Progress and other matters of the heart

After watching a long period of people in all walks of life, futily and foolishly, try to scare the world and one another into some bizarre and dangerously distorted notion of progress in the world, this is what I have to share as a bottom line.

It is clearly a failed path. It's not just a failed path for us, as is so clearly is to anyone not trying to defend the failure.

What has been bizarre about this path, from the beginning, is that it was the most clearly failed path of the 20th century, and really the failed path of the long length of any honest history of humanity. It was the failed path of Adolph Hitler's Nazi regime and Joseph Stalin's and the Soviet Politburo's Communist government. It was those failures that vindicated the efforts of liberal democracies, like our own, that took freedom and democracy seriously in a world that, at the beginning of that century, oppressed the majority of its people under the auspices of the very same logic that has animated this bizarre and failed period of repression as some proxy for a more honest path to progress.

The world got substantially freer over the course of the 20th century. And it's inhabitants had lives that were substantially better by almost any measure one could take of quality or quantity of life offered by this freedom.

And like every period of regression and repression in human history, the world looked at all of that real progress and said, "But it has not kept us from making the mistakes that frighten us." And they started turning the clock backward.

Apparently oblivious to the fact that no philosophy, or religion, or form of governance, or any institution or rule or law or belief or system of belief whatsoever will ever keep people from making mistakes in the world, even the mistakes that fighten us.

Quite to the contrary, most of the most serious mistakes in the world that frighten us are a function of the very kind of cynicism and fear about the world that animates that belief. Nazism and Communism being but only two of the many plethora versions of that tragic and foolish and clearly ineffective means of making all of our mistakes and our fears about all of our mistakes go away.

Here's the bottom line for our personal lives.

If we do not take responsibility for our failures, including our failures trying to force one another to stop failing and stop making choices we don't want them to make, it does not make our failure go away.

Pretending that you haven't failed doesn't mean you haven't. It just means you're pretending.

And the most important failure we are experiencing, right now, outside of failing to keep ourselves safer or more financially secure or have more honest safety around our health or to address our environmental or other common problems effectively, is raising our children and believing that trying to force them to be better people really is some kind of compensation for our own failures to be better people and the examples they need.

In all our fear-mongering, we have desperately lost sight of being the kind of honest, decent people that our children need to look up to.

And trying to pretend that we are being those people when we very clearly have decided to take the route of dishonesty, manipulation, fear, and base impulse, is really the saddest fate of all.

Failing and honestly facing your failure so you can move forward and avoid making the same mistakes is by far a better path than screwing up again and again, pretending like you are not, and then refusing to face your failure.

And failure as a parent, on this mark, is the saddest failure I can imagine.

Which is why it becomes all the more incumbent for us to get honest. And to face that failure, rather than stubbornly refusing out of an ego that betrays us because it fails to allow us to move forward and learn from the failure and our mistakes. And, ironically, the reason why threats and force and power are so counterproductive is because they undermine this very kind of open acknowledgement of mistakes and failure that allow us to move forward.

So here's the bottom line.

We want to keep failing as parents and teachers and political leaders and citizens because we stubbornly do not want to face the much more stubborn fact that our efforts to force others to be who we want them to be is counterproductive and demonstrates a lack of respect for their own ideas of what kind of people they want to be, so be it.

Don't face it.

And live with it.

And at the end of the day. When you're making excuses for how it's the pop culture or the schools or capitalism or the government or Western decadence or whatever dumbass excuse people have come up with, this time, for why they're not responsible for their failures as parents to treat their children with kindness and respect or why they're not responsible for the failures as citizens, neighbors and political representatives to treat their fellow citizens, neighbors, and colleagues with respect for their conscience and understanding and choices.

Just know that pretending that we are not failiing does not make the failure go away.

If you doubt that, ask the Soviet Union. They did it for 70 years. And only stopped because people just wouldn't put up with it anymore when it became crystal clear what a failure the whole dumbass idea of Communism was.

If you don't want to face your failures - as a parent, in your career, as a leader, as a human being - noone can make you. That's just a fact. And there is no talking or leveraging or manipulating our way around that fact.

You want to keep failing. So be it. Keep it up.

But no amount of pretending makes the failure go away.

Facts of life are stubborn like that. Much more stubborn than anything denial of them could ever muster.

That's why it's been so important to me to keep this one straight, no matter how much people try to bullshit they're way through it.

Because that failure, the failing as a parent, is the one that would break my heart more than any other. And I would count myself as a failure not if my child made mistakes or failed, themselves. That is an inescapable fact of life. There is no learning that happens without it.

I would count myself as a failure as a parent if my children either held back their own dreams to please some distorted notion of my own ego desperately trying not to face my own failures or if they decided just not to talk to or deal with me anymore, at all, as a parent, because I just persistently refused to face the fact that they are their own people with their own chosen courses in life and that I am there to help facilitate their growth, not to determine it's direction.

And if we don't want to face our failure to force people to be the kinds of people we want them to be, either as parents or teachers, or through politics or any other forum, then we will live with those much more serious failures.

Failures of the heart. The most serious failures of all.

Sara Bareilles and Ingrid Michaelson offer a more honest way forward.



It is in opening our hearts that we will more honestly move forward.

Without it, we are lost. As long as we take the path that avoids it.

And that really is the most tragic fate of all.

Perhaps it is time to reconsider what our hearts have to offer.