Our natural hypocrisy

There’s the dream bubble, and there’s the reality. In the dream, children are taught fairness, consideration, wrongness of being cruel and violent, to be careful about waste, responsibility with possessions, with other children’s possessions, with money. They’re taught natural and social consequences, and making thoughtful and mature decisions, and resolving angry conflict. They’re shown the value of work, maybe the pride of it, and of being one’s own person.

But then there’s the adult world, the one in every day’s headlines, in everyone’s lives. Government wastes trillions of dollars on selfish ends, with nihilistic debt. Wanting political power over millions of dependent people is the culture. Interfering in other countries and in people’s personal choices is the policy. Childish insults and conceits, bullying, gaudy materialism, normalizing of concrete thinking, primitive racist and bigoted beliefs. Fighting in a boxing ring or in a presidential race. Groupthink, where the concepts in our heads are those fed to all, chewed by all. A world of the popular people, shiny objects, hit songs and juicy gossip.

Why do we have these two diametrical realities? Or rather, talk one reality and live the other? Even reverse-logic realities, where children are good and stand tall, while adults shrink to savagery and pettiness? On the surface, it almost seems like some cosmic hypocrisy that we perform for the game of it. Earth, the Hypocrisy World. But it is actually individual psychology that requires this polar existence. We glance at the children and remember some moments of good from our earliest years, and we think we are giving that to them. But mixed with these gifts, or hypnotic residue, are the pains and frustrations we also suffered. There were many things we needed in childhood and did not get, and we were angry, or made cold. We seek them angrily, or cold, as adults. We were emptied of our good power, and now seek power to cover the emptiness. We needed love, and now fill that vessel with material objects. Thinking was our escape, adolescence on, from poisonous, needful feelings. These primitive feelings re-emerge when we have to act the adult.

Don’t you feel, in dizziness, this bizarre incongruity? Doesn’t it want to be cured? Can we question President Trump’s infantile and lost way of living when we really don’t question our own?