It is in the nature of human beings

It is in the nature of human beings to learn to abstract and generalize more and more as they grow older. In any group of people, minds grow that way. The group encour- ages and supports certain perspectives, and that is what a culture is. The more forcefully certain points of view are inculcated by any given set of parents and other teachers, the more hatred is built into the character structure of the accul- turated individual, who then passes the taboos and resent- ment on to the next generation.
Parents, out of a confused mixture of fear, love and an- ger, try to care for children the best they can, using the mind-sets they have been given by their own parents. They constantly warn their children to be careful, do this, don't do that, and watch out for a dangerous world. The results for millions of us have been tragic. We have been taught to be paranoid and guarded in life as our parents' way of trying to ensure our survival after they are gone. In turn, we attempt to convince our own children of the correctness of believing in the rules of safety, so that they will act according to the principles we teach them. We teach them how to be good according to our morals, then to believe in moralism, then to moralize. It's important to us to stringently dictate protective rules and to instill faith in the necessity of rules for control of self and others.
In our present culture, we are changing our minds a little bit about the use of rules. The change is very difficult for us. I have been witnessing the beginnings of this change and later on in this book I will tell you some stories that reflect this change. This book is itself the result of our culture slowly changing its collective mind.
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