Realized something important last night about learning to drive as a rite of passage within our society. In a nutshell, we have a culture whose defining transition into adulthood (for the most part) is commemorated around learning the use of a machine. When we learn to drive, we get together with our parents at an awkward time in our teenage lives (likely when our relationship with our parents is already strained) and they grudingly train us to manipulate a machine which runs on petrochemicals. We are taught that the proper manipulation of this machine is a great responsibility, but with it comes the enormous freedom to do as we like to become an adult. And our definition of adulthood is encapsulated within proper uses of the vehicle: prime among which are transportation to and from work and school, seconded then by entertainment and vacation.
Thus if we truly want to unravel our national reliance on oil, we have to reverse engineer our very ideas of what it means to be an adult. And unfortunately, the thing about rites of passage is that you can only go through them once. You only go through puberty once. You only have sex for the first time once. And you only learn to drive for the first time once (learning to drive manual transmission later on doesn’t count). And these events have all already been imprinted in us culturally. Even if you never learned to drive, you still are part and parcel of a system in which cars give you freedom and flexibility and assist you in performing the acts you associate with adulthood.
How convenient for industry that our conception of adulthood is rittually linked to the proper use and care of the machines they sell us. For another good one: think back to when you were a kid. Did you ever play store? What were you learning there? How to ritually engage in consumerism. What about playing doctor? How to abdicate responsibility and ultimate knowledge of and for your body to an industry-approved expert. What about playing house? How to fit within the social expectations of what a family consists of, what parents do, what adult relationships are like, etc. Then there’s playing cops and robbers, playing war, and countless others.
It seems, at times, that the knots in which we are entangled are simply too big to unravel.
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8 Comments
Have you thought about it in reverse? - it’s not a game that indoctrinates you into the rituals of “adulthood” but a mimicry of the rituals that adults are bound to by the realities of life, in the hopes of accelerating the growing-up process.
The reason most adults find House and Store and Doctor amusing to watch is that their kids are playing at and mimicing and enjoying rituals that they themselves would rather be free of. After all - what are they? Chores, groceries and letting some dude in a coat feel you up “for your own good”…
The reason driving is such a big deal is that its the one of those things we pretended to do as children that most adults enjoy as well.
Sure, my way of seeing it is way less fun to the conspiracy folks, but a much more (in my opinion) plausible answer than that standard and unversal (And untaught. I’ve never met a kid that was “taught” to play House.) childhood games are propgated for brainwashing purposes.
…If they are - who does it and how?
…If they are - who does it and how?
If you believe Foucault, everyone does it to everyone else. Power is exercised, upon the individual by the mass of other individuals.
It’s not a conscious conspiracy. It’s a self-organized conspiracy. It has those it benefits, like any exercise of power. But it wasn’t planned and set up by a secret cabal.
Is wanting to drive a car really part of “what it means to be an adult”.
As I remember when I was 16, it was a really cool way to be 16.
It was the most excellent of toys you could play with - you could easily describe it as the capping off of being a big kid, by the time yer 16 Xmas doesn’t hold the same thrill anymore…and people who have and want cars for more than utilitarian purposes are generally like kids in their love of cars and driving rather than being “adult” about it all. It sure didn’t cause me all of the sudden to become responsible and careful…it just made me a stupid and irresponsible 16 yr old with a fuckin awesome new game to play - drive around town! If you had to wait until you were 16 to drive a bike, for example, would bicycling become a new sign post of adulthood? Or would it just be really fun to ride a bike once you could? (oh ya and it can also help you get around for your grocery shopping, too) What’s my point? I don’t know, but I remember that driving was all I wanted to be able to do when I was 16, and it had nothing to do with wanting to become “responsible” as it did with being able to do something full o’ cool fun speediness. Later, when I had to have a car (and the expenses) for getting to work, driving the kid, etc. it became much more utilitarian. But if the norm available for doing those things were horse and buggy, then that’s what you’d get instead. Actually, it might be fun to horse and buggy it to work…again, no point just blah blah blahing…
Wow! I think the idea that we have replaced ancient coming of age rituals, which have a deep and lasting meaning, for something which has become a pox on American society, is most insightful! How better to perpetuate auto dependancy than impress it upon the minds of wonky teenagers …. plus combining it with associated speed and danger! Powerful connection indeed!
When I look upon my car obsessed neighbors - three, who all have at least 6 cars a piece, in various stages of rusty oil dripping - I wonder how this happened? I figured the love of auto came from the freedom of the open road, and owning your own personal shiney & sleek monster machine. It once included the ability to be your own mechanic too, working on combustion engines under a shady tree, but that’s gone the way of roof thatchers. This concept that it starts early is profound.
Perhaps the way out of this quagmire is somehow to reinstitute the meaningful coming of age rituals … and I dont mean whisky shots and a free hooker from yer dad.
Why not?
I think you may be right in some sense. We have all these rites of passage which we no longer recognize for what they are: religious rituals. As a result, we all have many many imprints which have been made upon our minds by society which we don’t even realize are there at all. What if we could intentionally choose how we imprint our minds, and control the context, meaning and implications of the whole thing.
The good news is: we can. The bad news is that it requires work and people are not used to that anymore because we’ve been imprinted (ritually) to be hooked on instant gratification, rather than the pleasure of discovery and of doing it ourselves, even if our end product is inferior to what could be mass produced and bought
I’m not really trying to express that I think any of this is conspiratorial at all, unless you abide in the idea that the only conspiracy out there is that things perpetuate themselves…
http://www.timboucher.com/journal/2006/09/05/the-conspiracy-of-society/
Read the chapter on adolescence in Colin Turnbull’s ‘The Human Cycle’