Member-only story
I Think I Just Succeeded In Explaining Ideology To My Seven Year Old
I’m Actually Pretty Sure He Got It
This morning, over breakfast, my son asked me if zombies are real. I answered him with a “no, but…” then realized I needed to provide some background. I pulled my copy of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein off the shelf — unread*, I’m ashamed to admit — and told him that two hundred and four years ago people were afraid of science and technology, and that Shelley managed to capture that fear and turn it into a monster who terrified people because they couldn’t understand it.
* I’m pleased that he wants to read it after I gave him a brief plot summary, so now I finally have an excuse…
While I walked him to school, I grasped for a way to describe my theory on zombies. (How convenient that I recently wrote it up after all these years!)
A few months ago I purchased 4D Toys on Steam for him. Although his enthusiasm for playing it ran out after a few hours, it turned out to be a fantastic investment in thinking about multiple dimensions! I described how each human can only see a tiny slice of the universe, and that although sometimes we can have widely varying perspectives of the universe, we’re ultimately still looking at the same thing.
And as I said that, an analogy struck me:
Every human being is only capable of holding on to a single piece of the enormous puzzle that makes up our universe.
Even the people who are closest to us ideologically are holding on to their own unique puzzle pieces, and although the images on our pieces may be slightly different, we can still agree on what the bigger picture looks like.
