Should I raise my children as psychopaths?

Should I raise my children as psychopaths? 

Were Plato and the ilk preaching against the open and free society? They did have their ethics based on the intrinsic value of the ethics and nothing else. There was a scope left for the powerful to define the foundations of ethics according to what suited them and therefore conform the society to their rule. 

When someone goes to a luxury hotel, the services of the employees are like those of slaves of the older times. It’s remarkable, for the garb in which a customer is able to ‘enjoy’ these services come under the regimen of free market enterprise, the merit based culture and the competition selecting the very best. 

However, we have to realise that in the making of a successful man of this world, several factors are at work and many of them are outside of the control of the individual. A female, black, disabled,poor  Somali entrepreneur would not be able to get the same bang for his buck as a white, privileged Swedish man would. This much is glaringly clear that efforts are not always the straightest way to success, the circumstances matter too. 

Under the veil of our prejudiced mind, the mind that wants to appropriate whatever is advantageous for it, we easily disregard the hurdles that others might have had to face for achieving the same level of success as we did. My uncle had once remarked that anyone with the brain of Einstein would have been able to come out with the theory that he came up with, even if it was the case of a black man in slavery. He said that he wouldn’t want to help anyone with education and financial help, for it would reduce his relative position in society if such a thing was to be operationalised. “And any ways, it’s their own Karma”

The last thought struck me as something viscerally wrong in our conceptualisation of the world. We have built a system of ethics that has radically different levels of treatment based on the position of the person in a society. Ethics become the chains that keep the oppressed, well oppressed. But then again is that so? 

One cannot say why or what exactly turned us into civilised people who can read and think and neatly fold the napkins before disposing them into appropriate dustbins. The modelling effect that taught us many of our unconscious learnings is invisible to the naked eye. Not that we cannot see others, but precisely because we see the going ons at all times, we ignore it. Just like your nose, but the moment you start paying attention, you can see both!

The root of the question of ethics is that of the source. It’s nearly impossible to get an impartial one, without leaving rationality behind and it’s very nearly impossible to have a perfect code, if it’s impossible to change. Certain things in the society have the power to change the thinking of the majority. This becomes the new ‘right’ against the old ‘right’. Almost always, the definition of what is right is related to what has been happening so far and in which book it’s support comes from, but then a time comes when everything changes, even if slightly so. But was it the time which played the magic or was it because of some individual. 

The most emphatic phenomenon of the effect of an individuals will over an entire society comes from observing the rise of religions. India had long been an agricultural society, an expanding society where the land was still ample. As the boundaries needed to be constantly expanded, the priests could play the role of the explorer, depending upon the customary donations to make their living. They would spread civilisational ethos to the tribals and all that deserved that they be rewarded. Ages went by, agriculture covered all the lands that could’ve been covered and even then the priests wanted their customary fees, for a job that wasn’t relevant anymore. 

What was being done was good and should be continued, because the society hasn’t collapsed. Probably that was the line of thought that enabled the Priests 2600 years ago in India to keep on demanding the sacrifice of animals, money and sex services from their congregation. Buddha realised the farce, that was his Nirvana. He made an atheist religion, expounded a scientific outlook and an open society. His morals still had the fear of divine punishment as the backing, but  it worked and soon India became almost wholly Buddhist. 

However, that wasn’t the point, that was me digressing. The point is that around that time, the Indian trade with Rome was making the merchant class fabulously rich. They needed to change the Hindu feudal morals that was making them guilty and unhappy, for no reason. Buddhism was a perfect company. 

A thousand years later, the Roman trade collapsed. Society relapsed into an agrarian model, where the domestic product was the produce of the farmer and to appropriate it another system of ethics was required, that of the Hindu hierarchal society and of the divisions. This ensured that masses toiled and the elites could enjoy their hard work without guilt. Sunshine and laddoos! That might also be the reason that the ultra rightist parties of India want to go back to that glorious time. 

Leap forward to today, the 22nd of September in the year of the lord two thousand and sixteen. I have seen the heroines of the 60’s reverting to clothing of the 20’s when they wanted to appear ‘cultured and good’ and those of 2020’s reverting to that of 80’s to do the same thing. Old people of every generation determine what is ‘good’ and that’s how it goes, not only with the clothing, but with morality and language and culture.

Information is pretty free today compared to the stone tablet era and yet we haven’t become the liberated, thinking individuals that would have broken the shackles of the ‘information less’ stone age. Still, society pretty much functions on the basis of ‘what is old is good’ and ‘the new is against the culture’ paradigm. Maybe it’s how the wiring of the brain is done, to form some sort of sense of the world. To change it would mean attacking the core of our beliefs lie, where the illusionary ‘self’ resides and to change that would take so much psychic energy that we prefer status quo of the ‘flawed but okay (flokay)” old philosophy to the ‘perfect but ever changing ( panging)’ new one. 

These are the contexts laid bare.The nature of the human mind to idealise a certain philosophy as good against the evidence of it’s rottenness makes the initially good philosophy a shield to do all sorts of shits. Christians massacred millions in the new world, in the name of piety. Hindus legalised slavery in the name of Karma and all the way to today when we are turning humans into robots in guise of meritocracy and constant flashy optimism to live a good life, which like a rich man’s house is filled mostly with empty winds. 

What about goals of life? Surely, if a person doesn’t develop the good bad paradigm, how would they determine where they would want to head? But, as I already said, nobility and radicalisation has done more wrongs than a clueless ‘dude’ could ever have. And not knowing the societal good would help them realise their internal definition of ‘good’ and if according to them, good is killing people, then so be it!

It’s too late for me. I already believe in truth and goodness and all sorts of humbug superstitions.Non believers of this creed are termed as psychopaths. But I can turn my children into psychopaths so that they like the leaders of our society can use the farce of ethics, religion and optimistic meritocracy to reach the top and kill me and my wife to get some more cash. And then, and then, and then, I don’t know. Was that the goal? Rewind. 

So ,the top secret plan was to make my children free of the guilts. Human beings are naturally perceptive. They’d empathise with others and set some automatic boundaries on their behaviours. Yes, they wouldn’t kill me I am sure. Further, as they experience the world, without the framework of ethics to guide them/bog them down, they’d align themselves to the Kantian line of thought, that their actions be judged by how they themselves would feel if someone had done the exact same thing to them. 

What about the sins? Overdoing pleasurable things only serves to make you sadder at the end of it, if only because you drop from the happiness cliff. Aren’t ethics instrumental for us in the sense that they help us to cultivate that serenity in life rather than experiencing the brutal ups and downs, the detachment makes us who we are, for otherwise, we wouldn’t be differentiable from our surroundings… I don’t know actually. I think it’s a personal management skill, personality skill that can be learnt without relying on philosophical intellectualisations. 

Respect would have to be earned, artificiality would become redundant and mind games of priests/people they meet in life wouldn’t work on them. I just hope they’re not total a&&holes and psychopaths, not that there’s anything bad with that, it’s just my own chains that constraint me into thinking along those lines!

I am not against the children studying and discovering new value systems after they mature and have developed their own internal sense of good-bad, but until then… I’d let them be free of it all.