Hasn’t it ever occurred to anybody that the meaning of “maturity” is not a question that can be begged.

There are differing sorts of maturity, and therefore different goals in terms of “maturity”. Take a look at, for instance,

Susanna Viljanen · Answered December 28, 2020

If someone has an advanced IQ, would they mature faster?

No. It is just the other way. High IQ people mature slower. It is the good old r/K selection: should I shoot with a shotgun or a sniper rifle? High IQ is an expensive property, and it takes a lot of time to develop, and it evolves only if it provides any benefit. Those organisms with K selection trait

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By the way, I consider this information just to be hinting at the general problem, which is that the broad mass of the human population have the predisposition to develop a style of maturity that is not oriented toward intellectual development. So, gaining intellectual maturity is not part of the general project of becoming “mature”. These are two very different things for the majority of the population.

As a consequence of things being very different for different people, we tend to become very confused when we automatically use the same word — “maturity” — to describe very different meanings.

A counselor who sees that intellectual development is a key part to becoming “mature” would in fact counsel you to feel free to push against them. On the other hand, for most counselors and most of their clientele, the goals are qualitatively different. And those who do not feel an internal pressure toward becoming more intellectually mature will often be seeking another sort of outcome instead. For instance, “maturity” would seem to many people as identical to the situation of finding a way to conform and belong to society in a more conventional way.

The answer to the question, then, is that it is percentage game, a numbers game, a proportion game — most of the time you will not find a counselor who will encourage to you push against them to gain intellectual and emotional independence. That is just because this isn’t what most people want. In fact most people might be reassured that the counselor as an authority has some clear “ideas about you”, because it makes it easier for the client to submit to these ideas and thus enter the gates of conformity. This is also because for most people, finding a means to conformity allows them to finally relax. The role of the counselor is to facilitate this measure with a sufficient priestly tone and with enough rigidity to make it seem convincing.

But, for the others…………………………..

This sounds very much like the Zimbabwean author, Marechera, speaking of “what available reality” there is to us.

He was also speaking in the manner of an artist, in this regard, and to some degree as a surrealist, although his methods were much more sweeping and involved personal risk taking to a much higher degree than was the case for any European surrealist.

Marechera’s experiment with life was to reject any limitations on his life that reality imposed, if he was not happy with those limitations.

For instance, if he wanted to travel to Europe but had no money or passport, he simply got on the plane anyway, and proclaimed himself a political refugee. (Well, assuredly, one of his friends in Eastern Germany must have bought him a ticket, but it was still a daring thing to do.)

If he felt that a film maker was imposing unwanted ideological limitations on his work, he simply left the hotel room that the film maker was paying for and lived for two years on the streets.

In all manners of expression, he accepted no limitations. He set up a writer’s workshop in the newly liberated Harare when he knew he would be targeted as a political dissident for not toeing the communist line.

And he wrote a book, Black Sunlight, that is actually so painfully destructive to read that it is almost unreadable — one’s very mind and emotions recoil at getting emotionally involved.

I did read Black Sunlight, the inverted Pilgrim’s Progress that leads through
“Devil’s End”, however, and I read it many times, to the point that I became inured to it, like watching a black spider walk all over your hand. And actually it has never ceased being painful, on some level, due to its extreme levels of violence, especially psychological violence. But it did break down some self-imposed limitations in my mind. This was so much so that I found immediately, upon cracking open one of the glass shields of my mind, that I was not limited by any ideological meaning regarding what was “black” or “white” in Africa. The ideological definitions of race had been broken, and I was free to return to Africa as its child, without having view myself personally as specifically either “black” or “white”. This realization made me cry a little.

But on the other hand, violence is violence, and the cost for opening one’s mind is to become exposed to violence. The inurement to black spiders crawling somewhere on one’s body never becomes a complete embrace of such spiders or their actions. That is to say that inurement to having one’s ideological walls taken down is not the same as complete liberation, and rather it is a liberation that is partial, and which comes at a cost of somehow internalizing and making much more intimate a knowledge of violence, as such. And this one cannot “un-know”.

Add to this another complication, in that people become generally boring and incomprehensible after you have embraced the meaning of violence and the possibility of reconstructing oneself through violent psychological methods. Everyone else seems kind of shallow, and living their lives on a much less intense level. That is odd indeed — an odd sensation of not being able to turn back, or really to recognize one’s previous self and why one thought as one previously did.

—I have found, though, one more benefit from this kind of exposure, which is that it has fueled my creativity in painting and sculpture. There is as deeper entity inside me that expresses itself through these artistic methods, and it has very clear values, systems and ideas. The violence reconstructs itself into a journey.

In the true emotional sense, you will never be able to see yourself the way others see you. That is because there is a tremendous amount of subjectivity in just “seeing”, and the best of modern artists incorporate this knowledge of things completely.

I mean, we do not “see” a person whom we have just met in the same way as we “see” them ten years later, after we already know them. What seemed superficial characteristics in them on first notice now seem deep, intrinsic, important features of their personality.

And similarly, when others “see” us, what they see isn’t really just the visual image of what is there, but rather the years of experience they have had with us, and what meanings we have relayed back to them, in terms of their own value system (totally outside of our control) over the years.

And there are also cultural overlays to this, for instance what a particular setting of the facial features means to us, in terms of our own culture. For instance, in American culture, a brassy and arrogant facial arrangement may depict power and confidence, but in another culture this means emptiness and an inability to see another person’s point of view.

Life is complex.

Thanks for the question, This raises an absolutely key point about what I see is the fundamental flaw with contemporary modernity.

Let me try to explain — although I will be covering a lot of very big ideas very briefly.

Every era has its implicit model, in accordance with which, things are made to run and society is compelled to tick along.

In the case of the fairly recent past and up until the late nineteenth century or so, the model was still religion. The implicit idea was that of the moral perfectibility of the soul. But after this time, the industrial model gradually began to replace the religious model. Now we have the implicit view that humans are more or less good to go, so long as they are standardized and similar to each other, at least in terms of the categories of their identities. However, it is considered that there is something flawed about them if they do not conform to what is standard.

In the case of the industrial model, it is as if the product (the raw human being) was being prepared along the conveyer belt of the factory manufacturing process when something went “wrong”. Perhaps a process worker was careless and inadvertently knocked the object off the conveyer belt, to the point that something inside of it was damaged. The worker placed the object back on the processing belt, but something inside was irrevocably broken. This product will never be able to meet quality control standards, and will have to be either sold as a “second” under another manufacture’s name, or simply discarded.

Now, I’m not suggesting that I prefer either model — the religious model of the “dark ages” or our “enlightened” manufacturing metaphor of life. Both of them have their elements of determinism. The loss of structural integrity is the metaphor for “flawed” that we apply in our current phase of history. But in the older past, the logic of “sin” and “decay” was also considered to be somewhat inevitable. The fundamental difference that I can see is that the religious model would see our inherent flaws as playing themselves out rather organically, whereas for the industrial model, the underlying flaws that may exist are highly mechanical.

Overall, however, I think that it is the religious model that allows for a much higher degree of intentionality involved in how someone expresses their “flaws”. There is deemed to be a struggle between good and evil in each person, and the consequence of this is largely related to someone’s intentionality. In the case of our industrialized model, however, the metaphor we have embraced is that mechanical processes are predominant in our very natures. We can’t really struggle with them, because it would be the same as a machine struggling against itself. It would produce nothing of benefit.

If we follow the metaphor to its conclusion, what is necessary for a contemporary type of person, if they have a “flaw”, is to take themselves back to the manufacturer to get fixed. Since it is futile with a machine to struggle with organic processes, the manufacturer must take charge, using mechanistic or chemical processes to remediate the broken equipment, and see if it is salvageable. At this point in the process, we can forget about “intentionality”. That is the same as a struggle with organic processes, and makes no sense.

The solutions of our modern society therefore involve such things as complete sex changes for those who have ended up non-standardized according to their designated gender. It also involves the treatment of hardship or complex situations with the mechanistic approach of psychiatric drugs. Al things must be, in this sort of manner, returned to clear categories, standardized and rendered salvageable only to the extent possible.

Of course, the “flaws” discovered on the basis of non-standardization will be considered inherent to the defective product. Where else could the non-standardization have come from, apart from the product itself?

But this is just the reasoning style of the industrial model. It is also why, however, those who have very unpleasant moral features, let us say (if you will allow me) pedophiles or wife-beaters, are considered to have no more than a mechanical flaw. Paradoxically, these sorts of people are much more off the hook than they would have been in an old-style religious society, which still held that very bad moral behavior was largely a product of intention.

Enjoy.