Yes, let's focus on that. What have you had to unlearn in your adult life? My son brings it up in the Education post.
I flooded the market with so much information to my sons that there must be a significant amount of unlearning needed, simply by law of averages. I had to unlearn many attitudes (and the supposed underlying facts) from high school and college culture. Maybe also junior high and the first few years after graduation. The actual information has held up a little better.
From my father, nothing. He was not part of my life age 6-18 and little until age 24. My mother? That will take some thought. I think I absorbed much in my bones, and it will be hard to figure what part is hers, what was my school, my books, my church, my culture.
Have a go at it. Sounds like fun.
I think the biggest things I had to unlearn I didn't learn from family or school, but absorbed from the culture. The first was the conviction that intelligence is the most important thing (SciFi giant brains, if you like), and not a gift to be used for important ends. The second was that children are a nuisance that get in the way of freedom, and not one of the purposes of freedom.
ReplyDeleteThat the only way to be strong and safe was to be independent. My family were outstanding at strategies for when everyone and everything let you completely down, but they were never that good at networking or building alliances against those catastrophes. Different approaches to antifragility, kind of like the tension between trade protectionism and robust free markets, or economic specialization (and inefficiency) vs. the jack-of-all-trades approach, where if the society collapses you still know how to produce a crop this year.
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