The Wall of Infancy
I’ve written quite a bit on ethics as technology--as an
ideological tool, focused on enlightening self and culture so that we can, as a
civilization, achieve better consequences [1].
It is similar to how we conceive medicine today, no longer faith-based and
instead subject to verifiable, reasonable standards. The purpose of this essay is to encapsulate
and abbreviate previous writings on this topic, while introducing a new aspect;
namely, that society needs to break through a specific cultural wall to achieve
virtue, mental health, and maturity.
Below, I explain why I call this the Wall of Infancy, and why breaking
through it is tantamount to accepting ethics as technology. In so doing, we reject traditional standards
of ignorance-based governance.
We have the brain- and cultural-plasticity to implement better
forms of ethics. If we don’t,
civilization will likely perish. As Omar
Bradley said in his 1948 Armistice Day speech, we are “ethical infants” in
control of armageddon-capable weapons. The
dire situation invokes a quintessential imperative: we must become emotionally competent, break
through the Wall of Infancy and grow our knowledge of how best to govern.
We have been making progress, especially in
the last few hundred years, but it must continue with serious expediency. Our cultural development, the phylogeny of human civilization, is in a race
between clear-headed decency, on one hand, and a short-sighted, greed-fueled
doom.
Human civilization, to this very day, is steeped in ancient,
sticky dogma. Mind-programming, if you
will, from tyrants past. To break
through, we must accept a paradigm shift.
The ways of ancient city states--their machismo, warlordism, and puerile might-makes-right--must
be rejected once and for all. If culture
is seen as an organizing platform for the human brain, then we need to reject cerebral blinkers and build a palladium of awareness.
Beating others down to establish a hierarchy of fanatic dominance, while proclaiming oneself a godking, is primitive tech. Higher ethics starts with common
sense: equality and its logical
corollaries, fairness and human rights.
While medicine attends to the health of the human body,
ethics attends, as well, to the general social corpus. Imagine the benefits of medicine magnified to
encompass the prioritization of virtue over vice, principle over profit, good
over evil. Imagine a system of ideas, of
technologically improvable mental tools--married to the praxis of science and engineering--committed to the health of
the whole. Human and environmental flourishing together. Synergy. Symbiosis. Win-win.
We have the computing power to initiate simulations
on how to create better culture, similar to how we simulate weather. The
invention of quantum computing, a few cobblestones away, will make the simulations
even more realistic. If an economic
system is like a transistor board, a pattern of efficient and effective flows,
AI can help optimize a monetary system where profit is distributed to advance
the Good, not batten the wallets of the already bloated uber-wealthy.
We don't need AI to design and implement healthier,
wiser ways of life and leadership. It is what we have already attempted, albeit crudely, for thousands of years. The main antagonist to breaking through the
Wall of Infancy is ignorance-based government, which is to say, government that doesn’t want truth or decency; that runs on fanaticism and fear.
Far in the future, civilization could look back and thank
us, we citizens of this early phylogenic stage of social growth. They will thank us, from their perspective in
hindsight, because somehow--incredibly, amazingly--we managed to break out of traditional
mind-control traps. We escaped
Ignorance, liberated ourselves, opened our minds to truth, and foresaw a
potential for Good governance across millions of years.
Circa the early 21st century, this barbaric
era, we tend to think of five thousand years as a long time. It is approximately how long our civilization has
existed. And yet, if we continue to
advance ethics tech and thereby eliminate war, millions of years of
heavenly existence awaits trillions of happier citizens spread across the galaxy, or even beyond.
The question we face is of the utmost
importance: whether we will adapt more advanced forms of government; or whether we will destroy, maim and torture
ourselves due to our inability to rise above the primitive stupidity of war. Make no mistake, future warfare will be conducted
with hellish weapons beyond the pale of what we understand now.
Eliminating war is the only way for our species to
survive, and maybe for nature itself to survive. Note well, it is possible to dismantle cellular replication at the molecular level, whether it is human cells, or those algae or protozoans at the base of the building blocks of all life.
We need a ‘Project of Light’
Given the catastrophic threats, we are desperate for a stable platform of virtue and reasonable assessment. We require new and better forms of decision-making to manage our super powers. We have a
choice: continue to be immature,
reckless, blind progenitors who lack a reliable cultural conscience; or assert
our ability to therapeutically build the competency of our minds.
We need not only summon our better angels, but allow them
to effectuate a transition. The world we
live in now celebrates stock market bumps even as 50% of Americans can’t afford
basic necessities. The global scenario, outside
the coin-grubbing empire, is even more dismal.
Higher ethics tech, by definition, means more
psychological skill in the population, which correlates
with more health and virtue, less vice and corruption. The therapeutic tools already exist. What we need is a delivery device for moral character. Instead, we get corporate marketers who flood the
airwaves with ads that promote tissue-thin vanity ("Please don't squeeze the Charmin"), saccharine consumption and petty insecurity.
Education which stops with efficiency may prove the greatest
menace to society. The most dangerous
criminal may be the person gifted with reason but with no morals. We must remember that intelligence is not
enough. Intelligence plus
character--that is the goal of true education.
--Martin Luther King, Jr.
Human nature does not prevent us
Over and over, people say that ‘human nature,’ whatever
that is, prevents us from progressing toward a Good world. In response, consider this: all the things that we have been taught cannot change already have. For most of human
existence, a span of two million years or so, war did not exist. Positive change comes in movements and
vacillations. We have leapt forward
mightily, say, in the last two hundred years, increasing our awareness. "The moral arc of the universe is long" and we are stumbling along the curvature.
It is abhorrent that a mere 150 years ago, America debated
whether Native peoples were even human. In
Standing Bear vs Crook (1879), a Federal District judge make the
monumental pronouncement … (drum roll) … that Native peoples are, indeed, human beings.
Standing Bear addressed the court as follows:
That hand is not the color of yours, but if I pierce it,
I shall feel pain. If you pierce your hands, you also feel pain. The blood that
will flow from mine will be of the same color as yours. I am a man. The same
God made us both. [f3]
It is sad how barbaric we were then. And are still. And yet it is joyous that we have advanced the methods of ethics to a place where we no longer debate whether people of certain
groups are human or not.
Universal Suffrage (1920 in the USA) broke from millennia of despicable ignorance. In the mid-20th century, Virginia
Woolf--speaking out in the modern age, when a woman’s voice could finally do so, publicly and
durably--wrote about women of the past who she referred to as “Shakespeare’s
sister.” Countless generations of women
and girls were never allowed to write, or even to learn to write. They were, as well, denied so much more, myriad and variegated opportunities to express,
achieve and actualize.
We’ve made incredible progress in the last few
hundred years. And yet the horrors of the past, the unspeakable cruelty of oppression and slavery--and the
horrors that exist to this day, in our own vicious, soul-crushing time--are necessary cynosures, if we
are find the candid wisdom to light a path for a Good future.
I don’t think [the] practice of acknowledging beauty and
denouncing horror is much more difficult than the practice of loving. In fact,
I think it is very much a part of the practice of loving. -- Anna Badhken
What is an Angel like?
We can start by admitting that Good and Evil exist, if
only as self-fulfilling prophecies, projected from our minds onto the ways we
live and shape the world. As power tech increases, the world establishes, more and more, a reflection of our psychological state, be it broken, shallow and fearful, or hale and apt to sublimate dark emotions with catharsis.
Our current culture crafts many an image of mythic demons and monsters. The entertainment industry feasts on them, ballyhooing
an ongoing parade of adrenal malignities, complete with realistic special
effects. The result is an expanding lore
of horror: phantasms and chimeras woven into tormented, tortured fates. Few of us go to libraries anymore, but most of us are handed, via the ghost-ocean of a screen, a mega-compendium of what it could be like to suffer the most fearsome,
gruesome, soul-crushing incarnations of evil.
In contrast to our familiarity with monsters, we know
relatively little about the behaviors and potentials of angelic creatures. How would such beings behave?
Our ability to create functioning ‘thinking’ robots is nigh. The main hurdle to creating artificial intelligence that advances the Good may be our cultural preference for monsters.
Indeed, a case can be made that we will create the scariest, most deadly robots as soon as possible.
The reason is that their invention meshes with the strategy of MAD, that is, mutually assured destruction. The perverse argument goes as follows: the higher the threat of a nightmarish
response, the less likely it is that anyone would dare to attack us; therefore, we should create as nightmarish a threat as possible.
This malevolent justification provides the rationale for the world you
and I live in today: a planet pimpled with tens of thousands of ICBM silos, ready to launch and detonate into a nuclear winter, blotting out the Sun for at least a decade.
We can choose to focus on angels instead of demons
What would it take for us to focus on angelic
expressions--true guides toward Goodness--instead of Terminator robots, which take
us one step closer to creating an actual hell on Earth, a self-fulfilling
prophecy of our own worst fears? Dante's Inferno is fiction--for now.
An angelic being requires a sophisticated ethical
decision-making process, one that is reasonable, logical, and empirically
testable to derive Good results. It
would rely on a body of knowledge both scientific and philosophic, literary and
psychological. The whole of human lore, our reflections on experience and understanding, would be needed to
extract a plausible path.
Imagine all the disciplines of academia, all the realms
of cultural expression, science yes, but also the arts, from the terpsichorean
to the poetic, every manifestation of who and what we are, our hopes and dreams, all
of it summoned to approach high-tech answers to ultimate
questions like, “What is happiness?” “What is the Good?” “What is the nature of health and
flourishing?”
Faith-based answers to the deepest, most meaningful
questions of life have helped move us
forward in some ways. Perhaps since the day our species first walked the earth, they provided refuge from the ugly, terrible aspects of existence. Faith gives comfort and love in a brutal world. But such answers have
also--when unregulated by reason and fairness--mired us in superstitious zeal, leading to balkanized schisms. These, in turn, catalyze crusades, inquisitions, witch hunts, wars, and other titanic injustices spanning millennia.
As the Dali Lama writes in Beyond Religion, ethics
can be a reasonable and universal tool, beyond the purview of any one religion. This is not an abandonment of spirituality,
emotion, passion or even religion itself. All of these are intimate, honorable aspects of a Good world. What is
required is a leap, not of faith, but beyond the damaging effects of preventable ignorance.
Critical thinking over dogma. Science
over zealotry. The rejection of any form
of credo quia absurdum . A commitment to psychological skills and an associated suite of equities.
Conclusion
With so much at stake, for both civilization and the planet itself, and perhaps the fate of other planets as well, if we reach them, we ought to put every urgent effort into unlocking the
potential of our minds to escape crippling social 'brainware,' the sort that
inclines toward cruel, dishonest intrapsychic walls, which fuel the engines of Evil empires [2].
In the nuclear age, the real enemy is war itself--Denzel Washington, Crimson Tide
Ignorance, as a kind of capital, has been central to the operation of government for thousands of years. People are spoon fed ignorance from birth, behaviorized to help spread it, and rewarded or ostracized accordingly. We live under the pall of ancient, bloody rites of vicious, irrational forces, derived from and delivered by the sword. The brutality and stupidity of might-makes-right has ramified to keep us down. It works because we are willfully kept ignorant while we serve to protect and advance that very ignorance.
We reach for the stars, split atoms, alter the very genetic codes of life; and yet we refuse to consider the simple benefits of a therapist anything but a stigma. We advance STEM research but can't even discuss our feelings with each other, or even ourselves. We struggle to even know how to deal with low self-esteem, while predators, both institutional and vulgar, feed off it.
In terms of the longitude of a hypothetical galactic civilization, you and I exist in a
very early stage, in a sub-niche on a scale that spans millions
of years. We live in what could be
called (as I have written before) the Era of Dumbing. We are dumbed down. We are ethical infants. And we are quite
likely to destroy ourselves with godlike powers we don't understand, if we continue to let immature, macho males, who have diagnosable
mental disorders, sit on their de facto thrones, point their cannons,
incline their missiles, and play chicken with each other so that they can snatch the
latest flag from some vaunted hill, even if that hill is only a tiny, uninhabited
island.
This is the time of stupidity in which you and I live. I wager that anyone reading this can imagine a territorial battle for a tiny, uninhabited island erupting into a full-scale
global war. That is how we go extinct. Poof, just like that.
What can we do? A good first step is to merely begin to talk about the Wall of Infancy. Consider the idea that we have potential to be much more mentally aware of our emotions and correspondingly
ethical. It is a known fact that we are now dysfunctional, which demonstrates, ipso facto, that there is a functional.
Emotional skills are measurable. And teachable.
If this seems impractical, if not magical and absurd to you, consider the
following real-life, grounded wisdom:
Authoritarian leaders, like narcissistic family members,
rely on well-worn tactics to manufacture a psychological state of volatile
uncertainty — where outcomes aren’t just unknown, but constantly shifting and
unpredictable. This overwhelms the brain’s ability to anticipate and prepare,
keeping people mentally off-balance and easier to control. The good news:
Awareness works like a vaccine, gradually building psychological immunity
against further harm.
“I’m A Psychologist Who Specializes In Narcissists.
Here’s What We Need To Do To Stop Trump,” -- Jocelyn Sze,
https://www.yahoo.com/news/m-psychologist-specializes-narcissists-stop-115203532.html
Maybe the most important sentence in the quote above is “awareness works
like a vaccine.”
Have we even attempted to give this vaccine to ourselves
as a society? As a population? Has it ever informed a motto for any of our institutions? We inoculate ourselves against measles. Why not vaccinate ourselves against a narcissistic takeover that could destroy everything we've worked for?
Even talking about a Wall of Infancy is extraordinarily
hard for us. It requires a capacity for deep honesty,
which is the first thing that our cultural programming takes away. In a world of gaslighting, power to decide what (or who) gets seen, let alone discussed, is given to imperious leaders disposed to dysfunction.
"There's no Ignorance. What are you talking about? We live in the best country ever!"
No
one born in civilization, at any time, has lived in a Good world. Or seen a Good culture. Not me.
Not you. No one. Our acculturation patterns fight against vision.
"There's no sexism, racism, or anti-LGBTQ that I can see! Stop being so woke!"
What we do know, and what most of us will acknowledge, is that culture can change. So-called human nature has not prevented us
from major paradigm shifts. We know, if we consider for a moment, that
our own culture will be very different in ten years than it is now.
Despite the depressing, molasses-gooey pace of the struggle--so it seems from the perspective in which you and I are embodied, that of a single
human life--truth has managed to advance. From the vantage of an historical framework, the changes have accelerated since the late 18th century, when Mary Wollstonecraft wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Women.
The legalization of gay marriage in 2015 was
met with surprise and joy, which towered against the inevitable fury of the predictable backlash of Ignorance.
Let’s at least start talking about the Wall of
Infancy [3]. It is not a nuclear weapon, or an AI-generated pathogen; but it is the reason we cannot properly manage such dangers. The greatest threat to our existence, then, is not a specific super power--it is our immaturity in regard to super power.
Trillions of far-future
citizens could be grateful to us, if only we dare to raise our heads. Moreover, if we do not, they will never get a chance to exist.
===============
Footnotes
[1] I've written a whole bunch of essays on this blog that go into some of the concepts here more deeply, such as:
Lightcraft: ethics as technology
On Hate
Sustenance and Darkness
The Purgatory Principle
It's the Dicks who are infected and deranged
The Apotheosis Problem
Godlike Technology Requires Democracy
[2] https://owlwholaughs.blogspot.com/2026/08/essay-its-dicks-who-are-infected-and.html
See the four stages of 'complicitous gravitation.'
[3] What I've completely avoided discussing in this essay (until this bitter end) is patriarchy and its effect on men, saddling them with normative male alexithymia (an inability to recognize or talk about one's emotions). In previous writing, I have situated our survival as a species in the question, "Can men be taught to truly accept women as equals?" If the answer is yes, we can survive and eliminate war. If not, then no. However, talking about patriarchy and men's inability to self-verbalize shuts down entire sectors of audience. And, of course, it's not just about men. The big question is whether emotional competence can be established as the cultural norm for everyone.
11/8 ... edited through it ... I feel this dream-like sense of dread, of missing something crucial... more edits later in the day, very tired, ought to be grading papers...more editing at night.. can't do anymore ..
11/7 ... tried to start editing... very tired...
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