Honesty.

When I was little, my mother told me that honesty was the best policy. Indeed, there are numerous proponents from virtually every sector that tell us that telling the truth is vital, that we know the best men because they are honest and fair. This is bullshit. This has always been bullshit.

It appears that for thousands of years, we have known that honesty is the proper virtue to be valued. And why not? We have a society predicated on the truth. We have a world that depends on the verity of every word we say. What is so hideous about lying? It is a denial of this truth. It is a perversion of order. It is the process of creating a little gem of information which appears to be true and honest, but is in fact the exact opposite. Why is this important to our society? Only because we could have it no other way.

When a man speaks, we first assume that what he says is true. That is because we have put a positive value on the identification of language. That is, that when a make speaks, language has a tendency to tell the truth, and society a necessity for this truth to exist in order to continue existing. Why is a lie so terrible then? Because it violates this order. To cut it down to simple situations, only two societies can exist. In one, everyone must lie all the time, and telling the truth is a hideous violation of this. In the other, everyone must tell the truth all the time, and lying is the violation. We have a society founded on truth, on fact, and therefore our society is the latter.

Thus, to lie is to undermine progress, to deny civilization, to ignore everything that exists in favor of hideous and perfect fantasies which cannot exist, if only because they are too perfect to be true. It is easy to see, then, why we tell our children that lying is a sin.

But the fact that so undermines this process, is that the adult in charge doesn't really mean this. Even this value of honesty is a lie for them. There exists nowadays, there has always existed, there always will exist, this fact. Adults tell their children not to lie. But everyday, they go out and they tell lies whenever it serves them, whenever it will make their own life easier. They mislead others, they hold back their feelings, they provide half-truths and mostly-falsehoods, all so that they can satisfy their own selfish goals, goals which will harm them in the long term.

I am no communist. I am not one to say that the state rules over man, and that man has no right but in the state. Who am I to say that men are only cogs in the machine? Ayn Rand has taught me at least that these are not true. But Ayn has no universal truth either. It is also true that man is not a distinct individual, that while the state is his own construct and his own working, he must at the same time understand that he must bow down to it as well, if it is to work. He must understand that petty selfishness is not the same thing as individuality, and that denying something does not make it any less true.

My parents told me never to lie. As a child, this earned me the favor of my parents. Now, as an adult, it only earns me the harsh derision of my fellows. Why is this? Is it better to be open and honest, or to hide what I am and spend my days avoiding myself, to speak nothing of others. The man who is scorned in the eyes of others suffers nothing in comparison to the man who is scorned in his own eyes. I know. But why is this? Why does this world so claim to value honesty, so uphold it and its virtues, when in fact it wishes nothing of the fact? Why is it that this world praises the strong, while working so hard to prevent everyone from becoming so? This world is a masochistic one, and this world is of our own making.

I am also shocked by this disparity between children and adults. By this model, in which we mislead our children and uphold for them false values that we will quickly forget when we grow up and realize that these values are harder than originally expected, we are only hurting our children. Rather than treating them as children, as tiny adults, we are treating them as another race, another people, from another existence entirely. We are upholding for them a style of life that does not exist.

Children are told to hate violence, to abhor evil, to uphold truth, safety, law, etc. etc. etc. But as soon as they become teenagers, we drop on them that the world is curiously about none of these things, as if puberty has somehow and suddenly changed them, transported them into a new world where everything is exactly the opposite.

Do you understand what I say when I mean that we should treat our children as small adults, and not as small aliens? In our current model, we tell them of a lifestyle that does not exist, and hold it up for them as virtue. Is it not better to hold up the real world that does exist, and show them the real virtues? We need not drop it all on them at once, in great amounts, because they are children. I am not saying that we must not treat them as such. We must release on them the information of the world in a smaller flow, so as to allow them to understand. But we must release on them the information of this world, because if we do not we are only hurting them rather than helping them, we are misleading them instead of helping them grow.

I can think of no reason why we should not be open and honest with our kids, at an early age. Certainly, they cannot be burdened to learn, in the first few years, while they try to comprehend the language and the basics of living itself. But in the years of grade school, when they can comprehend and learn, why not teach them reality, rather than this ideal and false world of happiness and butterflies that we currently push off on them without remorse? This doesn't harm them. God knows, if it could harm us, it would do it when we are adults, and it does. There are many ways in which children are inferior to adults. Grasping the basic tenets of society is not one of them.

The utter mass of filth which does just this, treating toddlers like some kind of idiot weakling that cannot possibly comprehend that life is complicated, that yes, we sometimes lie, and sometimes tell the truth, and virtue lies not in telling the truth but in knowing when to and when not to, is disgusting. Children's tv shows, books, magazines, everything about children is tailored as if they were some sort of disconnected being, as if they lived in a different universe. This is not right, this only leads to more being dumped on them later, when they begin to see through the shoddy craftsmanship of this false life, on more hardship and toil than would have previously.

Do you understand? By treating your children as if they are not old enough to do something, as if their age is a detriment to them, you are harming them. I am evidence enough. I turned out right. Isn't that bad enough?