You Just Need to Keep Quiet
How do you survive in a culture of duplicity? You can try to cultivate a child’s eyes or the Zen beginner’s mind, but the virtue of silence is the only reliable option
Anyone who has been around children is aware of one alarming quality: their tendency to speak their mind.
If the three-year-old sees a man with one leg, she exclaims (normally within earshot of the man), “Where’s his other leg?” If a cousin takes her doll, she’ll tell her aunt, “Mollie is mean.” If she doesn’t like the hamburger at a party, she’ll spit it out and say “yuck!”
As the child grows older, the act of being a child and speaking with brutal honesty is slowly wrung out of her by parents, older siblings, and friends who teach her that she can’t say certain things or, if she’s going to say them, how to say them in a way that won’t offend.
Enter objectifying
It’s part of what psychologists call the “individuation” process.
The small child is unself-conscious: self and external things are fused. The child doesn’t even perceive himself as a thing distinct from everything else. As a result, everything that happens to the child prompts an immediate reaction. The external…
