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Big Brother & You
“Mom, I want to stay up till midnight.”
“You know your bedtime is 9:30…”
“But Joey gets to stay up till way later than midnight, and he gets to take the car. It’s not fair!”
“That’s different. He’s your older brother. He’s in college and he has a job and he’s responsible. When you get older, you can do all those things too.”
“But mom! I wanna stay up and -”
“No buts! Go to bed! Now, young man!”
If you grew up with older siblings, this archetypal conversation or something similar probably played out in your household numerous times growing up. You would sit there and realize that your older brothers and sisters got to do way cooler stuff than you were allowed to do. They got away with things that seemed strange and exotic to your young mind.
In short, they had greater freedoms than you. Meaning, they were allowed to do more than you were allowed to do because they were more grown up and (theoretically anyway) more experienced and responsible than you.
And is freedom today any different? Sometimes I think it is not. Though Natural Law philosophy teaches that humans are naturally endowed with rights and only sacrifice rights into the “necessary evil” of the mechanism of the state, this reading no longer holds sway in public discourse. Instead, people seem to believe for the most part that the state gives you freedoms, but does so within reasonable bounds, to make sure that the state persists. You are allowed to do and say x, but definitely not y.
So us, essentially the younger brother (or slave caste) are given a narrow set of freedoms: we’re allowed to watch tv, but not cross the street by ourselves. We have to go to school and we have to wash the dishes. But we’re free to play with our toys all we want, as long as our homework is done. Etc, but meanwhile, our older brother (master caste) gets to do all kinds of crazy stuff that we don’t even understand: like go out on dates with girls, have a job, drive around in a car, etc.
We have freedoms, definitely. We are definitely “free” in a sense. But it seems that looking up admiringly at our older brother, he seems to have totally different freedoms that we don’t. Jeff Well’s excellent conspiracy blog, Rigorous Intution, does a good job of chronicling the additional freedoms that big brother seems to have, but that we’re not allowed to do: drinking drunk or on drugs, having sex with kids (and kinky sex in general), murdering people secretly, illegal business practices and so on.
“Mom, it’s not fair!”
But instead of fairness (which would perhaps too honestly confront the recognition that we find their additional freedoms secretly tantalizing), we demand that big brother be held to the same slave caste morality system that the master caste uses to manipulate us and keep us predictable. Talk about laughable from their standpoint. But they recognize that our system of understanding can’t simply face that harsh truth, and so we receive something like this in response:
“Your older brother goes to college, has a job and is responsible.”
And thus we’re trained to react to the amoral actions of the master class as well. They may be committing what we think of as heinous crimes, but we want nothing more than to be celebrities and billionaires like they are. They are our role models and what we strive to be. And this neat trick keeps us carefully in thrall to them.
Big Brother is watching us the same way a real big brother would on the playground: both protectively and adversarially.
“If you tell mom about this, you’re dead, chump!”
September 13th, 2006 at 10:55 am
crap, I was hoping there’d be some parenting techniques …
Hey! How come you got this big site and have time to write up all this stuff…?
September 13th, 2006 at 11:36 am
If the reason the little ones can’t do the same stuff is because big brother is responsible, going to college, etc - well it’s somewhat easier to accept.
Junior can grow up and get to that point too.
If the real reason is that big brother killed all the other older siblings to be the one who can go to college, and once he is there he will do everything he can to keep your little ass out of college…”Mom, it’s not fair. Big bro murdered the family and now he’s trying to keep me in kindergarten forever!!!”
September 13th, 2006 at 1:24 pm
That is the best analogy I’ve heard in a long time.
So do you think we can ever “grow up?” And when are we ready to?
September 13th, 2006 at 10:10 pm
I am an oldest. I was always upset that my little brothers got roughly the same privledges as I did, or else received them before I did on the age scale. For instance, I got a watch for my birthday when I entered 5th grade. The next youngest got one in like 2nd grade. That always pissed me off. So through this analogy I can almost see where the upper class as it were would be discontent with all us underlings grabbing for power and accountibility.
Unfortunately for the metaphore I grew up and am not as greedy beyond the point where I have to turn off morals.
September 14th, 2006 at 4:06 pm
I’m the second oldest. A lot of my friends are the second oldest.
My brother was the typical Alpha male: played sports, dated lots of girls, very popular in school, a tough guy in the streets and a nice guy underneath it all.
I was sort of the opposite: I read a lot, wrote stories and poems, played music, did OK with girls but nothing spectacular, only participated in one sport (cross-country running), always more street-wise than street-tough, and a nice guy on the surface.
My brother and I went off in very different directions, and even though he’s my older brother I think our differences made us into equals. He cannot do what I do, and I cannot do what he does.
However, my interest in the arts came from him. He used to dabble in writing and poetry and art but he never took an abiding interest in it. I did, mostly because he showed me the way. But I was the one who followed up on it.
I think the best analogy for me and him is Jacob & Esau, with Jacob stealing the birthright from his brother by fooling their blind father Isaac.
The name James is a derivative of Jacob, which means “the supplanter”. I like that idea, that I am a supplanter.
Maybe that is why I feel like I can usurp the established authority: because I’ve subverted it many times before, on smaller scales.
September 15th, 2006 at 4:53 pm
James: yeah I knew the name Jacob meant “supplanter” and it’s odd because I have several good friends named that right now, just as I also have several friends named Jeremy, which means “Yahweh has uplifted.” Funny how those things cluster around you
I’m definitely going to have to go back and read through that story again because I had forgotten about the actual circumstances of it. Hm, blind father - I wonder if that hooks into the “blind god” aspect of the Demiurge at all…
September 15th, 2006 at 4:54 pm
And
Great question… Can we “grow up”? What happens when we grow up? Does the conspiracy come to your house in a limo and give you a choice of getting in or getting murdered on the spot? What happens when you figure it out and tell your parents?
January 16th, 2008 at 1:26 pm
[…] In pack dynamics, this leadership role may not be a strictly formal one, so much as it is that the alphas set an example after which other pack members inevitably follow: The alpha pair have the most social freedom of all the animals in a pack, but they are not “leaders” in the sense humans usually think of the term. They do not give the other wolves orders. The alphas simply have the most freedom to choose where they would like to go and what they would like to do, and the rest of the pack usually follows along. […]