Continuing Neal A. Maxwell’s thoughts from half a century ago. . . (see first post. . . ‘The Smallest Part which I feel,’ July 10, 2020:
. . . . Knowing the truth about “who” man really is involves both his identity and destiny, and the implications of such persistent realities include crucial information about what man’s mortal environment should contain for his well being. The institution of the family is at “peril point,” for instance. Professor Urie Bronfenbrenner warns regarding our spreading generational separateness: “. . . In today’s world children are deprived not only of parents but of adults in general. . . . what is needed is a change in our patterns of living that will bring adults and children back into each other’s lives.”‘
A rational scholar will not exclude data about the physical sciences which persist in breaking through with a statistical shout. Yet with regard to critical data about human nature, so many seem to be “looking beyond the mark.”
One would think it folly, for instance, if Holland spent a significant portion if it’s citizens time and money destroying the dikes that hold back the sea; it would seem even more absurd if the Dutch people stood by cheering the wrecking crews! Yet, so much of what we are doing currently in our own culture is equivalent of breaching the dikes, of removing tried and proven safeguards. So little honest attention is given to such matters as family and self-discipline on which so much else depends, yet others clearly pay a social price for the hollowness of someone else’s childhood, and we all have a stake in each other’s capacity for self-discipline! LaRochefouchauld’s words seem to describe some of today’s programs which are sincerely designed to compensate for fundamental family failures: “There goes another beautiful theory about to be murdered by a brutal gang of facts.”
One of the “brutal gang of facts” of our time concerns reality “of things as they are”—that citizens who are untutored in restraint and who are driven by their unchecked appetites can neither behave as free men, nor leave other men free; truth includes a harsh knowledge of that harsh reality! He who is merely a “bundle of appetites” and has no capacity for self-discipline is neither educated nor free. A permissive climate is really a cruel climate, for it deludes its citizens into believing they must confront others but not themselves; it elevates appetites by suggesting that we are accountable to these drives but not to other people.
Real individual freedom is tied to truth, it is not freedom a la carte—not freedom apart from everything else—not just to the absence of restraint! Freedom is the catalyst in the chemistry of choice; it is not an outcome to be achieved by itself alone. Free agency in its fullest sense requires the individual to be in command of himself, for one who is a prisoner of his bad impulses cannot really choose; and another truth about “things as they are,” therefore, is that we either control our bad impulses or they control us. ~Neal A. Maxwell, The Smallest Part—which I feel (Salt Lake City, Deseret Book, 1973), 9-11 (continued at * A View of Truth III)
(Posts with a preamble asterisk * are for a more general audience, and not specific to teachings of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.)
