Clarence Paller
Philosopher Henry David Thoreau coined the famous line, “Most men lead lives of quiet desperation,” in the book Walden that he wrote in 1854. A lot of time has passed since this quote came to be, however, it hits so close to home for many and describes the world we live in today.
Pink Floyd hammered this concept on the head in their song “Time” from the Dark Side of the Moon Album. This sad world has been constructed for us since before we are even born. The thoughts, fears, stresses of our parents are absorbed by the baby in the womb. This was demonstrated by Dr. Henry Truby at the University of Miami when he found that by the sixth month, the fetus could hear and move in rhythm to its mother’s voice. It responds favorably to the mother’s happy singing or with anxiety and stress with mom’s yelling and anger,” (Fetuses are aware by Michael Orlans | May 4, 2015)
If at pre-birth we are already chained to the limitations of this world, imagine what it does throughout our lives. Once the child is born, not long thereafter, the infants are being whisked away to daycare so that both parents can work long hours just to survive. After day-care, some kids are enrolled into special schools to get them a head start even before kindergarten and the rest go into kindergarten. The journey of indoctrination and super-rigid structure begins. Children’s creativity is stifled in their early years because they must learn to obey, sit still and listen. This is the system that another Pink Floyd song, “Another Brick in the Wall” depicts. This system has real consequences that we are living out right here and now. Researcher Kyung Hee Kim’s recent report documented a continuous decline in creativity among American schoolchildren over the last two or three decades in her 2011 study, The creativity crisis: The decrease in creative thinking scores on the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking. Creativity Research Journal, 23, 285-295.
The below in italics is referenced from Peter Gray Ph.D. in his Psychology Today article, As Children’s Freedom Has Declined, So Has Their Creativity New research suggests that American schoolchildren are becoming less creative.
Kim, who is a professor of education at the College of William and Mary, analyzed scores on a battery of measures of creativity—called the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking (TTCT)—collected from normative samples of schoolchildren in kindergarten through twelfth grade over several decades. According to Kim’s analyses, the scores on these tests at all grade levels began to decline somewhere between 1984 and 1990 and have continued to decline ever since. The drops in scores are highly significant statistically and in some cases very large. In Kim’s words, the data indicate that “children have become less emotionally expressive, less energetic, less talkative and verbally expressive, less humorous, less imaginative, less unconventional, less lively and passionate, less perceptive, less apt to connect seemingly irrelevant things, less synthesizing, and less likely to see things from a different angle.”
According to Kim’s research, all aspects of creativity have declined, but the biggest decline is in the measure called Creative Elaboration, which assesses the ability to take a particular idea and expand on it in an interesting and novel way. Between 1984 and 2008, the average Elaboration score on the TTCT, for every age group from kindergarten through 12th grade, fell by more than 1 standard deviation. Stated differently, this means that more than 85% of children in 2008 scored lower on this measure than did the average child in 1984.
This is important because these kids grow up and due to their limited capacity to think creatively, to ask questions, to wonder, and to be curious, they entrap themselves and others into a desperate life and worse into tyrannical governments. This is because people have been conditioned their whole lives to think in a certain way without batting an eyelash even when pressing issues are hurled right at them. The correlation is happening right in Canada, whereas freedom of speech is under attack in the new changes too, “Bill C-10 made at the behest of Liberal MPs on the heritage committee — would allow the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) to regulate user-generated content uploaded to social media platforms, much as it regulates radio and TV content now.” (Your free speech is at risk with Ottawa’s push to regulate online content, experts warn by Ryan Patrick Jones · CBC News · Posted: Apr 30, 2021, 4:00 AM ET | Last Updated: April 30)
People living in desperation create actual desperation. This is because people who live in desperation are so domesticated that they either refuse to acknowledge what’s going in the world around them, refute or ignore history, or simply can’t comprehend that the system they were brought up in actually doesn’t care about them after all. Perhaps it’s Stockholm syndrome feelings of trust or affection felt in many cases of kidnapping or hostage-taking by a victim toward a captor. This is evidenced by a poll by “YouGov. Amid a widening divide between the haves and have-nots, the poll found that 36% of millennials polled say that they approve of communism, which is up significantly from 28% in 2018.” (More than a third of millennials polled approve of communism, Nov. 2, 2019, By Shawn Langloi, marketwatch.com). The millennials are desperate with rising student debts, lack of job prospects, and no way to attain sky-high house prices to be able to build a life, a luxury their parents had. This directly correlates with the research of professor Kim referenced above that shows a link between lack of creative thinking and leading into absorbing the indoctrination thinking.
Communism in the 20th century claimed the lives of over 100 million people and the millennials who are calling for it now have never known what it is like to stand in line for hours waiting for a piece of bread. As our society heads this way – as seen in Canada and the USA – the sad tragedy of history is that without understanding it, that it is doomed to repeat itself. That is how desperate people create desperate situations for themselves and those around them. The people cheering for communism today likely wouldn’t even bother to go talk to an immigrant from the former Soviet Union and learn about how life was there and why they immigrated to the West in the first place. That is because desperate people usually lack character which has been robbed of them from childhood. They are not equipped to handle the hard truths of life and feel like they are owed something. Luckily there is a solution and it’s not too late just yet.
The emergence of brave everyday men and women standing up and calling a spade a spade is rising. When people realize there already is nothing left to lose they start to speak out and challenge the status quo. In Montreal this past Sunday, May 2 there were over 100,000 people in the street marching for freedom with leaders like Maxime Bernier right there leading the charge. You reading this still have the power to research history, ask questions, be curious and stand for something. When a person realizes that Superman isn’t going to come to save them and that no government will come to save them is the moment a light goes on. They realize that the only way out of the desperate life and society of desperation is only found in self-accountability, depth of spirit and character, drive, and willpower. Each and everyone has this ability; it is merely a decision of free will which is a God-given right to be cherished and practiced. A light going on inspires and uplifts others no matter how small or quiet one thinks they are, “A candle is a small thing. But one candle can light another. And see how its light increases, as a candle gives its flame to the other. You are such a light.”—Moshe Davis
