Why are we unable, generally, to learn from our parents' mistakes? When we are young, healthy and dumb, why do we make poor choices, and sin a lot and waste our lives. Then, at 62, when we are tired, maybe ill, running out of time, and filled with regrets, why do we suddenly wise up and learn from our youthful mistakes, sins and indiscretions. We try to pass lessons learned on to the next generation, but the lessons learned fall on deaf ears, mostly, and are ignored.
We run in groups, and group-living is where our natural depravity, our silly arrogance, our false pride, and our fanatical dislike of the truth, our subjective emotionalism and our preference for pleasing illusions all work to surmount the warnings from our conscience and internal sense of prudence.
In light of these overwhelming psychological, sociological and poor value selections, it is very predictable that we cannot learn from the past, or from our old-too--soon, wise-too-late parents.
Once individual-living and individuating become commonplace, then most of these disruptive factors clouding the human, personal judgment will subside. Where our wholesome values tame and redirect the ferocious energies of the beast inside clamoring to escape and rage, where our calm love of obejctivity, logic and facts enable us to face almost any hard truth, where our rejection of lying and distortions leads us away from group-justifiying rationalizations, then our calm, temperate ken of the world and a study of what did and did not work in yesteryear can be dispassionately and accurately made analogous to what we are encountering today.
We will make many fewer mistakes, and will learn from the hard living and choices, good and bad, that our foreparents made before us.
No comments:
Post a Comment