On Becoming an Adult

Aldous Huxley was accurate in his claim that humans are conditioned from birth. His emphasis was the effect of media - television, radio, messages of mass comsumption as the ideal role of societal members - "keep the Big Wheel turning", so to speak. I realized today that we are also extremely conditioned by our parents. I know it seems a given, but bear with me. This is a train of thought that does reach a logical conclusion. Well, a conclusion anyway. I'll let you judge the logic as you see fit.

So. Either we act like our parents or we act the opposite of them. So great is their influence on our lives as social role models that virtually all of our beliefs are either parallel or pependicular to their own. This is most fully realized whn one reaches adulthood. Suddenly it is not enough to simply exist. One is expected to contribute and participate. All of a sudden one's opinoin is demanded, debated and processed by adults who before would have expected you (not long ago either) to simply be playing, gazing into space or walking away during their adult conversations.

In University, in particular, you find yourself spewing out opinions, ideals and prejudgments without even knowing they are your own. Then these get chewed up and flung back in your face. You are forced to defend them or, conversely, alter, reconsider or simply reinvestigate why you said what you did, how you came to think that or feel that way, and whether or not it is really what you, as an autonomous individual, truly believe. This has to be one of life's most difficult, onerous and exhausting tasks. Seperating, at the age of 21, who you uniquely are andwhat you uniquely believe from the reams of infiltrating messages that have been subtly moulding your viewpoint for your entire life.

In Aldous Huxley's A Brave New World, lab-created babies are hypnotized in sleep into accepting social norms before they can speak. Essentially, that's what happens to us. We go through such a large portion of life being taught what to think - about history, about war, about relationships - wihtout really having an objective view (if sucha thing exists), that when we are finally expected to have a definite opinion, it's someone else's; hundreds of other peoples' ideas that we spew out. Especially our parents'. The most interesting thing is finding, for the first time, that you are actually a very different person, with very different opinions, than your parent.