WHAT EVERYONE KNOWS ISN'T NECESSARILY SO

WHAT EVERYONE KNOWS ISN’T NECESSARILY SO



James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© May 31, 2013

REFERENCE:

This is an excerpt from “Meet Your New Best Friend” that will be released as a second edition in the fall.

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Parenthood is the most important job in the world and there are no qualifying examinations. Albeit not intended, more often than not, precious few parents seem to remember what it was like to be a child. Forgotten is how they became themselves. Each generation, for some reason, desires to save its progeny from the truth of its own life experience. Parents seek to protect their offspring from reality, from the pain, risk, embarrassment and missteps that first gave them identity, later to sustain them with character.

The process is a familiar one. The route to self–knowledge is not through parental wisdom. Even if this route were a viable one, few would take it. It is through life’s school of hard knocks that most find their way. Even formal education has little impact. It is a poor substitute for experience. Going from the womb of home to the womb of grammar and high school, and then unto the womb of the university or the job teaches little about life or living. No formal curriculum fulfills that purpose. Life must be lived, not contemplated to have meaning. For life to be lived, there must be encouragement at home and in school to experience it first hand.

Well intentioned parents, teachers, religious leaders and others are frequently mistaken when it comes to what is best for us, as the person in us is starting to express itself. Many have forgotten the trauma of youth, the boredom, the confusion, and hence the inherent lackadaisical quest for identity and authentication. As Immanuel Kant once wrote, “Out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was ever made.” So, it is with our youth and, indeed, with our life.

Yet as we were programmed before, young people are programmed now. They are conditioned to hear, but remain silent, to be treated to half–truths, and trustingly to swallow them whole. There is seldom the sharing of doubt, or mention of the grip that fear and failure have on a normal life. What youth has always heard is the echo of Life’s triumphs, not Life’s failures.

It is Life’s failures, however, that have made Life’s triumphs possible. Therefore, young people sense something is wrong when they are struggling to crawl and are expected to soar without ever learning to walk through the foreboding brier patch of life.

Parental expectations, if these youngsters only knew, are often misbegotten dreams of their own failures. A tinsel of lies leaves little room for the young person to gain an insight into his own essence. Such an insight is essential to see the possibilities of future triumphs through the inevitable veil of frustration and failure.

Human frailty and folly are indigenous to human nature, not an incurable disease. To stumble or fall from grace does not shame one for life. There is never a magic time to start over. It could be 16 or 60. Everyone falls from grace, sometime, but not everyone can admit it, or pick themselves up by the bootstraps and get on with life. Acknowledgment of the fall is the first step toward recovery, even redemption. The parental temptation to construct an elaborate montage of overt triumphs superimposed on covert failures is a mistake. It smothers out the truth.

A human bond is created between parent and child when the parent’s real experience is shared discretely, timely and in its naked honesty. This bond gives the child permission to be a human being.

The whole business of deception and denial starts with confusion over goodness and evil. Goodness is not the absence of evil. Goodness is not even the triumph over evil, as anyone knows who has ever managed that feat. The capacity for good and evil are inherent within our character, inseparable, as they are part of the same whole. Interestingly enough, evil is “live” spelled backwards.

An affinity for evil actually moves us away from life’s possibilities, and therein resides the sin, whereas an affinity for good moves us toward life’s possibilities. The inherent problem is that we must embrace our natural resistance to life to discover our goodness. Goodness is never a done deal. Goodness requires work. Evil, on the other hand, requires only going with the flow. That is the distinction, the problem, the possibility and the opportunity, depending upon our perspective. Fear of evil is the obverse side of good. Good, then, moves us toward life’s realization for us, but always with the full understanding that evil is a constant and irascible companion on that journey.

It is easy to deny we are equally capable of good and evil. Some truly believe they are more full of goodness than others, or that they have little or no evil in them. They are wrong. Oh, how wrong they are! Good and evil are in balance when we come into the world. The balance is tilted one way or the other largely by our conditioning and life experience. But the capacity for either one is inherent in our nature.

Good is sensed as little more than a bore. Our fascination with evil is astonishing. Goodness is hardly of interest. It is as if goodness is not nearly as delicious or exciting as evil. Yet to blatantly celebrate evil is not condoned by society. So, we go to great lengths to experience evil subliminally through creative pursuits or vicariously through our fascination with the depraved behavior of others, especially celebrities. Books on satanic serial killers sell in the millions. Evil played off against good is high drama, the fodder of writers such as Stephen King. Celebrated figures turn true confessions of their hidden evil into bestsellers. As indicated in the last chapter, it should come as no surprise to learn authors of inspirational tomes on faith and goodness are often addictive personalities and closet companions of evil, being heavy drinkers, inveterate smokers and philanderers to boot.

Psychiatrist M. Scott Peck, celebrated author of The Road Less Traveled (1978), confesses as much in his book, In Search of Stones (1995). He claims he writes so well of evil because he knows evil first hand, which (in turn) has put him in touch with his goodness. It is this combination, this awareness that makes him such a compelling author.

Contemporary religions have trouble with this reality. It is as if they are in a wrestling match with evil and only by pinning the devil to the mat will they win the support of the parishioners. They fail to recognize that by giving the devil such exposure, such prominence, it enhances the parishioner’s fascination with evil as well as exposing theirs. Instead of selling goodness, they play into the hands of the purveyors of evil. As long as the clergy and laity proclaim the diabolical nature of satanic entertainment, for instance, such music, film, art and books will flourish, and continue to sell in the mega-millions. Madison Avenue couldn’t dream up a more effective promoter.

The clergy’s negative campaigning realizes negative impact. Pronouncements of evil do not beget goodness in return. On the contrary, the clergy are actually selling the product, evil, that they purport to abhor. Our times are obsessed with evil and we need desperately to hear the “good news,” what the Gospels were meant to communicate. The clergy would have us believe that there is more evil now than at any other time in man’s history. Not true. There are more people. But there is no more evil in our times than any other, nor no less.

The clergy reduce good and evil to a choice, “either/or,” which incidentally was the title of the Danish religious thinker Soren Kierkegaard’s 1843 classic: either salvation through good works or damnation through evil deeds.

Few are buying this message. Anyone who takes a little time to reflect on the world around him knows that it is a rather precise mirror image of what goes on in the world within him. It could be disconcerting if he paid much attention to the incredible emphasis paid to evil, crisis, trauma and Armageddon; and the scant attention paid to good deeds and good days. His saving grace is that about 95 percent of all the information thrown at him misses its mark completely. He has become hardened to the ranting of those who cry, “crisis or damnation,” with every other breath. Sigmund Freud claims man needs religion as illusion to deal with the future, but not the religious. It is their home in the now.

The media, especially newspapers and television, support the clergy’s theme as they give wide attention to evil, little to goodness. Why not! Evil sells shampoo, hair spray, automobiles and psycho–thriller films, such as Quentin Tarantino’s amorality graffiti, Reservoir Dogs (1992), True Romance (1993), Natural Born Killers (1994) and Pulp Fiction (1994).

What makes evil more enchanting than goodness is theatrical violence. Tarantino epitomizes a kind of Post–modern primitive, neither especially immoral or amoral, but pre–moral, a kid whose Id loves the shoot–’em ups in the movies. This grown up child of the Pleasure Principle hasn’t thought through the echoes or consequences in the real world. Violence, it would seem, is not to be taken seriously, but found to be funny, entertaining. What appears to interest Tarantino is not violence, per se, but fiasco, the sense that life is a mess, even in fiction. His characters are wonderfully at home in the world of accident. For him, there is no interest in being realistic, because the world isn’t. With his peculiar brand of innocence, nothing is a matter of good or evil. It is like a dance sequence in a film, all style.

Immaturity has been taken to another level with current video games of this electronic age. We can see children as young as three or four playing these violent games with reckless abandon. Small wonder they become addicted to them well into their maturing years.

Goodness is envisioned as bland and lifeless, while the exact opposite is true. Actually, goodness is muscular, virile and strong. Evil is flabby, weak and lazy. Remember, goodness takes work, and evil goes with the flow. Artists, such as Tarantino, expose the hypocrisy of the whole idea of a moral universe, a culture which professes to be God-fearing, but acts self-sufficient; a culture which seeks an innocuous creed which consoles and reassures, which provides soul ease and aims to satisfy, a culture which displays little interest in being uplifting or challenging. Paint won’t make it any prettier.

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