Aesthetic Realism Foundation

The Answer to Youth Violence

by Jeffrey Carduner
 
     Like millions of people all over the nation, I have been heartbroken to hear and read about the shootings that have taken place in schools throughout our country, including in Springfield. I agree very much with U.S. Sen. Carol Moseley-Braun and the bill she is co-sponsoring, the Child Firearm Access Prevention Act, a bill that would make it illegal for any person to provide a child with uncontrolled access to a firearm.                     

     But this is not the complete answer. We have to educate ourselves and the children as to the cause of these horrible events. Taking a gun out of a child's hands, of course, is paramount. But why, when he has a gun, does he use it on innocent people? 

     Aesthetic Realism, the education founded by the great American philosopher Eli Siegel, shows that the deepest desire of every person is "to like the world on an honest or accurate basis" (Self and World, Definition Press, 1981). But it also shows there is another desire in every self, the desire to have contempt, the "disposition to think we will be for ourselves by making less of the outside world." Contempt, uncriticized, is the cause of these terrible shootings. 

    When you have contempt, Eli Siegel wrote, you take away the humanity of another person, and you can do anything: "You can rob that person, hurt that person, kill that person" (James and the Children, Definition Press, 1968). These young men could never do what they did. had they given to other people the depth of feelings these people had within themselves -- how another boy hoped to have love in his life, how a teacher was a living, breathing, feeling individual. I learned from Aesthetic Realism that a young man can use disappointments in the family, in love, in school, and unjust economics to be disgusted with, to have contempt for everything. Young men can use the injustices they meet to justify their own anger and ill will. 

     Ellen Reiss, the Class Chairman of Aesthetic Realism, explains the international periodical The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known: 

A huge mistake people make [is] they use the fact that they have suffered to be mean to others. ... People who have suffered from injustice have most often felt that they ... have the right to see other people any way they please: I owe nothing to a human being different from me, because look at what I had to bear; my pain is real; his is not. ... Every person needs to be asked a question only Aesthetic Realism asks: Do you use injustice to be fair to other people or unfair? ... There is no more emergent question ... today.

    In an Aesthetic Realism class taught by Eli Siegel, when I was a young man in my early 20s, I said, "If I see the world as against me, I feel I can do anything I want." I thank God I was met with the tough, beautiful logic of Eli Siegel, as he said: 

According to Aesthetic Realism, the one sin of the world is to use oneself to lessen what other things mean. Once you do that, you can get into embezzling, you can get into mugging, all the horrors.

     It is an emergency that parents, teachers, young people, and government officials study Aesthetic Realism now. Otherwise, we will have more of these horrors. The press, horribly, has boycotted Aesthetic Realism and this boycott has damaged lives incalculably, including the lives of young people. 
Jeffrey Carduner has taught Aesthetic Realism for the past 25 years.

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