I saw something interesting the other day. A fellow was talking about taking his teenage daughter out for a ride in his classic car, and she was confused about something. They were obviously traveling at about 60 mph, and she said to him, “but the speedometer only shows 45 mph”.
It took him a moment to sort this out – the speedometer needle clearly indicated 60 mph. Then, he realized that the trip odometer was displaying “45” and right below it, printed on the speedometer dial, it said “mph”.
If you grew up in my generation, you might be amazed that a person could so totally ignore the analog needle and dial of the speedometer and fixate on the digital readout of the odometer. How could she make that mistake? After all, everybody knows what a speedometer is.
Well, no. People are not born with much in the way of knowledge. We have to learn. And, in order to learn, we have to be shown. This is the reason families are important. Families are the vessel and vehicle by which culture gets transmitted from one generation to the next, with intact families generally doing this better than crippled ones. Who’s going to show the kids about life if Mom and/or Dad aren’t there to do it? The TV? Social media?
There’s a ton of things that we each learn as we grow up that we later tend to take for granted. You could call this our culture. For example, in my parent’s generation, they “knew” that people attained adulthood, got married, had kids. Everybody knew that married people generally stayed married (even if they really didn’t want to). They knew that, once you got a decent job, you’d stay with that employer for the rest of your working life. In regard to cars, everybody knew that the gas pedal was on the right, the brake pedal to the left of that, and the clutch (if there was one) was on the far left. Everybody knew that the speedometer was an analog gauge right smack dab in the middle of the instrument display. Etc.
Were they born knowing these things? Of course not. They had to be shown. What their family didn’t show them, they may have been told about in school, or by the movies, or out behind the barn. But – one way or another, somebody told them or showed them how things worked. Once they got enough of these basic data under their belt, they could get to the point where they could figure many of the other things out for themselves. But, they first had to be shown the basics of their culture.
My generation made a bad assumption in regard to raising up our kids. We were busy, maybe a bit self-involved, and so decided that all our kids needed was some time to mature or “ripen”, and they’d come out knowing the things we knew. We didn’t bother to teach them, to show them the essentials of life. After all, everybody “knew” these things, and so our kids would too.
Oops. Not so. And now we wonder how two whole generations could have come to adulthood with such gaping holes in their knowledge about how the world works. How could they possibly think or believe some of the things they think? Well, if that’s all they know, that’s all they know. This man never showed his daughter an analog speedometer, never showed her what it displayed and how it worked. But she had been shown lots of digital things – like her cell phone. So – she assumed that the digital readout was the thing to watch, even though that was not quite right.
What else did we miss? Well, we assumed everybody knew how societies functioned, what was good, what was bad and such. After all, we grew up in an environment where everybody “knew” these things, or at least paid lip service to them. We knew this so well that we never bothered to ask why these things were accepted.
What makes a good thing good? Why is it good? Why should people be polite to each other? Why should I be helpful? Why should we bother to do a good job of things? What’s so important about self-reliance? Why should we try to be logical? Why should we have a republic instead of a monarchy or a dictatorship? Why does free-market economics seem to work better than socialism in many cases?
I guess one of the reasons we didn’t ask about these things is that the answers would be hard to get. Too many unknown variables, too much missing data. What we weren’t able to figure out, we filled in with “now I’m supposed to’s”.
Well, this is now the 21st century and guess what? We have sorted out most of the data which was missing from preceding generations, and we’ve isolated many of those pesky unknown variables. We can take on the big questions of life and get real answers which work. We can know what to do, and why.
Since we now have these wonderful abilities, we need to take the time to get ourselves educated and sorted out, and then help others around us do the same. We need to make workable families. We need to educate the kids, and also to educate those who the system has left behind. We need to try to see that people know why they’re alive, how to achieve happiness, how to make a civilization.
Humanity now has what it needs to make a major evolutionary jump.
Let’s jump.