It's All Like That Ad

Parenting commentator Lenore Skenazy considers the bizarre premise of an ad from about a decade ago:

[I]in the time it takes dad to choose between the egg roll and wonton soup, his son has been abducted from a public place without anyone noticing -- including the staff at the Chinese food counter, who are presumably staring out at the dad and waiting for him to make up his mind...

We almost never need one of these. (Image by Marcel Eberle, via Unsplash, license.)

This is hardly Skenazy's focus, but it could be.

So much of the rash of control-freakish parenting advice out there is just like this. Indeed, loads of advice about almost everything reminds me of this.

We are continually invited and even aided in conjuring up worst-case scenarios about some matter dear to us -- and pressured into purchasing junk on offer by a huckster, performing some ritual, or supporting some infringement of our freedom by a politician.

In Skenazy's column, she notes the money, attention, and peace of mind parents end up frittering away when they fail to think critically about the actual risk of child abduction -- about zero -- inherent in most everyday situations.

And she shows -- for anyone wishing to keep those things (along with their children) -- the kind of thought process necessary to wisely consider such propositions: Consider how the alleged nightmare scenario would actually play out, within the context of what you already know. And carefully weigh the alleged benefits (emphatically including to yourself) of any suggested precaution against doing nothing.

The fact that something bad can happen -- to someone you love and who depends on you -- does not mean that it will happen unless you drop everything and start following the orders that, oddly enough, are coming from the same mouth that is trying to frighten you.

I blame two cultural factors for this: First, our failed educational system, which breeds conformity and discourages conceptual, big-picture thinking; and second, our culture's dominant morality of altruism, which serves as a mental kill switch the moment the issue of what we can do to help the weaker or less fortunate comes up.

Oh my God, Little Finster is going to get abducted right from under my nose. The ad says so. And I can't let that happen, so I'd better buy that surveillance app. And since being distracted and on pins and needles all the time sucks, it must be The Right Thing to Do. Besides, I don't want the other parents thinking I don't care about my own son!

At least that's my abbreviated imagining of the thought process that seems to cause so many people to quit thinking and start obeying every time some new, fad-like, nightmare scenario makes its way through the national consciousness.

Morality isn't about following orders, or about focusing only on what bad can happen, or on suffering. It is quite to the contrary of that, and I will always be grateful to Ayn Rand for explaining that, and more importantly, what morality is.

Indeed I would argue that the most valuable thing she did for me was to make known her approach to ethics, starting with first asking, "Why does man need a code of values?"

Why?

If there were only one word I could cause to become much more common, this would at least be in the running.

-- CAV