Paediarchy

In this episode, we explore the one core cause behind so many problems in this world of ours…

Autocracy. Oligarchy. Kleptocracy. Kakistocracy. Dictatorship, too. The list goes on and on - way too many of these societal-disasters, in way too many forms…

And yet, if we really want to understand what’s actually going on there, we can simplify every one of them down to the same underlying cause:

Paediarchy. “Rule by, for and on behalf of the most childish”.

That’s it.

That ‘great dictator’? That grandiose oligarch? That fearsome mobster, that mafiosi don? D’you know what they really are?

A two-year-old with a temper-tantrum,. A pampered, pandered-to Peter Pan, refusing ever to grow up.

That’s it.

But in refusing ever to grow up, they inflict it on everyone else. And that’s where the problem lies…

(source not known)

Think of the behaviours of an actual two-year-old:

— they demand to be the centre of everyone else’s attention

— everything’s ‘Mine!’ (unless they’ve decided they don’t want it any more, in which case it instantly becomes Somebody Else’s Problem)

— if they can’t have what they want, they’ll everyone else’s life hell

— if they can’t have it, then no-one else can have it either

— they’re often extremely manipulative

— they cannot understand the idea of sharing

— they cannot understand that other people have their own feelings, concerns and needs

And, yeah, all too often that’s just the good part: there’s a very good reason why the stage of child-development is known as ‘the Terrible Twos’…

Yet it is a natural normal stage of child development. A normal child, yeah, they do grow out of it - eventually… - and slowly develop towards becoming a normal, sharing, caring, responsible adult.

But if that two-year-old doesn’t get the support they need to develop into that normal, sharing, caring, responsible adult, what happen thens? Where do they end up?

Short-answer: look around in your workplace…

Terrifyingly often, these are the ones who purport to be ‘leaders’, in business, in politics, in social events or elsewhere - though you’ll note that they won’t do much if any actual leading as such. Oh, they do like telling others what to do, and telling those others that they’re wrong: delusions of power and all, though no real understanding of what power is or what it’s for. Watch them for a while: you’ll see that in essence they’ll still have exactly the same characteristics as they had when they were two-year-olds, callous, uncaring, vain, self-centred, lying, evasive, irresponsible, dishonest, demanding, bullying, blaming, controlling, clueless, incompetent, preening, pointlessly-possessive and all the rest. Often the only real difference from back then is that over the decades they’ll have homed their skills in manipulating others, perhaps added a bit of charisma to make the manipulating of others that much easier. But basically, thats it: a two-year-old in an adult’s body. Oh boy.

Yet because we never faced down that bullying behaviour, they never needed to grow up. They’re rewarded for not growing up. Which is why, in a paediarchy, they rule the world. Literally so, in too many cases. Oh boy…

In a full-on paediarchy, we reward the childishness, and denigrate or even punish people who are actually responsible about what needs to be done in the real-world. You’ll notice that, back in the worst of the pandemic, most of those who were classed as ‘essential workers’ were the ones who were paid the least; by contrast, those who did the least - all those super-entrepreneurs sitting back sipping champagne in their super-yachts, telling everyone doing any actual else that they were doing it wrong - who the ones who were paid the most, for doing nothing useful at all. That’s a paediarchy: all too literally ‘rule, by, for and on behalf of’ those who are, also all too literally, the most childish people in the world.

And the real tragedy of a full-blown paediarchy is that, if we reward childishness and punish people for being responsible, that’s a huge perverse-incentive for everyone to revert back to childishness. And when no-one accepts responsibility about anything, and everyone sits back blaming everyone else that nothing works properly any more? - well, that’s how wars start, isn’t it…?

Ouch…

Yet what can we do about it? Is there any way out from this entrapment in a fully global paediarchy that, if unchecked, will inevitably literally kill us all?

Actually, there is. It ain’t easy, but somehow it must be done.

The first task is to stop pandering to paediarchs. They’re not the adults they pretend to be, they’re literally nothing more than oversized two-year-olds - so we need to regard them as exactly that. They’re contributing nothing whatsoever to the world, beyond yet more misery for everyone in the world, including themselves - so we need to stop rewarding them for doing that. And we need to recognise and stop the perverse-incentives that are driving our entire world back into the same disastrous childishness.

Next task, in parallel: learn to recognise, and challenge ourselves, whenever we start falling back into the same patterns of paediarchy. That’s often the hardest challenge of all…

And the other main task here: identify, demolish and then rebuild any and all social customs and structures that can underpin a fallback into paediarchy. (The concept of ‘rights’ is one the more egregious examples, but that’s another story for another time…).

Overall, though, the real challenge is that the habits of paediarchy are a deadly disease that’s already infected almost everywhere across the world, in some cases embedded deeply within that culture for centuries or more. So how the heck are we going to get perhaps most of an entire world to grow up, before that rampant, rabid paediarchy kills us all? And we really don’t have much time left now - so however we do this, we need to make it happen now, and make it happen fast.