common facet of our cultural life: The Matrix, The Thirteenth Floor, Soylent Green, 1984, A Brave New World, World of Darkness, Blade, V for Vendetta, etc..?

"The world of the Takers is one vast prison, and except for a handful of Leavers scattered across the world, the entire human race is now inside that prison."

Daniel Quinn, In 'Ishmael'

Why do people wonder if they are deceived in our culture? Plato wondered about his mythological cave where people were imprisoned and taught that the cave with its shadow puppets was the whole world. Obviously Plato was trying to say that we were being deceived into accepting  a psychological prison of some kind. Descartes said much the same with his thought experiments about the evil mastermind who may be able to convince us that what we see is real, when in fact it is simply a construct of his making. From these images, the Wachowski brothers crafted the Matrix Trilogy- three movies about imprisonment of body, mind and ideology- all of which seem to heavily imply that human beings live in a box.

The Thirteenth Floor, Dark City, Soylent Green, A Brave New World, Fahrenheit 451, V for Vendetta and many other works of fiction in film, literature, and comics suggest that the world we live in is a prison in some way shape or form. It may a literal prison, or it may be a psychological prison. It may be a physical prison with walls, or a prison of surveillance. Even the religions of the world consider this world to a prison of sorts: a grim, sinful, and dangerous school where we will be graded and either pass or fail for all eternity. Why do we feel this way? What is wrong with this culture of ours, because certainly if an individual had this obsession with the idea that he or she was in a prison that they were unable to see or even prove the existence of, we would have diagnosed them as having severe paranoid delusions by now. Thus if this enormous obsession with imprisonment is not normal, then why do we feel this way?

Are You One of Us?

Hi, I’d like to introduce myself. If you don’t know me, you likely know somebody like me.

I’m the young person who seems at least reasonably smart and hard working who can’t seem to fit in and get the hang of life. I’m sometimes congenial and other times stand-offish.

I’ve been accused of being unreasonable, unrealistic, naive, or foolish.

I’ve been accused of having a bad attitude, or not wanting to pay my dues, or not understanding how the world works.

I wander, seemingly without purpose. The benchmarks of my parents good pay, good benefits, job security, don’t impress me. I quit or get fired. I am often depressed.

People like me fall into drug use in seemingly larger numbers each year. People like me struggle with depression and seem to swing between apathy and passionate anger at the oddest times. People like me seem to have their lives permanently stalled or locked in neutral at the on ramp of adulthood.

What is to done about people like me?

I often like the outdoors, the sound of wind over the hill. I frequently like hiking and camping and often take martial arts or outdoor sports.

Psychologists and artists both are noticing that the frustration and directionless in security of adolescence is lasting longer and longer. Robert Bly wrote about it in “Iron John”, as did Michael Kimmel in “Guyland”. Adult women read teen fantasy such as “Twilight”- in which a teen girl slowly enters the world of the undead, forever sixteen. Popular television is rooted in the teenage quest for popularity- the reality television show. Immature adults populate movies in ever greater numbers.

But I do not think that most of us want to be here- trapped in this nowhere space between child and adult- despite what Hollywood might think. I think people like me remain here- trapped- because we see no viable exit.

Meat on the barbecue

You are meat. I am meat. We're both meat, and the only reason we are alive is because we are cooking. Our brains are on fire with electrical activity. And if you change the current, you change who you are.

Our meaty goodness is not a topic of polite conversation. We don't like to draw attention to, or confront, the fact that or biology makes us who we are and not the other way around. There is no compelling evidence that we are anything eternal- that we are anything other than the temporary flickering of neurons, no more relevant to eternity than the life and death of a mayfly and just as brief compared to vastness of the universe.

You are not the big screaming deal you think you are. The universe will not notice when you are gone.

Revelations

I want to talk about that moment of revelation. I want to talk about the moment when you understand that you are screwed- the moment when you realize that you and your uncle have both done the same job, as a clerk of the grocery store, 20 years apart. The problem with this is that he earned fifteen dollars per hour, while you earn eight and a half. The moment I'm talking about is the one when you realize that a real house is half a million dollars and not as well made as in the previous generation- although at that price the quality doesn't really concern you.

This is that awful moment when you discover your parents may have been right- high school may actually have been the best time of your life. How disappointing is that?

Three Pillar Skills

I have written a little bit previously about three pillar skills. So what are they?

Three pillar skills are skills that relate to critical thinking, self sufficiency, and self defense: what we call the three pillars of adulthood. These three broad categories define the core essence of what it means to be an adult: the ability to think and make decisions, the ability to provide for ones self, and the ability to defend ones self from harm. With these skills, we are at mercy of external forces that do not generally have our best interests in mind.

Growing up means more than being old enough to buy beer, drive, and have a job. Growing up means taking your life into your own hands. Being a child means leaving your life somebody else's.