Sisyphus figure

Sisyphus figure

Bringing young children into environments with rules of order that they cannot comprehend or abide by is inherently mistaken.

This mistake manifests in two aspects.

Firstly, it easily forms negative memories for both the people present and the children.

The impacts on the other people present can be set aside for now. These individuals will likely never interact with you again later, so any harm is a societal loss that can be assumed to not directly affect you. Let’s focus just on the stimuli received by the children themselves.

It is difficult for young children to avoid becoming enemies of the operational order of the entire occasion, damaging the real interests of everyone present. And once such outcomes occur, harsh punishments or even retaliation are likely to follow. Even if this retaliation is not directly aimed at the children but rather their parents through collective public condemnation, such scenes will still impact the children’s core memories.

The direct events may be completely forgotten after many years, but the intense emotional shock and the tense, explosive atmosphere of the scene will certainly leave deep scars in their cognitive development. They will inherently have to ideologically reconcile and adapt to these outcomes based on their instincts and “knowledge” at the time, trying to explain to themselves “why it happened” and “how to avoid/recreate it.”

If they feel emotionally that “this is a terrible thing,” they will naturally want to find ways to avoid it. But their limited cognitive abilities will make it very difficult to truly grasp the precise mechanisms of “how to avoid it.” This will lead them to either overreact, turning themselves into living mummies (aka being introverted) whenever they leave a family environment, or try to come up with some unknown tactic as an attempt - one that will either fail, leading to a second intense shock, or unfortunately “succeed” by picking up some kind of “children’s rhetoric” that unintentionally strikes at a societal “sweet spot”, causing them to be firmly caught by the habit and moving towards becoming a “professional child.”

It’s not impossible for there to be appropriate outcomes, that possibility certainly exists, but it is extremely small.

To use an illustrative analogy, it is like a primitive tribe at a very early technological stage suddenly faces extreme climate challenges - say a great flood - while their technology is still primitive. They will inevitably divert what little materials produced by their meager technology to deal with this challenge.

But looking from a third-party perspective, it is clear the dam they build through primitive means at great cost is extremely inefficient and expensive.

If they had not faced such huge stimuli early on, and instead learned slightly more advanced techniques from something like house building first before encountering the flood, the dams they build would be far more advanced and cost-effective.

In summary, under the premise that it can be avoided, premature exposure to such great difficulties and sharp disasters is of course a loss for the parties involved.

Secondly, the parents’ own behavior will set poor examples for their children.

You could say there are two styles of conduct:

Style A: Avoid danger, better to be the head of a dog than the tail of a lion, follow local customs when entering a village.

Avoid danger - observe the environment in advance, and if it is complex and fragile without stable expectations for oneself, don’t enter it if possible.

To be the head of a dog - Only enter environments where you have sufficient advantage, as a player with enough say and influence to avoid being in a passive position, making mistakes when caught off guard and wastefully losing resources.

Follow local customs - Once obscure customs (i.e. unspoken rules) are discovered in such an advantageous environment, prioritize respect, seek harmless disengagement, or at least avoid direct strikes, and turn instead to other environments that are stable and controllable.

The so-called “resistance” under this approach only occurs after multiple rounds of re-selection to arrive at an environment where one has sufficient advantage and ability to single-handedly influence and change customs through strategic power. Only then does one pivot from evasion to offensive domination.

In short, it values reconnaissance and concealment, and does not fight unwinnable battles. The vast majority of the time is spent outside of potential opponents’ sights, only actively appearing when already possessing overwhelming odds - such that even some mishaps leading to halved capabilities would still lead to 50%+ chances of victory.

Style B: Reckless entry, followed by intense struggle amidst disadvantage to preserve oneself.

Reckless entry - Before entering, preemptively assume there will be no problems (if there is still awareness of “entering a new domain” as an action); assume everyone will act as envisioned on time (if there was still a “envisioning” step).

Once in trouble, rely on intense fighting spirit to preserve and save oneself.

Such people place extreme emphasis on the legitimacy and necessity of “resistance,” because they constantly depend on “resistance” to resolve endless crises.

This “resistance” generally leads to total defeat after upholding an illusion for a period at a depleted cost.

Lifting a rock against gravity costs nothing, while lifting a rock costs something. As long as you keep lifting, it may seem you “triumphed over gravity,” but the ultimate result is you exhaust yourself and suffer great defeat.

In total, their resources are always wastefully consumed, accumulations constantly emptied.

And young children will constantly learn this style of living from the example of “fierce parental arguments with the public, explained as victory after returning home,” becoming the next “Sisyphus.”

The Sisyphus’ dream is to become a mighty warrior like Xiang Yu, able to lift immense weights, unbothered by however heavy the rock or long the lifting lasts.

The problem is, in the history of humanity, there has only been one Xiang Yu.

The problem is, the conqueror of hundreds met his end at Wujiang.

To put it bluntly, the developmental direction of civilized society absolutely cannot be “all public places are suitable for children to enter.” And “all public places objectively unsuitable for children are not explicitly prohibited to them” is by no means a good state that should be insisted on.

Before societal development reaches a higher stage and fixes this loophole, as guardians, you have a responsibility to prevent children from paying unnecessary costs - much less tremendous costs - due to this developmental lag in society.

• Recognizing the times and restraining oneself is not “weakness,” but humility, a logical obligation to maximize one’s limited self.

All who fail to recognize this logical obligation and seek to erase its necessity through a “resistant spirit” will ultimately pay the cost of such arrogance with the value of their lives.

You could have been so much greater than you are now, but you wasted it to feed the vanity of arrogance.

You bear inescapable responsibility for your own mediocrity.