maladjusted

So how do we teach the next generations to behave?

What about...

Set yourselves high standards: do not intentionally deceive, harm, undermine or otherwise disadvantage others. Explore the likely consequences of your actions before embarking on them, weigh up the likely good and harm that may be caused by anything you do and never undertake actions which violate, directly or indirectly, the basic human rights of others.

Look around you constantly for behaviour which violates these principles - in particular the last. Be ready to withdraw your support from such behaviour, to express publicly your disapproval and to lend your positive support to any actions meant to put an end to violations.

Try to take small steps towards a world where instances of deception, harm, or undermining and disadvantaging others are made less likely and more difficult to bring about.

... as a bare minimum. But it would be kind to the next generation – and more honest as well – if we added a few notes of caution to this list.

So here we go ...

Expect to find a world where there are far too many instances of deception, harm, intentional undermining and disadvantaging of others for you to be able to be aware of them all, let alone to take a stand on all. Do your best to allocate your time and energies between these issues, while still retaining enough optimism and sanity to have the drive to carry on.

Be aware that you will meet small and large instances of corruption and deception around every corner, and that mostly the rest of the world will not stop in its tracks to be shocked, let alone to address them. Be aware that unless you too are prepared not to stop in your tracks, you are likely to be left behind by the steaming engine of world progress.

Proclaim the noble principles above with passion and with eloquence, by all means: you will be generally revered if you do so. But do not expect to take them seriously or follow them to the letter. In fact, it is probably advisable, for your own security and sanity, to follow the crowd, rather than the principles.

If in doubt: compromise. You are certain to have to do so if you want to get anywhere in the world, at least in a worldly sense. Be ready to turn a blind eye to injustice, to tolerate deception, to venerate the wealthy and the powerful, and to court those in positions of power or influence. They are likely to return the favour - and you may need those favours.

Above all: never doubt or undermine the unwritten rules that keep the system going and the engine of world progress steaming forward. Hold the written rules up to inspection, one by one; doubt them a little and even undermine them, mostly with your tongue in cheek. But do not try to halt the engine of progress; do not seek to undermine the institutions that the engine put in place; do not wonder if the place might be a better one without the institutions; and do not even entertain the thought that the unwritten rules were unwritten according to the wrong unwritten principles.

Still troubled by standards and applying them. In particular, by how we can avoid applying our own standards beyond their realistic limits, given the ruthless and pragmatic world we live in; and by how we should react or respond to behaviour that technically violates our standards, and that we would judge harshly if we did it ourselves. Triggered, this time, by revisiting George Orwell's Keep the Aspidistra Flying, but worried by it in general because -

a) I am suspicious of the position of educators - and by the HRE-ers in particular - who mostly refuse to make moral judgements, except when these are securely backed up by international law (and then they are no longer really moral judgements, but legal ones). In other words: what clearly violates international law can be safely condemned within the realm of HRE, otherwise 'we do not judge'. That position seems to me to be both inconsistent (because we make moral judgements about our own behaviour without any difficulty), and unhelpful (in terms of making progress).

b) I am worried by the fashionable position among 'progressive educators' which is that judging (on a personal level) is to be avoided - even disapproved of - and yet I do not want to slip into the non-progressives' realm of constant disapproval, of marking everyone as hoodies, foreigners and vandals, of condemning, failing to understand, feeling superior.

c) I am worried by how one stops making judgements about what is right or wrong. In other words - where one continues to measure behaviour against the standards, where one refuses to do so, and then where (or how on earth) one alters the standards to make them not what one sees as the 'right' ones, but the ones that fit the ruthless and pragmatic world, the ones that work in practice (the unwritten rules that I have talked about before).

For this last reason alone - that of not knowing where to stop - I am half-inclined to plump for the HRE-ers non-judging stance. But then I go off and become a business magnate (or at least one in the form of a roaming 'Consultant'); or else I buy myself an aspidistra.

Troublesome cases, which others do not seem to mind about (and which I have mostly written about before, ad nauseam):

- Western consultants and ngo-businesses eating up the money meant for people genuinely in need.

- Nice, respectable, kind, generous people leading their lives, and living in luxury (or relative luxury) while others die from poverty-related causes.

- Nice, respectable, kind, generous people making a killing out of others' ill-paid labour.

- Nice people (and all the rest of it) working for and benefiting from corrupt institutions, institutions which according to most 'standards' should be cleaned out if not shut down completely.

(You can't do that! Doesn't really matter. Someone else would work for them instead.)

And perhaps above all - nice people not minding about most of these things. Or thinking they are just inevitable, part of the daily fabric, cannot realistically be changed. The trouble is, I sometimes fear they may be right.

Extract from Martin Luther King's speech to West Michigan University in 1963:
'Modern psychology has a word that is probably used more than any other word in modern psychology. It is the word "maladjusted." This word is the ringing cry to modern child psychology. Certainly, we all want to avoid the maladjusted life. In order to have real adjustment within our personalities, we all want the well-adjusted life in order to avoid neurosis, schizophrenic personalities.
But I say to you, my friends, as I move to my conclusion, there are certain things in our nation and in the world which I am proud to be maladjusted and which I hope all men of good-will will be maladjusted until the good societies realize. I say very honestly that I never intend to become adjusted to segregation and discrimination. I never intend to become adjusted to religious bigotry. I never intend to adjust myself to economic conditions that will take necessities from the many to give luxuries to the few. I never intend to adjust myself to the madness of militarism, to self-defeating effects of physical violence...
In other words, I'm about convinced now that there is need for a new organization in our world. The International Association for the Advancement of Creative Maladjustment--men and women who will be as maladjusted as the prophet Amos. Who in the midst of the injustices of his day could cry out in words that echo across the centuries, "Let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream."...
Whole text available here