these drives change as we grow older. a drive of a child and why he does the things he does is entirely different from an adult’s drive and why he chooses to do the things he does.
a child is motivated by pure curiosity. an innate drive to learn about the world, his surroundings, his environment. this drive to learn is accompanied by a necessary naivete, being naive, being unknowing in a subject, to be fully open to all possibilities, akin to an idiot is the most efficient, best way to learn something new.
a child’s drive to learn is a necessary evolutionairy trait in order to prepare them for their next phase of life, adulthood. how can a biological organism survive in a world if he does not know how it works? children’s role is to learn about their world, that’s their primary directive, their purpose: learn about the world. create rigid & complex narratives/metaphors/processes/structures to explain how the world works. why? because you will have to survive in that world. this is your next stage in life, so you better adapt. the same way a caterpillar eats enough leaves to fuel a transformative experience into the butterfly, so does a child gorge itself on information about how the world works in order to survive the transformative experience into adulthood & beyond.
the childlike wonder & naiveté one feels when young is a biological mechanism ensuring survival as an adult. imagine an adult who skips the phase of a child, he would be a complete idiot, would have no idea how the world works, forced to come up with quick, simple structures to explain the world and navigate around using those totally rushed & incomplete stories.
what is the drive of an adult? firstly, create a safe environment for itself. secondly, procreate & secure a safe environment for the offspring of his procreation.****
*men & women have different variations on this. men are more concerned with creating a large number of offspring with little care about the safety & permanence of his offspring. Women are more concerned with harboring a safe environment for her more selective number of offspring, it takes a tremendous amount of energy & resources to even procreate once. a man can procreate many times with no real negative side-effects.
the childlike wonder & naiveté which is largely correlated with emotional vulnerability needed to create works of art is a domain of the child. not a domain of the adult. the adult cares very little about naiveté, it has an order of business and prioritizes that order religiously. food, shelter, water, safety, proper functioning, proper mate, good off-spring, done, content.
art is a form of play, play in the juvenile large cat way. imagine 2 lion cubs playing. play is exploration, naive learning, naive possibility navigation, a naive discovery process, an idiotic openness to everything, an ignorance towards everything already seen and a total oblivious happy-go-lucky interest towards anything not seen already.
theory: the earlier a person creates an internally cohesive complete worldview the earlier he grows up and the earlier he foregoes the childlike, naive, creative qualities of a child. complex world views take a long time, they account for many different perspectives, many different ideas of how the world fits together, it takes a long time to puzzle all the pieces together. a simple world view is easy to put together, requiring significantly less perspectives, ideas, elements. a person creating a simple worldview will grow up much quicker and have a much easier time to categorize the world quickly, but there will be significantly less nuance in the categories. a person with a complex worldview will look at all the different perspectives and slowly come to a more precise, more nuanced way of thinking, a person with a complex view of the world when confronted with a new element will take time to find a way to adequately fit that new element into his vast & varied worldview. a person with a simple worldview will judge that new element and have to quickly and clumsily jerry-rig the new element in, there is no room for new elements, he throws the new idea aside entirely or try to fit in with some effort. a person with a complex worldview will have more room to play with new elements, it is less rigid, it is open for possibilities. it is essentially creative.
conflict is an idea in the realm of the adults. children do not fight, they cannot truly fight, they only play. conflict, brutality, murder, egoism, strife are all elements of the domain of the adult. when a person grows up, a switch is flicked, life is no longer a happy play pen for me to learn and be naive. it is brutal survival, that switch enables murder, egoism, destruction of others for the self and the procreation of the self.
true empathy mostly only occurs in the child. a true adult has no empathy apart for finding a mate to create off spring and the off spring. that’s where most of the empathy goes, between an adult & an off spring. a mother can give lots of love. a father can give love. children give love to the world. love is empathy. empathy occurs
henry darger might be considered an infinite child, only child, no adult, a pure naivete caused by extreme fear & abuse in his youth. at a certain point the switch is always flicked. in those people the switch is flicked probably very young, and so they had to resort to the adult, conflict oriented, simple worldview at a very young age and they never had a chance for play or pure exploration.
conflict & play are similar in many ways. they overlap in quality, necessity, purpose, feeling, etc. a child playfighting is preparing for actual combat later. playfighting is a constant in both child & adult domains of life. playfighting is a naive childlike version of actual conflict. an adult enjoys fighting because it satiates the same part of his brain that enjoys playing.
women don’t playfight as their survival strategy does not rely on directly fighting herself, they have no need to practice fighting. women are eternally child in many respects. they must always remain a child, naive, ignorant of conflict and always empathic. Their main mode of survival is empathy based, they employ empathy to be cared for by a man and to care for their off spring, their entire mode of survival is defined by empathy, and empathy necessitates a naive openness to the world, an open understanding of other people, a type of understanding love, an empathy.
nietzsche said a man requires play, and the greatest play thing is a woman. a man becomes bored, an adult becomes bored when his drive to play is not satiated, (play is in many ways the same as fighting/conflict). boredom results in stagnation, in a lack of fulfilling your potential, in a malaise, in a lack of vigor, lack of mental stimulation causes negligence of those faculties. like muscles weakening when not worked out enough. the mind becomes weak when not exercised. man’s greatest weapon, tool, muscle is his mind. constantly firing, constantly working.
we are monsters. we are cold blooded killers. our DNA & our inherent need to procreate makes it so. we will murder to protect our own off spring, to protect our ability to protect that off spring, to protect ourselves, we will always find our own selves more important than other people. this will always be true. if any of us had a choice if we could either kill ourselves or another person we our natural instincts will always point towards the other person, no matter who it is.* unless it is our off spring. our off-spring will always be more important than us because it is us. it’s a continuation of us. we will always sacrifice ourselves for our off-spring, this is ultimate empathy, this is ultimate love. this is the difference between childhood & adulthood, in childhood we love the entire world. in adulthood we forego ourselves to reproduce, to procreate. adulthood enables our procreation mode: set everything else aside apart from finding a good mate, reproduce, and protect that off-spring at all costs.
idea: treat every single human being and almost every other life-form as your off-spring. you are willing and able to sacrifice your entire life for any other organism. you are the ultimate father. willing to kill himself for the life of any other human being (and maybe animals too). that is ultimate, universal, cosmic love. i am willing & able to sacrifice all of me for the continued survival of a single sprite of grass. that sprite of grass is my off-spring and in that sprite i will live forever. yes, take it one step further, that blade of grass will repopulate the entire universe. any adult’s idea of success is an off-spring which procreates successfully. our entire life force after reaching adulthood is dedicated towards securing an off-spring, why? so the off-spring can reproduce too, so the off-spring can procreate. our DNA is pretty intelligent but it is incapable of thinking ahead, it cannot influence the effects more than ! generation down the line, it doesn’t know and cannot know what will happen in the future. only that now, in this life, in this moment, it must succeed in bearing an off-spring. but as intelligent human beings we can think a little further ahead and feel intuitively that an off-spring which bears more than 1 off-spring is better than an off-spring which only produces 1 off-spring, so the logical conclusion of love is treating your life as null and able to be sacrificed for a sprite of grass which produces no off-spring. (this might need some work)