Harkness – MacGillivray Stories

We didn’t need to end up on a deserted island, like the boys in William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, to behave the way we did. Golding’s novel is naive in that it imposes an adult morality on children. Whatever we did as children, or whatever happened to us, it rarely occurred to us to question the ‘morality’ of events. It is only later in life that one starts to actually do that.

The majority rarely question the morality of their actions since doing so has to danger of reducing the comfort of their own lives. So, we were torturing other boys; boys were torturing us; teachers or parents physically abused us; and yet it rarely occurred to us to ask: “Is this right?” Of course, this is meant to be “Boyhood Recollections” of more than half-a-century ago; however, it would be a too sterile re-telling if one was unable to relate it to current events.

Children learn what is ‘right and wrong’ – but they don’t really learn this. They only learn that certain forms of behaviour will be ‘punished’. ‘Talking in class’ is ‘wrong’ and can be punished. Saying a ‘bad’ word to your parents is ‘wrong’ and can be punished, and so on. It is only when one becomes a young adult that this idea of ‘right-and-wrong’ is de-coupled from punishment by adults. One starts to question the actions of adults, which in itself is a ‘punishable’ offence when you are a child.

Pre-Pubertal Stage of Global Development

Similarly, as of 2022, if you are a Russian citizen (read ‘child’), it is a punishable offence to question the actions of your ‘parents’ (read: the unelected Communist government). Of course, one cannot ‘elect’ one’s parents, but it seems reasonable to assume that people should be able to elect their leaders in the modern world. This is perhaps a naive thought, as it seems as of 2022 that dictators, totalitarians, tyrants, autocrats, and thugs,¹⁵⁹ still rule the majority of countries in the world today.

Regarding the current (2022) global situation, we are caught in a situation between pre-puberty and post-puberty. Some nations are still in a pre-pubertal stage, where the only important principle is ‘obedience’; that is, it is a punishable offence to question the actions of the ‘adults’ (the government). Thus, the populations of Communist and Fascist dictatorships are forced to remain in a pre-pubertal stage – like mindless and weak sheep being guarded by ‘protective’ wolves.  

Speaking for the Truth

I came to this conclusion on reading from Twitter something Robert de Nero said, and also what the Chinese Foreign Minister has said recently.

“There are things that are going on in the world. If you have a voice and see what’s happening, you have the right to say something about it. You must. You have to,” De Niro said, after he was asked about the Russian invasion of Ukraine by Russia.

“See what’s happening in Ukraine now. You have to stand up and say, ‘You can’t do that, it’s wrong’. It’s that simple. It’s not even about democracy, but about right and wrong – the truth.”

Of course, there are those who remain in the ‘pre-pubertal’ stage; they have calculated that like a baby hungry for milk from their mother’s teat, it pays most to whine and cry in a ‘dishonest’ fashion:

“Moves by U.S.-led NATO have pushed tension between Russia and Ukraine to a ‘breaking point’,” Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian said on Wednesday.

As an aside, it might be imagined that Chinese and Russia’s united front (shown at the Chinese Winter Olympics), might embolden Xi to invade Taiwan; if not, it could increase their military presence in Hong Kong, or in the South and East China seas. But from an amateur viewpoint, the stalled ambitions of Russia’s regime in Ukraine might give the pragmatic Chinese government second thoughts about following aggressive colonial endeavours (as of April, 2022). 

Cause and Effect

Of course, I am not so naive that I imagine everything in global politics is merely cause-and-effect. No one knows what is emerging in the future – perhaps two mercantile blocks? Nevertheless, this does not alter the fact of ‘right-and-wrong’, as pointed out by Robert de Nero. So the U.S. and the West are now occupying the ‘moral high ground’. Cynically, the U.S. and the West, are ‘holding back’ to see what further war crimes Russia will engage in. 

We are also waiting to see how China will ‘behave’ in the future. If they invade Taiwan or Hong Kong or make further incursions in the South China Seas, then we will have a kind of World War 3. But I suspect this will be a so-called ‘limited’ war; it might mainly be about economic global dominance (from my ‘amateur’ viewpoint). But the West will have established the ‘moral high ground’, which is often an important pre-condition for any conflict.

¹⁵⁹  “Biden calls P*tin a ‘murderous dictator’ and ‘pure thug’.” CNN. Read: 25 April 2022. Of course, although such a statement may be ‘true’, it does not do much to ease the conflict. In other words, one suspects that the US and Russia are not concerned about the fate of Ukraine, but more concerned with feathering their own political nests. Ukraine is just a ‘pawn’ in their global game.