Son, You Ain't Been Raised Right

(First published in Bali Advertiser, October 12, 2005

There are other choices, Man Lambert. Our children have no expectation of being burned to cinder, blown to fragments. They are free of that fear. Which is the better love, Man Lambert? – the Argonian Vonk Soobuknoora to the human anthropologist and sociologist Lambert in John D. MacDonald’s science fiction short story, Common Denominator

Every time people blow themselves and others up for an idea or belief, I think of John D. MacDonald’s tale about a man worried that humans will destroy themselves before achieving their potential. In the story, Lambert, chief of a future Bureau of Racial Maturity, searches alien civilizations encountered by space explorers to find one that has solved the problems of war, crime, and insanity, hoping to discover the key to human survival.

The Argonauts, inhabitants of three planets orbiting Argus 10, after a violent early history, have achieved a placidity and contentment that may hold the answer. Eight thousand earth years ago, war, crime, and the insanity index dropped almost to nothing in their three-planet system. The drop, though, is somehow connected to one thousand following years in which the death rate of 18-to-24-year-olds is higher than normal long after the end of war and violent crime.

What Lambert finds on a visit to the Argus system is that Argonians -- in horror of the self-destructive tendencies of their species -- made suicide a painless, easy alternative to any Argonaut older than 18. They reasoned that this would weed out the unstable and parents would take greater care raising their children, knowing that from age 18 onwards anyone can easily kill themselves in a fit of pique or depression over some insignificant setback of post-adolescence.

“At eighteen the operation is performed. It is very quick and very simple. We saw destruction ahead. We had to force it through. In the beginning the deaths were frightening, there were so many of them. The stable ones survived, bred, reproduced. A lesser but still great percentage of the next generation went – and so on, until now it is almost static,” Vonk tells Lambert.

Lambert recoils from the thought of parents planting in their children the “seed of death,” but he then realizes that if his own children were to be given the Argonian surgical implants, “I would do a better job as a parent. I would try to give them enough emotional stability so that they would never have that urge to kill themselves.”

It’s only a story. Still, children and young men and women do have the power to damage themselves and others, even without surgically implanted ‘kill switches.’ And it’s probably true that those who end up doing damage have been failed on some level by parents, teachers, and religious leaders. Men, for instance, who strap bombs around their waist, walk into restaurants, and blow up themselves, clearly weren’t ‘raised right.’

The same could be said of American teen boys who get it in their heads that it would be ‘cool’ to go out in a blaze of glory, guns, bombs, and high school carnage, or workers who walk into their workplace upset at being passed over for promotion and kill everything that moves. They may not have the same ‘religious’ motivation as Bali’s suicide bombers, but there is no difference in the senselessness of the acts. And it is just as likely that someone failed somewhere in teaching them whatever it is that keeps most of us from mass murder.

I’m not wasting tears over ‘poor, misunderstood boys and girls’ who carry out suicide bombings. I’d be just as happy as anybody if they all blew themselves up in the middle of an empty field. But we who have the fortune not to be blown up with them have to figure out what it is that makes some people susceptible to the enticements of the death lovers. We can only truly defeat those seducers when we produce generation after generation that ignores fools when they see and hear them -- because then they will just laugh at anyone who says exploding themselves in the middle of a crowd is a noble, laudable act.

A good place to begin would be to start getting across to people the idea that few beliefs are worth dying and killing for. Dying and killing for a belief requires certainty, and human history documents the defeat of one certain ‘truth’ right after another. Gods regularly change names and abodes, the earth changes shape and place in the sky, taboos and socials norms are in constant flux. People fight and die for one idea in one century, and fight and die for its opposite in the next.

People don’t really need ‘kill switches.’ We all have the “seed of death” in us already. How we handle the power that implies is largely a result of what we have been taught in our formative years. We as individuals and communities at least need to make sure that our children -- the only important assets produced by the human race -- aren’t susceptible to the seducements of the many brands of gurus and clerics high on death.

Copyright © 2005 Lee Roy LeRoi