M.Y.O.B.

"Don't try to educate the children."

My youth was peppered with this admonition of adults, "M.Y.O.B.!" It was used too frequently perhaps. After all, the curious child is often the child who grows into lifelong education more gracefully. Telling that child to mind his/her own business could be stifling to inquiry in general. This was not the intent of those who reared me. M.Y.O.B. was a lesson in discretion, an admonition to attend to one's own business correctly before sticking a nose into someone else's. 

This is no longer an age of M.Y.O.B.. We have had two generations of children raised in the more affluent West with constant applause for whatever they do. Many parents have been incapable of saying "No." to their children. Most have found it socially unacceptable to be sternly critical of aberrant, yet naturally narcissistic, behaviors. The child has been cast as a genius from birth. The child's genius must not be diminished by discipline or education. To discipline even the most outrageous behaviors of children is labelled "abuse".

And these children are now grown. Some are having children themselves. And what canon do they have to follow in rearing their children? None.

The concept of minding one's own business has been turned upside down. In the U.S., it used to be tied to the idea of freedom, melded with protected privacy. In other words, freedom of speech and association were treated with reverence under the law. They were strongly defended against the likes of Senator McCarthy, for example. The maintenance of these freedoms, while protecting domestic and mental privacy, brought us fully into the various forms of liberation of the 1960's and 1970's.

Today, minding one's own business has no social meaning. It has no practical meaning. Twitter, Facebook, Instagram have destroyed the commonly held standards of personal privacy in a social context. Making one's personal business everyone's business is the standard of adult behavior today. And when this is combined with the shamelessness and lack of inhibition of generations of undisciplined children-turned-adults, society's norms for what is appropriate and what is inappropriate in the public space have been twisted beyond any universal application. There is no discretion in public spaces. 

A glaring example is slut-feminism. This entails women dressing in public in an undeniably sexually seductive way while demanding gender-neutral equality with men. Finding this contradictory to the point of questioning its sanity does not require Freud or Jung. These same slut warriors are prone to publicizing any sexual misadventure they encounter as "rape'. In other words, conventional adults are being told to mind their own business when provoked by sexually explicit dress in public while also being told they must run to the defense of a self-proclaimed slut warrior when her own behavior has consequences. What better example of children raised so permissively that they do not associate their own behavior with negative consequences?

Similar examples are transgender adults who demand the right to public display of their difference, yet tell those who notice and react quite normally to mind their own business. Extreme sports fanatics who expect glory for publicly displaying their self-destructive habits, but tell those who would assess their behavior as self-destructive to mind their own business. Even in the more conservative Muslim culture, adults assume all the beliefs and trappings associated with global terrorism, while screaming "profiling" when their behavior attracts public attention. In other words, a convenient claim that their 'faith' is private and the critic should mind his/her own business. 

Silencing free speech while expanding the spectrum of acceptable antisocial behavior in the public space is social regression, not progress, as might be claimed by so-called Progressives. Laudatory speech for those who are acting in antisocial ways is acceptable, but skeptical analysis and criticism are equated with violent assault. This is symptomatic of a culture in decline due to the elevation of mindless individualism and materialism above mindful social accountability and social responsibility.