Do not bother children when they..............

.........................are skateboarding.   A few excerpts from Rule 11:

     Some might call that stupid.  Maybe it was.  But it was brave, too.  I thought those kids were amazing.  I thought they deserved a pat on the back and some honest admiration.  Of course it was dangerous.   Danger was the point.  They wanted to triumph over danger.  They would have been safer in protective equipment, but that would have ruined it.  They weren't trying to be safe.  They were trying to be competent and it's competence that makes people as safe as they can truly be.

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Of course, culture is an oppressive structure.  It's always been that way.  It's a fundamental, universal existential reality.  The tyrannical king is a symbolic truth;  an archetypal constant.  What we inherit from the past is willfully blind, and out of date.  It's a ghost, a machine, and a monster.  It must be rescued, repaired and kept at bay by the attention and effort of the living.  It crushes, as it hammers us into socially acceptable shape, and it wastes great potential.  But it offers great gain, too.  Every word we speak is a gift from our ancestors.  Every thought we think was thought previously by someone smarter.  The highly functional infrastructure that surrounds us, particularly in the West, is a gift from our ancestors:  the comparatively uncorrupt political and economic systems, the technology, the wealth, the lifespan, the freedom, the luxury, and the opportunity.  Culture takes with one hand, but in some fortunate places if gives more with the other.  To think about culture only as oppressive is ignorant and ungrateful, as well as dangerous.

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     Men enforce a code of behaviour on each other, when working together.  Do your work.  Pull your weight.  Stay awake and pay attention.  Don't whine or be touchy.  Stand up for your friends.  Don't suck up and don't snitch.  Don't be a slave to stupid rules.  Don't, in the immortal words of Arnold Schwarzenegger, be a girlie man.  Don't be dependent.  At all.  Ever.  Period.  The harassment that is part of acceptance on a working crew is a test:  are you tough, entertaining, competent, and reliable?  If not, go away.  Simple as that.  We don't need to feel sorry for you.  We don't want to put up with your narcissism, and we don't want to do your work.

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And if you think tough men are dangerous, wait until you see what weak men are capable of.

-Jordan B. Peterson,  12 Rules For Life:  An Antidote To Chaos