Necessary in children, obedience can be ruinous to adults
By Dave Read, Lenox, MA, Jan. 26, 2025 – Obedience is a trait we instill in children to assist them, and carry them from infancy until they learn to reason. When young people learn to reason, they acquire agency and begin to take command of their own lives.
The current condition of American politics, including an unprecedented proliferation of conspiracy theories, demonstrates that a growing segment of the population is stuck in the phase of pre-rational obedience.
How else account for the absurdity of electing an unapologetic, unpunished felon, and draft-dodger, to be the nation’s chief law enforcement officer and commander-in-chief of her armed forces?
People vote according to what they want to believe, instead of according to what reason tells them it would be wise to believe.
science takes us only so far
Belief and reason exist in happy opposition to one another. We believe in the scientific method because, among manifold other reasons, it led to the invention of the electric toaster. But, as wonderful as toast is, toasters leave us on our own to decide which side gets the butter.
Elections are the two parties in America begging to get buttered. One party makes the case for why the butter goes on this side, while the other party makes the case for why the butter goes on that side. Reason goes out the window, or back to bed, while the electorate picks sides according to which campaign they believe loves and cares for them the way their parents loved and cared for them.
Thousands of lies, a documented history of fraud and sexual abuse, plus 34 felony convictions become vapor against an avalanche of promises to assuage the fears and satisfy the wants of voters who act as if they haven’t grown out of obedience mode, as if they remain in parental care.
Had they reason at their disposal, they would see that the candidate of the republican party says what they want to hear. That his first motive is to avoid prison and make a few buck is immaterial, so long as it feels good to finally be on a team. Whatever the other side says that isn’t buried in the first avalanche is lost in a blizzard of old lies and new conspiracy theories.
The point is, having failed to emerge from obedience to reason as they left adolescence, American voters are trending away from wisdom and toward a tyranny populated by people with minds trapped in pre-adulthood. Education begins in the home. It is the duty of parents to lead their children through the stages of childhood development all the way to mature, autonomous adulthood. Unless they teach their children to think for themselves, they fail them and leave them vulnerable to frauds and tyrants.
Political parties run on obedience to core values and beliefs. Unless a person is armed with the power of reason, they will not be able to decide which party is made up of people with the same sense of justice and honesty as them.
Belief is a bridge in the same sense that obedience is. Belief substitutes for evidence, and is a dominant element in religion, which substitutes divine revelation for empirical truth. Religion has jurisdiction over questions that seem beyond the scope of science.
Project 2025 is the latest fruit of GOP’s southern strategy
My generation of Baby Boomers took no notice of the political flip-flop that occurred in 1964, when the democratic party, then dominant throughout the south, rejected racial animus by passing the Civil Rights bill. That led to the defection, to the republican side, of the Senate’s most popular, powerful, and outspoken segregationist; where he remained until he died in 2003, aged 100.
Until 1964, the republican party bragged that it was the Party of Lincoln. They kept up that boast even though undeserved because to challenge them, the democrats would have had to answer for being safe haven for Jim Crow since the aftermath of the Civil War. Since 1964, racists in search of a political home have made common cause with republicans, because they butter their toast on the same side.
First enunciated by Nixon, the republican party’s fear- and ignorance-based southern strategy has so transformed the nation that, in the mind of the present occupant of the White House, the Statue of Liberty is just another New York broad in a department store.
Nowhere is skin as thin as what wraps politicians and their parties. Neither will republicans boast of making racists welcome nor will democrats admit to being their former home.
Racism, like every other human trait, will not be legislated out of existence until ignorance and fear are banned first. That fact puts the onus on well-meaning people to learn all they can about candidates for office by examining their records and by interviewing the people who have known them, worked and played with them.
Redemption is only available to people, not political parties, so we can wait until hell freezes over but neither party will ever indulge a thorough soul-searching, nor renounce evil and wrong-doing and promise to go forth and sin no more.
Honesty, love, charity, prudence, temperance, justice, and wisdom are personal traits; they are not available to any other entity on earth – no party, nation, business, or corporation. But, in an infinite variety of mixtures, every person shows themself to be a combination of all of them.
Nobody, not even George Washington, never tells a lie but everybody tends to be honest or dishonest. The human experience is an essentially binary phenomenon; each of us always is somewhat honest, somewhat motivated by love, somewhat charitable, somewhat prudent, somewhat temperate, somewhat just, somewhat wise.
It is the job of parents first to teach children how to play on see-saws, then how to use reason so that they may see which candidate’s character is properly in balance.