Try This At Home

Disclaimers, Devils, and the Death of Democracy

Don’t try anything you see at home. We’re what you call experts.
—Mythbusters Disclaimer

Andrew was one of my college roommates. Smart guy, as funny as a funeral (if you’d been to some of the funerals I have, you’d realize this isn’t ironic), and built like the Berlin Wall.

And, like the Berlin Wall, there wasn’t anything in the world that could possibly knock him down, with the exception of heavy machinery, which he found quite disarming—literally. When he was ten years old, he was playing with his father’s tractor while wearing a long-sleeved shirt. He got close to the spinning PTO shaft on the back, the shaft caught the shirt—which was very well-made—and the shirt wrapped around the shaft with his arm in it. Wham, rip, thwack, and there was nothing left of his right arm below the shoulder.

He was the kind of guy who, when you met him, you wanted to shake his hand, but first you had to ask where he left it. Sometimes he had a spare costume-store dismembered hand in his back pocket, and, if you found yourself in need of assistance, he’d shove it up his sleeve and give you a hand-out.

I’m lucky enough to still have all my fingers and toes attached (along with everything that connects them to the rest of me) though it isn’t for lack of trying. In my growing up years in the quiet San Francisco suburbs I was impaled, sliced open more than a few times, took a couple swan dives onto concrete, fell off the occasional roof, face planted over the handlebars of a bicycle, and got all manner of interesting scrapes and bruises.

But the carnage doesn’t stop there. Between the back yard archery, the back yard explosives range (yes, in the suburbs—I wasn’t very good with bombs and none of them ever successfully went “boom,” alas, so the cops never came sniffing around), the bike races (no helmets), the chemistry sets, the car repairs, the skateboard and bicycle jump ramps (and taking my turn laying under the flight path of friends who jumped over a line of us), the tall trees, the clubhouses, the wood burning projects, the campfires, the drag racing, the war games played with real projectiles, the ropes courses (without harnesses), the stunt driving, the rock climbing, the cliff scaling, the body surfing, and the stage diving, I was pretty lucky to make it to the age where I was responsible enough to crush my hand in a 4000lb pneumatic press in between shifts at a warehouse where I drove a forklift on and off of a sometimes-moving truck. Fortunately I didn’t get into doing anything really dangerous until my twenties.

Here’s the weird part:

No kidding and hand-on-heart, in all my growing-up years, I was the most risk-averse boy I knew.

We all had scars. Yeah, some of my buddies had them from drunk parents who put out cigarettes on their arms. All of us had one or two from fighting, even though there were only ever a few fights undertaken in anything-but-fun. I didn’t know a single kid who hadn’t bashed his fingers trying to hammer nails, or skinned his leg to hamburger laying down a bicycle in order to avoid riding in front of a car. Except for the one kid who’d been in a house fire and had bad burns on his face (who we were all secretly scared of in the fourth grade), all those scars made you cool. You earned them. You had stories to tell. You knew how to put your ass on the line. And if you were good at it, you could tell your stories in a way that let everyone laugh at you and still made you look pretty cool.

Those disclaimers they had on the front end of Mythbusters? Those were invented because that’s what kids used to do: try it all at home. That’s what being a kid was about. You fucked around, you found out, and you lived to fuck around again, so that by the time you got to be man-sized (or woman-sized, for the girls that wandered through our little clique at different points) you could handle yourself, because the world out there was pretty rough.

Well, what else could we do? Stay indoors? With Mom?!?!

Talk about boring! That was the kind of thing babies did.

If you were walking around on your own and you weren’t playing outside where adults couldn’t see you, that’s what you were, too. A baby. Because only babies need that kind of protecting.

Unbeknownst to young me, things had begun slowly changing shortly before I was born. Thanks to enterprising lawyers and bored parents who had nothing better to do than get the vapors about safety, all the cool playground equipment was starting to die off, to be replaced with newer, safer, smaller, plasticy and boring structures that were more suited for hamsters than for children.

But I first noticed the change, and how fast it was moving, when I was thirteen. The Satanic Panic was in full swing, and Sally Jesse and Geraldo had convinced every parent who earned more than $35k (at the time, this was solidly middle class) that going out on the streets in broad daylight was gonna get you abducted, raped, and then sacrificed to the devil (if they didn’t do something really awful and teach you how to play D&D first). Some of us even knew people whose faces wound up on milk cartons (I did—two of them). It was, after all, the tail end of the Golden Age of Serial Killers and the Golden Age of Cults (Baby Boomers had such strange hobbies!), so of course a few of us were gonna get picked off by the monsters when they wandered through every now-and-then. We all knew it. That’s why we had bicycles and pocket knives and mad skillz at evasion.

There is a break in the culture a couple years behind me, where the children were too young to tell their parents to go suck an egg when said parents told them not to go anywhere out of sight. Where the idea of “breaking curfew” went from being the height of cool to the depths of terrifying. Where the kids were too protected to know what had been stolen from them.

It takes self-possessed people to run a healthy democratically-arranged nation.

It takes a lot of scars and risk and fights to make someone self-possessed.

And if a child is to get those scars, and take those risks, and have those fights, their parents must look the other way.

People who are scared of every shadow also have the right to vote—and, if history is anything to go by, they will always vote to turn the State into their parents. They think it’s a kind of freedom. They call it “freedom from fear,” “freedom from hate,” and “freedom from threat.” They want to be safe, because they’ve never tasted the joy of danger, of escaping by the skin of their teeth.

And so they vote for people and institutions that are strong enough to keep the monsters away.

People like Hitler.

People like Stalin.

People like Mao.

People like Peron.

Because, unlike those of us who grew up in the golden twilight of freedom, they didn’t try those things at home.

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This post grew out of the final-phase edits of my upcoming book The Art of Agency: Understanding and Mastering Self-Ownership, a guidebook to learning, thinking, and teaching based on nearly thirty years of experience training and mentoring others, and studying the way learning and apprenticeship have worked throughout history. Watch for it this August.