{"id":67540,"date":"2024-04-24T15:15:06","date_gmt":"2024-04-24T20:15:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=67540"},"modified":"2024-04-24T15:15:06","modified_gmt":"2024-04-24T20:15:06","slug":"childhood-conditioned-to-pretend-to-know","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=67540","title":{"rendered":"Childhood: Conditioned to Pretend to Know"},"content":{"rendered":"

Childhood: Conditioned to Pretend to Know<\/a><\/h3>\n
\n

\"barsotti-nobody-knows-anything\"
\n\u00a0New Yorker cartoon by the late\u00a0Charles Barsotti<\/a><\/em>
\nWhen I was a young child, I would look at my parents and other adults interacting with each other, with a mixture of bewilderment and amazement. \u201cSurely\u201d, I thought to myself, \u201cthey don\u2019t really believe what they\u2019re saying. It must be like an act, like the adult form of playing \u2014 they\u2019re just\u00a0pretending<\/em>\u00a0to know what they\u2019re talking about, \u2018playing\u2019 at being adults.\u201d<\/p>\n

I was always a \u2018slow learner\u2019. I didn\u2019t mimic adults\u2019 behaviour like a lot of kids. I had been conditioned to try to understand what was going on, and why it was happening, before emulating anyone. And I was conditioned to always speak the truth, no matter what, which meant waiting until I thought I had some idea of what the truth in a particular situation really was. In many situations I never did have any idea what the truth was, so my conditioning drove me to stay open and assert no opinion \u2014 which drove other children and adults crazy.<\/p>\n

So lots of kids learned \u2018social graces\u2019 \u2014 like how to behave in ritual situations (church, parties, school), and how to converse (what was permissible and advisable to say, and not permissible or advisable to say, to certain classes of adults, to get their approval, regardless of what one really believed). Not me.<\/p>\n

I never learned how to sweet-talk, how to coerce, how to ridicule, how to deceive, how to persuade. Why would one ever want to learn and practice such\u00a0dishonest<\/em>\u00a0skills? So I didn\u2019t talk much, and largely withdrew from social contact both with other kids and with adults. I couldn\u2019t understand their behaviour, and didn\u2019t much want to learn it, even if would make my life easier.<\/p>\n

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Childhood: Conditioned to Pretend to Know \u00a0New Yorker cartoon by the late\u00a0Charles Barsotti When I was a young child, I would look at my parents and other adults interacting with each other, with a mixture of bewilderment and amazement. \u201cSurely\u201d, I thought to myself, \u201cthey don\u2019t really believe what they\u2019re saying. It must be like […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[11065,32260,32259,34341],"class_list":["post-67540","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-liberty","tag-conditioning","tag-dave-pollard","tag-how-to-save-the-world","tag-knowledge-acquisition"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67540","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=67540"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67540\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":67541,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67540\/revisions\/67541"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=67540"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=67540"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=67540"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}