Maturity
In a world where mental and emotional maturity are defined as the ability to adjust well, to be “well-adjusted”, it ought to be obvious that maturity is just another word for insanity; and immaturity the natural state of normal man. But instead of natural man, today we have mature man.
It has been “mature man” who has built up our detente of nuclear standoff, and the bombs that necessitated it, who has divided the world into armed camps called nations, who counts spraycans and air-conditioners more vital than protection from over-radiation given us by our ozone, who creates and broadcasts our television commercials, and watches and is influenced by them, who produces and sells our sex- and violence-crazed movies, and complains of them, and awards them with honors, who builds cars as if intending to kill people, who complains of pollution of the air while smoking his cigarettes and paying a hundred dollars for a gasoline-engined lawn mower and a gasoline-engined sidewalk edger, and hundreds more for the right to exercise at a “spa”, to keep healthy. This is mature man in our age.
In a world in which “maturity” is something you have to acquire as you grow up—literally—where you have to learn to adjust to the ways of the world—where a man is born immature and must be taught maturity—I say it is no honor.
For me, I want to be immature; I want to be mentally and emotionally mal-adjusted to this world; since only then can I stay a connected piece of the other world, the still dominant world, the biological world of my birth and conception.
