Humans by default want to love one another unconditionally. It is how kids are, it is how our pets are. It is our biases and prejudices and labels and insecurities and traumas that have made our love for one another conditional.
The whole world needed a big hug after the pandemic. We didn’t get one. We saw powerful propaganda being an effectual tool in sowing discord, and it worked by appealing to our individualism, incorrectly overriding collectivism. With the visible rise of individualism worldwide, we’re all shriveling in our lonely corners, unloved. Everyone is, not just those choosing the individualism. The world needs loving. Here’s a hug for everyone who reads this comment. I love you unconditionally.
Hellll no. Have you seen how cruel kids are to each other in school? If you show any amount of weakness or insecurity or difference from the norm, everyone will gang up on you and make your life hell. There are literally cases of children being driven to suicide or developing mental illness due to bullying. Kids derive pleasure from making their peers feel inferior to them, much more so than adults. Kids are also some of the most intolerant, us-vs-them people, spread rumours because they think it’s fun to put down someone else, pretend to warm up to people they perceive as useful to themselves and throw them away as soon as their usefulness is depleated (copying homework is probably the most common example), threaten their friends with ostracism to make them fall in line, say horrible things to people they don’t know on the internet, exploit the ignorance of their peers to scam them (ever had someone try to convince you that a really rare trading card is actually a terrible one, and they’re being so kind to trade you for something better to take that bad card off your hands?), straight up steal stuff from their peers, etc etc. Nice kids are not a given, they are a small minority and their parents have to carefully mould those attributes into them. Kids left to their own devices with insufficient parental discipline are horrible, which implies that their default nature is one of selfishness and cruelty, not compassion.
Humans by default want to love one another unconditionally. It is how kids are, it is how our pets are. It is our biases and prejudices and labels and insecurities and traumas that have made our love for one another conditional. The whole world needed a big hug after the pandemic. We didn’t get one. We saw powerful propaganda being an effectual tool in sowing discord, and it worked by appealing to our individualism, incorrectly overriding collectivism. With the visible rise of individualism worldwide, we’re all shriveling in our lonely corners, unloved. Everyone is, not just those choosing the individualism. The world needs loving. Here’s a hug for everyone who reads this comment. I love you unconditionally.
Hellll no. Have you seen how cruel kids are to each other in school? If you show any amount of weakness or insecurity or difference from the norm, everyone will gang up on you and make your life hell. There are literally cases of children being driven to suicide or developing mental illness due to bullying. Kids derive pleasure from making their peers feel inferior to them, much more so than adults. Kids are also some of the most intolerant, us-vs-them people, spread rumours because they think it’s fun to put down someone else, pretend to warm up to people they perceive as useful to themselves and throw them away as soon as their usefulness is depleated (copying homework is probably the most common example), threaten their friends with ostracism to make them fall in line, say horrible things to people they don’t know on the internet, exploit the ignorance of their peers to scam them (ever had someone try to convince you that a really rare trading card is actually a terrible one, and they’re being so kind to trade you for something better to take that bad card off your hands?), straight up steal stuff from their peers, etc etc. Nice kids are not a given, they are a small minority and their parents have to carefully mould those attributes into them. Kids left to their own devices with insufficient parental discipline are horrible, which implies that their default nature is one of selfishness and cruelty, not compassion.