Never have I felt such commonality with Calvin's parents

[conuly]

http://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/1989/05/10#.UnRUBcu9KSN

I, too, kinda assumed adults knew what they were doing. It was an enormous shock to realize that they - we! - were really all just pretending.

Comments

[ancarett]

That's a very, very good strip!

[elenbarathi.livejournal.com]

I always liked that one too, but I don't recall any shock at realizing the adults didn't actually know what they were doing. I was ten when I concluded that most of them were lying most of the time; that those who weren't lying were repeating lies that they'd been told, and that they weren't reliable sources of factual information because they'd say anything rather than admit they didn't know. or lie outright (like Calvin's Dad) as a form of mockery.

One might conceive of 'adulthood', emotional maturity, as being a stage of development in which one knows the difference between lying and telling the truth well enough to tell which of them one is doing; is able to apply critical thinking skills to the statements of others; is able to admit it when one doesn't know something; and does not find it amusing to make fun of others for not knowing things. The exercise of the faculty of Reason, in other words.

Our present society is so infantilized that plenty of people with advanced University degrees die of old age without ever displaying these bench-marks of adulthood. Listen to how many people spout that Peter Pan "I won't grow up, I'll never grow up" line as if it were a point of pride rather than a symptom of dysfunction. In order to become an adult, one first has to want to be one: aging happens, but maturity must be achieved.