We have the stupidest ideas among us—promoted in tandem, yet inconsistent in principle:
I. That those who choose a life of intellectual immaturity—who shun learning, morals, self-correction, and duty—make a respectable choice, and that it is the duty of the world to cater to such people, sheltering them from consequence—
II. That those who expect others to grow up are themselves negligent in learning, morals, and self-correction, and are shunning their duty to refashion the world, and ought to be punished for it.
While to God, nature, and an orderly society, the willfully-immature are a menace, some of those vying for dominance over this world have taken to counting the mature as the menace, for the mature are the ones more apt to oppose the tyrant and the scoundrel. And so these two notions are promoted robustly by some of the rich, and they spread much more than they would ever spread if left only to the casual support of the common man.
These ideas are repulsive even to nature and certainly to God, who established nature, but they have always appealed to rebels. And they have always been useful to those who vie for power in the world of politics. They use them to undermine the order of a society by encouraging the under-matured masses to see themselves as the superiors and the rightful darlings of the world. It is a lie, of course, for the tyrants who coddle them and then stir them up as needed do not love them, but simply find them to be “useful idiots”. And this they get merely for helping underdeveloped people feel good about their underdevelopment.
