I was reading Margaret Mead's famous anthropological study, Coming of Age in Samoa, when I noticed a similarity between an assumption she made and the worldview of Stefan Molyneux, the host of FreeDomain Radio (for anyone unfamiliar with FreeDomain, Stef is all about self-ownership and NAP and seeks to extend the bounds of morality we hold whendealing with our neighbors and friends to the interactions of societies and governments. Of course if governments observed these decencies, they would no longer be governments.
Steph, building off the rationalism of Ayn Rand, has stated that he believes the root cause of much of the psychological strife children and adolesents experience is due to an inability to reconcile two ideas about reality. For instance, if a parent tells a child not to hit but himself hits the child, the actions of the parent are irreconcilable with the words of the parent so, as well as being abused, the child grows up believing that morality is mostly talk and something that adults will throw off whenever it is convienient. This would tend to breed a cynicism and an amoral attitude whenever the child can get away with it.
Margaret Mead was also trying to explain some of the psycological strife children in America go through. Notably she was trying to answer the question whether adolescent anxiety and angst were a result of the physiological phase the body was going through or of environment conditions of the society. To answer the question, she turned to a people far different than those she originally inquired about and compared the adolescent experience of girls in Samoa with girls in America and found that there was significantly less nuerosis in Samoa and that much of the strife that makes adolescence a difficult time for the American girl did not exist in Samoa.
She cited many differences between the cultures that cause these diffences in adolescent experience, such as attitudes towards sex and death, but a lot of her assumtions drew on the idea that America, being a much more heterogenous culture, had many more internal inconsitenceies which could trouble the young mind. In America, worldviews are in constant collisions with each other, while in Samoa there is one basic path to life and one basic understanding of the universe. In America, we still believe that there is one objective truth, but we have many definitons of what that truth is, so many, in fact, that the young mind must understand that whatever any person around her believes is very likely false. If she does chose to accept some worldview as her own and embrace it wholeheartedly, she runs the risk of dealing with its own internal inconsistencies. The inability to reconcile all of these problems likely leads to a good deal of strife in the adolecents' expeirence.
I find it interesting that such different thinkers could come to a similar idea. Though the sight different examples (Stef's based on violence. Mead's based on reconciling Christianity with war and the Declaration of Independence with inequality) I do believe they are both striking essentially the same bone and that there is a lot of truth to their thoughts. Unfortunately, these problems are likely to stay, as we are not likely to give up our hetergenous society. A few suggestions I would build off both Stef and Mead are to not pressure children to make decisions early, when their minds are still adjusting to the world as is the habit of the protestant evangelising movement in America and to always treat children honestly and fairly. It is important to walk the walk as well as talk the talk when dealing with them because I believe, as do many psychologists, that experience as a child has an extreme impact on developement and if your experience with rules of morality is full of hypocrisy and dishonesty, you are not likely to hold much account in morality.
Solutions to problems like these are not easy to come by, especially considering that they are problems throughout society. Our chief method of combatence is awareness and I think the more people understand that adolecence does not have to be an especially difficult time in a person's life and that much of the difficulty is a product of the environment, the closer we will be to living smoother and more contented lives.
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