Youth, Commitment and Life-Owning Lies

The problem with people making life decisions when they are very young is that they do not come from the position of adequate knowledge. They know only what they have been taught; and if what they have learned were incomplete or corrupt, then it will take them a long time to learn anything else or to come up with something that is informed by real-world experience or that is uniquely their own.  And since most people around them are the same people who have imparted to them what they know, what we see is young people being effectively manipulated to do what these influences want them to do, whether or not it is right.

The problem is complicated by the fact that many commitments made are commitments that are expected to be long-term or to be life-long. A marriage is expected to be life-long; parenting is expected to be life-long; and career and religious and ideological choices made are expected to be either lifelong or long-term. The commitments made in this manner therefore steal people’s lives. Incompletely informed, or wrongfully informed, young people, are manipulated into lives that are wrong for them. And leaving such settings can be exceptionally difficult and, in many cases, impossible.

Thus a young woman with a quick mind may be manipulated into marriage with a right-wing brute and to have it expected of her that she submit to him. Such a man would be made a tool of oppression against the young woman and to behave in a controlling, oppressive, violent way with the eye toward bludgeoning the woman out of her intelligence and curiosity and destroying whatever influence she may impart to the children. What is created for the young woman is effective slavery – slavery that becomes life-long through the expectation that marriage be life-long, and still more so through manipulation of the loving bond that she would have with her children. The children, in turn, would be raised in the same false and oppressive way that is practiced by the conservatives around them; and if they start questioning or wanting to leave, there will be vast action to keep them from so doing – through guilt trips, through bludgeoning, through false reasoning, through demonization, through physical violence, through abuse of the legal and psychiatric systems, and through attacks on their minds to name a few.

This is how lives are stolen and owned through generations. This is how liberty is extinguished and destroyed. This is how unelected, unofficial, unchecked and unbalanced entities such as churches, families and communities wield real power over the supposedly free people. Finally, this is what is meant by “social fabric” by people who have these conservative beliefs.

A woman who leaves her husband is usually seen as evil or crazy; but in this circumstance her actions are typically correct. Someone seeks to extricate herself from a life-owning lie, which is the only way that one can find one’s way to a free and truthful existence. The real solution for these kinds of problems is for these kinds of life-owning lies to not have been created in the first place; but if they are, then people in the free country have every right to get out of them.