They Know What’s Best. Just Ask Them!

     After an unconscionably long time away, laughingly blamed upon such trivia as a crushing workload, the birth of a daughter, and the imminent transformation of his neighborhood into a ghetto, Dystopic / Thales has at long last returned. As usual, it’s well worth your time:

     “It’s for the children” was a tactic employed by the media during the Syrian refugee crisis, often by showing carefully staged bodies of children, or as in one particular example, showing an injured child in an ambulance. In the latter, the child was dirty and bleeding, but journalists still found time to sit him in the otherwise clean ambulance and take a carefully-considered photo to push their political points.

     However, today’s tactic is, perhaps, even more insidious. In this case, Progressives are using the gullibility and lack of experience of children to push for their political goals. One individual of some notoriety, whose name escapes me at the moment (it made the rounds on Twitter, if one of my readers has a name please drop it in the comments), mentioned that children are often wiser than their parents on social and political issues. And they are supposedly less gullible, too. And while Democrats want to raise the age required to purchase a gun, they simultaneously want to lower the voting age. Surely there’s no self-interest in that, right? After all, it’s easier to talk a child into Socialism with a basic “it’s not fair” kind of argument.

     Look, the fact is children just don’t understand. That’s why they are children, not little adults. They don’t have the life experience to make such weighty decisions yet.

     Thank God someone has finally said so.

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     One of my blessings / curses is a very clear remembrance of my youth. For reasons beyond the scope of this tirade, I had to “grow up young.” Part of the experience was the shocking discovery that what I’d previously believed, in my youthful ignorance of that ultimate confounder of unfounded opinions, reality, was...not so. At odds with the observable facts. In a word, wrong.

     It was embarrassing, but far less embarrassing than if my father had permitted me to spout off in public, as so many young folks do today.

     You see, back then, when the “older and wiser heads” were still weighing the merits and demerits of descending from the trees, adults had a saying: “Children should be seen and not heard.” It was based on what I call a “sturdy wisdom:” Kids don’t know shit. How could they? We learn the greater part of what we need to know to survive and flourish by observing consequences. Childhood is a period during which one is allowed to be safely irresponsible. Children are insulated against the harsher consequences of their beliefs and actions. As we mathematical types like to say, quod erat demonstrandum.

     Children – a loosely defined term; today I’d say the irresponsible puerility that defines it isn’t guaranteed to be over and done until Junior’s 35th birthday – don’t possess sound perspective or good judgment. But they will exploit any unwarranted attribution of wisdom to preen themselves and offer you all sorts of opinions. Rarely are those opinions worth more than what they once left in their diapers.

     But kids make great foils for evoking tender emotions in the unthinking. Note that I didn’t say “the unthinking adult.” He who can’t or won’t think clearly – i.e., who won’t associate decision and action with consequences and learn from the latter – will only survive if he’s protected from the consequences of his actions by more responsible persons. He remains a child, no matter how old he is.

     The promotion of ignorant, emotion-dominated children — some taller than others — as founts of sociopolitical wisdom is one of the great follies of our era. But it’s massively useful to the Left, whose strategists and tacticians know full well how tender we are toward the kids…and how, as the kids-to-adults ratio continues to shrink, that effect will only become stronger.

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     One final thought: Children are more susceptible to appeals to envy than are adults. They’re more likely to wish harm on others who have something they don’t. And they’re quite inventive about justifying demands that arise from their envy.

     Socialism is denotatively defined as a politico-economic system in which “the workers” own “the means of production.” Mind you, many a “socialist” would quarrel with that definition, but that’s the way it was defined by Karl Marx, and that’s the definition that appears in the dictionary:

     Socialism, n: a theory or system of social organization that advocates the vesting of the ownership and control of the means of production and distribution, of capital, land, etc., in the community as a whole.

     However, the propulsive impulse toward socialism is envy: the desire to see others who have more brought low. How could it be otherwise? No socialist economy has ever done anything else, and socialist advocates and agitators know it. But children, equipped with neither adequate intellectual knowledge nor real-world experience, can easily be led into it through their propensity to envy.

     It’s been said, though I forget from whom I first heard it, that if the transmission of civilized values and accumulated social capital were to be interrupted for just one generation, Mankind would revert to savagery. The Left is ardent to manipulate us through the uninstructed and inexperienced: our children. Draw the moral – and keep your kids out of their clutches.