THE UNASKABLE QUESTIONS

This phlog post reminded me, somewhat unwillingly, about a topic 
I've thought about commenting on before:
gopher://tilde.club/0/~user18130814200115/posts/0008-appeal-to-nature.txt

Not actually the "appeal to nature" thing, but this section:

 As I grew older and become a teenager, I started to question the
 teachings of my parents, and one of the things which was
 addressed were the many appeals to nature made in my
 life-choices. Now that I am yet-again older, I decided that, at
 age 14 -- wile pumping hormones and sleeping 11 hours
 per afternoon -- I was likely not smarter than my parents,
 teachers, government, etcetera. Since discovering this
 ground-shaking fact, I have made an effort to try an rethink
 every decision or pattern-of-thought which I started in that
 period, and as-such, the appeal to nature reared its head again.

Now I don't really remember my youth very well. Even though I'm 
only in my late twenties I tend to resist thinking about it. I was 
never really cut out to be a child, or a teenager. The entire time 
is tinged with a very special mix of frustration, depression, and 
bottled-up anger which I understand now was really unavoidable for 
me given how the limited freedom and regular close proximity to 
others required of a typical upbringing in Australia. I rather 
suspect that if I were one of those people working a minor office 
job under a controlling boss while living in a share house, it 
would all start winding me right up again. Although whether that's 
just fear, I don't know.

Although those emotions seem more typical of a boy's teenage years, 
I feel like they built up earlier. Later on my will was broken and 
I just stopped caring much about anything anymore, which in many 
ways made me more normal because the main thing I had grown to 
care/obsess over was school work and rules and few other kids took 
great consideration of those.

Anyway that's a bit of an aside which I just feel like venting 
seeing as the topic got me back in that mind. I do get emotional 
dealing with these memories and it's showing even while I'm 
effectively writing to myself in text. The topic I was attempting 
to discuss is reassessing opinions formed during youth. Basically I 
feel like, other than the idea of school years being so 
unimaginably and unbearably long that their end is beyond 
comprehension, I don't feel I've really changed many opinions 
formed by my late teens.

This probably does have a lot to do with simply not remembering 
them. But the memories that stick, and they're mainly from my 
pre-teens, are when I asked what I immediately learnt was an 
'unaskable' question. One example will demonstrate exactly what I 
mean: asking one of parents (who aren't on speaking terms, and 
never have been in the time I can remember) why they're not still 
together. So basically a question that doesn't get any answer but 
immediately sours the mood to the extent of implying a need for 
rapid retreat to one's bedroom. I'm still in complete mystery over 
the answer to that one, but I don't think I want to know the answer 
anymore anyway.

Other questions also turned out to be accidentally loaded. They 
tripped over different tabos, informing me that I was thinking 
'wrong' in a way. These actually got down to some core differences 
between my own opinions and wider culture, and I've kept those 
opinions. One question to my mother was along the lines of (in some 
far more clunky childish wording) "why does society value children  
more highly than adults, when adults have more learning and 
ability?". I got some dismissive response which I can't actually 
remember, but the emotion fixed it in my mind in the way that only 
my major social mis-steps ever seem to get fixed. Still I hadn't 
got an answer, so even though I knew that my mother disagreed I 
concluded that there was no good reason. I still feel that way, and 
cringe at the excess of mourning that happens over the death of 
children. Now I have a broader perspective, I see there's a sense 
of a lost potential, as well as, or probably primarily, a natural 
empathy towards children that I simply lack. I really dislike 
babies and children actually, and would prefer they were hidden 
away. I was a child then, pre-teens I think, but somehow that 
missing instinct already swayed my judgement. I also still think 
adults are more valuable, a bunch of adults can achieve something, 
a bunch of unguided children is just a disaster. With age I came to 
understand how adults make more children anyway, so there's 
actually just a few years lost in the process, less than the 
investment put into recreating a grown and educated adult. Getting 
so much more worked up over the death of children makes no sense at 
all.

Another one, which I must have asked back when I was five or six if 
I correctly remember which house I was in when I asked it, was "are 
different races of people like different breeds of animals?". I 
think I was told, by a mother who presumably had a sudden fear that 
she was raising a neo-Nazi, something like "we don't say things 
like that". Again, I took the lack of counter-argument as 
confusing, but ultimately reinforcing my opinion that they were the 
same. Now I see that I was stepping over two tabos at once, with 
racism, and the idea of comparing humans to animals. But I also see 
that I really was right. 'Subspecies' would have more accurately 
expressed my understanding, because 'breed' often implies human 
design, although now that I think of it that's implicit in 
consensual human reproduction too. I don't embrace the will to view 
humans and animals separately. It's probably in part to isolate 
distinctions by race from the distinctions made between animal 
breeds. But facts are facts, eg. the Australian aboriginees are 
certainly better bred for living in their country's climate than I 
am, burning in the sun unless my skin's dripping in sunscreen.

So I've thought about those beliefs and held onto them, but what I 
have come to appreciate over the following years is how they 
differentiate me from wider society, in Australia at least. Also an 
aversion to taking commercial medicine (in my case any medicine, 
since I'm not inter herbal things either), which is what that other 
phlog post was about, is something that I actually did develop 
contrary to my parents in my teens and I've held onto that as well. 
Given that my mother's a nurse who used to do injections at 
schools, questioning her on the safety of medicine is an unaskable 
question as well, but I'd learnt how to avoid those questions by 
then so I didn't confront it directly (I just said "no"). Except 
more recently with the COVID boosters since I stopped getting them 
after my bad reaction to the second dose, but she knows I'm pretty 
firm on that topic now. I guess going back to the quote from that 
phlog, my conclusion has therefore been that as a teen I _was_ 
smarter than my parents, teachers, government. But I don't really 
think of it in terms of intelligence and more as forming a 
preferred world-view, which often lies beyond the realm of concrete 
facts anyway. In the same way I also don't believe in religion, but 
I wouldn't consider everyone who does to be stupid. In an uncertain 
world a hormonal teenager is almost as likely to stumble upon a 
workable estimation of those uncertainties as a brilliant educated 
adult.

 - The Free Thinker