I am living proof that conservatives’ and liberals’ values are worlds apart.… I don’t believe that the Ten Commandments were delivered to Moses on tablets of stone, and I never cease to wonder what made the ancient Jews believe that God wanted them to “honor” their fathers and mothers. If I were trying to make up a precept that made no sense, I would be hard pressed to think of a better one. Although I was good to my mother in her declining years, I would have hit the ceiling if anyone had ever suggested that I was obliged to do anything for her.
When I was a child, and someone said to me, “Respect your elders,” I always asked, “Why?” The question was not rhetorical. By what logic does youth owe deference to age? The reverse is true. Older people ought to be able to bear discomfort and inconvenience better than kids or teenagers. While I usually offer my seat on a train or subway to a child or teenager, I would not dream of offering it to an older person. I once offered my seat to a toddler. His mother took it, and I demanded that she give it back. I let her know what a pig I thought she was, too. In my view, a mother who would sit and let her child stand deserves to be spat upon.
On telling parents to f*** themselves | The Righteous Mind. Actually, your account has nothing to do with liberalism and conservatism. Instead, you are living proof of the unassailable fact that the more absolute a jackass a person is the prouder he will be of his jackassery.
I quote this response to Jonathan Haidt’s Righteous MInd book because it raises an interesting question: How many people are there like this, people who think that they owe nothing to anyone? People who seem genuinely unaware that their parents raised them, fed them, protected them — that they would be dead without parental care, in constant danger from the cruelly powerful without laws and law enforcement, ignorant without teaching — people who, like Milton’s Satan, think themselves “self-begot.” How many such people are there in the world?