Tuesday 12 May 2015

Fire Your Parents

You think your parents did a good job with you right? Raising you, sending you to school, teaching you values etc. I've got some sad news, they fucked up big time. And that's nothing to get very up set about. Now that you know it, you can work to fix the damage done. Now this will be easy or hard, that totally depends on two factors:

- Your age.
- Your commitment to fixing it.

even morpheus apologized for freeing an adult mind from the matrix:

Morpheus: No. But if you could, would you really want to? I feel I owe you an apology. We have a rule. We never free a mind once it's reached a certain age. It's dangerous, the mind has trouble letting go. I've seen it before and I'm sorry.

We should first take a look at what we're fixing right. If they have given you the gift of religion — i would say that's probably the biggest fuck up but there are so many more, i really have to plan to put them here in a well framed sentence. The thing is being a parent is not fucking easy and the worst part is society celebrates when two people go out and have a kid. Society has decided that marriage and parenthood should be celebrated by default because they're "so hard" and "demand so much". One would expect that society would have expected more and demanded more from people who would choose to venture into things which we think are hard, but clearly that's not the case with parenthood. Instead, society shames men(no not women, not anymore, they're empowered which is a different story) for not playing according to the script.

It's exactly the same with voting. Come election and celebs and the media tell you go out and vote what they don't tell you is to read economics, public policy and understand the philosophy behind the idea of government and society, no — they just say go out and vote. And we know how that ends.

You were not even wanted

We're all told how happy everyone was when we entered the world, but that has comes with conditions. You see most people are just going through with society's plan for stages a "grown up" is expected to go through, and while they do felt the happiness for becoming parents, it was not in the sense how this man writes about having children. For most it was just time they made some kids and time to be happy for having made them.

No financial planning

I am in Mumbai, India. It's both the financial and slum capital of India, not to say there are not poorer people elsewhere in this country. We have 1.2 billion people as of now in the country and a good 60% is poor and a good 40% would be counted as desperately poor by western standards. Hell when applying western standards I think our middle class is still their poor class.

Our liberal socialist policies, our first PM Nehru all are definately to be blamed for this, but when you look for simpler reasons, we are here because of the social convention of getting married and popping out kids no matter how poor you are. And in the end the kids end up even poorer and illiterate who repeat the cycle.

All cultures have the social convention that people MUST and MUST get married but in India it's just a different ball game altogether and hence we have this mess.

And this is most likely true for your parents and mine. You see, the thing is we were never meant to go Harvard and do anything big(not to say you can't do it big without your parents but i'm trying to highlight the social convention side of it). We were only meant to go to some local school, get a basic job, get married, have kids and slog it just like our parents did, that's "how life is right?"

Feeding you their dogma

Just like the mother eagle vomits food in to it's young one's mouth, your parents off loaded all their misconceptions, inconsistencies, fallacies on to you for a long time now(depending on your age). Now that I'm 25, it really depresses me at times how I never had someone who could have solved even 10% of my doubts and answer my questions as a child. Right from "why are roads so bad in mumbai?" to "which religion is true?" everything damn question got a BS answer from them and point to be noted "i don't know" was not one of them.
The ego investment a person makes once a certain age into one's thinking and knowledge just never lets them say "i don't know". To quote from how to win friends and influence people

So, if you are inclined to tell people they are
wrong, please read the following paragraph every morning before
breakfast. It is from James Harvey Robinson's enlightening book The
Mind in the Making. 
We sometimes find ourselves changing our minds without any
resistance or heavy emotion, but if we are told we are wrong, we
resent the imputation and harden our hearts. We are incredibly
heedless in the formation of our beliefs, but find ourselves filled with
an illicit passion for them when anyone proposes to rob us of their
companionship. It is obviously not the ideas themselves that are dear
to us, but our self-esteem which is threatened. ... The little word
"my" is the most important one in human affairs, and properly to
reckon with it is the beginning of wisdom. It has the same force
whether it is "my" dinner, "my" dog, and "my" house, or "my" father,
"my" country, and "my" God. We not only resent the imputation that
our watch is wrong, or our car shabby, but that our conception of
the canals of Mars, of the pronunciation of "Epictetus," of the
medicinal value of salicin, or of the date of Sargon I is subject to
revision. We like to continue to believe what we have been
accustomed to accept as true, and the resentment aroused when
doubt is cast upon any of our assumptions leads us to seek every
manner of excuse for clinging to it. The result is that most of our so called
reasoning consists in finding arguments for going on believing
as we already do.
That gives us an idea how and why most people (and hence most parents) will definitely vomit all their dogmas and inconsistencies in thought on to their kids, because that's all that they know in the first place.

Where to go from here?

The point of this post is not that we start hating our parents. This post is here so that you understand how your wrong ideas about the world entered your head in the first place. Of course schools, the government, church and pop culture and now feminism and other endless sources are responsible due to which people don't develop their rational thinking prowess but the house is where it starts.

The point is to understand that in this world only an inquisitive mind which values knowledge will get any of it and how much more there is for you to learn and unlearn.

The point is to understand that your parents are simple the victims of the social conventions set before them and probably did the best they did, and that you don't make the same mistakes if you choose to ever be responsible for a human's life in as deep way a way as parenting is.

And in the end just love your parents, don't live your life according to them, you don't have get along with them just — love them.