The Case Against Adolescence

Psychology Today had a very interesting and radical interview with the author of the book “The Case Against Adolescence.” “Teenage years” are one of the last bastions of prejudice against other human beings.

You believe in the inherent competence of teens. What’s your evidence?

Dumas and I worked out what makes an adult an adult. We came up with 14 areas of competency—such as interpersonal skills, handling responsibility, leadership—and administered tests to adults and teens in several cities around the country. We found that teens were as competent or nearly as competent as adults in all 14 areas. But when adults estimate how teens will score, their estimates are dramatically below what the teens actually score.

Other long-standing data show that teens are at least as competent as adults. IQ is a quotient that indicates where you stand relative to other people your age; that stays stable. But raw scores of intelligence peak around age 14-15 and shrink thereafter. Scores on virtually all tests of memory peak between ages 13 and 15. Perceptual abilities all peak at that age. Brain size peaks at 14. Incidental memory—what you remember by accident, and not due to mnemonics—is remarkably good in early to mid teens and practically nonexistent by the ’50s and ’60s.

If teens are so competent, why do they not show it?

What teens do is a small fraction of what they are capable of doing. If you mistreat or restrict them, performance suffers and is extremely misleading. The teens put before us as examples by, say, the music industry tend to be highly incompetent. Teens encourage each other to perform incompetently. One of the anthems of modern pop, “Smells Like Teen Spirit” by Nirvana, is all about how we need to behave like we’re stupid.
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Teens in America are in touch with their peers on average 65 hours a week, compared to about four hours a week in preindustrial cultures. In this country, teens learn virtually everything they know from other teens, who are in turn highly influenced by certain aggressive industries. This makes no sense. Teens should be learning from the people they are about to become. When young people exit the education system and are dumped into the real world, which is not the world of Britney Spears, they have no idea what’s going on and have to spend considerable time figuring it out.

There are at least 20 million young people between 13 and 17, and if they are as competent as I think they are, we are just throwing them away.

The curious, the incurious, and the agnostics.

The maxim that “[f]or every problem there is one solution which is simple, neat and wrong” (by H. L. Mencken) is often repeated. However, we stop at saying that it is wrong, and don’t look at its effects in society as a whole. For there are plenty of solutions out there which are simple, neat and wrong. There are also plenty of solution which are more complex, messier, and still wrong (just look at all the laws in the law books, which have never solved anything and definitely fulfill all three criteria).

The reason why I point this out is because it relates very much to a thought I had recently. It seems to me that curious and incurious people both have one thing in common: they see everything around them, every experience, as being pregnant with meaning. They both try to construct explanatory schemes which gives them the answers to why things are the way they are, and how things should be.

But there are vast differences in the kind of schemes that both groups use as their explanatory schemes. The incurious people use arbitrary ad hoc schemes (God did it, karma, destiny/God’s will, “spirit forces,” etc) and schemes based on prejudice (nationalism, racism, sexism, manichean worldview, etc). These schemes shut down further thought, new questions and new answers. They are meant to be the end point beyond which one cannot and must not look.

For example, when someone explains a fact with “God did it,” nothing more can be said beyond that. How did God do this? Blank. How can we differentiate between things that God does and things that nature or man does? Blank. How do we deal with the ethical consequences of what God does? Blank. God did it, and that settles it. You either believe it or you don’t.

The manichean worldview is another popular scheme that shuts down thought. For instance, why did Hitler commit all the incredible crimes that he did? Because he was an “evil person,” of course. By what magic do some people acquire the property of “evilness”? Blank. How can we identify “evil people” before they get the power to inflict evil? Blank. How come people identified as “evil people” can still do good things? Blank. He was an “evil person,” and that’s all the explanation you need. Any attempt to explore the issue, or to portray him as a human being, means that you are trying to cover up this absolute and complete “evilness.”

In contrast, the curious people use theories which expand their understanding and open the mind towards further thought and questions. Science is a good example of that. For every question that science answers, five new questions open up, and new areas of thought are created constantly. In fact, any thinker who tries to shut down his reasoning, who sets up dead-end streets in his mind, cannot be called a good thinker at all.

Also, there is another major difference in how each group treats new experiences. The incurious will do everything they can to fit new experiences into their schemes, no matter how bad the fit. The curious will do the exact opposite, trying to fit the schemes to their experiences. If the fit is bad, they will either try to explain why, or change their scheme to fit the new experience. This idea of a revolution in thought, a change of paradigm, exists in all fields where people are curious and honestly seek truth, and is known to all such persons as a personal experience as well.

If someone says “God did it,” then not only is there no further thought possible, but also no amount of evidence can dissuade him of that premise. After all, God can do anything, and can have any motivation that the believer can come up with. All the monstrosities of this world, all the diseases, all the suffering, can be explained away to any believer’s satisfaction, even though such rationalizations are always illogical. The atheist, on the other hand, has no need for such rationalizations, because he has no such metaphysical absolutes to defend.

If someone believes that Hitler was an “evil person,” then no evidence can dissuade him of this position either. After all, any seemingly good action can be explained away as a sociopath trying to posture himself as being compassionate. But if a person is really interested in learning why Hitler grew up from being a child to being a genocidal dictator, or to explain the rise of Nazi Germany, or the origins of any criminal mind, he can read biographies and psychological analyses. By understanding what factors acted upon the “evil person,” he will necessarily expand his understanding to encompass this person’s family, the institutions he was subject to, and his society as a whole. In doing so, he may refute some of his own beliefs.

Now, most people reject both attitudes, and see any attempt at constructing a system of thought as being dogmatic. It is not hard to understand why they think so. After all, religion has made a monopoly of moral and ethical systems, and these systems are very contradictory and self-repressive indeed. Therefore most people associate system-forming with the contradictory and the self-repressive, and will spend all their energies trying to contradict all the systems they see, or trying to show how self-repressive they are. Once again, this is a natural reaction.

I call this group the “agnostics.” Although this is mainly a metaphor, actual agnostics tend to be in this category also. There are few experiences more frustrating than trying to convince an agnostic of anything. In all things, the agnostic attitude is “I don’t know anything, and you don’t either.” They may even see people who make schemes of thought as being arrogant, or even as trying to impose their opinions on others. Some people simply revel in the mystery, and believe that understanding a thing somehow destroys its wonder. Others believe that base pragmatism gives them the higher ideological ground.

In fact, most people are agnostics to some extent, and will readily reject the idea that anyone can possibly know anything about this or that field. But man is a meaning-seeking animal, and this impulse is fundamental to our sociability. After all, what is speech but a search for meaning in sounds? Likewise, as the maxim goes, “[r]eading is bringing meaning to and taking meaning from squiggly little lines.” This may seem trivial, but the difference between that and interpreting daily events is merely one of scope.

An agnostic would agree that life is “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing” (to paraphrase Shakespeare); a curious would try to figure out exactly where all the sound and fury comes from. The end result is that the curious gets much farther in his capacity to understand life than the agnostic. Therefore, one should not be afraid of explanations, even if they may turn out to be false in the future. After all, a little bravery is required to confront the truth.

Was God a Volcano?

Reality beats The Onion.

It’s hard to believe that this was not an Onion article, but it’s not: No joke: South Carolina now requires ’subversives’ to register.

The state’s “Subversive Activities Registration Act,” passed last year and now officially on the books, states that “every member of a subversive organization, or an organization subject to foreign control, every foreign agent and every person who advocates, teaches, advises or practices the duty, necessity or propriety of controlling, conducting, seizing or overthrowing the government of the United States … shall register with the Secretary of State.”

There’s even a $5 filing fee.

By “subversive organization,” the law means “every corporation, society, association, camp, group, bund, political party, assembly, body or organization, composed of two or more persons, which directly or indirectly advocates, advises, teaches or practices the duty, necessity or propriety of controlling, conducting, seizing or overthrowing the government of the United States [or] of this State.”

I really shouldn’t add anything since this parodies itself, but wouldn’t ALL political parties, since they “advise the necessity and propriety of [themselves] controlling the government of the United States,” be considered subversive as well?

Police Brutality: Cop Slams Elderly Woman’s Head On The Concrete.

Demolishing property rights again: the child renter argument.

I’ve discussed extensively about Block’s Corollary, regarding the absurd consequences of the concept of property. Block’s Corollary is basically the position that the right of property logically implies the right to a degree of control over the people who are on that property. This is generally admitted in many cases, but we’ve merely taken the argument to its logical conclusion, as Block does, and proposed that under the capitalist property scheme rape is not necessarily a crime as long as it’s done under contract (as Block says, it is in fact purely voluntary).

To this, there seems to have been pretty much one response from the capitalists: “well, that’s not what property actually entails, the woman still has her rights regardless of her being on the boss’ property.” But they cannot answer why the woman’s rights have precedence over her boss’ rights. They cannot answer because there is no answer; it’s an ad hoc rationalization constructed to defend property rights. But if true, it would imply that there are “different degrees” of property, which is a contradiction, as property is by definition absolute.

Noor has constructed a new argument which similarly destroys property rights, but from a different angle.

Imagine that there is this house where a voluntary contract links a tenant and a landlord. Then a child is born from that tenant, grows up, becomes an adult, his mother dies, and now the landlord start asking for rent from the child as well. But there is no contract linking the child and the landlord, therefore no consent. So the child is faced with a situation where he must either pay a rent he never consented to, or be forced to leave against his will. And even before that, when he didn’t pay rent, he was still subject to the other rules of the contract, which he obviously never consented to either.

The capitalist has no choice but to say that the contract is necessarily valid, since he believes that all voluntary agreements are necessarily valid. But the contract implies non-consensual attacks on another person’s rights, the child. Within the capitalist property system, it must be so.

I hope the analogy here is clear. The child cannot do otherwise but be born wherever he is born, and the same is true for all of us. And yet we are told that a contract, the US Constitution, binds us to our landlords, the US government, and obliges us to pay tribute.

The “anarcho-capitalist” may reply that the US Constitution can only bind people who actually signed it. But then the same would be true for the contract with the landlord, which should only bind people who actually signed it, but it obviously binds the child also, who never signed it. In the same way, the US government, acting as illegitimately as the landlord, claiming property over the land it arbitrary delimits and calls the United States, demands that the children born on its property be its subjects, even though no consent was ever given.

The other part of the process is the idea that the child, as well as the unwilling citizen, should simply leave. This is the “love it or leave it” part of statism, and is subject to the same objections. To list these would be besides the point; I would hope that my Anarchist readers don’t need such a list anyway. The only important thing regarding the argument is that this alternative is equally non-consensual.

So it seems that from this voluntary contract can only arise non-consensual consequences. This paradox only exists because of property rights. In a possession system, the child would be recognized as the sole remaining legitimate possessor of the house after his mother’s death. The so-called land-lord would have nothing to lord over, since he could never be recognized as the actual owner of that land.

Property rights leads to absurd consequences. Nowhere is this more obvious than in how frantically capitalists try to rationalize that fact without being able to prove anything. “I don’t support rape!” they’ll exclaim. I’m sure I will get a lot of comments to this entry saying “The two examples you gave are not the same because the landlord is well within his rights to coerce the child, but I don’t approve of the government’s claims!” And yet they will never, ever be able to show how the examples are dissimilar.

Some may argue, on the other hand, that they oppose coercing children and that therefore my argument is invalid, but they will be unable to explain how property rights are compatible with their view. If my experience with Block’s Corollary is any indication, I expect their argument will be something like “the child’s (property-)ownership of his own body trumps the landlord’s (property-)ownership of his land.” Why does one kind of property-ownership trump another kind? Blank. How can the concept of property, which is absolute, admit of higher and lower forms of itself? Blank. The belief in property remains absolute circular nonsense.

In fact, the line of argumentation that I’ve discussed in this entry can very easily be made parallel to Block’s Corollary. One can imagine any contract which, being in effect, would hurt the child without his consent. For example, the tenant and the landlord may have made a contract which stipulates that the child may be starved if he is unable to pay rent. One may argue that this is an obvious attack on the child, but the difference between normal contract rules which are applied to the child without his consent, and an abnormal rule such as this one, is merely a matter of degree. In all cases the rights of the child are attacked. To accept one but reject the other is hypocrite.