Unexpected

 

It may be that what is true often seems counterintuitive, even paradoxical, is because it is, and this is well the universal law of moderation at work, in many, many unrelated realms of Being.

 

Regarding morality, one would think that we could inspire people, our children for example, to be good, to self-realize, to be happy and serve to higher power, if we taught them right from wrong and modeled, non-hypocritically and sincerely, in practice, the fine values that we preached.

 

The likelihood of our children doing better and choosing to be better does go up quite a bit in a firm, loving, disciplined household, with a Mom and Dad, who made the kids work and taught them right from wrong.

 

But that is no guarantee. That works better where the parents are joiners, groupists, and advocates and practitioners of altruist-collectivist ethics.

 

Each youngster has a human nature that instills in them from the moment of inception that they have little worth, that they should love sin over virtue and righteous, that they should hate themselves more than love themselves, that they should prefer pleasure over duty, ease and leisure over hard work, fatalism over activism, selfishness over self-discipline, that they should love group-living and nonindividuating. Then they are born into a world run by the Evil Spirits.

 

These are the obstacles the average parent can anticipate going up against to bring up a good child. At some point, all the modeling and training can take root, if the child, at some point, of her own free will, agrees that being a good person and serving God are the most important things in life for her.

 

We see this same tension play out in society when one is a moral reformer like I am. People have to come to Mavellonialism and individuating individualism of their own free will. I am ethically bound to advertise my value system, but never to force, intimidate, or seek power over another soul to make them reform themselves.

 

God would be furious with me, and I would be punished. God the Father, God the Mother and Jesus all want humans to be both pious, virtuous and maverizing, but love and self-development are always a personal choice—beyond gentle persuasion and invitation, there is nothing the exhorter can do but sit back and watch and wait.

 

We are not able to use force to help others save their lives for that very attempt must fail and is pure wickedness.

If we are vicious and totalitarian, and use torture, force, terror, murder, and violence to scare youngsters to do evil, most youngsters will go along with the immoral training, a permanent attachment to it. The wicked can make people fail (Most people run in packs, and a guru or mob surrounds the individual and implies or actually hurts him to join the mob and do evil, most people will go along, and wreck their lives, growing in cruelty and darkness; it is not much about free will for evil people, it is about winning and gaining converts, willing or not.) and wreck their lives, but the good cannot make the young make the choice for them to save and uplift themselves.

 

The world is not for the good, so it is hard—but not impossible to know moral victory, for it is still our duty to fight the uphill battle, win or lose (God never guaranteed us victory in this world.). If they try hard enough, the good can make headway even here on earth.

 

This fact of meeting stiff, recurring opposition to reform in this world is why many idealists turn bitter and hateful, using eventually totalitarian compulsion to “force the masses” to do the right thing.

 

Wrecking lives is a collective enterprise. It is easy to scare people into doing bad and doing wrong, for their wills are naturally weak, they are innately other-centered and do what the group does, and their basic free will is easy to force to submit when cornered by a gang of yelling brutes shouting, join us or else.

 

The individual that is strong enough to withstand such domineering thuggery would be a rational, strong-willed lover of self, God, truth, justice and free-living in accordance with his pursuit of his own dreams, his own earned happiness, which, he put together, on his own, of his own free-will, He is a self-determined and self-determining moral success.

 

Evil Spirits and their human allies have an easier time of it because the existential deck is stacked heavily in their favor. People are born meek, gullible, ordered about, enjoying conformity, with someone to do their thinking for them, so they easily submit to what is the narrative that they are born into, what their elders, their public officials, their peers, and their pastors tell them is true and right.

 

These lost youngsters of natural evilness, groupist and trapped by a corrupt social set up, easily elect to settle for sinful, easy lives in the pact, stunted and fairly content to wallow in the muck that they were born into.

 

Dennis Prager suggests wisely that good parents can raise bad kids, and bad parents can raise good kids, and all well-meaning good parents are lucky if their kids turn out. This sage teaches that most important job a parent can take on is to raise a spiritually and morally good child who has elected to do good, and be good.

 

There are no guarantees for the parent that their child will turn out, but it is well worth the effort, successful or not.