Growing Up With A Philosophy

(Just play the music and read this post. What I’ve written has nothing to do with the ad!)

People are always thinking about something or the other irrespective of whether what they are thinking about has any use for them. And thinking is never wrong – people will always be worried about somethings that they cannot comprehend, sense or expect. And they will need to figure out for themselves whether the decisions they will be making are right, wrong or justified. However, something that could be wrong is enforcing your ideas on someone else.

For example, when among a group of people, someone, say ‘Mike’, thinks of something right and good for all of them to do together as part of an objective that they’ve all been set. If Mike is able to convince himself that what he thinks is right, he will also begin to believe that those around him can be convinced as well. When everyone conforms to the same idea and expectations, Mike will feel as though he has a security blanket of sorts around him: since everyone’s behaviour can now be predicted as all of them are working towards the same goal, the uncertainties are eliminated in the possibilities that might crop up. And that is the blanket people will always like, the blanket of changelessness, the blanket that resists all entropy. As much as I say these things again and again, I’m not fond of change either. Change disrupts the balance we’ve all worked so hard to set up. Change portends growth, but change also bodes aging. Like the kid says in ‘The Last King Of Scotland‘, being afraid of death doesn’t have to mean cowardice: it could also mean you’re afraid of giving up a life you’ve worked so hard for.

Let’s get back to the point. That’s what control is all about: being able to predict, being able to stand comfortably in the face of a crisis. And that is why people think, and that is why people enforce. Objectively thinking, they cannot be blamed for it because it is an inherent component of humaneness. I’m sure even I would behave like that, but I’m also sure the person at the receiving end of it all won’t feel nice about it. People resisting such enforcement could be because of either of two possibilities: 1. they want their own ideas to be as dominating, or 2. they don’t want to be the people who seem capable of giving others second chances all the time. For, as much as they are giving their best to make their lives seem wholesome, adopting someone else‘s ideas makes them feel as though someone else is getting an unfair chance to live his or her life a second time through the decisions made by them but not influenced by them.

Growing up with a philosophy is something similar. Instead of learning for oneself about the different aspects of one’s life through experiences alone – the best teachers – some, like me, have grown to accept some things for what they are. I take some principles for granted, those principles that others around me would have learnt by experience. My behaviour will be different. And I will stand out not just because of the difference: I will also stand out because that difference became conspicuous in me earlier or later in life than those other people. And that is what makes philosophy an undesirable (rather, unconventional?) part of a person growing into his adult years. Twenty years down the line, I’m sure all us 20 year-olds will be similarly thinking people, but the path to that point is what makes the difference more than anything else. Makes a difference in what? A difference observed in the deductions made from similar phenomena: I will think like you, but I won’t decide the same things as you.

I don’t know if growing up with a philosophy is good or not. I don’t know if philosophical concepts themselves are to be inculcated through experiences. That is something weird about them, I would say. Philosophy is like the mind in that the mind can be perceived to exist if and only if the mind itself exists. It is the only element that understands and recognises itself. Philosophies may dictate or explain the behaviour of everything in the universe, but what dictates the future of a philosophy itself is a mystery. Only if something happens can a philosophy rear its head. It cannot exist in inaction. And if one were to face this fact earlier in life, taking to a philosophy only seems more meaningful. In all the decisions that we come to make, none seem more precarious than the ones about which we have no information. If I can convince myself that, say, existential nihilism is the path of today’s society, then no decision is as precarious any more: I have information, I have predictability, I have an edge. And that is the goal of thought: it is not to explain, but to justify.

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While on one of my ritualistic excursions through the net, I came across this article on Wiki about the 1999 Columbine High School massacre, listed as America’s deadliest high school tragedy. I went through the whole thing, starting from the strategy of the two kids, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, and their blood stained tour through the school, before they killed themselves. With a whole lot of debates raging from Cassie Bernall’s questioning and Rachel Scott’s Christian martyrdom, psychiatrists blame the megalomaniac nature of the two students for the whole incident. I also went around looking for Harris’ blog page, which seems to have been removed, where he documented all the hatred he bore towards the society in general, the making of the pipe bombs and the propane explosives, and the death threats he issued to his neighbours and family friends. This might all seem like me digging up an issue so known and old to the readers out there, but to me this is something new. I come from a very secular and conservative society, and all children are taught patience as a virtue even before they begin schooling. The need of tolerance is very high in a country in India, and though it seems to restrict our personality developments in the earlier stages of our lives, we come to understand it later on and also appreciate it. But what’s interesting to me here is not the mental structure of Harris or Klebold, but the social phenomena that may have provoked them to commit this crime. I for one believe that not everyone is a fool, and even though foolish decisions exist, there must have been some reason or the other that provoked them to commit this misinformed and misguided act. Looking beyond the role of one’s parents to take responsibility for their child, the role of the society also plays a very important role in one’s upbringing. The friends you make, the relationships you hold on to, the people you turn to in times of crisis, and the people whom look up to or look down on.

The impressions you have in the minds of the people around depends on many social factors. At the same time, one other factor that inhibits a complete assumption and ‘display’ of one’s own personality is bullying. While bullies seek to overshadow some other moment(s) of failure in their lives by picking on younger kids, the effect they have can even be devastating. Bullying exists in the childhood of every child, either as the bully or as the victim. If you had been the bully, you’d have experienced some sort of overwhelming sensation that makes you think that you’re in power at that moment – a compensation for your megalomania. But the victim feels helpless in a world that is supposed to have helped. It blunts the display of your character and makes the issue seem rudimentary and inconsequential in your eyes, further deepening its nails. This will lead to a suppression of emotion on a temporary basis but as the child matures, it will all pour out in one form or the other. The need for a friend and a friendly touch is always necessary for an adolescent youth, and this need is projected in our conformity to a given set of rules and regulations in order to find acceptance and a sense of belonging and, most importantly, identity. A loss of identity is equivalent to having home no go back to at the end of the day, an absence of an ideal reference point for all your decisions. As for the blames on the violent video games and all that, I think those wouldn’t have mattered much as long as the child had in mind the fact that it was a just game, a portrayal of some event as it would have been if it ever happened.

Just An Other Word For Losing!

We all need to have some sort of control over some aspect of our lives. Our parents will invariably come to dominate the earlier parts of our lives, but as an adult pre-marriage, we somehow evolve into an individual who needs to be the ordainer of just one section of his or her life. It gives us a sense of powerfulness, and sometimes it is enough to devour even a bit of helplessness when a loved one passes away. When you take up a task for yourself and complete it with the utmost perfection and, at the same time, without taking any help from any of your friends, it makes you believe in the fact that you are capable of accomplishing things which you were born to do: it makes you believe in your creation. The belief in one’s creation is the greatest joy one can get, although it may depend on what you think you were born to do! Anyway, imagine a person who has had all of this, and is now just about to relinquish that control? Why does the helplessness sink in again? Why does the person feel as though he or she has been transported back through time, to the day when the helplessness first raised its head? To control is not to love, is it? It is to dominate! The opportunity to control is the willful desire to subjugate! Over everything else, to control someone else is to take for granted a chance to avenge your mistakes.

When you let go of a loved one because she has let you know that it is what she wants, you should also believe that if she returns to you at sunset, it is love that is unmatchable. I know relinquishing is just an other word for losing control, but it is a word in its own right and therefore, should mean something else as well. When you find it in you to take control of something or someone, there is a pressing need within you that needs compensation at the earliest. It means that your guilt is driving you to such an extent as to encroach on the freedom of others and impose your own limits on them. Control is lost, or you lose control, only when it should it is yours by right and you have claimed it via duty. On the other hand, control is relinquished when you willingly give up control that did not belong to you in the first place. We must all relinquish control, but never lose it, for it may pertain even fractional aspects of our life – like in the taming of our senses.

And what of controlling a single aspect of your own life?

The greater experience and age of your parents while you’re a little kid makes sure that every little thing in your infant- and childhood is taken care of by your parents. It is the later-childhood and early adult-hood (or adolescence) that makes the difference. Some parents will (obviously) be worried that too much freedom on the child’s part might perhaps lead him or her to misuse it. But denying that much freedom, on the other hand, will leave the child handicapped as an adult who finds it unable to make even the simplest of decisions sans assistance. Here’s what I think is the secret to strike the perfect balance between the two. You have to let your child learn from his or her own mistakes, not from the mistakes of  friends, nor from the mistakes of you – his parents. By leaving your child free to do just this, he or she will be able to establish a very important relationship, that of one between the action and the consequence that follows it. If you leave him or her to learn from the mistakes you committed as a child, he or she will only gain the experience of the consequence and never of the action. This means the ability to associate and, later on, recollect the same event will be hard and there will linger an irritating chance that the child will do the same mistake again. When this sort of an education is meted out, one need not give thought to the degree of freedom being assumed by the child as being his or hers. For, if you think about it, freedom is not yours to give. It is one’s to assume. The right amount of consequentiality will breed the right amount of responsibility, which will fester the right amount of individuality. And the individuality with which you can account for yourself in all your actions is nothing but your freedom.