Source of truth

Children don’t know a lot about the world, and they shouldn’t. If one of them did, I believe it would be very wrong. Picture a six-year-old boy traveling the world with his well-to-do parents. He’d see all sorts of personalities, people’s behaviors that would cause him excitement and confusion, maybe love, maybe hurt or fear. If his feelings were respected and not conceptualized or corrected by his parents, he would “know” that something felt wonderful (an old person dancing). He would “know” that something felt very hurtful or wrong (a man in anger kicking a dog). But would he know the kicking was “bad” or “evil”? He might only feel the sadness of it. Conclusions would be hard to come by for this child – for any child – until either his innate neurology and chemistry blended with experience over time to eventually produce a feeling-conviction, or until his parents told him, then and there, what was “true.”

If his parents so informed him, this would be wrong: He would be absorbing them, not truth. He would be internalizing either their uniqueness or what they absorbed from their parents. Experience from his own platform over time would be the only valid way to know.

But what if he’d been born to pain that no one ever saw or helped? Birth trauma, mother smoking during the first nine months, born in respiratory distress or in cocaine withdrawal, “cooking” inside a hyperactive or anxious or Borderline or suicidal or schizophrenic mother, placed in an incubator exactly when the maternal bond needed to spark, mother’s illness, epidural anesthesia, father’s Prozac or psychopathy, her reaction to husband’s cheating, his dread of parenthood, malnutrition, prematurity. Can we doubt that this child, this baby, would see and learn the world through pain? Would be unreceptive or conflictedly reactive to loving touch, maybe even find it torturous the more he needs it? Would be generating enduring feelings and thoughts that sanction his pain and isolation? Nothing good and gentle would soothe the inner fire. The opposite: It would give him “emotional bends” – a sense of fatal decompression. He would need the harsh, explosive, sharp, cold, alienating, isolative, negative to feel he is right in the world and to drown out, like white noise, the roar inside.

His knowledge, his truth would be his own. He may be arrogant. He may be narcissistic.

Harry Harlow said that “primates love early or they probably hate forever.” I believe this is true of human beings, with the difference that we can hide from ourselves and from others.

We begin life in love, which is right and true, or in pain, which is wrong and true. These two states (though there can be mutual pollution) are the basis for each person’s nature and future. Her capacity for happiness, her definition of happiness, her feelings, attitudes, beliefs, absolute certainty of what is a fact. But we can hide from ourselves. He can believe in love but feel his burning deadness and hatred inside. He will be living an outer truth that is illusory and an inner truth that is strong.

We feel love, care, compassion only if we were born to it, or if we have the courage to feel the pain of knowing they should have been.